Sid Meier’s Civilization VI
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That AI though... declares war on you for no reason. In my first game, five AI players decided to declare war on me out of the blue within the space of three turns. This was in the early game and there was no obvious reason for it. Some of them didn't even border me, and I was no military threat at that time.
In the second game, I had a city with districts that reached out to the end of my city's border. One of the AIs decided to place a city right next to my border and the very next turn expresses nervousness at my troop buildup near its border. The troops being the units fortifying my city, which were there before it settled its city.
It's like playing against a schizophrenic.
After Civ beyond the sword, some Civs would express their aggression in terms of espionage.
Now, war drives your happiness down and production/science goes down with it. Declaring war early might not be a very good strategy unless you know very well what you are doing. Like ganking a civ that everyone is in war with.
http://civ6.gamepedia.com/Leader_Agendas
https://civilization.com/news/entries/diplomacy-gets-a-major...
Also, some previous versions of civ make AIs generally dislike civs that are at war, scaling with the number of wars, leading sometimes to a 'pile on' effect.
That's the problem. It's like the devs saw "zero tolerance" in US schools and said "what a great idea for a diplomacy system!" Nobody wants that!
If an AI settles too close to my city and I declare war, other civs should be willing to acknowledge fault in the offending civ. Casus Belli is important! I don't want to manipulate/game edge-case bugs to get ahead of the AIs, I want functioning and rational relationships. Begging for gifts and friendship betrayals should be a possible surprise, not a "will happen every 30 turns guaranteed". It's not fun, might as well play a regular wargame.
At least in Civ 5, that's a REASON for Civs to DOW you, not a reason for them not to. Expansionist Civ 5 AIs are opportunistic; they attack what they perceive as weaker neighbours. That's why you never grant them embassies or open borders; so they don't learn that you're not building an army.
I tried playing SMAC the other day but I had trouble adjusting myself to the dated interface, even though I spent so many hours playing it years back. I'd be happy with a remake of SMAC with the same gameplay but updated graphics and interface (especially the ability to give move orders that take several turns).
No Civ game comes close to Alpha Centauri for atmosphere.
Both games share a similar problem of repetitiveness, but being able to use the keyboard and muscle memory makes SMAC a lot less tedious for me.
"She's gone. She said she wants nothing more to do with me. But I saved a lock of her hair. She will be mine again..."
Still gives me shivers.
I loved my chosen. How then to face the day when she left me? So I took from her body a single cell, perhaps to love her again.
Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Time of Bereavement"
"I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again. So won't you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment." -Anonymous, Datalinks (played when the player first constructs the hab dome building).
I always see this quote with this fresco: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--rQuNLP71fA/UdonE8DAuAI/AAAAAAAAC...
"My son was asked to use the word prototype in a sentence. He said: 'people are a prototype'. I was too scared to ask what he meant."
We sit together the mountain and I. Until only the mountain remains... But once, we were here.The gameplay itself won't receive a true sequel for the same reason we won't see another civ like Civ2 or Civ4.
A media- and story-rich space game would require enormous resources to make the same impression on gamers today that SMAC made on gamers in 1999. I don't believe Firaxis has the bandwidth to do that and also do X-Com and the Civ series.
I may have spent more time playing this game than reading actual history books.
No wonder this was the first game where I played all night and after a few hours wondered who turned the light on. Then it dawned on me.
That was a wikipedia-less age though.
Good one!
I find Victoria 2 much more interesting, and Crusader Kings 2 is just amazing the way it makes you think and play with the mindset of a feudal lord :)
And then I read how much of a time-sink it is (compared to Civ) once you get going and I think that I was probably lucky it didn't work in a lot of ways!
Crusader Kings 2, on the other hand, I've played to death and love :) especially the Game of Thrones mod.
Colonization was a fun game, though. I still load it up quite often on GOG.
Perhaps it's because my introduction to the Civ series was made by the original Colonization, but for me that will always be the most addicting of all the Civ series.
I liked it because it played much more tactically than Civ, with much more micro-management of individual colonies, and way more interesting interactions with non-civ players (native tribes)
Sadly that style doesn't seem to have been pursued much, or if it was I missed those, the 4X I've played since mostly seem to follow Civ's relatively remote/high level investment in cities.
Also, the topic itself is kind of messed up for a video game, in that doing it justice is really difficult. Like, in retrospect, while I dearly love the game, Colonization is deeply problematic in the worldview it pushes (while the manual for the game is notable in being pretty up-front about the shitty behaviors of the colonial powers, the game itself plays as straight as "in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue") and I think, in order to ethically create a similar game, you have to challenge the default assumptions a lot more. And that's a really tough line to walk: on one hand, you do want to make it possible to dispace and wage war on the natives, because that happened, but that comes with its own ethical problems that I don't think a game is very good at exploring (and yet I feel needs to explore in order to treat the historical topic appropriately). The only nod in Col to the general shittiness of European colonial powers in the New World was a score penalty when you burned native villages, and that's not nothing, but it also isn't a lot given the game they were working with.
The best idea I came up with was the synthesis of a fake Wikipedia article after the end of the game, but that's going to be more of a lecture after-the-fact than a conscious exploration of player decisions as they progressed.
It's a really, really hard one to tackle. I'd love to take another crack at it someday.
Makes sense. I only play solo 4X so I don't really see that, or care.
> Also, the topic itself is kind of messed up for a video game
The topic is a side-issue, you could make a similar micro/tactical 4X with a completely different settings, it's not like all 4X have the same premises. Hell, not even all Civs have the same premise (if you consider Alpha Centauri and Beyond Earth Civs anyway)
For another example of a game that sort of falls down when it becomes so unmoored from something we recognize as reality, I'd like to suggest Pandora: First Contact. In addition to just not being a super-great game, I feel like the fact that it relies on transposing "familiar" concepts to an unfamiliar environment and just totally falls over in the process. Ditto Beyond Earth. Alpha Centauri actively doesn't do that, but it was also designed by Brian Reynolds and he's a rather sharp individual. =)
Sure but I don't think that's a very important/interesting part of Col, and you could always have that with mounted or mechanised units in other settings. The most interesting parts of Colonisation to me were the management of cities, their very specific resources, the colonists/workers and their specialisations, and the necessary setup of trade/exchange links (both with AI and between your own colonies as you might have raw resource cities which are not amenable to extension and processing, so you'd have a small colony producing a ton of e.g. tobacco or sugar — either directly or through native allies — and a bigger one processing them into cigars).
The big sticking point I think would be Col's early reliance on the "mother nation" for economic needs (selling goods, raw materials and new colonists).
Another one of those games that taught me loads about the history of a situation, as much as it was loads of fun.
The only thing that wasn't fun is that the game seemed to corrupt floppy disk 2 every once in a while, even when it wasn't write-enabled.
InfoAddict is a awesome for getting a higher level view of what's happening in the game.
I only switched to Civ V from IV because it has a Linux version (and Civ IV does not, though it does run reasonably well under Wine, though I hate the fiddling required to keep Wine and GPu drivers happy through OS upgrades and such). Civ V runs as well under Linux as it does under Windows; not perfect, mind you, but it's not perfect under Windows either.
And why couldn’t they keep the fantastic Art Deco-style UI?
But civs are like shoes, the new ones never fit as well as those that are already well worn in.
But I personally love the idea of cultural victory. Military victories are an easy way to win, but they feel unsatisfying to me because you never develop high technology. Advancing your civilization needs to have some payoff.
A lot of games lean heavily on having you judge a "guns or butter" tradeoff, where if you don't produce enough otherwise worthless guns, someone else will come in and take all your nice stuff. I prefer to play in an all butter style, where you're competing over how well you develop yourself rather than how well you can balance an unfun military tax against fun development.
That's a fact about the design of the game, not a fact about what would be fun.
> That's akin to racing in time trials instead of a race with other cars beside you.
I guess you changed this from "that's akin to playing on a deserted island" after realizing that plenty of games, and novels, are all about surviving and establishing yourself on a deserted island?
It's only akin to racing in time trials rather than against other cars if your model of "racing with other cars beside you" is Mario Kart. It's precisely analogous to racing against other cars on the fairly reasonable assumption that you're not supposed to run into the other cars in the race.
> instead of just developing your own economy you have to second guess your opponents in the race for the nuke
There's no "race for the nuke" in Civ. If you're going for military, you'll win or lose long before you develop nukes.
Religion can be important for culture though and I find it too similar to the war mechanics i.e. churn our religious units, march them across the map, fight for control...
There are times when the multiple conditions makes for a better game e.g. having to keep cultural powerhouse in check during a domination attempt with a couple of nukes on their culture producing cities.
It's not just that I'm older and less interested in games - there's still the odd one makes me think I need rehab. Factorio managed to achieve it early this year! I'll undoubtedly buy VI and play it though.
Even though the Dragon's engines are for emergency take off or surface landing, they would not be used in space in real life, unless I'm mistaken.
Pretty sweat that they included it in the trailer, though!
Personally I am among the people that enjoyed Civ III and IV more than any other Civ. Civ Beyond Earth had good potential and I was legitimally hyped by the trailer, but the game was less fun than Alpha Centauri.
A third of the way through a game and my military units are orders of magnitude better than my opponents, because the AI doesn't know to stack traits.