Destiny

[Richard_III]

A number of posters have mentioned this (I assume) Civ like game as a 'top turkey.' I seem to have the impression that it featured a truly spherical map, a concept I find very interesting (witness Manifest Destiny). Can anyone describe the game in more detail as well as why it was so bad?

[Narck]

The one thing I got really upset about is that it was ugly in 2d mode. And when in 3d mode, You would see your character as an enormous giant who was twice as big as cities.

Bah

Gameplay sucked too.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Richard III:

IMO graphics was the least of Destiny's problems. The game had Numerous Large defects:

It had a detailed resource model which wasn't too bad except that the resources that cities could get at were Not sufficient to support a modern economy IMO. FE when you discovered automated farm machinery you couldn't update your farms to the new technology because if you did you'd quickly exhaust your coal/oil and cause the collapse of your civ.

The micromanagement was A) Awful and B) Absolutely Required to make any progress. FE a civ's education level was determined using formulas like # of schools/ population. That's ok, but the design required All Cities to have X education level before the Civ could use it. So one minor mistake, which caused A Single City to regress, could set your civ's technological progress back substantially. This 'feature' also made it very hard to make colonial settlements after your civ had made progress because the colony would tend to screw up the tech for your whole civ as it was getting established.

To call the AI Abyssmal would be charitable

It had the pace of a RTS game, but a complexity far exceeding civ, and the two made an Awful combination.

About the only thing they did well was an auto-scout feature where you could send your scouts out in a pre-programmed geometric search pattern (FE moving away from your civ back and forth with the boundaries being a cone).

The game had A Lot of good ideas in it, but the implementation of virtually every one was tragically flawed.

------------------
Mark Everson
Project lead for The Clash of Civilizations
(That means I do the things nobody else wants to do ;-) )
This Radically different civ game needs your suggestions and/or criticism of our design.
Check our our Forum right here at Apolyton...

[Richard_III]

Thanks for the info, guys. Sometimes I think that it would be nice if when a game really and truly tanks, as Destiny did, the manufacturer would post the source code and let people tinker with it. Perhaps something could have been salvaged from the wreckage.