Given that the content described in the partnership here is part of a DLC, I wonder if the Tribe is party to any profit sharing agreement with the game company.
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Seems like a fair play given the history...
Yes and no. The history is pretty fucked, but on the other hand nobody currently alive screwed them over. In a lot of cases, people's ancestors weren't even living here back then. I think that it's not as fair in light of the lack of culpability.
There are still many current issues; eg: the Dakota Access Pipeline was routed to pose a threat to native water supplies and avoid being a threat to non native water.
There are still native women alive who were given "free sterilisation" (ie unrequired, undeclared and unasked for sterilisation procedures) while having appendixes removed, kidney operations, and straight out made up procedures as an excuse to carry out eugenics ideals of breeding out Indians. IIRC some of those "doctors" are still alive.
> There are still native women alive who were given "free sterilisation" (ie unrequired, undeclared and unasked for sterilisation procedures)
You know how in the first half of 20th century there was this big scare about overpopulation? There were books, films, studies, and lot of that leaked into the medical profession, often with a eugenics involved. Lot of experts, and highly educated people, believed that it is necessary to stem the number of births, in interest of the ignorant masses. This included Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood in US.[1]
To make things worse. Supreme court legalized forced sterilization with Buck v. Bell in 1927.[2] All in line with consensus of medical professionals. It didn't really get overturned by the way, just sort of overridden by later laws.
Add some racism into this mix, and guess who will get hurt the hardest? This didn't just happen in America. Entire world embraced this, because it was seen as modern and progressive.[3] And medical professionals, trained to believe it, performed procedures for decades, even after the mores have changed, basically out of habit.
And it's still happening today, in UK for example, it's still perfectly legal for state to enforce sterilization.[4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger#Eugenics
[2] https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...
[3] https://www.ochrance.cz/uploads-import/ENGLISH/Sterilisation...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-31128969
Edit: I forgot to add article specifically about native americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_of_Native_Americ...
> Add some racism into this mix, and guess who will get hurt the hardest? This didn't just happen in America.
It also happened in Greenland [1], Israel [2] (against Ethiopian Jews, the effect of this has been called into question [3]) or in Russia [4].
Homo homini lupus est.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66990670
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...
[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26554851
[4] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/10/23/years-of-stone-age...
> Add some racism into this mix
>> or in Russia
That's not correct.
The article describes a case where over the course of ten years more than a dozen of Russian women living in a facility for people with mental development issues were tricked into consenting to sterilization. It created a nationwide scandal when became public and was under investigation by law enforcement authorities.
Nothing racist, nothing systemic.
> The article describes a case where over the course of ten years more than a dozen of Russian women living in a facility for people with mental development issues were tricked into consenting to sterilization.
Unfortunately, asylum inmates getting sterilized is a very common and sad thing to happen...
What happens when they do get pregnant and must raise a child while also dealing with weekly or daily hallucinations that no drug seems to treat?
>asylum inmates getting sterilized is a very common
Citation needed
Pick a country, pick a time frame, it varies. _very_ common might be a stretch, but that it happens at all is a problem.
For interest, in California in the USofA,
By 1979, long after the peak of the 1930s eugenics movement, California sterilized an estimated 20,000 people, deemed unfit to reproduce, without their consent. The practice ended in 1979 for state hospitals and in 2010 for state prisons, when eugenics laws were finally repealed.
An exposé from The Center for Investigative Reporting in 2013 revealed 148 women were sterilized without proper approval from 2006 to 2010, and a separate state audit found that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation oversaw the illegal sterilization of 144 inmates from 2005 to 2013.
shows that eugenic type sterilization procedures continued after the laws allowing them were repealed in 2010.
Yes, I realise that "the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation" isn't an "asylum" but given the nature of modern US mental health treatment there is now considerable overlap.
What is more recent and alledged to be ongoing is unconsented abortions and sterilizations in ICE centres, eg: https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/reproductive-abu...
( there are multiple ACLU articles about different aspects of this ).
Thanks for caring to respond, I didn't know that and was too skeptical to even google
As others have pointed out this was a practice that continued into the 1960s and 1970s .. hence my statement that "some women that had these procedures w/out their consent are still alive" and that "some of the practitioners are also".
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Indian Health Service (IHS) and collaborating physicians sustained a practice of performing sterilizations on Native American women, in many cases without the free and informed consent of their patients. In some cases, women were misled into believing that the sterilization procedure was reversible
> are still alive
No drama, easy mistake to make.
I would point out, though, that any child sexual abuse happening right now, any sly sterilisations going on today is likely to remained buried for a couple of decades .. just going by a century or so of history on this type of thing.
Reporting of shitty behaviour is getting better and more immediate in the digital age, which gives us hope .. but lack of current reporting isn't always evidence of lack of current activity.
https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2022/08/25/an-indige... contains paperwork from a legal case from 1974. Given that a lot of this happened back then, I don't think you'll find any "recent reputable" sources, but are you willing to accept older material?
There's also https://repository.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2129&...
This still does not excuse punishing third parties to the facts you mention. By that logic we can cheat and exploit Germans, including people not alive during the holocaust, because there are still victims alive. Collective punishment is against the Geneva convention. What times we live in...
You are of course not personally culpable for what was done to them (and many other tribes), but you still indirectly benefit from it and they still suffer from it. You can’t disentangle history from the present.
This makes a nice sound byte. How do I benefit? How far back in history are you willing to go, to make everyone feel guilty?
I'm adopted. I've had people ask me if I have native blood just from features. Not since I moved east of Texas, but all the time on the west coast. I could be part native.
Tell me how I benefit and why I should feel bad forever?
Just being part white and alive today means your ancestors won lots of fights over thousands of years.
White people! Feel bad forever because your ancestors fought, killed, warred!
note: I'm a white person that tans very dark. I'm not gunna demand anyone else feel bad. Oh, i take back my "east of texas" people think i am a Mexican-American sometimes in Louisiana.
You benefit by living in a prosperous country that was in part built on the backs of people who were enslaved or egregiously mistreated.
Personally I have no direct connection to much of that because all my ancestors arrived in the US around 1900. My point is you can't extricate what the US is today from what was done to people in order to make it what it is today. I still indirectly benefit. I think my ancestors benefited from having white skin in the US as opposed to dark skin, when they arrived.
> Just being part white and alive today means your ancestors won lots of fights over thousands of years.
Being white has nothing to do with it. Everyone's ancestors probably did terrible things if you go back far enough. That's not the point. You're not guilty and you don't need to feel guilty. But you should at least be aware of how the modern context in which you live was derived. It was derived from the suffering of others. How far back do we need to go? I don't think it matters, really, but just as far as is substantially relevant to the present. So for the US today, I'd say it's worth considering at least as far back as the founding of the country because we can still draw direct lines from the way things are today to events that happened from then until now. I mean, it was only in 1967 that many people realistically gained the right to vote, unfettered from schemes like poll taxes and more which were used to disenfranchise them.
> How far back in history are you willing to go, to make everyone feel guilty?
The goal is not to make anyone feel guilty. And there's no benefit in delving through ancient history. Because many of the problems that still exist in this country today are persistent effects of what happening in what is really only very recent history.
Do Italians need to feel bad about the Romans keeping slaves? I don't think so, I think it would be a stretch to say that modern Italian society was built by the slaves of Romans, let alone the Romans themselves.
But if you look around the US today you can easily find buildings that are still in use, sometimes in their original capacity, that were built by enslaved people. So I think it's still relevant. Likewise you can find the direct ancestors of native people who were forcibly displaced and mistreated, and by direct ancestors I mean really only a handful of generations, still very much recent, by historical standards.
> You benefit by living in a prosperous country that was in part built on the backs of people who were enslaved or egregiously mistreated.
by an accident of birth. I didn't ask to be born.
> Being white has nothing to do with it.
that's the only thing i can speak to, personally.
the people in the government that made those decisions area long gone. As i asked elsewhere, "What's the solution?"
they replied "decolonization."
aside: An interesting fact is that Korea had more slaves and for longer than any other peoples on earth. I wonder how they're dealing with that.
Except you live on the lands of native tribes that were taken from them by force or in unfair deals.
what's your solution?
Decolonization.
Sure but people around today benefited tremendously from the horrific acts of their ancestors.
It’s uncomfortable if you’re on the benefactor side but it is the truth.
There are levels to it and some oppressive acts of the past were magnitudes worse than others. I mean literal genocide.
> Sure but people around today benefited tremendously from the horrific acts of their ancestors.
Including the Shawnee people. So it makes this stance just a tad hypocritical.
Not really. One group was literally wiped out. And Shawnee were just one group.
My people lived under imperial colonial rule. Cool we got railroads but trillions looted and millions killed in famines.
Just because some people sold out their own doesn’t forgive the sin of the atrocities brought forth that set generations back.
> Not really. One group was literally wiped out. And Shawnee were just one group.
Does that make them any different? My ancestors were nearly wiped out several times before, although much earlier in the history.
The same applies pretty much to any group of humans.
> My people lived under imperial colonial rule. Cool we got railroads but trillions looted and millions killed in famines.
"Trillions looted" is another example of hypocrisy.
> Just because some people sold out their own doesn’t forgive the sin of the atrocities brought forth that set generations back.
And the notion of "generational sin" is another example of hypocrisy.
Why is it that some former colonies of this power have done exceptionally well for themselves, and others, nearly a century on, still think about it every day and use it as an excuse for their lack of development?
> Why is it that some former colonies of this power have done exceptionally well for themselves
Like which ones? Sure, the US (being former colonies) is doing exceptionally well, but off the backs of others.
There's always an excuse. Many countries around the world and throughout history have been completely destroyed and then re-built by their people. They would also have a lot of excuses to remain in misery, but they decided to strive forward.
The principal thing I wonder is doesn't get boring to not move forward? If you live in squalor, what does it matter if you blame yourself or blame somebody else? You're still stuck there in the dirt.
Like which ones?
Barbados, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brunei, Botswana...
the US (being former colonies) is doing exceptionally well, but off the backs of others.
Ah so the poorer ex-colonies are simply too moral to develop. How noble of them.
Last year's Nobel Prize on economics was given for this very research!
The TLDR; is that the countries where colonizers moved in to settle are doing better than the countries where colonizers moved in to exploit the natural resources.
This assumes the genocide has ended, which it very much has not. In what year did Native American parents receive the right to choose not to send their kids to a boarding school?
1978.
Until 1978, Native American families were being separated against their will.
To say that no one currently alive screwed then over is absurd. This month, the President made motions to try and remove birthright citizenship for indigenous people.
No, there are absolutely people still alive who screwed them over.
This was a counterfactual in a court argument. I am no Trump fan but this wasn’t that.
This is some bizzaro world logic, as if causality stops when a new generation is born. Europeans waged total war and stole resources for themselves, directly benefiting their ancestors. So the rule is - theft is ok if you wait long enough and give it to your children?
White Americans want it both ways: keep the stolen treasure but take no responsibility for it.
If I stole your car, then gave it to my son when he turned 16, would you just sit back and say "Oh well, his son didn't do the stealing so I guess it's his now"? No, you'd demand the car back.
That's exactly what's happening here. The privileged ancestors of thieves may not be thieves directly, but they don't get to claim ownership either. You don't get to nullify a crime with the "I didn't personally do it" defense, knowing full well it was stolen while refusing to give it back. Insisting on hoarding the stolen treasure is indistinguishable from theft.
Eh. We've accepted adverse possession of real estate since the Code of Hammurabi. Continuous possession in good faith eventually conveys ownership.
If you steal my car, kill me, forge the title transfer, give it to your kid who believes they got it in good faith and century goes by, then their descendants get to keep it and mine are out of luck.
couldn’t you just ignore them?
How? If you enter into a contract with them, it has to be litigated in their tribal court. Who do you think is going to win? The chief sits on the court as the judge and jury.
> If you enter into a contract with them, it has to be litigated in their tribal court.
Isn't it possible (and typical) for contracts to specify a particular forum for dispute resolution?
> Isn't it possible (and typical) for contracts to specify a particular forum for dispute resolution?
Tribes are sovereign under U.S. law. In most cases when you sign a contract with a tribe (or under tribal law), the tribe is free to modify it ex post facto.
Looks like they learned this from the US government, which signed a series of treaties with the various Indian groups in the 1800s and then ignored the treaties.
> they learned this from the US government, which signed a series of treaties with the various Indian groups in the 1800s and then ignored the treaties
No, the New World figured out empires, exploitation and abrogration of treaty obligations all on its own. The Maya are notorious. But there is a reason even e.g. the Navajo call the ancestral Puebloans the Anasazi [1].
That's true of all of human history. Alliances shift between nations, disagreements occur, war breaks out and the map gets redrawn.
The USA is really on another level than many other nations in its lack of respect for treaties, at least in modern times. Anyone who signs an agreement with the USA should really expect at most 3-4 years of validity, depending where in the election cycle it was signed.
> USA is really on another level than many other nations in its lack of respect for treaties, at least in modern times
Uh, not really. We basically have a pattern of countries with excess power-projection capabilities going on a rampage as soon as they can. Russia in Ukraine (and Africa and the Middle East, to say nothing of Europe). China in Tibet and Hong Kong, with the Philippines and entire UNCLOS treaty system and now Taiwan. Saudi Arabia in Yemen and the region; same for Iran and Israel.
The U.S. was sort of with Europe for a few years on trying to hold the rules-based international order together. Now we're jumping into the international-law-doesn't-matter pool.
I'm talking about a slightly separate thing.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for example, is a massive war crime and against international law (specifically, it's against the international law of aggression, the specific one for which the Nazi leadership were hanged). But, it doesn't break any treaties that Russia signed with Ukraine in the last decade - Russia last promised in a treaty not to do this in the 1990s, when Ukraine agreed to renounce the nuclear weapons the USSR kept there. So it's *not great", to put it extrmelet mildly, but at least that treaty lasted for 20-30 years.
In contrast, look at the Iran nuclear deal. That went into effect in 2016, and the US unilaterally withdrew from it and reinstated sanctions in 2018, not even two years later (they claimed some breach, but no other party to the treaty agreed that the breach existed, and the EU even tried to block the US sanctions to try to keep the deal going).
Or look at the Paris climate accord, which the US has signed twice and withdrew from twice in the last few years.
Or the USMCA agreement that replaced NAFTA in 2020, which the USA has violated in 2025 by seeking to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
And these are just some of the bigger, better known ones, with the clearest terms. Even Trump's actions on Ukraine right now are a clear breach of some less formal deals made by the previous administration a few years ago, when they were urging Ukraine not to seek a quick peace treaty with Russia - but it's less clear there what the deals were and to what extent they've been breached.
Whenever you'll look at a US deal, at least in the past few decades, you'll have a better than 50% chance it was broken by the USA within at most a decade.
Again, this is separate from the new era of ignoring international law by many powerful countries, and it coexists with the times when the USA was one of the biggest proponents of the rule of international law.
> But, it doesn't break any treaties that Russia signed with Ukraine in the last decade
I don't think that's true. In fact, I think in the last decade (or, 11 years), the russians have done this ~25 times.
A standard russian tactic appears to be to ask the enemy to lay down their weapons, and then when the soldiers comply, the russians shoot them in the face anyway.
Utter barbarians.
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/07/russia-launche...
- https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/risks-russian-...
Those are slightly different things than treaties (as the articles you quote show, many of those ceasefires were unilaterally declared by Russia, not the result of an agreement between the two parties). Still, I don't mean in any way to praise Russia here, or even to claim that the USA is just as bad as Russia on this.
As bad as many of the US unilateral cancelations of treaties I mentioned are, they do not in any way compare to the horrifying aggression that Russia is showing in Ukraine, both at the basic level of invading a neighbor to steal their land, and in the details of how they are pursuing this illegitimate goal. Putin and his general are war criminals to a degree that few others in the last decade could be described (Netanyahu and Assad probably being the main "competitors", and Assad was only able to do what he did with Putin's help).
you can expect a country that is controlled by its people voting to be a bit schizo to some degree when it comes to treaties. surely, you cannot expect something that is meant to have large effects on domestic policy like the Paris climate accord to be stable in the US when there is a lot of difference of opinion domestically over it.
Of course you can. If a country commits to signing an international treaty, the normal expectation should be that it considers itself bound by that treaty, for some time at least. A normal president can't just go and overrule the previous president's words unilaterally, for the very simple reason that I illustrated: it makes it impossible to take anything the country signs seriously. Why would anyone accept a compromise deal with Trump on anything that has repercussions beyond 2028 knowing that the next president will just ignore it?
I should note that, on this particular ground, I don't necessarily blame Trump as the one who backed out of the deals. It's very much possible that the blame should rest on Obama for signing a deal he knew had insufficient support in his country and wouldn't be followed through by his successors. If he were an honest man, he wouldn't have signed the deal in this case, even if he believed (as I do) that the deal is critically important for the future of the world. Falsely committing to do the right thing is no less dishonest than going back on a word you gave.
Treaties specifically have to be approved by Congress and have approximately the same force of law and durability as the Constitution. Lately we mostly do "executive agreements" instead, which do not require Congressional approval and can pretty much be ignored on a whim by the next president. We could go back to treaties but considering Congress has given up so much of their responsibility to executive agencies because they can't even pass laws, it seems unlikely.
This is essentially the same as saying the United States should never be trusted.
I believe Russia signed a border demarcation treaty with Ukraine pretty recently like 2010-12
I couldn't find details on any such agreement, I'd be curious to see it. The only treaty signed between the two countries from that period I could find was the leasing to Russia of the Sevastopol naval base in exchange for preferential gas prices to Ukraine.
Still, to be very clear, I don't mean in any way to claim that Russia has any justification whatsoever for invading Ukraine and stealing their land, with or without some treaty.
how is it an argument when both sides are so deliciously correct
Not really, unless there is some higher jurisdiction that can assert power over both parties. Maybe america can do that to the tribal nations, but no one wants go near that quagmire, unless there were huge issues at stake like the survival of the country or something of that magnitude.
How would they enforce the court verdict if you aren't on their land?
In this situation they owe you money, not the other way around.
Entering into a contract doesn’t sound like ignoring, we did it to them only makes sense they can get away with exactly the same thing now
Ah yes, the ole "two wrongs DO make a right" argument
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Nothing! So not sure why you raised it!
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I highly doubt that the poster did anything other than try and conduct business with the tribe.
Thievery is thievery--if it's okay on a small scale now, it must've been fine on a large scale then. At which point, we're just scoring who was more effective at it. Sucks to suck.
> if it's okay on a small scale now, it must've been fine on a large scale then
This is literally the opposite of cause-and-effect, and also a horrifically simplistic—even elementary—ethical model.
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So basically because someone did something bad to them, they have become unethical thieves? And you're fine with it?
(I know nothing about them, but your description of them ... yikes. You are making them out to be pretty terrible people.)
To be clear here, it appears that
deviantbit described the Shawnee as:
flat out thieves
genocide survivors [.. that] operate in a landscape that is existentially hostile to them [..] from an immeasurable disadvantage.
Did you reply to the correct comment?
rexpop essentially confirmed that they are thieves and then said it's correct for them to be thieves.
Saying someone is a permanent and irredeemable thief, is worse than saying someone stole something.
"essentially confirmed" with airquotes is what escalates them from alleged thieves to permanent and irredeemable thieves in your mind?
That's interesting.
Their comment reads more as someone still angry about stolen land, stolen children, Indian boarding schools, stealth abortions, and other events which still touch living people and cause them to be upset when reading allegations of theft.
I'm saying that calling them thieves is genocide apologia.
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>Shawnee language
>Native speakers 100-200 (2024)
Imagine knowing every single speaker of your language personally. You could invent neologisms and make them spread quickly.
In reality:
Imagine having no canonical word for 'tap' (to tap something on a touchscreen) and needing to come to a consensus on what that should be, where a number of speakers aren't digital natives.
Imagine doing any form of research/preservation/data collection involving audio, and having no practical ability to do this anonymously, because voices are recognisable.
Imagine holding back recordings and writings because your great grandmother may have said something unusual, and not wanting to bring shame on the family/her memory.
Imagine discovering that your language has translations of the N-word, and needing to decide whether to reintroduce this to the language.
Imagine taking on the responsibility of releasing a dictionary, and drastically changing the usage of the language.
Imagine also knowing that if you don't teach your language, few else can, and fewer will.
And it's a polysynthetic language, so new words are invented all the time :) Also cool: They have two third persons, proximate and obviative (some times called fourth person)
> In English and many other European languages, the principal means of distinguishing between multiple third-person referents is using gender or (lack of) reflexive. Thus, in "she saw him", it is clear that there are two third persons because they are of different genders. In "she saw her", it is clear that there are two third persons because otherwise, one would say "she saw herself". However, "she saw her mother" is ambiguous: it could mean that she saw her own mother or that she saw someone else's mother. This is because it is not clear, in some contexts, if "she" and "her" refer to the same person. An obviative/proximate system has a different way of distinguishing between multiple third-person referents. When there is more than one third person named in a sentence or discourse context, the most important, salient, or topical is marked as "proximate" and any other, less salient entities are marked as "obviative". Subsequent sentences that refer to previously-named entities with pronouns or verbal inflections can then use the proximate and obviative references that have already been established to distinguish between the two.[0]
Russian has a similar distinction: if there are two "he's", you can use "on" (proximate) and "tot" (distant) to distinguish between them. Like,
"he (on) said it was okay, but he (tot) disagreed".
All words are invented?
This is true for everything, but it's more obvious when you only have ~200 speakers.
I had always assumed from the amount of attention that was paid to them that the tribe adjacent to my city numbered in the tens of thousands spread out across the greater area. I found out last year that the tribe's population is only around 400 members in total, with only around half of them living in their ancestral territory (which is now a suburb).
It sucks that all the Civ competitors seemed to have failed so far. The genre really needs some innovation.
Civ VII I actually think has a lot of new ideas. The game has civilizations transform into other ones. Ever since Civ VI they have made it so you need to spread improvements across tiles instead of building tall.
Civ does seem to change a good amount each game.
Although I also will say, I’m pretty happy with Civ VII, and I think popular opinion is 50-50 right now
The problem is, I don't think their new ideas are good ideas. Civ switching was really not fun when Humankind did it, and the eras system doing a lot of progress resetting seems to undermine the entire point of playing well in the early eras. And to make matters worse, these things are in service of solving a problem I don't even agree is a problem. I think late game Civ has always been fun and enjoyable, it didn't need them to completely overhaul the formula to make it so.
I do want to be open minded - maybe these things are more fun than they seem to me. But I'm also not going to drop $70 just to find out. So until they release a demo, put it on game pass, or have a deep discount sale, I'm not going to risk my money on this one.
I did pay the 70 and by the time I found out I hated the concept the return window was over.
The game has a broken UI, broke gameplay and everything which should be included is dlc. Try playing on a random map. Oh no you can't as the game requires two continents.
Wait two years and then buy for 15$. At least you feel less cheated by then.
This is a great reason to pirate a game before buying it.
Good idea.Maybe you should sit this one out,Bigrat.
I would argue the bulk of Civ VII's ideas were actually taken from Humankind
Exactly. And what both Humankind and this latest Civ seem to have done is make the game more a puzzle than a sandbox.
I'm skipping VII. Or maybe getting it when it's on sale for $10 with all addons included.
<Looks sadly at his collector's edition of VI, which is mostly unplayed.> They're going downhill...
Isn't it funny how a puzzle test your capabilities,but a sandbox is just a giant kity litter?
They forgot to copy the UI.
It's U "and" I.LMAO.
Civilizations switching is a bad idea stolen from Humankind.
I’m Sid Meier’s memoir he mentions how intentionally this certain amount of change each game is done.
> The game has civilizations transform into other ones.
This is the most significant gameplay change for this edition, and from a concept point of view it's not a terrible idea, but the execution is extremely jarring. As you progress into the next age the game basically gets a reset. Alliances are gone, trade is reset, city states disappear unless you've pulled them into your civilization, most buildings become obsolete, units get reorganized in a rather dramatic way.
I get what they're trying to do, they're trying to balance the mid and late game to prevent snowballing. The problem with the way they've done it is that as you progress towards the end of the second age, as a player you have very few incentives to actually build most improvements. Outpace the AI in research and culture, or outproduce them and lay waste to their big cities.
The settlement limit as you go into the second age also tends to penalize early expansion, another balancing measure. You find the "new world" but you can't just go ahead and do the massive landgrab because doing so comes with a set of penalties which you'll have to offset by building things that'll compensate and in turn stunt growth. As you approach the end of the second age that limit is raised drastically which I can only guess is to promote conquest at that point, since the existing factions on the other continent will tend to expand but not be powerful enough to stop you from steamrolling them.
It leaves you with the impression that ages are just designed to stunt growth and expansion and you're fairly confined unless you want to stack penalties. I got the impression the AI doesn't deal with the reset particularly well either, since some AI players which were fairly strong early on started faltering in the second age.
Finally, the ages mechanic comes with an end-age crisis, which rather than an interesting challenge turns into a bunch of busywork. In the second age the crisis I got was religion related, where you get to pick your poison and then deal with your choice. In my case I had a choice to invest into a lot of buildings to boost happiness as the AI sent out waves of missionaries to stamp out my religion, or just churn out missionaries. The latter was cheaper and didn't take up precious space.
> you need to spread improvements across tiles instead of building tall.
I have mixed feelings about this in the long game. It's nice to see cities sprawl out into districts/quarters, but at the same time you're trading resources for growth. Overbuilding is a nice mechanic, but in the end I feel that buildings becoming obsolete at the end of an age makes me not want to invest too much in certain buildings despite having a massive amount of production. A particular game I played I ended up with Rome next to the sea, which grew and grew until there was no room for expansion anymore until the end of the age. Maybe it'd have been better to have one or two more buildings in a district?
In Civ 6 I felt it was a neat feature with some nice gameplay mechanics, but in 7 I feel the mechanic has expanded so much that you're constantly weighing options trying to plan ahead that it weighs things down. Maybe I'll feel differently about it over time.
> I’m pretty happy with Civ VII, and I think popular opinion is 50-50 right now
Honestly, this is the first time I'm really on the fence about Civ. There's a lot of ideas in there that kind of work, but at the same time kind of don't work. If I were to summarize my sentiment in a single sentence: the motto "a civilization to stand the test of time" has been supplanted with the dread of looming impermanence whispering "this too will pass".
> The problem with the way they've done it is that as you progress towards the end of the second age, as a player you have very few incentives to actually build most improvements.
Outdated buildings lose adjacency but have a yield of +2 (if from antiquity) or +3 (if from exploration) yield of whatever their base yields were, so they aren't worthless.
> The settlement limit as you go into the second age also tends to penalize early expansion, another balancing measure. You find the "new world" but you can't just go ahead and do the massive landgrab because doing so comes with a set of penalties which you'll have to offset by building things that'll compensate and in turn stunt growth.
I'm not sure that "things you might want to do require you to devote some of your limited resources and sacrifice something else" is really a bad thing.
> A particular game I played I ended up with Rome next to the sea, which grew and grew until there was no room for expansion anymore until the end of the age.
Having big cities grow to (very close to) footprint-filling urban conglomerations supported by fishing/farming/mining towns is quite clearly an explicit design intent.
by the sea,eh?To think,Such a cosmic force unrivalled could have been tapped out by a tsunami,coincidentally during it's early reign...Weird.
Wink,wink.
makes me wonder if valve has a publisher protection service you can pay extra for.
Paradox Interactive is right there and thriving? They’re like the next step into the 4x rabbit hole and their fanbase is pretty loyal.
I'm a big paradox fan, especially eu4 and hoi4, but their dlc policy is downright toxic. There are tons of dlcs, they are all overpriced and they all break the base game in their own ways, and the only way to "fix" it is to buy the dlc. Oh and often time the quality of their dlcs is shit because it's all outsourced to other firms who don't know the game, or the code and are stuck with tight deadlines and budgets
Once a year paradox releases a dlc. Its pretty reasonable. It only seems unreasonable if you jump in 15 years after.
I honestly like the Paradox model, game mechanics breaking until patches aside.
Give a chunk of new base functionality as a free update.
Charge for a more expanded form of that functionality as a DLC.
We can quibble over whether this DLC or that DLC was worth the price, and there are certainly balance issues that are patch resolved, but it keeps expanding their games for years with pretty serious new stuff.
That's more than you can say for other publishers' post-release behavior.
EU4: 11 years
HOI4: 8 years
Stellaris: 8 years
How about we don't drip feed content over the years, causing problems and then graciously fixing them?
Why not? The only thing I think you could reasonably say is that it would be nice if there was a built-in way to freeze the game at a certain state, so that you can still play, say, Stellaris 2.0 if that's what you liked, and not get any of the patches that essentially assume you'll also have certain paid DLCs to function fully.
But Stellaris 1.0 and all the other were massive games people enjoyed playing, they weren't stripped down skeletons to build DLC on.
Were they as good at release as they are 8 years later? Not at all. But having them change and generally evolve over those 8 years is a key part of what makes people still play Stellaris today, when many other games from that time have long been abandoned.
Not to mention, plenty of people would have actually preferred it if instead of Civ VI and Civ VII, we were getting Civ V 4.0 today.
More like Civ IV 5.0 but close enough.
I mean, do you expect them to have created these massive games with multiple expansions’ worth of content at the beginning? Hasn’t Stellaris been essentially rebuilt over the years with DLC?
Stellaris has had at least two Ship of Theseus level reworks over the years.
Yeah, it's hard to call their model particularly predatory, when a lot of the industry is going with battle-pass models that rely on FOMO to keep the revenue constant. At least with Paradox you can still buy-in on a sale years after release and not be forever locked out of anything because you weren't playing sooner.
OSG!!But If You Do that than you would be stuck in an endless time loop,a never-ending cycle of losing the game and forgetting about it just to respawn again at the point of conundrum and frustration,to be laughed at and mocked by the winner for all time...and then some!You didn't do that though,right?
There was a time Paradox was releasing almost 2 paid DLCs and even a couple of unpaid ones every year. Particularly in the case of EU4, where some DLCs ended up overriding the content of previous, even paid ones, to the point that they have 37 expansions for that game alone (and that's not even including the paid aesthetic expansions).
This math doesn't add up: I just checked a random paradox game, Stellaris, and it has 24 paid DLC (26 actually, but I've excluded an eBook and soundtrack as neither seem to have an in-game impact) - but was released in 2016.
That's cause They aren't stuck in the ring w you.Bye.
Stellaris has been consistently getting at least two DLCs per year [1]. Arguably one of them is a story pack and the other a gameplay one, but a lot of interesting mechanics are blocked behind DLC-only species.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/dlc/281990/Stellaris/#browse
Civ 7 launched with 3 DLCs
and has more DLCs planned for release in march and april
and this is how they keep updates flowing to games released 9 years ago. I'll take that over "log in every day to get your battlepass coins" MAU engagement psychological warfare any day of the week.
It also sucks that all the Paradox competitors seemed to have failed so far. The genre really needs some innovation.
Yep and paradox 4x games honestly take a brute force approach by adding too many limits of various kinds to ensure you don’t break the game.
Eg. fleet cap, star base cap, empire size, new systems requires spending influence that ticks over slowly, leader caps, etc.
Yes there’s ways you can increase things like influence 25% faster but that means you’re only 25% larger in size (and you’ll then be hit by the empire cap). In general I just don’t think paradox makes great 4x games compared to what I’ve played in the past. There must be a smarter way to have a fun 4x without resorting to a ton of different types of caps to stop you getting too far ahead. I will definitely +1 that the genre needs a shakeup.
Crusader Kings and Stellaris always felt more like… story-generation games than strategy games, to me. Sorta like Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld at a different scale.
Yep, which makes them so amazing after Civ decided to abandon that approach and heavily push into trying to be a static boardgame.
How could Civ abandon that? Civ never was a story-generation game (arguably, VII is a very slight move toward that, but Civ I was pretty much Empire with a tech tree, more varied terrain, a more detailed (terrain-based) production system, and founding/growing cities replacing conquering independents.
I’m not sure I disagree. Civ certainly doesn’t have a lot of “flavor” events or characters. The standards of the era were pretty low for this kind of stuff though, so there was a little bit of a feeling of building a story, for me at least.
As a sidenote, somehow the setting, leaders, and tech blurbs in Alpha Centauri managed to construct a much better facade of a story generation game, IMO. Despite being very similar mechanically. The system allowed a lot more customization… even if it was just a bunch of little +1 bonuses here and there, it made it feel like “your” faction.
Anyway, it’s all a facade. Other than dwarf fortress. I’m sure those dwarfs will achieve sentience soon.
I really wish they believed in UX, though. Going from Civ to EU4 is like going from one of those meal kit recipes to someone handing you some raw olives, grain, and a live chickens and expecting you to figure out the details.
You chose your path poorly.
The correct order is Civ to classic Dwarf Fortress to EU4.
Old World, made by some ex-civ people, is really quite excellent
I heard this from so many people that I bought it, and ultimately sought a refund. I had similar problems with its UI that I did with Civ VII. The row of 15 unlabeled icons, a parade of numbers. Font pairings that do not work together. It was hard to see the likely good game underneath.
I wish Humankind was a better game because its presentation is so good.
I especially like that they’re still making substantial improvements. It’s quite the contrast to Civ V having game-breaking bugs which were never patched.
Not to discount your experience, but I’ve played for thousands of hours and never had any problems like this so YMMV
Yeah, I know it’s a complex game but we had a big multiplayer game deadlock a couple hundred turns in and that kind of soured everyone on the franchise.
Specifically by Soren Johnson, lead designer of Civ 4, so naturally OW has Civ 4 vibes. I will say that Civ 6 and OW seem to appeal to different audiences, so if you absolutely loved Civ 6 plays then OW might not be to your liking.
I am playing this right now and love it, though the learning curve is steep even for a Civilization veteran. This is what Civ VI or VII could be if they didn't try to dumb down the game to increase the audience.
I would recommend everyone play their first OW game on the easiest difficulty, regardless of their experience with Civ. It is a fair bit more complex and Civ skills do not directly translate well to OW even though the two games look graphically similar.
I’d hardly call Paradox a failure. Europa Universalis in particular is the most 4X game from PDX, even if grand strategy game is a better description.
Amplitude Studios’ Endless Space and Endless Legend series. Age of Wonder. Zephon. Terra Invicta.
Do not forget Humankind, from which a lot of ideas in Civ VII seems to come from. The others are borrowed from Millenia.
Their AI is atrocious though. F.ex. Endless Space has a mechanic that to take over a planet, you to have to put this bomb upgrade into a ship. The AI just... doesn't. Their fleet meta sucks, their individual ship designs suck. All harder difficulties do is generate larger piss-poor clumps of ships which attack without any strategy.
>It sucks that all the Civ competitors seemed to have failed so far. The genre really needs some innovation.
They failed because they were not the full "civ experience", which is to say attention to detail with character design, artwork, music, voice acting, etc. etc. They were mostly just attempts at innovating on the gameplay mechanics and treating the historical aspect as an afterthought, rather than a main focus.
Indie devs can make great games with great mechanics, but this video from the OP kinda demonstrates the difference between indie and AAA dev. No matter how good of a game you can make, you simply will never have the resources for the level of polish required to truly compete against something like Civ. Short of another AAA studio taking up the mantle, I doubt anyone will ever outdo them.
> failed
What is success meant to look like? Many play and enjoy other Civ-style games, as they offer varied experiences and alternative styles of play. If success is just about becoming the biggest game, then that's a fairly narrow view of what entertainment is supposed to be.
What a strange take, there's plenty of successful Civ competitiors. Amplitude's Endless series, Old World, Age of Wonders, heck even Paradox series managed to capture a lot of what made Civ good.
civ started with an idea based on nerding out over history… it needs more history and less game. half the reason anyone likes civ v is because of the narration of the tech tree. it makes you feel like you are voyaging across history. now the history is simply a two dimensional backdrop for the game which is not even very good
Eh, the problem is that god games like this always have to focus on a few angles or risk making a tedious game no one will ever play outside of a few nerds.
I liked Civ(1, 2, uh.. 3 and 4 I think)because it felt like a good balance of strategy, discovery, and turn-based action. Actually I was hooked by Civ I because it was like nothing I'd ever played before, having missed out on Empire. The closest thing to it I'd played at the time was Dan(i) Bunton's Modem Wars on c64/128.
If you're cool with a more fantasy setting Endless Legend is amazing and definitely has not failed, similarly for Endless Space for a space setting. And Endless Legend 2 was recently announced. Avoid "Humankind" though...
Try “HUMANKIND” by Amplitude Studios.
I've been a big fan of Humankind and haven't played Civ since I got it.
old Wolrd is absolutely incredible as a CIV replacement
I've already said this in another thread, but check out Old World (free demo).
> With each Civilization title, we take great care to thoughtfully and authentically portray every culture on our roster of civilizations and leaders
Especially Gandhi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
(Note that while the original bug apparently wasn’t real, they _did_ play with it in subsequent games, at least V and VI).
Nuclear Gandhi, as far as I can tell, was actually about Civ I, not Civ II. Gandhi would get to nukes early because India had a tech boost, and he would threaten the player in every diplomatic interaction that his words were backed with nukes. The AI in the early Civ games is pretty aggressive, too, so I assume that if you rejected him too many times, he absolutely would become a big warmonger.
As to the integer underflow, that appears to either be debunked or to be something that Sid Meyer misremembered (IMO both are possible). I don't think you need an integer underflow for Gandhi to go nuclear in an early Civ game, though.
It is authoritatively debunked in Sid Meier's (excellent) memoir - there was no such integer underflow bug in Civ I, it was all a rumor that went viral. The franchise did embrace the meme, though.
I am aware that it's in his memoir, but I am not sure whether he actually went through the code to write it or just went back through his notes/memory. Or whether 2K told him to "debunk" it so he wrote some fiction (also a possibility - see Feynman's memoirs which have quite a bit of fiction in them). It was a long time ago and prior to the memoir, neither he nor any of the other developers on a Civ franchise remembered whether there was an error, and they all said as much on the record. Also, the story of an underflow was about Civ II, not Civ I. I am not necessarily convinced there is no underflow, but I am convinced that there is a plausible alternative theory.
[dead]
Civ was completely changed after Civ 4.
The Normandy invasion in World war 2 was a "death stack".
Blitzkrieg style operations were death stacks too (e.g.: schwerpunkt)
And almost every major conflict involved a decisive battle with two death stacks on each side.
The game designers of Civ 5 decided to restrict forming death stacks and the new versions of the game still have this mechanic. This is the moment Civ became a completely different game. The last true Civ game was Civ 4.
The problem isn’t really the existence of death stacks so much as the fact that the map is too zoomed out for _any_ tactical nuance. This creates extremely unrealistic game-y mechanics when you have two opposing stacks of 50 guys and one guy moves right while the other guy jukes and runs into a city that’s not defended.
I actually love Humankind’s approach where you have a fairly chunky stack and the stack gets spread out over the map into individual units during combat where you do some short term tactics that pulls in all surrounding units as reinforcements with temporary combat only movements.
I played a lot of the original Civ but it was in the early 90's so my memories are a little hazy now. Units on the world map had a "zone of control", you couldn't move units through tiles adjacent to an enemy unit, so the behavior you mention where you could juke past a stack of units wasn't possible, you could put units around cities and similar to create blockades, cut off reinforcements etc (including with naval units).
There was even a tile improvement you could build "fortress" which was useful to build in chokepoint areas as it gave defenders a big advantage. It made this blockading tactic more effective.
The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this.
Alpha Centauri was the peak civ game for me had so many cool things you could do like nerve stapling (removed the cities unhappy population permanently but also removed specialists), population booms - where you could grow cities extremely fast by funneling a massive amount of growth resources into them, Supply crawlers (could ferry resources from any tile on the map to crawlers home city), multi tiered social civics (for example rather than just playing a constitutional republic, you could be a combination of Democratic/Planned Economy or Fundamentalist + Free Market, Police State + Green Economy etc.)
I think the issue is that people actually want to do tactical fighting with flanking and concentrating attacks, but the scale is quite odd. Zone of control is a good game mechanic but it’s very game-y; I can’t pass this guy who’s standing a city’s distance away from me?
Maybe a better mechanic could be for units to be able to pass by each other, but it could cause attrition for the moving unit (representing the fact that the moving unit will have trouble foraging with all the entrenched defenders hanging around).
Civ 5&6 apply zone of control well, I think: you are able to move past enemies, but it takes all of the unit's move points. So the advancing is slow and dangerous.
Ok sure but let’s zoom out a bit.
Both sides have 10 guys. Let’s say one of them puts 10 in a stack. The other splits into 5/5 to tackle two nearby objectives.
In death stack civ games the 10 stack can just instantly swallow the 5’s without suffering much in the way of losses.
Alternatively you have two cities to defend. You have 9 units vs. their 10 and would win if defending from walls or lose if they fight in the field. Does it really make sense that you have no option but to let them take a city for free because you can’t split your defenses to any effect? Nah.
Humankind’s combat is simply far more elegant. If you attack the 5, the nearby 5 can reinforce them. The combat also takes time. So if a small force can hold off a large force at a defensible choke point or maybe a walled city you can buy time for your other troops to arrive at the battle. The focus on gamey movement points and timing of inputs is gone.
> The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this.
I haven't played Civ VII, and I don't think I played much of Civ II or III, but tile improvements is still a thing in Civ IV, V, and VI. In Civ I, the settler unit would do tile improvements and found cities, and at some point they switched to a settler that only founds cities and a worker unit that does tile improvements. In Civ VI, the worker only has a certain number of charges and then disbands, and they separated out road construction to happen with trade routes, but you still need workers to irrigate and add mines and whatever you need for special resources (in Civ I, there was one special resource and it was called resources; later games there's like spices and bananas and coffee and gold and what have you)
In Civ I there were resources, for example jungle tiles could have "gems", hills had "coal", grasslands had "game" etc. There was also another resource "luxuries" which is what I think you are talking about, you obtained these via establishing trade routes between cities, or by creating specialized citizens (entertainers).
> The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this.
Tile improvements have used units (settlers in Civ 1, settlers/engineers in Civ 2, workers in Civ 3-5, builders and military engineers in Civ 6) in all version of Civ in the main franchise line until Civ 7, in Civ 7 non-road improvementsare created automatically by working a tile (and you can't change which tiles are worked once selected, while road and railroad are created by creating cities close enough [roads] or close enough and with rail station buildings [railroads].)
Civ 6 made roadbuilding automatic with trade route creation, but still required units for other tile improvements, including railroads.
That's kind of the niche Age of Wonders occupied, a civ-lite strategic layer and xcom-like tactical layer. Too bad 4 is hideously bland (I'll blame paradox and focus group testing for that)
The problem is that Civ has never modeled military logistics.
That gap means death stacks are magically logistically-supported.
But fair, as that's not the kind of game it wants to be.
You can pick the world size.
Knowing how to concentrate your forces is a tactical element. Once you get railroad you can move your units across your territory easier.
“Put everyone in a single stack” is not an interesting tactic or knowledge check imo.
There was a year-ish period of sc2 which was death stacks, I think at that point I went back to watching sc1 lol
I agree, it's not fun or interesting
I have to agree: Humankind has a much better base for combat.
Normandy was not a death stack. The actual landings involved 156k troops facing 50k troops over 80 km of coastline. That's maybe 2x as many troops as in a major ancient battle, stretched over a frontline 20x as long.
WW2 battles were physically large, often spread over hundreds of kilometers. When the main threat was artillery, dense concentrations of force made no sense.
How big do you think a single square in civ takes up? It's about 80 km wide[0].
And Normandy was multiple units moving against multiple defensive units occupying the same space. This is far better approximated by the original of many units in one spot moving into a singular space occupied by many other units, than the new method of singular units spread hundreds to thousands of miles apart.
[0] Post in thread 'How much area does a single tile cover in Civ?' https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-much-area-does-a-...
It depends on the map. In the Civ 6 Europe map, the area where the Normandy landings took place was 3 tiles. You could have three units attacking in the initial wave against 1 defending unit, with various ranged units on both sides. At that point in the game, the units could be corps or armies, which would make the overall scale of fighting about right.
> How big do you think a single square in civ takes up?
On the largest map size in the last game to have squares at all (Civ 4), about 278km east-west if you assume that the cylindrical map has the same circumference as earth does at the equator. Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference. (The answer you linked is based on the hexes of a later civ game, but based on Earth’s land area.)
Later Civ games the answers are larger, since, as well as switching to hexes, the largest map size is smaller in each subsequent Civ iteration (5 is smaller than 4, 6 smaller than 5, and 7 uses the same sizes as 6 but cuts off the two largest.)
That’s one way to measure it, sure. Another way is that archers can shoot 2 tiles away.
Part of the abstraction of the game is that the map for cities and the map for units are at different scales (despite being the same map), and scales change depending on what year you’re in
> That’s one way to measure it, sure. Another way is that archers can shoot 2 tiles away.
Well, if we are talking about games where the size of a square is a coherent question, they can only do that in Civ III; Civ 1/2 units have only attack/defense, units with weapons "better range" just goes into the attack/defense abstraction, whereas in Civ IV archery units get first strike, and artillery units damage city defenses, but, like all other units that can attack at all, they can attack only adjacent units. (Even the single use missile units in Civ 4 are just units with a lot of movement that are destroyed when they attack, not ones that have a "range" capability distinct from movement.)
Range units came back with Civ V, along with the introduction of hexes and the elimination of stacks.
> Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference.
This would make no sense; the top and bottom of the map are always land that blocks you from going that way. If you assume that you're on a spherical Earth, you also need to assume that the regions around the north and south pole don't appear on the ingame map.
I agree that the assumption makes no sense, but the calculation offering an 80mi diameter elsewhere in the thread is, in fact, based on distributing the Earth's land area across the number of tiles in a (Civ 6 huge, IIRC) map, calculating the area of each tile based on that, and then calculating the distance across the tile based on the area.
That might be an interesting mechanic. Allow unlimited stacking but make artillery pieces hit every unit in the tile. Civ kind of has that mechanic with nukes, but they have all sorts of other implications that make them impractical in most games.
Thinking about this some more it might be possible to make "doomstacks" that actually have some tactics.
Idea:
Unlimited stacking is allowed. Units are ordered in the stack based on melee attack power * current health. When stacks attack one another only one melee type unit and one ranged unit may attack any particular single unit on the other side. Both attackers and defenders work from the top down. If an attacker or defender destroys their unit then leftover attack power will be used against the next available unit, after all initial attacks have been completed, but that melee unit will take return damage based on the percentage of the attack they have remaining.
For example, side 1 has a stack with 3 warriors and 2 archers. Side 2 has 1 warrior and 4 archers.
Initial attack:
side 1 archer 1 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
side 2 archer 1 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
side 1 warrior 1 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 50% damage to warrior
side 2 warrior 1 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 50% damage to warrior
side 1 archer 2 vs. side 2 archer 2: 60% damage to archer
side 2 archer 2 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
side 1 warrior 2 vs. side 2 archer 2: 40% damage to archer, 60% attack remaining
side 2 archer 3 vs. side 1 warrior 3: 40% damage to warrior
side 1 warrior 3 vs. side 2 archer 3: 100% damage to archer, 0% attack remaining
side 2 archer 4 can not make it to the battle lines and does not take an action
Followup attacks:
side 1 warrior 2 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 3% damage to warrior (10% health, 60% attack), takes 3% damage in return
I think this could be an interesting way to do combat, but it is relatively complicated and the AI would probably be even worse at managing it.
> That might be an interesting mechanic. Allow unlimited stacking but make artillery pieces hit every unit in the tile. C
Congratulations, you have basically invented Civ 4's collateral damage mechanic.
> Thinking about this some more it might be possible to make "doomstacks" that actually have some tactics.
Yes, it is. For one more fully developed example, see
https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Combat_(Civ4)
(They have a different solution to modeling ranged capability -- in addition to the collateral damage effect of artillery, it includes the First Strike ability of archery and certain other units.)
> The Normandy invasion in World war 2 was a "death stack".
It's clear to me that the designers wanted to include flanking as a mechanic, and other positioning elements of warfare (ranged attacks, zone of control, etc) thus stacks of doom had to go.
If you want to be pedantic about it, Normandy was 5 separate beaches in a 50 mile stretch, and involved paratroopers behind the beachfront ahead of time. And the game does model concentration of power to some degree, in the form of armies and corps.
Fair argument, but death stacks (however realistic) were boring. There was no gameplay there, it was just "mash your stack into the other stack". Perhaps the 1UPT system wasn't the right answer, but they needed to do something to make warfare be an actually interesting part of the game.
They were never boring for me at all and there was lot of strategy and planning involved in troop composition of such stacks. Civ4 was a game about research, development and relationships between civilizations and not an turn based strategy game like latter iterations try to be.
One thing that bugs me the most in Civ7 is that there's no option to continue playing after the victory condition is achieved, anymore. Nor can you disable some victory conditions if you don't want them.
This seems to be the biggest (gameplay) complaint across the web, so I would be shocked if it’s not addressed in an update fairly soon.
I haven’t played much Civ — is there some reason that preserving that particular mechanic is important? It doesn’t seem obviously desirable (or undesirable).
I preferred it because I considered the point of Civ to be building up your economy/tech such that you were superior to your opponents, and then using that economic/technological advantage to out-produce them in military and defeat them that way.
The shift from death-stacks to one-unit-per-tile made economic advantage relatively less important and battlefield tactics relatively more important. Tech is still important, though.
Some players like the old feel where battlefield tactics were abstracted away, and some players like the new feel where battlefield tactics are a big part of the game. But they are two very different feels from the same franchise, so we get into this debate.
Imo one way it was desirable was it was much easier for the AI to play (most people only play against the AI). It has never reeeally gotten the hang of routing and positioning units around in a 1-unit-per-tile model. Consequently they struggle to pro-actively fight each-other even.
Civ 1, 2, 3, 4 all played the roughly the same.
Civ 5 onwards plays completely different because how tile movements are restricted.
In real life those silly restrictions they added do not exist and get in the way of simulating a war.
A single giant blob of every unit you have moving as one is about as unrealistic as you can get with respect to war logistics and strategy.
On the other hand the “solution” has to be create a carpet of units creating traffic jams, just a different set of annoying and unrealistic logistical problems.
That’s what I thought. But Humankind’s solution of moving stacks around that get spread out for combat solved this very elegantly imo.
Moving to one unit per tile didn’t add a logistics or strategic component. It jumped all the way down to a tactical one, you suddenly care about individual units flanking each other.
IMO it was sort of more “honest” from a realism point of view to just admit that the simulation is not that accurate at the unit level, you smash the stacks into each other and assume the officer corps of each army is handling flanking.
It is hard to say which way is more fun really. Seems like a matter of preference. I like tactical games better anyway, so IMO the new way is an improvement. But, realism? Not really.
That’s why Humankind’s approach is great. Stacks are fine for macro movement. And then actual battles take place with one unit per tile and tactics considerations.
At random, I picked and read Battle of Pharsalus. The Deployment section explains in detail how, through meticulous troop positioning and clever tactics, Caesar was able to defeat the overwhelming force of Pompey.
All of those battles involve battlefield tactics, and in several of them the numerically inferior force won — exactly the opposite of "death stacks."
The Civ series is not the Total War series.
The level of detail of battles is meant to be low because it's focused in wars not battles. You are not a war general you are a head of government.
There are still plenty of tactics in Civ 4. Units have different bonuses depending on terrain and other factors. You have to plan where the combat takes place and what types units you want to use.
Some unit types have collateral damage (catapult, trebuchet, cannon, artillery, mobile artillery, etc.), and there are similar mechanics with air units, cavalry, etc.
The game is not short of battle tactics just not the board game inspired mechanic of Civ 5+.
Stalingrad was won because the Soviets flanked and cut off the supply lines supplying the German 6th Army, not because of one death stack defeating another.
And in Civ 4:
- you can destroy roads (needed for some resources)
- you can also occupy the tile or destroy the improvement (mine/plantation/camp/quarry/etc) needed to harvest a resource
- you can use diplomacy to deny a resource
- you can use a spy to destroy an improvement
You've got it right: it comes down to personal preference.
Civ 1 and Civ 4 got highest ratings on Metacritic .
https://www.metacritic.com/pictures/every-sid-meiers-civiliz...
Civ 4 is cheap on steam. I decided to buy that and go back and run a campaign on there while I wait for VII to mature a bit.
Yeah but it's mac and windows only, no?
It works on Proton just from Steam with no modification.
Natively, yes. I seem to remember it ran fine on Wine years ago, though. ProtonDB gives it a gold rating.
It doesn't run on macOS either these days.
Civ 4 Colonization is a lot of fun.
And the AI was totally incompetent at maneuvering tactically. They had to massively outnumber you to even have a chance at taking your city. And they really haven't learned anything since!
Why do people hate 'doomstacks' I dont get it. It is a 4X game about civilizations after all not a turn based military strategy. There is also startegy involved in doom stack composition and you can beat a much larger doomstack with better troop composition. But like in real life of course, with all things being equal bigger doomstack will defeat smaller one. How realistic are armies of a few thousands man spread across half a continent like in latter Civ series.
> Civ was completely changed after Civ 4.
This is true, but it was also completely changed after Civ 1, Civ 2, and Civ 3 (and, for that matter, Civ 5 and Civ 6.)
> The game designers of Civ 5 decided to restrict forming death stacks and the new versions of the game still have this mechanic.
Civ III radically changed stack mechanics by eliminating "defeating the strongest defender destroys the stack" (it also added ranged units), Civ IV radically changed stack mechanics by adding in collateral damage from certain attackers (it also got rid of ranged units, replacing them with first strike or archery, and collateral damage for artillery.) Each of these changed the game as radically as Civ 5s one-unit-per-tile (which also so substantial changes with Civ 6's Corps/Army and Fleet/Armada mechanics, and Civ 7's different Army/Fleet/Squadron mechanic.)
The idea that Civ 4 was the single point that changed everything is silly.
I actually loved Fall From Heaven II[0] as a Civ mod because of the latter civ style handling of archers and such. Somehow Civ 5 onwards utilized that style, but didn't really bring over all the tactical complexity of FFH2. Sadly there has been no other mods that caught my attention the same way FFH did.
[0] https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Fall_from_Heaven_(Civ4)
I only play Beyond the Sword, the new Civs are not for me. Civ4 is a logistics game, as is real life.
even unit stacks were janky. for me the last true civ game was CTP 2
Ironically Call to Power 2 is not a Civ game because their Civilization license was lost so they had to remove Civilization from the name.
yep, that was the joke!
That press release is written in the most servile fashion. Delete "carefully", "respectfully", "authentically", etc you get the exact same content except it doesn't sound boot-licking. I'm all for getting a culture right, but the proof is in the product, not in easy to type adjectives that describe how you should always act without expecting praise for it.
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"With each Civilization title, we take great care to thoughtfully and authentically portray every culture on our roster of civilizations and leaders."
Like making Gandhi hurl nukes around like no other? :) Love my Shawnee neighbors though, happy to see my One More Turn habit helping them preserve their language.
I want some kind of LLM for every rival civ so we can have natural language diplomacy
Asked 4o:
Translate into Shawnee: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights"
Translating a specific sentence like "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" into Shawnee can be challenging without expertise in the language or input from a fluent speaker, due to nuances in meaning and the language's polysynthetic nature. Furthermore, high-quality and detailed language resources or native speakers are often necessary for accurate translation, considering contextual and cultural factors.
If you need an accurate translation, it might be best to consult resources or individuals specializing in Shawnee, such as language preservation organizations or native speakers involved in language revitalization efforts. These individuals would have the nuanced understanding necessary to convey the meaning appropriately in Shawnee.
> Nihshanáhkwa nehi neelio ku nitehowski, wa nitho nitanawitshili.
Asked a random online translation service [0], I have no idea if this is accurate or if I just insulted someone's mother. The translator service also has the input field labeled "normal language", which is pretty oof.
[0] https://anythingtranslate.com/translators/shawnee-translator...
This "translator" seems to be producing complete gibberish.
For the example sentence "The house is red.", it gave me "Nikiki sîhîi.", "Iko nèeki kèya.", and "Kanǫ́kǫ ǩąn ʌpa nǫhǫ." in three subsequent attempts. Now I don't speak Shawnee but it seems highly unlikely that these very different results all correspond to the original sentence in any language. Plus, the few examples of Shawnee I could find online [1] also suggest it's not written with non-Latin characters and diacritics such as were produced by this "translator".
nice site, it even has a "Translator Creator" so you can create your own translator of dead languages which haven't been deciphered yet: https://anythingtranslate.com/translators/linear-a-translato... which says the UDHR's first sentence is 𐘧𐘋𐘍𐘑 𐘖𐘊𐘍𐘖 𐘌𐘇𐘍𐘟𐘖𐘔 𐘒𐘊𐘍𐘔𐘉𐘍𐘛 𐘉𐘞𐘍𐘓𐘔
who needs linguists when you can just make shit up
It's easy to slap an LLM in there to make contextual conversation with the player, but how do you go from what the LLM says to actual gameplay mechanics? The LLM can come up with basically anything to negotiate a deal with you, but then that deal has to be made explicit from natural language into game mechanics, and that's tricky.
Civ II will always be peak Civ
I'm proud of these efforts. I'll probably buy a full priced copy of the new Civ because of them.
I would have preferred they partner with some UI experts.
I'd go for AI! The problem I have with Civ is that they create these really sort of interesting and elaborate systems, but they've clearly long surpassed the capabilities of their AI systems to the point that the only way to create the illusion of competitiveness is with giving the AI ever more massive cheat bonuses (200% faster research, 200% more resources per tile, etc type stuff).
That really ruins the 'real' game and creates this sort of meta layer where you're specifically aiming to compete against these cheat bonuses rather than actually playing the game. It'd be analogous to a really weak chess AI trying to create the facade of challenge by randomly giving itself a new pawn every 2 turns, a a knight every 5 turns, and a rook every 20.
Firaxis’s team is quite skilled, and many of its designers also code, which helps them build features more intentionally than at many other studios. I’m pretty sure they considered doing more autonomous AI for Civ VII, but there are really good reasons not to.
In most strategy games, rule-based AI is easier to author, contextualize, and theme. Players usually prefer AI agents with memorable and varied traits instead of excellent high autonomy (complex utility, HTN, ML) AI. They like evident strategy more than complex strategy. Smarter and harder AI sounds appealing on paper, but it’s often less fun for most players who want a predictable, beatable opponent.
High-fidelity human-level opponent AI is only really appreciated in eSports, where it serves a training purpose. However, eSports people have fun in an aim trainer—they are not the “normal” gamer.
Most people want “really weak chess” and wouldn't enjoy hard or complex chess. They like game AI opponents acting in simple and vulnerable patterns they can outsmart and feel clever. And the more they dominate the agents by learning them, the more they like the game. Even if they say they don't, the user testing shows they do. The cheat bonuses that are super easy to win against are probably intentional :)
There is also another reason for building simple game AI — the illusion of intelligence is not created by complexity but rather by anthropomorphization/personification. It's the same as with LLMs — the big breakthrough was when they started speaking like humans, and all further complications aren't adding much to the broad and intuitive feeling of their intelligence. Similarly, a game AI agent that tells you what they are thinking achieves more perceived intelligence than an AI agent that is actually more intelligent. With this in mind, game developers don't waste much time on deep intelligence. This time is better used making agents bark, animate, display human reactions, show context awareness, etc. It is very much about the agents being showhorses, not workhorses.
I say this from pretty long AAA game AI design and architecting experience. It’s wiser to do what Firaxis did.
It's not like the choices are between a 'lively' cheating AI that can't play worth a fiddle without massive cheat bonuses, and a soulless unbeatable superhuman AI that plays fair.
If it were possible to create a superhuman fair playing AI then the Civ bonuses themselves would create personality (in fact often strongly related to the desired personality characteristics of each civ!) even without additional 'hard coded' imperatives, which would of course also be possible.
And in this scenario create a compelling weaker AI would be much easier than trying to create a compelling strong AI (from a very weak base). There will need to be some 'move' evaluator function and simply picking weaker 'moves' would so fine. If that creates uncompelling AI then we could get back to cheating and impose resource penalties, but with much more compelling play. E.g. - kind of like playing a strong chess engine with knight odds.
When one builds game AI, one of the core design decisions is whether they want the system to be autonomous or authorable. You are right, its not a strict dichotomy. But both choices offer many advantages that an undecided/mixed approach doesn’t.
Look up different game AI architectures: scripted, rule-based, finite state machines, behavior/decision tree, utility, planning, hierarchical task networks, and machine learning. Hard-coded imperatives are very difficult on highly autonomous architectures, as is complex systemic behavior in authored ones. Consider how hard it is to make an autonomous AI system like ChatGPT implement one simple hard imperative: not revealing the system prompt.
Weak AI and strong AI are ambiguous terms. Most junior-level software engineers can create very complex gameplay systems if you're talking about complexity. It’s much harder to build simple ones that effectively create the illusion of intelligence on limited hardware. If you are talking about difficulty, then challenging AI is no harder to make than easy AI. Usually, game designers will naturally create hard AI as they play the game so much they become experts, and player testing is used to make it easy again.
As you describe it, the move evaluator is a utility function approach that is neither very authorable/personable nor very autonomous. It is pretty limiting on both fronts, so it’s rarely used. A simple rule-based approach is more straightforward to balance and personalize for each agent/archetype. And difficulty scaling or balancing the game differently doesn’t require what you propose. They just chose not to do the balancing you want.
There’s nothing wrong if you prefer a utility approach. We all have our preferences, and I like some pretty clever AI systems like GOAP that aren’t always a good fit for games like Civ. They are cool and smart systems but players rarely respond better to them than simple FSMs or rule-based game AI, which are easier to author. The utility approach is somewhere in the middle and could also be made context-specific with enough separate utility functions the agent would evaluate. But it is so much more work than to define simple if-then rules. :)
I find the detail interesting but I think this is somewhat tangential. What we're talking about is cheating vs non-cheating AI. How it happens to be implemented is largely inconsequential. And it's obviously entirely possible to create a non-cheating AI with scalable difficulty, and there's not a player alive that'd miss the current systems of incapable AI that generates a challenge by excessive cheating.
Why does it matter if the AI is "cheating"? There's nothing inherently virtuous about symmetric advantages, and Civ is already highly asymmetric in its fundamental design (map generation, spawn locations, faction bonuses). If you wish you had the option of facing a human-like opponent without inherent advantages, that's fair. But it's entirely unfounded to claim that giving an opponent advantages is somehow intrinsically illegitimate. It's a game, the nature of the challenge is an extraordinarily broad design space.
I think there's a simple issue to sum up the problem - implementation details should be hidden from the user. But AI systems that rely primarily on excessive cheating become a game where knowing their implementation is essentially 100% of the strategy because overcoming such an unfair gulf is basically impossible without breaking the AI. This lends itself to awkward strategies that should not work, but do. And it simultaneously also makes many aspects of the game basically red herrings in that they simply don't work. And that's seriously (!!!) a shame because the designers in Civ have done a great job of creating lots of really interesting systems, but these systems have gone far beyond the AI's capability, which is just compensated for by extreme cheating.
It can also lead to the appearance of buggy behavior if you don't understand the implementation. For instance I think Firaxis did a much better job of the AI in XCom (in that it's enjoyable to play against at least), but there too you kind of need to understand the implementation or you might wonder about why, for instance, enemies seem to be magically teleporting around the map. The answer, of course, is that they indeed are.
Of course creating a non-cheating AI that's competitive against skilled humans is extremely non-trivial. But if you at least work on improving the AI you can tune down the amount of cheating necessary to create a challenge, which means the experience can feel much closer to 'organic.'
Because it becomes very not fun to play with the AI when the unfair boosts make it very difficult to win without just cheesing it in ways that exploit its predictable stupidity.
It matters because it becomes very quickly obvious. And the moment that it becomes obvious that you are not playing against an opponent that tries to use cunning and strategy, but merely an equation - a puzzle - which you have to solve, the entire house of cards comes down. Puzzle games can be fun, but the very people in this thread are arguing that CIV games are not about being a puzzle, but about roleplaying a civilization. There's a puzzle aspect of course, but a blatantly cheating AI is just a puzzle and nothing else.
It matters for the same reason that people don't want to play against a human-like AI, because that AI would be a double crossing bastard who tries to win at all costs. They want to play against a roleplaying AI who tries to appear like Ghenghis Khan or Tutanchamon. But if I see my sworn enemy Attila the Hun spawn in an endless stream of battering rams out of thin air, and yet is so utterly incompetent and dumb that it cannot navigate a simple pass between mountains, that's a worse transgression against my suspension of disbelief than if he was just plain bad at the game.
Concerning cheating - yes, AI agents cheating against the player is universally disliked. Players quite like game AI that cheats in their favor. For example, in a fight with a group of AI opponents, only one would attack you simultaneously (we call this tokening/ticketing) and at a DPS generally lower than yours (through reduced accuracy, mini-cooldowns, and imperceivable timing tweaks between attacks, or more in-universe reasons) so that you can beat them all (even if the agent has the same weapon and loadout as you, and even if their stats screen shows higher stats!) There are also modifiers to how AI characters in traditional third/first-person games move and escalate when they are off-screen, as the players don't take well to being surprised by an enemy that emerges from off-screen close to them, even when it's plausible (Cyberpunk 2077 police). It is super cheatable, and many players end up unconsciously using these techniques, but they consider it "fair" and fun :) There are a lot of these tricks game developers do to make AI cheat in the player's favor. This isn't true for some titles meant to be hard, but it is typically true in AAA. Meanwhile, AI cheating against the player is considered very undesirable.
Firaxis might simply be balancing with formulas like y = mx + b, where the AI starts with a bonus b and gets better at a rate m through the age/game. I am only speculating, but perhaps they want the AI agents to seem harder at the start and make it more likely that the player overcomes them over the game. The feeling of dominating an opponent is one component of a design pillar in many games called "power fantasy," which players love. Dominating them from a position of the underdog is even more rewarding. Whether this plays as well as never giving the AI agents an "unfair" advantage is another question, but this advantage is a part of the Civ formula now. And there is a bit of inertia around design traditions in game series - many things are built around them that wouldn't work and would have to be redone if they changed. Perhaps they didn't want to spend time here.
One way or the other, this is a matter of balancing and not big-picture game AI design, architecture, or systems as much. So, if you are only concerned with cheating, then set all of what I said about these big-picture things aside. However, the comment I was responding to was more about the overall quality of AI systems.
I hope the context I've given anyone who reads this lets them communicate with Firaxis about the cheating problem in a more direct and constructive way. Saying that AI is bad overall from the perspective of system modernity does not express that sentiment and would confuse them. I am happy with the game AI in Civ in the same way most programmers are okay with bugs in software. It's not perfect, but I understand why it is this way. You can challenge the cheating in their forums if you'd like.
I'm not disagreeing with what you are saying, but I think the issue at hand is very different than what you are arguing about and must be taken in context of the greater game design: past CIV 4, the game design got disconnected and ran ahead of the AI. I'd imagine that the AI in the later games is actually much more advanced, but it feels incredibly dumb. Truly catastrophically dumb, because the game mechanics were not made in mind with the capabilities of the AI, or the AI was not made smart enough to function with the game mechanics. I'd argue the latter is much more difficult to do (and here we agree), but it doesn't excuse the development team.
Take one of the most controversial features of CIV 5: one unit per tile. On the face of it, this is a great feature that opens up interesting tactical opportunities. Blockading, the importance of terrain, formations etc.
Unfortunately, whether due to unwillingness or lack of competence, the AI was completely befuddled by this. It'd make big armies, and then be fundamentally incapable of moving them. It would shuffle units one by one around endlessly and get stuck in the smallest of congestions.
This is not about whether an AI should play to win like a human or it should roleplay. I agree - and the majority of playerbase agrees - that the CIV AI should primarily roleplay. We all remember the frustrating double-crossing bastards during the early days of CIV 5.
This is not about the AI being complex or not. This is about making a game where the AI is competent, and this is not just the AI being some super smart intelligence in absolute terms. It is (mostly) about designing the game such that the AI can appear competent and pose a threat where the human player can feel like they are playing against an opponent that can test their skill, instead of just trying to beat some pre-determined math that is stacked against them.
CIV 4 was a game built in an era where computers were orders of magnitude less capable, and yet the AI in the game poses a much better and more competent appearing threat than in the current iterations. Not because it was more advanced, but because the game was built such that the AI didn't need to be that advanced. The AI still cheated of course, but it only needed a few simple heuristics and rules to build doomstacks that appeared "smart". A simple A* was enough for it to navigate this doomstack to your capital and make you sweat.
Now we have very complex tactical battles with positioning and formations, but this would require vastly more complex AI to do well. Unfortunately, the AI has not kept up, so we are left with opponents that appear dumb as bricks because they don't play the game the human plays. The AI simply spawns resources and armies into existence out of thin air in ever more blatant ways. The less the AI plays by the same rules the player has to, the less it feels like a story and more like a math puzzle.
Totally agree. The response to complaining about bad AI in civ is usually about how players don't really want good AI, but for me as the AI randomly shuffles their units around outside your city you constantly pick them off with mutually supporting ranged units, achieving kill ratios in the 20:1 range is so totally unrealistic that it destroys immersion.
I fully believe that the great mass of the bell curve is happy with the bad AI, but for those of us who are a little better at the game, we will keep complaining about how terrible the AI is.
I think the great mass of the bell curve also hasn't actually seen a good CIV AI experience because they never played the 4th iteration. But people know there is something wrong with the AI. One just needs to look at the steam forums and reviews. By and large, everyone agrees that the AI does not really know how to play the game. Which is a shame because I think the games themselves are genuinely built with love and care.
I would just like an AI that isn't so incompetent that it breaks immersion in the game. In Civ 6, on Deity, if you survive the first 50 turns, when the AI had a massive cheat advantage, it is virtually impossible to lose to the AI militarily. In later stages they essentially never use planes, or any kind of coherent tactics.
The AI certainly does tell you what it's thinking: "Duuuuhhhhhhhhhhh"
I've been playing a game called Old World, which is basically Civ with decent UI and AI. The UI is intuitive and uses a nested tooltip system similar to Crusader Kings 3. The AI is pretty decent at war, it will flank you, use its strengths against your weaknesses, and will retreat to heal units that you don't finish off instead of fighting unwinnable battles.
It's set entirely in the ancient time period instead of having multiple ages, which I find this to be a strength since units and technologies remain relevant throughout the entire game. Also, ethical sales practices: the base game is very complete and DLC only adds small changes unlike most games in this genre (looking at you Paradox). The game's also on GOG, which itself is a green flag in several ways.
The developers are active daily on all support channels (Discord, Steam, forums etc). I've seen people attach saves asking for help, and a dev always respond a couple hours later in great detail.
As one of the OW designers, and a daily HN reader, this is an unexpected but highly pleasant mention of the game here!
Ah yes, the famed Solver! You're known for your inhumanly rapid responses to every Old World related discussion on the Internet but I didn't expect you to show up here.
I'm first and foremost a computer nerd, about the very target audience HN is for. Which also happens to be the target audience the early Civ games or Old World are often for!
> I've been playing a game called Old World, which is basically Civ with decent UI and AI. The UI is intuitive and uses a nested tooltip system similar to Crusader Kings 3. The AI is pretty decent at war, it will flank you, use its strengths against your weaknesses, and will retreat to heal units that you don't finish off instead of fighting unwinnable battles.
Civ also does everything you mentioned - ie their units will flank and retreat. Is the AI markedly better than Civ?
The AI is just one of many things I like about it. In short, whatever Civ does, Old World probably does it better, all without giving mega-bonuses to the AI.
It has a lot more going on than Civ (1 turn in OW is equivalent to about 3 turns of Civ), but somehow it's a lot more polished. There's a free demo, feel free to try it. It's often on deep discount as well. It has a 200 page manual. I find that skimming a manual gives me a good feel for a game before I play it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hb4dmDKxpf3pJJtpdFA4y4OOY-d...
The lead designer is Soren Johnson, who was also the lead designer for Civ 4, so if you liked that particular iteration you might like OW.
I'll take a look. This is the first time I heard of OW and I'm a pretty big Civ fan so thanks for the recommendation!
Most strategy games are like this. If the game were simple enough to be amenable to the AI competing on an equal playing field, it wouldn't be marketable to strategy gamers. If it becomes more complex, it's dubious that AI could be developed at a reasonable price point in the first place, or that it could be run on consumer hardware.
People looking for novel strategy gaming generally just go online, and those people are such a small minority of users it wouldn't make much sense to develop the game around their preferences. It would be interesting if an AI could be trained on ingesting data from multiplayer and single player games to come up with novel strategies, but the training costs probably exceed the total value of the market for any particular game.
Civ IV was interesting in that it patched its AI across multiple expansions based on playtesting and user feedback. The AI in IV is generally predictable, but it doesn't fall for a lot of cheap feints that you might expect because of this.
I always thought there might be some model that could support development like this - something like the season pass model, where the same game gets updated with novel content every year. Minecraft does this for free, FIFA does it every year by retailing what is effectively the same game with updated content, and Fortnite operates a traditional season pass. Microsoft has kind of done this by revamping some old titles like Age of Empires II, but the only studio I can think of that operates on this model is Paradox. That does get expensive though - Crusader Kings II with all of its expansions retailed for around $250 USD. Not bad for a game you play over the course of years (comparable to many MMORPGs), but a lot to pay for a game all at once.
That's essentially what they were doing at least as far back as Civ2 (I think there was a cheat menu for creating custom maps?) — the shields the AI needed for a unit or building, the bushels needed for city growth, were reduced on higher difficulty settings.
(I've not seen the original game, dunno what they did for that).
Original game was the same IIRC. You’d see it when you spied on enemy cities - ludicrously spaced out shields in their build bar
Absolutely.
Not only they turned Civ6 into a board game for PC, they equipped it with extremely dumb AI which can be easily beaten even at the highest difficulty level.
Now I'm looking at the gameplay of Civ7 on youtube and no way I'm buying it. Maybe I'll play Civ5 when I feel nostalgic.
That is also my main problem with the game. Playing deity difficulty is finding a way to game the game in order to overcome the bonuses your rivals get, it is not about creating brilliant strategies because your rivals are cunning. In fact the AI is rather dumb.
This is always a challenge in video games; the goal of enemy AI is not to beat you, but to make for an interesting and fun challenge.
I'm sure there's a community where they build alternative enemy computer players though. And else there's always online multiplayer, but that's not for everyone.
The problem with AI 'cheating' is that it often shifts the challenge away from strategy and more toward figuring out how to outpace artificial handicaps. A well-designed AI should create challenge through better decision-making, not arbitrary advantages.
Exactly this. I'm not at all complaining about the game being too easy or too hard. I'm complaining that when you create a challenge by taking a horrific AI and then just letting it cheat to the point that it poses a challenge, you create an entirely new game. And that new game is often nowhere near as fun as the game itself "really" is because it all comes down to meta-gaming the horrific AI to overcome what should be an insurmountable handicap if the AI played even remotely decently.
> And else there's always online multiplayer, but that's not for everyone.
Civ's multiplayer is traditionally very poor (frequent crashes, desyncs etc), which is a big reason why there's such demand for good AI, moreso than other games.
I wish they would invest on the reliability of multiplayer... every time I hope it will be better and every time I am disappointed.
You are right, but the issue here is slightly more nuanced. The CIV AI is just plain atrocious at playing the game. It's not about having a personality, it's that the developers add game mechanics that the AI is fundamentally incapable of dealing with. To give you an example, CIV 5 introduced the concept of 1 unit per tile - it used to be that you could stack as many units as you wanted into one tile before. Neat idea, right? Terrain and unit placement suddenly mattered!
But there was a significant issue with this: the AI was terrible at moving units and armies. It'd get confused by the smallest congestion. The AI would build a large army, and then be incapable of moving it anywhere.
The AI can still have personality and roleyplay instead of attempting to win, and yet be a competent strategist and tactician.
No unit stacking even breaks the automated worker orders which are meant to help the player by reducing the amount of micro. Automated workers are borderline useless in Civ V compared to Civ II.
This isn't a case where the AI is meant to have "authored personality" or whatever.
That's a very good point as well. Again, I think the point is not about making the AI human-like (ie play to win), but making it competent. Firaxis seems unwilling or incapable of making the AI competent.
We could argue that making a competent AI is difficult - it is! But then a competent game designer comes up with mechanics that the AI can handle. A well designed game is put together knowing the capabilities of each game component so that they work together, not against each other.
This is I feel the source of brilliance of CIV 4. It was a game running on vastly less powerful machines than what we have today, and yet the AI felt vastly more competent. It is likely actually less "smart" than the AI in CIV 7 in absolute terms, but it was operating in a world which it understood and could reason about much better.
It's an issue with a lot of modern games. People have starry ideas about fancy features, but then they can't integrate the features together into a cohesive whole. I think this is something we lost in the modern days of game development. It has never been easier and more accessible, but this accessibility (which I support wholeheartedly), has made it easy for people to design themselves into a corner.
The problem with multiplayer in Civ games for me, aside from the really long play times, is that their networking code is extremely buggy so 80% of games I play end with the game state freezing or someone randomly dropping.
If they partnered with a modern UI expert, the buttons would be replaced by hieroglyphs even more cryptic than symbols from the Shawnee Tribe and organized into at least 3 separate hamburger menus.
They do have huge amounts of whitespace everywhere so I guess they did do some modern UI design.
I don't think it was lack of experts. I suspect the UI people are professionals.
I much more strongly suspect it was "we're going to hire one person to do the work of three" and the result was "get it working as quick as I can".
> get it working as quick as I can
That’s certainly what it looks like. When I first tried the game, before getting a refund shortly after, my first thought was “wtf, did they accidentally ship an old build?”. The UI feels so u finished, lacking feedback and visual clarity.
I don't think they are mutually exclusive but yeah... The UI is pretty terrible. The icons feel cheap, everything's inconsistent and grey and ugly.
Definitely LOL'd watching the video when it opened up with the singing native American trope. Marketing content is torture. I'll die on this hill.
Marketing content has definitely destroyed Google search. So much harder to find in-depth content
If you don't mind this unsolicited product-recommendation, I use Kagi now and I'm won-over. Turns out that when users pay for a search-engine it ends-up focused towards the users' needs and not advertisers; funny that.
(Though Kagi isn't perfect: I find it slower than Google: it'll take maybe 500ms for a result compared to <100ms on Google; Search-autocomplete is also less responsive, and their privacy-first approach means they don't save your search-history, whereas I want them to save my search-history for me, but anyway).
The way Google randomly deletes words in your search term drives me insane.
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Cautiously optimistic, though I'm skeptical a game based on "explore, expand, extirpate, exploit, extract, exterminate", capitalism, and colonization will change sufficiently in this next iteration. To be fayuh... I mostly played Civ3, Civ4 and only a little bit of CiV, and put Civ6 on my Steam Ignore list after reading enough about it (and now I've gone and (gladly, willingly) deleted my Steam account, so this is academic for me).
Awhile back I daydreamed about other "victory" conditions (what other victory is there but an interesting story across generations, a sense of meaning and purpose to life, and the continuation of a diverse interrelation of life forms on Earth?), and would like to have played a game where I set up the initial conditions, played out as many turns as I wanted, and then turned it over to the algorithm (not AI, not the current ML/LLM fad, but something far cheaper to run, and with just the biases of the devs as a result of all their research) to see how things shook out over the next ten thousand years.
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