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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

I remember playing Civ 1 back in the day. It was a great game, albeit easy to win with rapid-expansion strategies. Civ 2 was probably my favourite of the Civilization series (Alpha Centauri being my favourite overall).

As time went on, the designers worked harder and harder to block the best strategies in the game rules. They added more and more convoluted systems of upkeep, corruption, etc. in order to slow down a rapid expanding player. This has probably been my biggest beef with the series: redesigning the rules to counteract the player instead of making the AI opponents smarter. I haven't played Civ 6 but Civ 5 just bored me to tears with how much of that nonsense they did. That game felt like you had a million decisions to make and none of them had much consequence.

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For me it was paradox games that ruined civ, they're so much more in depth, your decisions don't just have effects but the have ripple effects, an English Portuguese alliance could take down the Spanish fleet and allow Ottoman hegemony over the Mediterranean for instance. A large part of that is the sheer number of nations, but also some good modelling of their motivations.

They also feature some much better (but now largely gimped) late game features. An inheritance war can tear empires apart in CK2, culture and colonies may revolt in EU4, communists will start a revolution if they don't get social reforms in vicky and and soldiers will become more loyal to their general than you in rome.

6 is a decent rethink of the core rules and mechanics, that still doesn't stray too far from 5. I would recommend taking a look at it on youtube at the very least, it's definitely the better recent title.

Civ is one of the very rare strategy multiplayer games where AI mode is a lot of fun; different than PvP, but still a challenge and a mostly fresh experience. My main issue with it is the exceedingly annoying political behaviour of the ever-complaining AIs. (You're expanding too much! You're not expanding enough! Your army is too large! Your army is weak! One of your units stared at me wrong!)

I also find it a good thing that they try, with subsequent versions, to balance out the play so that you can't just use one strategy and win all the time. Anyone who remembers Nod Bikes knows how little fun that ends up being. Also [1]

The thing that's always been a bummer about Civ's single-player-vs-AI games is that, like most games, the difficulty level simply controlled the amount of handicapping rather than made the AI smarter or more cunning. The difference between hard and easy mode was that they'd just give the player more money, stronger units, better bonuses, etc.

1: I just searched Google for Zerg Rush and holy moly that is awesome. Great job whichever Googler thought of that.

I got incredibly annoyed with people denouncing me in Civ 5, to the point where I would invade and completely wipe out their nation just because they wouldn't stop whining about me (looking at you, Austria).

The only problem I have with 6 is a bit of an odd one; I don't really like the nation/leader options. They feel a bit stilted in comparison to 5, though there are a few exceptions.

The music in 6 is fantastic, however, and I love how it changes as your civ progresses.

My issue with the civ AI was that the tactic of paying them to declare war has always been too powerful. The civs only ever will by choice be in one war at a time, so if you bribe a warlike nation a (pitiful) about of gold to declare war on your closest competitor then you can keep them off your back and squabbling with each other to a cheap victory even on the hardest difficulties.

With V, Gods & Kings and Brave New World really completed that experience, though. One could argue both for and against the religion mechanic and the adjustment to culture, but expanded V is like night and day compared to vanilla V, and I like it better. I genuinely think Firaxis is treating vanilla releases as a somewhat "early access" period to observe how people play then tweaking accordingly, while slipping in more-complex mechanics that didn't make gold to keep the metagame interesting. They know to weather the shit reviews now, too, because V got them as well; people hated V against IV when it came out. Some still do, but I find most of them never tried fully expanded V.

I'm assuming VI will end up similar, and potentially diverge a bit more from V. I'm excited to see what the first, and maybe second, gameplay expansion do to the game, because there are some corner cases (such as the difficulty with tall strategies being discussed). Whenever I recommend V, I say "make sure you have the complete expansions," because it's really a different game. Vanilla VI didn't hook me like expanded V does, but I suspect expanded VI will, and I'm looking forward to that.

This article says it well, too, and also includes a bunch of stuff I hope they consider. The "break-up of nations/empires" point they make about Civ late-game in general is particularly salient. I've always liked the thought of the modern era looking more like the modern era, because late-game does get boring on occasion as everybody rushes toward their victory.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/civilization-vi/civilization-6-expa...

I am an OK Civ2 player (can expect to win on Deity without cheating unless I get quite unlucky).

Goto is hopelessly broken, probably an unfortunate limitation of making a game that can run on 1996-era computers.

City walls are too strong. Catapult, cannon, and artillery should be able to penetrate them. They are always literally the last thing diplomats will sabotage.

The computer gangs up on the player. I guess this makes the game fairer but it also makes diplomacy useless.

The simulation is nukes is hopelessly unrealistic and boring. I wouldn't mind it so much if the pollution system wasn't broken as well. I still got global warming even after making an effort to build solar plants and mass transits in all of my cities because of pollution caused by AI nukes. Rage quitted on that one ;-)

Nuclear non-proliferation in a later Civ was a very good idea IMO.

>I am an OK Civ2 player (can expect to win on Deity without cheating unless I get quite unlucky).

I think that makes you much better than an 'ok' player!

A slightly weird thing about global warming as a result of nuclear war in Civilization games is that nuclear war would likely make the Earth cooler.

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

IMO, in Civ 6, going wide is the only way to really win. There are some penalties but they are minimal. In Civ 5 it was totally possible to win with one city, in Civ 6 that's almost impossible. So, if you like building large empires, I highly recommend it to you.

Yeah, that has certainly been my experience so far. In Civ 5 I'd generally take the culture/diplomacy route; I was able to beat one city challenge on immortal with a little bit of luck. In Civ 5, it just doesn't seem possible.

Part of the issue I'm finding is that real estate ends up being a real problem for buildings and wonders. You can't just indiscriminately rush and stack wonders - you'll simply run out of tiles. So, you're trying to place your cities in such a way to avoid land grabs by other civs, but not so much that they crowd out tiles for your other cities.

The barbarian spawning seems to be very unforgiving in Civ 6 as well.

I once saw a video presentation of Sid Meier talking about what he learned talking to playtesters.

It was mostly about people being angry about low odds of losing a fight actually prevailing, so the game shows fake probability to the point you'll lose 90%-chance-to-win fights way less than 10% of the time.

But he did tell one thing that really disincentivized him from pursuing a smarter AI: when the AI does something brilliant, people just assume it's cheating.

This way of thinking is way AI in games is so underdeveloped. Most players don't actually want smart AI, they want AI that makes them feel smart.

Fall from heaven 2 beyond the sword mod, if you like civ and never played it do yourself a huge favor and get it! I loved the civ games and this mod makes them all look boring.

It really was an amazing game. I loved Civ, but FFH2 was just such a good upgrade.

The main developer, Kael, is now a game designer at Stardock. His latest is Galactic Civilization 3. Have you tried it?

I lost many hours on galciv2...

My default statement is always that the best Civ is (and always will be) Alpha Centauri. I still have it installed and give it a playthrough every now and then.

Yeah, it's really disappointing that instead of actually improving the AI, they made it cheat to win. Really lazy game design, and very frustrating for someone who largely prefers playing against computer opponents.

Calling it "lazy game design" is not only offensive to me as a game designer, but it's plain wrong. Here's a talk about AI in Civ from Soren Johnson, Lead Designer/AI Programmer on multiple Civ games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJcuQQ1eWWI

It's absolutely lazy when they are on record saying they will let the mod community work on improving the base AI.

This certainly is. Do you have a source?

>is not only offensive to me as a game designer

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/706825-it-s-now-very-common-...

Boo hoo, you're offended by people playing your games. What about us spending money on your game and then hours learning the mechanics only to get beaten by your AI violating the established rules and doing things we cannot.

I don't have have enough time with Civ to have experienced this there, but in Fifa watching defenders with speed and acceleration 10+ points below my strikers outrunning them or that magical switch flipping that says "AI will score now" and watching my own defenders actively run away from the ball or the ball even go right through their legs may not be result of "lazy" design but it's infuriating. Especially when I think of how much money I've laid down to have this experience.

I'm not offended by people playing "my" games - I'm offended by people who can't appreciate the amount of work which is channeled into making games. You can be certain that for every single feature within a (good) game, at least one person spent countless hours thinking about it.

You don't like a feature - that's totally fine. Talk about your grievances all you like, so we can learn and improve said feature. But don't call the people "lazy" if you don't know what you're talking about.

I think we all understand that making a game is a tremendous undertaking. But playing a game on a higher difficulty for the additional challenge should never result in that game cheating. That is lazy design. If you can't figure out how to make the game more of challenge without cheating then simply don't offer higher difficulty levels.

See I agree, but at the same time, Civ achieves being the only strategy game I can think of (I'm sure there's others, I just can't think of them) that actually has a solid AI mode. So is it possible we should heed the lesson we don't like?

> solid AI mode

Paradox games like Crusader Kings II!

I like CK2 a lot, but its AI is nothing to write home about. The game doesn't effectively develop provinces, its strategic war AI is flail-y, and its diplomatic AI is largely deterministic.

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