Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes | Hacker News Reader

Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes

polygon.com

215 pointsyread148 comments

I've bought every Civilization game except the very first one. They're good games, but the one I really love is Alpha Centauri. Maybe it's a nostalgia thing--- I got SMAC when I was in middle school. But the faction design was phenomenal, and it was great how you actually had to play the factions differently, and knowing the other factions meant you handled them differently. I started playing University of Planet and just out-teching everyone, but learning how to play the other factions was very interesting and provided a ton of replay.

To me, Paradox's Stellaris is more of a spiritual successor to SMAC than Beyond Earth is. You have empires that have radically different traits, values, and governments. You actually have to play to your strengths and think about your policies. (Disclaimer: I am extremely sleep deprived from playing Stellaris the last two nights.)

The Civs and Beyond Earth all play the same. The faction differences are superficial. It's bleh.

//edit forgive me HN, I commented before I read. The article does address my concern:

> "We found that there was a bit of a sameness to leaders as opponents," he says. "They didn’t really act as different personalities in terms of diplomacy. In Civ 6, every single leader in the game has a historical agenda. We look at something they did very well in history and we dial that up in the game world to make them a bit fanatical about it in Civilization 6.

But I have very little faith that they've solved it. Having a leader that is more fanatical about something isn't the same thing as having to make hard deicisions about Values & Government trade-offs!

For reference: The Alpha Centauri Social Engineering panel: http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/201... And wiki for details: http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri/Soci...

SMAC also had 10/10 flavor text and setting overall. It's a game that has a lot of character.

One of my favorite stories about Alpha Centauri was from a person on the PA forums called Wallhitter:

I learned the word Atrocity from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

My dad and I had a horrible discussion in the car about the word, eventually.

"Dad, what's an atrocity?"

"It's when someone does a horrible thing to a lot of people"

"...but sometimes they're necessary, right?"

"..."

This was pretty entertaining. I think I want to see if I can get this game now.

It's on GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri and I was even able to play it on OSX--- GOG has packaged it with a Windows VM.

Furthermore, there are a series of community patches that improve the game in a number of ways, such as making it properly work in windowed mode in Windows, and give you smooth zoom:

http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=14308.0

> "...but sometimes they're necessary, right?"

Are we still talking about Caesar chopping off all those rebellious Gauls' right hands?

Yeah it did. You can find the technology quotes on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24OXzIRIiMQ

> “He held his arm too stiffly, and so was thrown back repeatedly, until at last I seized his forearm and snapped it back against itself. His training suffered while the arm healed, of course, but I felt this was a lesson he must learn early, and well.”

I know that my brother had difficulty with this quote. The mental image of someone's arm being jui-jitsu'd off is pretty powerful. My brother would click "OKAY" as fast as possible to avoid listening to the quote.

Your quote is in this video, around the 4:00 mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S1N8_Lkeps

Any of you fellow SMAC fans play Beyond Earth? Is it a spiritual successor?

Sadly, no. BE is a dressed up Civ5.

Beyond Earth is kind of sad...

Civ 5 wasn't bad, but I'd rather take on Auriga in Endless Legend if I'm playing a hexagonal 4X - plus it reminds me pleasantly of Master of Magic.

unfortunately would have to say no. bells and whistles and alien fungi but missing the spirit. Stellaris however is AMAZING.. its got the feel of original Master of Orion and old time Civs.

Unlike other commenters here, I didn't dislike BE. It's a fun game, and it's worth checking out (especially with the Rising Tide expansion).

It's very much trying to be a spiritual successor, but I'm not sure it really achieves the goal. The setting isn't as convincing (it's mostly Civ 5 in space, with orbital units). The factions all pretty much play the same, just with some bonuses. The biggest problem (though I suppose this has been a problem for all civ games to some extent) is that the AI is bad. It can do tactical decisions, but strategic big-picture it seems to have no clear goal.

It's worth checking out, but it's only partly the spiritual successor to SMAC it tries to be. I see a lot of people here recommending Stellaris, I haven't tried it but now I think I should.

Oh, yeah, SMAC is the best civ ever. Man, that game had atmosphere. The faction leaders were great. And the technology! Will we have to research Alphabet for the sixth time in Civ6? Well, SMAC had us research Mind/Machine Interface, Frictionless Surfaces, Digital Sentience...

And the Planet Busters! God, I'd love a SMAC 2!

Civ 5 did a bit of experimenting with distinctly asymmetrical nations - for example, there's Venice, which can only directly control a single city. It feels like they completely forgot about that kind of thing when they got to BE, though.

Here's a blog (that I found from an HN comment, interestingly!) where someone goes through and analyzes all the SMAC flavor text and writes about how well-done it was. It was interesting for me because there's a lot more depth than I realized when I first played SMAC, and the different factions all seemed to me more like caricatures than real philosophical viewpoints:

https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com

That's an amazing series. I miss Alpha Centauri all the more, and the disappointment of BE is that much harsher.

Thank you for sharing this! That link does a very good job of exploring just what it was about various concepts in SMAC that made it so compelling.

I played SMAC at a similar age and similarly have great nostalgia for it. I went back to it more recently and it held up. The setting is out of this world (heh), and the unit customization options were awesome, and added a layer of depth that MOO and others have but Civ does not. That's what really did it for me.

PC Gamer ranked SMAC as the best game of all time for quite some time, and deservedly so. That is not an accolade they hand out lightly.

I would love to see a game that accurately reflects modern geopolitics. It would generate a world and run a history up to a certain point, at which you'd take control as head of state of a particular nation and conduct national affairs.

Ideally, the game would be able to make conducting the affairs of a large global hegemon like the United States as interesting as playing a small kingdom beset on all sides. Sort of like Crusader Kings but set in the modern world.

The real interesting part of the game in my view is that conquest is no longer an option, and tactics would get abstracted out of armed conflict in an "amateurs think tactics, generals think logistics" kind of way.

You never played Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis?

Victoria 2 is, I think, the most interesting of them.

Although I've never gotten deep enough into Crusader Kings II to really know how to play it.

> The real interesting part of the game in my view is that conquest is no longer an option

Isn't it though? Russia seemed to do OK with the conquest of Crimea. Anyway the suggestion of Europa Universalis is probably the closest you will get right now. If Paradox made a post-cold war sim I'd play the hell out of it, but I think it would be hard to do right and be interesting precisely because without real conquest and wars, there isn't much that is interesting for a game on the global level.

I enjoyed Europa Universalis as well. It taught me quite some history while being engaged with addictive gameplay.

A modern version simulating the last 100 years of politics and war on a worldwide scale would interest me. Especially if you could try different strategies and perspectives in current day hotspots like Syria, Southeast Asian sea, etc.

Well, technically speaking Stellaris is post-cold war, by about 150 years. :P

True, and I'm currently enjoying the hell out of Stellaris, so I guess that counts :D

    > Russia seemed to do OK with the conquest of Crimea

While I'm no Putin apologist, Russian "conquest" of Crimea is a bit like hypothetical Éire conquest of Northern Ireland. You're certainly going to upset a lot of people, but it's also hardly black and white.

> it's also hardly black and white

No, I think it's clear. The Russians invaded another country, conquered Ukranian land and kidnapped Ukrainian people.

EDIT: Fixed the ambiguous pronouns

    > Their military invaded

"Their" being Russian here...

    > conquered their land and kidnapped their people

By 'their', you mean the people of Crimea, of which over 50% identify as Russians?

You can't invade another country because people "identify" as something. It's an absurd argument, worthy of the Kremlin (from whence it comes).

Plus, IIRC that survey was also Russian propaganda.

Under that logic, the 87% Hispanic population of Texas's 15th and 34th congressional districts ought to welcome the Mexican army.

Don't forget cities like New York, with China Town, Crown Heights, etc. etc. etc. It's going to be a challenge to manage all those national borders in such a small area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

Hardly black and white? Care to provide us with some sources which provides the legal grounds for Russia annexing a part of Ukraine?

You could view Crimea just as minor oscillation in the wake of collapse of Soviet Union.

Conquest of strategic locations is just as important as before. Suez, Panama, Gibraltar and Singapore are pretty carefully looked after. But there has been significant decoupling between ownership of arable land and economic power. So you don't see same kind of land grabs that marked most of middle ages and lasted until WWII.

> conquest is no longer an option

Sounds like an interesting idea for a game, but that doesn't really accurately reflect modern geopolitics, does it?

From a historical perspective there's been shockingly little conquest in the past 50 years. Almost all redrawing of borders have been a result of internal struggles, and only a tiny amount of soil has changed hands as a result of invading armies seizing territory.

There've still been civil wars, coups, proxy wars, trade wars, foreign-funded revolutions, etc, but these are way smaller scale and result in far less bloodshed than building up a massive army and smashing it against an enemy in an open war of conquest.

Interesting dynamics for a game like Civ.

It is also a lot harder to model these sorts of dynamics and make for a compelling game, IMO. An interesting idea of an "economic rts" type game is Offworld Trading Company(incidentally the brainchild of the Civ4 creator). I think they strike the right balance for their type of game, but I'm not sure it could be done for a more deliberate, Paradox-style strategy game.

It would be very interesting to have a political simulator where the internal population of the country is divided into factions, ethnic groups, and subcultures that differ on one of several dozen identity dimensions, and your goal is to lead the country and hold it together. If you screw up and deviate too farm from the centerline, either an opponent leader takes over and you have to rebuild your powerbase, or the country splits up in civil war. If it does split up and enter civil war, then the geography becomes very important and you need to hold territories (and their inhabitants) containing military bases, industrial production, and natural resources.

I think Democracy 3 [1] covers the first half of your description.

[1] http://www.positech.co.uk/democracy3/

There have been games that strove to do something like that -- though, usually, based directly on the real world rather than a generated one, and usually with a limited array of real-world country choices, and sometimes with a fantasy twist.

Balance of Power (both the original and 1990 editions; allowed play of the USA or USSR only) and Shadow President (allowed play as the USA only) come to mind; ISTR one that allowed play as a wider variety of real-world nations, but can't place the name.

More country-level than international, but I think you'd like Democracy 3 http://store.steampowered.com/app/245470/

I remember playing a very old game called 'Shadow President' that I thought was particularly fun.

I'm an Aussie and Australia in the game always frustrated the heck out of me. I often nuked it. :-/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_President

i remember the sequel "Cyberjudas", fun but frustrating too. was excessively impressed with how the game used CIA world factbook info.. "whoa, this is like so real dude!"

I would love it if Paradox did a Crusader Kings/Europa Universalis/Victoria/Hearts of Iron set in the modern era.

A Civilization game that doesn't involve rushing to remove Gandhi from the game before he starts piling up nukes is not a Civilization game. At least that's where I draw the line.

That goddamned smile. They're gonna keep him that way, aren't they?

this must be one of the funniest and memorable bugs-to-turn-feature in all of gaming or even software itself. If I was the producer of any future Civ game, I would insist on this remaining as-is.

This explains a lot: http://kotaku.com/why-gandhi-is-such-an-asshole-in-civilizat...

That is about the best thing I've read in a while.

Civ IV had a very nice mod called Rhye's and Fall of Civilization that "simulated history" up to a point until the starting time period of your chosen civilization, and it had "historical forces" (random and scripted events) that destabilized old civs and sometimes caused new ones to appear. It also had "historical victories", in addition to the usual victory conditions, that were thematic in relation to the chosen player civ (imagine things like (made up, because I no longer remember) "control all of the Mediterranean by X" or "never lose a city to the Mongols while building 6 academies).

The problem with the modern era is that it's kind of boring from a strategy game perspective. Eras that are boring from a strategy game perspective are the best eras to live in, so I'm not complaining, but a strategy game where the biggest challenge is to manage the Eurozone crisis or react to changing oil prices is not going to be nearly as popular as a strategy game where the biggest challenge is to win a World War.

I, too, like to play Civ this way. For my money, Civ4 (and its various mods) comes the closest to allowing this style of play. The game itself is highly moddable, and provided you play with the right set of AI personalities, you can actually conduct geopolitics without reverting to the simplistic "Blow them up before they blow you up" imperative every few turns.

But make no mistake: this is not how the game is designed. The game is designed around conquest, by one means or another. Sooner or later, the game 'wants' you to go to war. Everything pushes towards war. There's a lot of fun, in fact, in trying to be a stabilizing force in a world hell-bent on going Mad Max. But it will go there, sooner or later.

Every faction ends up going to war with the others, and you'll find yourself taking various sides in an attempt to shore up the defenses of the helpless, the aggrieved, and the outmatched. Since the roles of aggressor and aggrieved change every few cycles, you'll pretty much go to war with every other nation in a grim rotation of shifting alliances. Eventually you're rewarded for your peacekeeping efforts with the seething and irreparable enmity of every other faction on the map.

At that point, you've got two choices: 1) Cheat and reset relations with the other factions; 2) Accept your new role as World Police, bringing democracy and prosperity at gunpoint.

It doesn't support a procedurally generated world like you are asking but there was a game for Sega CD called Third World War that I loved to play that had a good balance of diplomacy, trade, and war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_World_War_(video_gam...

There's a Paradox game I played a few years ago called Supreme Ruler that I got excited about thinking it was similar but it tends to get bogged down in the military in my opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_World_War_(video_gam...

I haven't played Victoria II but know it also fits this mold. It is set in the colonial time frame so not quite modern but close.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_II

When Civ 1 came out I played it religiously. To the point I could wake up at noon, start playing then look outside and find it was dark.

I didn't really play Civ 2 or 3. I just found them to be classic examples of sequels: adding tedium more than anything else.

Civ 4 I also played a lot, possibly as much as Civ 1. Civ 4 was, for me, a rare sequel that didn't just add feature bloat. It added a lot of depth while streamlining some other aspects.

But I didn't play the base game as much as I played a particular mod: Fall From Heaven 2. Fall From Heaven was, I believe, a mod that came with the game that was fantasy themed. Ffh2 was that taken to another level with years of development effort.

There was much more difference between civilizations. Unit promotions were about twice as strong (eg each strength was 20% not 10%). Heroes and magic were pretty interesting. I spent countless hours playing this mod.

I tried to like Civ5. Really I did. But it just never grabbed me. Some people got excited about hexes. Not me. Once you add in all the expansions (that fix a lot of issues with the original Civ 5) it's not bad but just not inspiring.

I'm not sure I have terribly high hopes for Civ 6. I mean, it might be a perfectly fine game but the smart money is on it not hooking me like Civ 1 or Civ 4 did.

Really I just want a Ffh2 successor.

The right way to buy Firaxis games is to buy the "Complete Edition" or whatever. Civilization N with all expansions are almost always better than the base Civilization N+1 game.

I agree, I bought Civ 5 about a year ago on sale with all expansions and DLC for a small penny. Vanilla Civ 5 feels like an incomplete game with zero replay value. I'll most likely pick up Civ 6 in five years.

Similar boat here. I burned out on Civ back in 1991. I believe most of the new Civ4 or later addicts simply started later and missed the original's release.

I also played Civ2 for DOS and the Windows version that had multiplayer over modem. After that I was definitely done with the general mechanics and had my fill. I'm going to take a look at FFH2 out of interest, but more than likely won't start playing it.

I can't play the same game for 25 years straight and I imagine most gamers my age have also just moved on. Maybe the others don't even play games anymore. But MOBAs are still new enough for me that I haven't burned out on those yet. I played WC3 Frozen Throne DOTA back in 2003 when it was new but I didn't play enough to really get it. Fast forward to when League of Legends came out in '09 I was hooked and been playing that ever since.

I have friends that played Duke Nukem 3D over Kali with me and are still playing FPS games daily. That's another genre that I enjoyed but really can't do anymore out of overexposure.

After League of Legends wears off on me I'll probably move to games built for VR as the formulas that work there are solved.

Civ 5 was arguably incomplete at launch. The optimal strategies ended up being pretty shallow and the AI was pretty brain dead. The expansions helped a lot (although Religion tends to feel like a sideshow), but BNW made it a little to easy to secure a culture victory IMHO.

> although Religion tends to feel like a sideshow

Does it? One of my favourite tactics in Civ5 is rushing to pile up religious wonders, convert the crap out of other countries, and proceed to actually get decent trade deals with their leaders. Combined with Patronage and a few network-oriented beliefs, religious domination will let me lock-in complete support from all City-States (as long as goddamn Alexander isn't in the picture) and dramatically ease my path to victory.

Civ4 had more depth (with expansions) regarding alternative way to dominate (religious or commercial).

Pssst, go treat yourself to Stellaris!

> Stonehenge can only be built near stone.

Found this a bit amusing given that the most likely quarry site for Stonehenge's material is a couple hundred miles away from Salisbury Plain, in Wales. (Not a nitpick at all, the restriction is a good idea, just thought it was quite funny given reality.)

Each tile in this game represents a large area of land.

some might say, "huge tracks of land."

tracts

I'm a bit surprised at the graphics they have shown so far. I originally saw a screenshot and assumed it was a mobile game rather than a full-fledged AAA title for the PC.

Ditto. The cartoony feel doesn't really fit what I would expect from a CIV title, hopefully that will change.

The gameplay changes themselves seem very promising, though

I feel like V is fairly cartoony. These screen shots just don't feel polished though.

Art usually doesn't change much from the screenshots. What you see is probably what you're going to get.

99% of my time in Civ 5 is spent in strategic view. Keep that mode and fix that I can't tell if a tile has a coast line and you can base the graphics on the My Little Pony for all I care.

Alternatively, Civ 6 for the tablet could be amazing.

Definitely. I'd love to be able to pick up a Civ game I started on desktop and continue it on my tablet/smartphone on the go.

Civ 5 and Beyond Earth both have tablet modes. They work very well.

Tablet "mode" isn't too useful if I can't install it on my tablet in the first place.

It's the Surface Pro's killer app.

I have to admit I'm not a fan of the graphics. I had high hopes for Beyond Earth but haven't played more than 100 hours of it, as opposed to 1500+ with Civ 5. I hope Civ 6 doesn't disappoint like Beyond Earth did.

Let's hope some mods will make the look more palatable.

Here is a fan made mockup of how Civilization VI could look with a different art direction:

http://i.imgur.com/ZawuP8E.jpg

Here is the original look for comparison:

http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/289070/ss_a79c8...

I think the original looks so much better. I guess I'm tired of the trend in games where they remove most of the color and add some filters to them.

Well, the fan-made mockup has such look because that's the only thing you can do with the screenshot.

Real mod could do much more, e.g. changing textures or models geometries.

It's the whole new cartoony art direction that's weird and off-putting, unfortunately evoking the feel of cheap mobile games.

Here is a real world photo example of what look modern AAA "Civ-like" game could strive for:

http://i.imgur.com/p4XZDeR.jpg

It's possible to be lush and colorful, yet realistic and more mature looking.

While the new one looks more natural, the original is more iconic: the colors are exaggerated to make items stand out more clearly.

I prefer the original. It's more consistent and I don't think realistic graphics are a good fit for something like Civ.

100% agree. Reminds me of the Diablo 3 art debate: http://www.diablowiki.net/Art_controversy

Sort of looks like Rome Total War 2 vs Clash of Clans there.

The 2D isometric art in Civ 2 will always be my favorite, though.

I think this may be inspired by Endless Legend and how it does improvements in "districts".

Endless legend is pretty cool, but doesn't run on Linux, sadly.

I'm hoping they've made some changes towards making vertical expansion (focusing resources on developing a small number of large, advanced cities) a bit more of a viable alternative to horizontal expansion (focusing resources on founding as many cities as quickly as possible).

In Civ5, with the former approach, city population growth eventually becomes unsustainable (as with fewer cities, you have access to fewer resources and buildings to provide happiness to offset the growth of unhappiness from population), and city productivity will also eventually plateau (as all tiles are worked on and specialist slots filled). In practice, you tend to fall so far behind your rivals in terms of technology, economy, and military that even a cultural victory becomes out of reach on higher difficulties.

IIRC, Vertical expansion has been improved and made more competitive in every Civ release starting with at least Civ III.

You're probably right. I've only played Civ5 though, so that's the only perspective I have. Hopefully they continue the trend with Civ6!

Yeah, I remember spamming cities seemed to be the only way to get ahead in Civ 1 (and democracy to elimite waste/corruption... ha!). Now I play most Civ 5 games with somewhere around 3-4 cities if I'm not going for a conquest victory.

I agree. Venice was a very viable Civ to play as in V, and there you're only allowed one city.

Or at least provide some AI governors so that when you do build wide, you don't have to micromanage all the different build-priorities quite as much.

"Look, it's very simple, the city is called Moneyopolis, it's next to gold mines, and I want it to focus on money. That means unless something really dire is happening like a food-shortage, you build a marketplace, a bank, and a stock-market. If you can't, then make me some gold."

"OK, now Scienceland and Warriorville, any status updates?"

Does anyone remember Empire Earth? I'd love for that game to be remade. I truly enjoy playing Civ but the RTS side of empire earth created a dynamic mix of technology advancement and geopolitics combined with a starcraft like micro-management opportunity.

To me, III was the sweet spot.

IV added some interesting ideas, and could have worked really well, but the interface and design was an ugly mess.

V sorted the interface and design, but seemed a very shallow shadow of the former game. It also seemed to want a ludicrous amount of resources - a simple isometric view that always seemed to need as much PC power as Far Cry. Games bogged down to plain slow from mid game on - too much turn waiting, not enough playing. I gave up on V quicker than any previous Civ and spent most of my Civ time since in Europa Universalis.

If I buy VI at all it'll be after it's been out long enough to have plenty of real reviews and opinions on how well they did. Some of the ideas sound interesting, but the real test is how the balance ends up.

Don't like the cutesy graphics style though, so would hope for a mod or post-processing fix.

If you liked any CIV game do yourself a favor and get the mod Fall From Heaven, civ 4.

I really enjoyed the civ games and played all of them and this mod blows them all away by far and im not much of a mod fan. Seriously go look it up now :)

I strongly agree. I rarely play mods, but Fall from Heaven 2 is awesome and totally reinvented the game in a very new and creative way. I might've played more FfH than Civ.

I wonder if there are any plans to improve game engine performance on OSX. It never seems like a high priority. I understand Windows is 80%[1] of the market but still.

[1] Number pulled out of my butt - I've no idea the exact figure.

Yeah, I have a modern macbook pro, but nothing I do on here sucks battery faster or makes the fan noisier than playing Civ 5.

It's not only OSX/Linux, the Windows version is a bit embarrassing with its performance and graphics glitches too. I really hope they're using a different game engine for this one. Civ5 late games with massive maps are very tedious to play even with a beefy gaming desktop.

I think the AI turns are quite CPU bound with the current engine, so I agree. Late game end turns take forever to complete.

Last time I profiled it, most of the execution was in vsprintf. I'm pretty sure the answer is just “nobody put time for that in the budget”, as with multiplayer support.

FWIW, Steam reports 3.57% of users running OS X in April [1].

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Low user numbers are something of a self-fulfilling prophecy if it's a bad port in the first place, though.

That number is not for Civ V specifically, it is across a random sample of Steam users.

And I'm still sitting here and waiting for Age of Empires 4 :/

You and me, friend. Whatever happened to the MS division that published those games?

I wonder if those games didn't make money, or just didn't make enough money. I'm thinking AoEs and Flight Sim.

RTS genre in general is on decline. Last good RTS was Starcraft 2. It is all caused by the shift to MOBA games...

Also there is huge challenge to create playable RTS game with current popular monetization strategies - in game purchases

AoE would be awful with in-game purchases. I'd rather play an old version on a VM than go through that experience.

Rise of Nations 2

Oh yeah, totally! Surprised there hasn't been, thought it was a hit (for an RTS, that is)

MS shuttered the studio in 2009. You are going to be waiting a long time.

Well, the original division was shuttered. But Microsoft "remastered" AoE2 and sold 3 million (!!) copies. It's their most popular game on Steam. http://steamspy.com/dev/Microsoft+Studios

Unfortunately, they're driving the franchise into the ground with bugs and no support. :( If anyone at Microsoft reads this... help us!

Microsoft Studios is still active, however, Ensemble Studios who developed Age of Empires was closed in 2009. Then you have Skybox Labs who built "HD" versions of some of their games.

Some guys from Ensemble has since formed Robot Entertainment, released e.g. AoE Online, and is supposedly (?) using Microsoft as publisher once again but I don't think they're part of Microsoft Studios anymore. AoE Online was shut down in 2014 though. :/

Yes, still play AoE 3 occasionally.

I am looking forward to see new version of the Age of Empires. I currently play extensively a AoE2 on random map and I would like to improved AI of the path finding of units. It drives me crazy if I set a map with 6-8 players with a 300 population cap and the units after getting an order to attack they are attempting to adopt formation instead of fight in close quarters.

Didn't they release an expansion pack for AoE2 recently?

I've been playing a lot of CIV 1 lately. Because I happen to have it installed on my travel-laptop in DOSBox. I'm sure I've clocked over 100 hours of CIV1 in the past year.

It would be fun to upgrade to a new CIV and see how it compares. Maybe I'll do that in October. But I might need some laptop-upgrades :)

I have more fun playing Civ 4 than Civ 5. I have not played Beyond Earth much but it doesn't feel like a true spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, a much immersive game.

I think there has been a strong pressure to make Civ more appealing to casual audiences and this has somehow degraded the game to a more bland experience.

I loved Civ I, trekked through the sequels, and fell in love again with Civ V (the orgy of stats in IV was starting to kill the franchise, IMHO). I think they are on the right track - the point of Civ is to find a balance between statecraft drudgery and military action, and V moved the needle back towards that ideal centre IMHO.

This new direction sounds slightly too RTS-y, but as long as they don't try to pull a Simcity 5 ("social" games, just say no, kids!), I'm happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I really like the visual style changes, especially how resources show up on tiles. Very nice!

Now, just to let my friends and family know that I'll be a little harder to get hold of this autumn...

Ugh. I wish they'd delay this for a year or two -- I'm afraid I'm going to lose a couple weeks of my life to this game when it comes out, unless I ration it very strictly. Civ II through V were amazing, especially with the expansions, so a version of this made by the people who make the expansions is going to be novel and addictive.

"Just one more turn..." is the ultimate design pattern for a game.

Interesting. The new city system feels almost like a return to Accolade's 1996 game, "Deadlock": https://images-4.gog.com/b621a9344cd3732776dfe5bd8039acde7eb...

Most improvements were sensitive to the type of tiles they built upon.

Nice but if it is only available with Steam's DRM then it will pass me by like Beyond Earth and Starships. Civ5 fooled me, I won't get fooled again.

Hopefully they can add some AI that is not totally lame.

Agreed. I was kind of disappointed in the "AI" in Civ V. The first time I played and an country denounced me I obliterated them off the map and thought to myself, no one else will be foolish enough to denounce me now. Wrong, if you take over nation completely then everyone starts to denounce you, that is the way the "AI" is programed to think.

I dunno, makes sense to me. Annexing one nation will make all the others fear and hate you even more, of course they'll denounce you. A big part of the game is figuring out how to walk the line between expansion and alienating the other civs.

They can fear and hate me, as long as they are too scared to do anything about it.

Right, you are now an expansionist violator of the social order, and they're all going to gang up on you to stop you from doing it again.

It would be interesting if they logged the total hours everyone spends on it.

Am I the only one who wants to play this in VR with a Vive?

I remember this kind of city building in Alpha Centauri.

i really like the idea of having tech advances depend on in-game actions. likewise the idea that city improvements would be more linked to geography.

I love the Civilization series, but I'll be honest: it really bothers me that certain companies have one or two franchises and they keep churning out new iterations of them every year or every other year. It just feels like a money grab after a while (especially with franchises like Call of Duty or Madden, which, from my perspective, don't improve appreciably in between iterations).

I'd like to see them taking some risks and innovating new franchises, and perhaps even new genres.

They did make Beyond Earth, which is more different than Civ than you might expect. That said, I didn't find Beyond Earth to be much fun...

Beyond Earth is essentially a sequel to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (both of which are in the same genre as the main Civilization series, though quite distinct from it.)

(They also recently made Sid Meier's Starships, which is a completely different genre, though IIRC it can integrate with Beyond Earth.)

In contrast, I found it far more compelling than Civ. And yeah, they play surprisingly differently.

> I love the Civilization series, but I'll be honest: it really bothers me that certain companies have one or two franchises and they keep churning out new iterations of them every year or every other year.

The main Civ series has had a new base-game release every 4-6 years, not every year or every other year.

Civ I: 1990 Civ II: 1996 (6 years) Civ III: 2001 (5 years) Civ IV: 2005 (4 years) Civ V: 2010 (5 years) Civ VI: 2016 (6 years)

Ouch. This makes me feel old. I remember playing Civ I on my Amiga, on it's four floppy disks.

It's been around for a quarter of a century...

Not to forget:

Civilization: Call to Power (1999)

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (continuing where Civilization II ended) (1999)

Call to Power II (2000)

Civilization: Beyond Earth (2014): Spiritual sequel to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

There are of course other PC games that are related to the Civilization series but those are IMHO further away from the "main Civilization series".

SMAC and the Call to Power series were made by different companies than the main Civ series, even though, through the process of the various sales and mergers since, all the rights related to them are, I think, in the same place now.

SMAC was the same people, though you're correct about CtP.

> SMAC was the same people,

SMAC was made by the same people (at least, some of the key people) that made Civ I-II, at a different company (Firaxis) from the one then producing and controlling the IP for the main Civ series (MicroProse) who had, IIRC, laid them off.

Several acquisitions and spinoffs of everyone involved, and all the rights are now with Take-Two, of which Firaxis is now a studio under the 2K games umbrella.

Apart from Alpha Centauri, most Civ fans (me included) prefer to pretend these games do not exist.

I loved Call to Power II and Ages of Man

But I can't play those any more because I'm addicted to hex maps now. And pie menus. I hope Civ 6 has pie menus.

>>The main Civ series has had a new base-game release every 4-6 years, not every year or every other year.

I think my point still stands.

I got downvoted for it though, so it's probably not very popular. :)

On the flip side, I'd love to see other companies take on the historical strategy genre. I know there's Paradox, but nobody else seems to want to make a game that spans the entirety of human history.

I suggest you read these two articles that gives you some of the reason behind the yearly release of franchises: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/115152/Analysis_Koticks_R...

http://www.wired.com/2007/12/call-of-duty-gu/

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