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Worthingtons
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Pride Park,Derby
Jan 2002
time: 05:17
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I've seen a lot of people have a go at Firaxis for thier destruction of Civilisation III, and other reasons. People feel cheated by them , and feel like they, the loyal consumer doesnt matter anymore. whilst this is quite true , people do not realise Firaxis are no different to any company, like Eidos for example.
Profit will ALWAYS come before the interests/satisfaction of the Loyal consumers in any company that exists, hence every good game taken over by a big company will go down the same route as Civ III .
Nearly every good game is born by a gamer (or gamers) themselves (In this case old Sid), but as a game become more and more popular, it's potential profitability becomes higher, and a big company will buy the rights to develop the game, and then it's numbers on P&L accounts, rather than smiling faces that takes precidence.
Civilisation II, and Championship Manager 97/98, and Elite Frontier II, are 3 of my all time favorite games, these games were born from the dreams of thier creaters. But once they captured the imagination of a large audience, the dream was exploited to make greater profit until the dream is dead and all is left is game which sells copies by living on the game's past glory and the 'casual gamers' desires.
I dont feel Civ III is nearly as good as it could be, I'm annoyed sure, but I understand WHY it's happening, and how powerless we are to stop this. Libitarian Moaning on this boards is guaranteed to have zero effect on the polocies of Firaxis.
We would all like to See the games we have really took to just get better and better, and are upset when they dont, but how many of us really have contributed towards it's creation?? we have all put our money into buying the game, but we will all agree we have our money's worth too. The problem is, a demand to pay for a product, on it's own simply isnt enough to get what we truly want out of a game. If we really want a good game, what we feel Civ III should be, the 'hardcore' fans should attempt to develop such a game for themselves - This is the best chance of getting what we really want from a game. I myself am no expert coder, my knowledge of programming is quite limited, but if i dont put in anything, I cant expect anything more out of the game apart from the £35 which I invest to buy it, which i feel I have got a good return for.
A lot of people want a lot more, but how much more are they actually willing to put in??
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ScottVib
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Who's we?
I've been playing since Civ I and I enjoy Civ III as is, but to each his own...
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Worthingtons
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Pride Park,Derby
Jan 2002
time: 05:17
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'We' is the vast majority of people on here, who seem to be highely critical of Civ III. All i can see on here, are posts about Civ III's shortcomings, and moans at Firaxis. I cant see many posts saying 'This game is absolutly amazing, they seem to have got Civ III near perfect' , I happen to agree with most views, but dont see a way that Firaxis will change.
A lot of people are annoyed, but who can we blame for a product that isnt whey want???
The shareholders and owners are bound to want a return on thier investments, I would had I invested Millions of Pounds.
The Managers are bound to want to make the company as profitable as possible, so they keep thier Jobs.
The Programmers just do what they are told to do.
So while I am nowhere near 100% happy with Civ III, I dont see how my view will change any of the above.
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Libertarian
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quote:
The problem is that each gamer has their own idea of what they want to see in civ3. It would be mpossible for Firaxis to make a civ3 that pleased all the civ fans here at 'Poly. To even come close they would have to devise a super-editor that allowed each player to change the game to their liking and that would be extremelly difficult to pull off. They made a civ3 that pleases some players but upset others. That is inevitable. If they had done the opposite, they would have pleased those gripping now, but at the expense of those content now. |
That's an ignoratio elenchi.
What you've actually shown is that people are groping desperately for some way to make the game interesting. What if they did this? What if they tried that? Maybe this other thing would help.
Primarily two attributes keep a single-player game interesting: (1) the player is forced to make meaningful decisions, the consequences of which have pros and cons no matter which way he goes, and (2) there is a reasonable chance to win (or lose) throughout the entire course of the game.
Civ3 fails miserably in both of these.
What are interesting decisions in the early game — do I forego building this to accomplish that? — settle into pure unadulterated drudgery as the game moves into the modern age (or even the industrial age). Instead of should-I-build-a-worker-or-another-settler, all the the fundamental matters of development are accomplished. You have a hundred workers; you have all the cities that the map will support; you have all the basic improvements necessary to ensure empire growth.
Unfortunately, the game doesn't shift at this point to something that will force you to make interesting decisions again. Rather, you can pretty much set everything on automatic and just sort of watch. Problem is, the interface won't release you from interaction. Whereas before, your clicks had consequences, now they do nothing more than advance the game along to its next excruciating turn.
This is the point at which many people, including people who hate war, go to war — often for no reason other than that there's nothing else interesting to do.
Unfortunately, the game's interface and design doesn't lend itself well to conducting manual enterprises in the modern age. If you go to war, you must be prepared to fight not only the enemy, but the interface as well. Thanks to bizarre unit activation sequencing, you will be routinely yanked away from your theaters of battle. Maintaining any sort of continuity is a hopeless exercise in futility.
Meanwhile, you have not been relieved from the prior tedium already described. You still must click-click-click to keep the game moving along. Here comes the frigging Domestic Nag, bothering you about hospitals. You click a hundred times to dismiss her. And she is as dumb as a stump. She will ask you whether you want to abandon your wonder two turns before completion.
By this time, the conclusion is in sight. Whoever has the greatest lead in the linear technologies wins the conquest or space-race game. Whoever has the greatest lead in the linear culture model wins the culture game. The only mysterious victory is the diplomatic one. But many players turn it off, having reported that they lost despite impeccable diplomatic relations over the entire course of the game.
Once you've achieved victory, you've no choice but to drive it home. Otherwise, you'll be penalized if you want to continue play, i.e., your score will suffer if you wait. So, even if you have resigned yourself to playing along with the doltish rule-set you've been given — building railroads on every tile, etc. — you get a penalty instead of a reward.
Many years ago, Sid said that it's interesting decisions that make for a fun strategy experience. He was right. And Civ3 has those for the opening part of the game. But then they vanish, leaving you to clean pollution in a world where you can't eliminate it; to mollify people who can't be made happy; to feed populations that can't support themselves; to build things you don't need.
And when you've stuck it out, you run headlong into a violation of yet another fundamental rule of gaming. For your efforts, you get a beep and a message box declaring your victory. It is sudden. And it is insulting with its anticlimatic ruination of your experience. Winning is supposed to result in a climactic display of honor and glory for a job well done.
People would be happy if they were given interesting decisions to make. It doesn't matter so much what they are. Just something that makes sense and is supported by the interface.
Now, when consumers of such a game begin to complain to a company whose official policy is to ignore questions and complaints, you end up with the current state of affairs — a game that returns more than ten pages when you search for it on ebay.
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OneInTen
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brisbane.qld.au
Jan 2002
time: 15:17
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Libertarian, what you describe is not only a fault in Civ 3, but a fault in every game in the genre that I have played.
My belief is that it is caused by the exponential growth curve your lead tends to take. The problem is the rich get richer without even trying, until they reach a point where they can't lose without making an effort to and the game becomes somewhat dull.
If you get twice as powerful than the rest of the civs in 100 turns, you can bet your bottom dollar that in most games, by the time another 100 turns have passed, you'll be 4 times as powerful. And then 8. And then ridiculous amounts.
Come from behind victories are simply very, very unlikely from the AI (the human player can pull it off against the AI only because the AI doesn't use its advantage anywhere close to effectively, and the AI's production bonuses on higher difficulties help it more in the early than the late game).
I've been kicking around a game design in my head since before civ 3 came out, and this point is one I consider one of the most vital to address, if not the most vital.
If you manage to get twice as powerful as the other players, if you slack off and only play as well as the other players from that point, you should at best maintain your lead. You should have to continue to exceed the play of your enemies to build a bigger lead - and the bigger your lead becomes, the better you should have to play to extend it, it shouldn't just grow by default.
Additionally to this, the AI players should behave like any group of intelligent human players would, and aim to gang up to take the current leader (whether human or AI) down a notch and back to the pack. Simiarly, an AI in the lead shouldn't jsut allow itself to be overcome, and should instead use intimidation against some of the weaker opponents to try to force them into fighting on its side.
In my opinion the lower level AI doesn't even need to be particuarly good at the game so long as the high level AI is programmed to interact with the other AIs and players in such a way that will enhance its own position.
Anyway, I've gone of on a bit of a tangent perhaps, but if you know of any game that works the way I've described, I'd love to heard of it. But at the moment, I can't mark civ 3 down for the late game tedium because it seems to be a consequence of the way all the games in the genre are written (I have ideas of how to fix it, but until they're implemented, I'm only guessing if they'll work). If anything civ 3 is slightly better than most since the corruption model at least attempts to limit the lead in production any one player can take, and the tech research model with the min and max times ensures that no one civ can get too far out from the pack.
Last edited by OneInTen on 22-01-2002 at 20:07
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Libertarian
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But that's like breaking Michael Jordan's knees so the game will be more "interesting". It won't be. The most balanced college basketball game I ever saw was back in the olden days when Dean Smith had just unveiled his Four Corners Offensive. Duke beat NC State 10-8. Uh huh. Ten to eight. In basketball. It was the following year that the shot-clock was introduced.
Balance isn't enough. The player must be given interesting decisions to make. Making interesting decisions is the very soul of strategy.
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Velociryx
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of Candle'Bre
Apr 1999
time: 05:17
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 Well...if I could chime in....the game we're making doesn't quite exist in computer form yet, but the way it's shaping up, it looks like there's be a lot less late game tedium than in many other games of the sort.
Granted, our first release will be just "the basics" but it's a sign of things to come, and I DO have some solid, tangible ideas to keep late game tedium from becoming a factor, including:
1) Random events/Scripted Events. There's an old Alan Parson's project song that very much guides my thinking here, and one line in particular goes: "...but the game never ends when your whole world depends on the turn of a friendly card."
Good line, and a great gaming mechanic to keep things dicey to the very end.
2) The bigger you grow, the harder it is to grow more. With built in limits to stuff like that, you don't get the usual, build troops, rush, expand, rinse, repeat, done. You grow to a point, and can grow further...but the effort involved becomes ever greater....to the point that it simply becomes more efficient...more EFFECTIVE to grow vertically instead. Mind you, there's less we can do with this particular aspect of the game we're making in the very early releases (again, for the sake of simplicity), but the *ideas* are there...just waiting till we're advanced and on our feet enough to begin implementation.
And I'm always lurking in forum threads like this one soaking up ideas....
-=Vel=-
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Libertarian
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Dean Smith invented the offense and popularized it at UNC, where he used it sparingly as a tactical system.
However...
It spread like a sick disease, and other schools (especially ACC schools) began to adopt it as a strategy. The final blow was the 10-8 game I cited.
If you're not familiar, the Four Corners Offense was basically playing "keep-away". Just as the name implies, four guys would park themselves on the four corners of the half-court. A pivot guy would meander around distributing the ball to them, where they would each just stand still and dribble it for several minutes. A team could keep possession for a long long time. It was originally intended to be something to run out the clock in the last few minutes when you had the lead.
But it got to the point that the first team to score would shift immediately to the Four Corners, and the rest of the game was one huge yawn.
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FrantzX
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I work in a Planet X, a video game store at the local mall. Whenever I see someone looking at a Civ III box, a walk up to them and talk about the game. I almost always get them to buy it, and so far, we haven't had any returns.
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Libertarian
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What is the time limitation for returns at your store?
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FrantzX
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Seven days if you don't like it. No set policy for defective stuff, but if you have your slip, we'll most likely take it back.
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21-01-2002 21:17
Actually, my little quip needs to be qualified in knowing which fora are bent on squelching negatives posts and the ones that are not. Regarding EU, the fanboys and the constructive critics have gravitated towards Paradox' forum, but by no means is it universally loved, as you imply. IMHO, EU sucks as a game, regardless of the amount of positiveness in the forum and the amount of PR by Paradox. Good posts and good PR doth not a good game make.
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