Over the Christmas break I found myself playing through Civilization 4 for the first time in about ten years. It did a lot of neat stuff that I’d just plain forgotten about, so I decided to play through all of the Civilization games to see how well they held up today and how the series had evolved from one iteration to the next, and then write something summing up that experience so that I’ll have something to refer back to when I inevitably forget again.

———————————————

Civilization has the distinction of being the very first game I played on a proper IBM PC. This was way back in my school computer room in 1995, which was an environment that was far too cheap for Windows 95 and the flashy multimedia games that came with it, and so the four year-old Civilization was the best we could manage on the 386s we had available. By this point I’d played newer, better-looking games on the Atari, Archimedes and Megadrive (not to mention Doom and Command & Conquer on some weird PC card hookup jammed into an Acorn RISC PC), and Civilization looked positively primitive by comparison. It didn’t matter. I was instantly hooked.

Well, of course I was. Ever since I played Mega Lo Mania there’s been something particularly intoxicating to me about that image of cavemen versus soldiers on the front cover, and Civilization was an entire game that took that idea and applied it to the real world. It was also the first game I played where military confrontation took a backseat to city logistics and scientific advancement. War is obviously a big part of Civilization — probably bigger than in any of the sequels, just purely as a consequence of there being comparatively fewer other mechanics for it to fall back on — but there’s a non-violent way to win and you can get through an entire game without fighting anyone, if you play it right. This was just as well given the primitive combat mechanics, since you could never quite be sure what was going to happen when you threw your troops at the enemy; the original Civilization is the game that originated the infamous “spearmen beating tanks” phenomenon, after all.

In spite of how undeveloped this and other parts of Civilization are, going back to it I was pleasantly surprised at how well it held up twenty-eight years after it was released . I’m not saying I’d particularly choose to play it over certain later iterations if I didn’t have a nostalgic fondness for the way it does things, but even if I cast the rose-tinted glasses aside I can’t think of any games contemporary to Civilization that have aged anywhere near as well¹. I think part of the reason why this is so is that Civilization itself was inspired by a boardgame and so this first iteration is possibly the most boardgame-y Civillization of them all. Boardgames (or at least good boardgames) have a much longer shelf-life than your average videogame because they focus on clean, transparent mechanics above all else. Civilization follows that line of thinking, preferring a relatively small number of advances and improvements which have sweeping, powerful effects which are nevertheless quite simple and whose value is easily understood by the player.

Take the Library as an example. In modern Civs this improvement does something anaemic like giving you an extra two scientist slots that can be worked by citizens, which creates something like six points of extra science and which is only powerful because of how miserly the later games are with resource gain. On the other hand the original implementation of the Library was that it increased science gain in that city by a whopping 50%; given that base science yields are already quite high (thanks to it being a function of trade value converted to science instead of a dedicated science resource), the effect of building a Library in a single city is immediately noticeable on an empire scale. It feels good to build a Library in Civilization, even 24 years after I first played it. It feels like I’m making big steps towards building up my empire, instead of the infinitesimal power increases of the later games.

Because there’s less to build (but the things you can build do more), the ancient-medieval phase of Civilization ends up feeling quite nippy. Build times are quite long until your cities have a few population units under their belt, but there’s no fancy animations getting the way and it’s much faster at doing the number-crunching that follows every End Turn action, meaning that waiting ten turns for your Temple to finish is actually faster than waiting five turns for something to complete in one of the newer games. There’s also no Worker units to micromanage; at this point we’re using Settlers to build tile improvements, and maintaining Settler units is very expensive in terms of production and food, so early on you’re only going to be able to spare one or two at most. However, because of that limitation tile improvements are much faster to build, with roads being built instantly and irrigation taking 4-5 turns.

Later on the game slows down a bit, both as a natural consequence of having more cities with more to do, and because Civilization is very fond of showing you everything you’ve accomplished on that turn in minute detail. I’ve spoken of my love for Civilization’s City View before, and for good reason: it’s tremendously effective at making those single colour squares that represent your cities on the world map feel like actual places that you’ve built, and you’ll be transported there every time you build a new improvement or wonder, or when the population gets unruly and downs tools because you don’t have enough Elvis impersonators on hand.  Whenever you research a new technology you’re confronted with a full-screen description of the thing you just researched first, and then a summary of what it unlocks, which is a nice way of jamming some edutainment into the game². If you change government you’re informed of the new thematically-appropriate ruling council via a newspaper headline. The game is full of these little visual flourishes, likely in an attempt to compensate for the basic graphics on the world map and the city management screen, which is where you spend 90% of your time.

I was going to say that you’d never get away with this today, and that dragging the player around the game like this is a pretty big UI no-no for all that it adds to Civilization’s atmosphere. That would be a complete lie, however, seeing as how modern Civilizations are, if anything, even more pushy with grabbing the player away from whatever they were concentrating on and e.g. making them manually reroute eight trade routes and place three spies every few turns. So if we’re going to do this, Firaxis, can we at least spend the time looking at something worthwhile instead of a trade route dialogue? The connection with the game world as an actual world is something that recent 4Xes are in danger of losing touch with completely; I’ve spoken of my dislike for Endless Space reducing its colonies to a bunch of numbers, and Civilization has been headed down the same route for a while. It would be nice if Firaxis used their utter disregard for UI norms to build a more robust context around your civilisation and lend it more of a sense of place.

Another thing that struck me about the original Civilization that’s been lost in the more modern iterations: the tech tree is a genuine tech tree instead of a collection of anaemic tech sticks. You can research Explosives without ever having discovered Masonry or Bronze Working. Once you’ve worked your way up to the highest levels of the tree you start building the spaceship, and Civilization’s approach to it is, in my opinion, far superior to any other Civilization game (save 2, whose spaceship is a direct copy of this one). Instead of having ten individual spaceship components with glacial build times resulting in a mind-numbingly repetitious hammering of the “End Turn” button, Civilization has you building up a spaceship out of a set of small parts which are relatively quick to produce, but which you have to build multiple copies of. The full spaceship requires 12 SS Modules, 12 SS Components and 40-odd SS Structures; you can launch with fewer than this if you’re pressed for time and are happy with scoring fewer points at the end of the game, but I prefer building the full thing. The build time for the complete spaceship is approximately the same as in later editions of Civilization, but because it’s parcelled up into smaller chunks like this you feel like you’re making concrete progress towards its completion — more than that, you can see it taking shape in orbit, piece by piece. Again, it’s something that feels far more satisfying to build than the spaceship in Civilization 6, where you don’t get to see the fruits of your actions and the game ends as soon as you hit the “Launch” button so you don’t get to see it fly, either.

In just about every 4X I can think of there’s been a tension between two major strategies: building up a relatively small number of super-cities with high resource outputs, otherwise known as “going tall”, or eschewing city development in favour of cranking out Settler units to expand as fast as possible by founding new cities on every available scrap of land, otherwise known as “going wide”. Ideally you do a bit of both and try to balance the two approaches, but the first Civilization games were infamous for the phenomenon of “infinite city sprawl”, or ICS, which should tell you a little something about how successful the early efforts to discourage going wide were. In fact, until I did this replay of Civilization I thought that was actually intentional, and that it wasn’t until later that designers realised micromanaging an empire of thirty cities could get a bit tedious. However, it turns out it does make an attempt to stop the player from gobbling up virgin territory and AI empires alike via two mechanisms that have been absent from Civilization for at least a decade: government types and their interaction with city corruption.

When you start a game of Civilization your empire is ruled by you (obviously) as dictator at the head of a Despotic government. You have to research other government types and the closest alternatives — Monarchy and The Republic — are a few rungs up the tech tree, so in your early expansion phase you’re stuck with Despotism. This isn’t such a bad thing, though, as Despotism offers free unit support costs; in Civilization units are supported with production (and in the case of Settlers food as well) rather than money, and so building up the initial Settlers you need to expand and develop your empire and the military you’ll need to defend yourself from marauding barbarians would be crippling at this early stage if you didn’t have Despotism. Even Despotism comes with a catch, in that each city only gets free support for a number of units that’s equal to that city’s size, and if you build more than that you have to start paying production. Given that production is quite hard to come by in Civilization, this can flatline your cities if you expand too fast and crank out too many units. So even the government type that’s specifically intended to aid early expansion has a natural brake on going too fast: you have to wait until a city reaches size 3 or 4 before it’s properly useful to your empire in terms of building and supporting units.

Corruption on the other hand actively siphons off money and production from your cities. Your capital has zero corruption, but subsequent cities will have increasing levels of corruption the further they are from your capital. Expansion may be comparatively cheap under Despotism, but Despotism experiences rampant corruption and pretty soon any new cities you found will have the majority of their resources consumed by it. This is an incredibly negative mechanic that I instinctively dislike (since it makes founding a new city feel awful when 80% of its resources are sucked away by corruption) and which was removed from the game in Civilization 4 for good reason, but it’s undeniably effective and almost works in Civilization. The idea is that you’re incentivised to upgrade from Despotism to Monarchy/The Republic by two things: first is that Despotism has a cap on the resources that you can gather from city tiles that gets removed when you change to any other government type, and second is that Monarchy and The Republic are both less corrupt forms of government. The flipside is that you’ll have to start paying full support costs for your units (even Monarchy doesn’t give you any free ones) but once your empire has developed to a certain point this will be outweighed by the boost you get from more resources and less corruption. Switching too early, on the other hand, can really throw a spanner in the works as the production costs of supporting units are far higher than the savings you get from the new government type.

This is a very good design idea. Figuring out when exactly you should switch away from Despotism to The Republic, and then from there to Democracy (which has its own drawbacks) is supposed to have balances and tradeoffs and make the player think carefully about when exactly to make the switch. Unfortunately Civilization shoots itself in the foot here thanks to its boardgame nature; it likes these very powerful, simple mechanics but doesn’t fully think through what’ll happen when people play the game for thousands of hours instead of running through it once or twice and then putting it back into the cupboard. The problem has two parts. One is the Democracy government type, which (somewhat naively) completely eliminates corruption and gives a significant trade boost to your empire, in exchange for extreme penalties for doing anything military. You’re supposed to switch to Democracy once your expansion phase is over and you want to start building your cities tall, which is why it’s situated halfway along the tech tree and should in theory take some time to get to, during which you’ll have to labour under one of the lesser forms of government and deal with the resulting corruption, slowing your expansion. By the time you switch to it the AI empires should have built up a decently threatening army and the military penalty Democratic civilizations receive should therefore be somewhat meaningful.

Unfortunately the Pyramids wonder — available after researching Masonry, one of the very first advances available — lets you use any government type even if you’ve not unlocked it yet. This means that you can switch to Democracy around 1500BC if you’re beelining for it, and while you take the intended production hit for unit support it’s massively outweighed by both the turbocharged growth your cities experience as the food restrictions on city tiles are lifted, and the trade boost that lets you simply buy anything you can’t produce, as well as boosting your science well beyond what it should be at this stage of the game. This lets you spam Settlers with wild abandon until you’ve filled every nook and cranny of your continent, at which point you can briefly switch to Communism to beat the shit out of your nearest neighbour with a technologically advanced military and take their space, and then back to Democracy again. There’s no other restrictions or penalties for expansion in Civilization — no spiralling technology costs, no happiness penalties, no maintenance — which is why the very first installment of the series ended up with empires that sprawled across the entire surface of the planet. It’s the optimal way to play.

Still, given that the Civilization series has spent the last twenty-eight years grappling with this problem and still hasn’t come up with an adequate solution, I’m not going to hold Civilization’s failure to do so against it. It’s interesting enough to discover that it was aware of the ICS problem from the outset and took steps to try and govern it, even if those steps were flawed. Anyway, there’s a bunch of other weirdnesses in the game that date it far more thoroughly, from the utter failure of the AI players to respect territory boundaries — they’ll happily park themselves right outside your cities, preventing you from working the tiles, and there’s no option to tell them to sod off — to there being no way to initiate diplomatic contact with other empires; you have to wait for them to come to you. That and the primitive interface make Civilization a bit too painful to play compared to Civilization 2, which is the same game with the rough edges sanded off.

I do think that there’s a lot to learn from the way Civilization handles world-building, though, and its generally positive (if somewhat privileged) attitude towards the that world. It’s a game that celebrates humanity’s achievements and which looks towards the future with an optimistic view that seems very out of place in the cynical landscape of 2019. You can cure cancer in Civilization. You can contact aliens by building the SETI wonder. And yes, you can build a spaceship and colonise other worlds, which is actually shown in the goddamn ending sequence here rather than the game instantly ending when you launch the spaceship. It’s a very outward-looking game, which is refreshing in this era of constant navel-gazing via the internet and social media. Given that this is so remarkable when the Civilization series is still going strong (there’s an expansion pack for Civilization 6 coming out next month, in fact) is a pretty damning indictment of how recent incarnations of Civilization have chosen to portray that broad sweep of human history — but I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, let’s just say that OG Civilization is a product of its time, but that’s precisely why I still find it fascinating almost three decades later; the difference in its approach and outlook is rather stark when compared to almost any modern 4X, and for me that ensures it avoids being reduced to a mere historical curio. Few other games from 1991 can say the same.

The post Civilization Through The Ages: Civilization appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

God help me, but I was actually looking forward to Civilization VI. After experiencing both Civilization V and Beyond Earth at launch I really shouldn’t have been; both were eventually patched into a decent state and after two expansions Civ V even went on to surpass its predecessors, but at launch they were flawed, buggy messes with plenty of basic functionality missing. Given Firaxis’s previous track record here it seems foolish to have expected great things from Civilization VI on launch, but after peeking at the development videos I just couldn’t help myself. The lead designer is the guy who pulled Civ V out of the muck. As a headline idea I can’t exactly call unpacking city management onto the world map inspired since Endless Legend got there first, but it’s potentially completely game-changing and Civ VI looked like it was going to explore the concept in far more depth. And in a departure from previous Civs they weren’t going to leave trade, espionage and religion for the expansion packs and instead integrated them into Civ VI as core features, essentially making it a Greatest Hits version of Civ V post-expansions. How could this possibly go wrong?

Well, if you have any familiarity with Firaxis whatsoever all I need to do is say “It’s Firaxis” and you’ll probably just know what’s wrong with Civilization VI. It is a classic Firaxis game, packed full of great design and mechanical ideas that are genuinely daring and will impact the entire genre for the next decade, if not more, but which technically-speaking is a bit of a car crash — I’m not talking about basic code quality here as it ran perfectly acceptably on my system, but rather the eternal Firaxis bugbears of AI, general game balance and user interface. It would be unfair to say that Civ VI has been executed badly since it gets so much right, but I definitely think that (for example) Firaxis considers any flaws in the UI as a secondary priority, a cosmetic feature that they can polish up later, and then it goes on to have a disproportionately bad impact on the game because the player is having to use that busted UI literally 100% of the time that they are playing it.

As usual I’m getting ahead of myself, though. There’s a hell of a lot to like about Civilization VI and it’s also a little unfair to set the tone of the review by opening with a diatribe about what it does badly even if that also happens to be a pretty fucking long list of stuff that really got up my nose. For what it’s worth I feel like the issues are less acute than they were in Civ V or Beyond Earth — I certainly don’t think Civ VI is going to require a full expansion in order to fix the worst of what’s wrong with it — and so I’ll leave the badness for the end where it can be examined in the full context of Civilization VI’s considerable accomplishments.

The Civilization series is the PC’s flagship turn-based strategy game franchise that covers the progress of human history from the invention of irrigation and the wheel all the way up to nuclear weapons and the space race. Probably you’ve at least heard of it, but I apologise in advance if you’ve never played it since I’m going to be referring to certain core game mechanics that have persisted throughout the series’ 25-year history — and the state they were in as of Civilization V in particular — as if you know what I’m talking about. The interesting thing about Civilization VI (and about all iterations of the series, really) is what it changes from the installment that preceded it, and it’s impossible to have detailed discussion about these changes and why they are good (or not) without assuming some pre-existing knowledge – that or making this review the length of a small book, and if you scroll down some way you’ll see that it’s already pretty damn long. So let’s get cracking, shall we?

Civilization V, then. It launched in a pretty abject state, but after two expansions and four years of patches it ended up being the best of the series by quite some considerable way. It wasn’t without certain systemic flaws, however, the most acute of which was that it was absolutely pointless to go wide (4X-speak for building a lot of cities to monopolise as many resources and produce as much stuff as possible) thanks to the global happiness mechanic. Going tall and pouring all your investment into just 4-6 incredibly built-up super-cities was by far the best way to play until you were ready to unleash the blitzkrieg and make a bunch of puppet cities via war. That drastically restricted the range of viable strategies on offer, and the various attempted solutions that the expansion packs added all suffered from the same issue: since they hadn’t been in the design from the very start they always functioned as more of a band-aid to a problem that was never truly solved.

Now, the nice thing about Firaxis — and why they’re one of my favourite developers despite their repeated UI catastrophes — is that they take mechanical criticism of their games very seriously. Civ V’s Going Tall problem was itself caused by an overzealous attempt to fix the previous problem with the series: ICS, or Infinite City Sprawl, where it was never not a good idea to build another city even if it was on a one-tile island in the middle of an ocean, and so the player ended up in micromanagement hell dealing with dozens and dozens of cities. Civ VI similarly tries to fix Going Tall, but its solution is far more subtle than the sledgehammer of Global Happiness. Instead it opts to overhaul something that’s remained fundamentally unchanged since the very first Civilization: the way cities build their improvements. In Civ VI, cities are now semi-unpacked, with almost no buildings existing in the central city tile and most being built in themed District tiles that exist externally to the city on the world map. Some of these districts have strict requirements on where they can go (like military Encampments not being allowed to be placed adjacent to the central city tile), but most of them instead have passive adjacency bonuses that let them derive a benefit from clever placement, and it’s this that now prevents you from just spamming out cities willy-nilly since you really have to think about tile placement and how to make the most of the surrounding terrain in order to get the best out of them.

An example. The science district is the Campus, which can initially build a Library that gives two science per turn. Later it can build a University that gives 4 science per turn, and then a Research Lab that gives 6 science per turn, but you won’t be building either of those until 100-200 turns into the game. Initially the Library and its relatively piddly 2 science are all that are available to you — that, plus any adjacency bonuses you manage to get from putting the Campus down somewhere good. It gets +1 science for being next to rainforest or mountain tiles, so if you find a particularly good spot to plonk one down next to one chunk of rainforest and two mountain tiles that’ll be +3 science. That’s huge in the early game. It’s more than doubled the initial yield of the Campus without doing anything more than settling your city in a place where you could actually make use of that bonus. Commerce Districts get similar bonuses for being next to rivers; Industrial Districts for being next to mines (which must now be built on hills or resources, so you can’t just spam six mines on grassland around an Industrial District); Theatre Districts for being next to Wonders. The adjacency bonuses become less important as you move into the mid-game and the rest of the game systems start coming online, but in the early game they’re absolutely critical for getting a good start, especially since building a district is quite expensive and the cost goes up with the total number of districts of a certain type existing within your empire (so building a Commerce District will increase the cost of the next Commerce District you build in a different city).

Just considered on its own, without bringing any other game mechanics into the equation, the District system achieves two things. First, while we’ve gone back to expanding relatively early almost always being a good idea there’s absolutely no point in doing so unless you’ve got a really good spot lined up for your next city; somewhere with lots of space to expand into the right type of terrain. If you found your city in a bad place your districts will get poor yields and you’ll have made it harder for yourself further down the line. Finding a good spot for the second city is easy. Finding a good spot for the third city is slightly less easy. Finding good spots for cities four, five and six becomes increasingly difficult as you and the AI eat up all of the available room. Space is now the major limiting factor on expansion; space and terrain and the availability of fresh water, which feels far more natural than the Global Happiness system and the inflating tech/social policy costs in Civ V. And the second major impact of Districts is that unless you have found an absolutely amazing location it’s no longer possible – or efficient – for one city to do everything. With the spiralling District costs you need to specialise to at least some degree, and I’m happy to report that aside from Commerce there’s no district type that you absolutely have to have in every single one of your cities; in all previous Civs the Library has been the second or third thing I’ve built in all of my cities, but in Civ VI I never even built a Campus in about half of them. It just wasn’t worthwhile – or necessary — and so I instead focused on what those cities were going to be best at, whether that be production, money or just being in a good spot for building Wonders.

Ah yes, the Wonders. Certain Wonders have always had terrain-based requirements in order for them to be built, like the city having to be next to a mountain to build Neuschwanstein or next to the coast to build the Great Lighthouse or The Colossus. This was always a little too restrictive, however, as finding a good city location that combined these Wonder requirements with the production required to actually build the thing ended up being a bit of a pain. Civilization VI’s Wonders are at the same time both more flexible and more restrictive thanks to the city management system; Wonders take up their own tile and so can in theory be built anywhere within a three-hex radius of the building city, but the tile they’re built on has to fulfil some very specific requirements such as being a river tile next to an Industrial District, or a tile that’s adjacent to both a Commerce District and a Cattle resource. With foreknowledge the majority of these requirements can be planned for, but if you’re targeting a specific Wonder it’s a very good idea to check in advance what you’ll need and to make sure you have an appropriate tile ready and waiting for it when it becomes available.

I like this system a lot. Wonders and Districts spill out onto the world map to share space with the usual city improvements, in effect bringing back the City Screen I so missed from Civilization 1 and integrating it into the game seamlessly. Once you have a good understanding of the system you start to plan your expansion the moment you plop a city down — building mines on that cluster of three hills will ensure a hefty bonus for an adjacent Industrial District, but you need to remember to leave some space free next to the Entertainment Complex so that you can take a stab at building the Colosseum wonder. You also need to keep in mind the fact that you still do need the basic improvements such as farms, mines and lumber mills in order for your cities to grow in the first place – a city can only support one or two districts when it is first built, with further districts being unlocked once the city hits certain population milestones.  Building a district or Wonder initially blocks off a tile from being worked by a citizen and you’ll lose any basic yields that tile might have had, meaning it’s sometimes an agonising choice over whether or not to sacrifice a tile that could otherwise be useful later on in the game. The new city management adds a lot of interesting decision-making space to the game, and what I particularly like about it is that at the moment it appears to be quite flexible; there is no one true way to build a city, and how you expand is going to change based on where the city is and your strategy at the time.

It’s an avowed goal of the Civilization designers that when they add complexity in one place they take it away in another to avoid overwhelming the player. Or rather I should say they streamline, since what Civ VI does as a tradeoff for city management in no way diminishes the game: they’ve taken a fair chunk of faff out of how you build tile improvements. The improvements themselves still have the yield-boosting effects you’d expect, and they’re still (mostly) constructed by Builder units who roam around the map setting up farms and seaside resorts; the difference is that where in previous Civs you’d have a lengthy wait before your improvement was finished (sometimes 15-20 turns depending on what you were building), Civ VI’s improvements are built instantly. This is a huge quality-of-life feature that cannot be understated, and it feels fantastic to just immediately get a set of farms up and running the moment your first Builder spawns. The instant builds are balanced by Builders having a limited set of build charges — a base of three, with more being added by Wonders, social policies and unique civilization bonuses — and once those charges are gone the Builder is expended and disappears from the map. Basically they’re converting city production into tile improvements more or less efficiently depending on how you’ve got your empire set up, which strikes me as a more elegant, less spammy version of the Public Works system from Call To Power. The only thing that Builders cannot build are roads; these are now spawned automatically as your trade caravans travel between cities, which both removes a sizeable pain point from the game (was there anything more tedious in Civ than building a million roads?) and makes getting your trade engine online early even more important.

The other big change Civ VI makes is to the technology tree, which up until this point has been possibly the single most important part of Civilization and which has received only comparatively minor tweaks in the twenty-five years that the series has been going. Civ V introduced a second tree of Social Policies that could be bought with your Culture income and which basically functioned as your government type, but ultimately they were far too static and limited for any really interesting decisions to be made. Usually you’d decide at the start of the game if you wanted to go Tradition or Liberalism, and then a little further you’d pick another tree based on which victory type you were after; all your choices were basically predetermined. As this bolt-on solution didn’t really work, Civ VI opts for something rather more drastic: it chops the technology tree in half, and takes the 50% of it that consisted of social technologies and puts it in a new Civics Tree. Now you’ve got two tech trees running in parallel, each focusing on a different side of the game: in general Science buys Technologies which introduce new resources, tile improvements, production boosts and military units, while Culture buys Civics that unlock both faith- and culture- based buildings and Wonders as well as new policy cards that can be used to customise your form of government – more on this in a paragraph or two.

The effect this has is to lessen the emphasis on a strong science base while boosting the importance of culture even if you’re not actively pursuing a Culture Victory. As I said earlier, while science remains important throughout the game it is no longer necessary to construct a Library in every single damn city you build; you can get by with just a few cities specialising in it. Meanwhile if you take the anaemic approach to culture that I usually do you’ll find yourself falling behind in both trees thanks to the technology/civic boosts built into this new system. The way these work is that every single technology and civic in each tree has 50% of the progress bar part-shaded in, along with a short condition listed at the bottom of the tech card like “Meet another civilization” or “Kill 3 Barbarians”. Once you fulfil that condition you’ll activate the boost for that tech and the part-shaded 50% of the progress bar is immediately filled in for free. All of the boost conditions are themed to the technology in question (so the “Kill 3 Barbarians” one boosts Bronze Working as your civilization suddenly comprehends the importance of finding new and better ways to stab people) and so you’re probably not going to get all of them if you’re specialising in the way I just described, but you can target the majority of these boosts with just minor modifications to your playstyle and so progress along both the Civic and Technology trees much faster than you would do otherwise. The boosts are also used to make both trees somewhat interdependent, in that some Tech boosts require you to have researched certain Civics and vice versa.

The real impact of the Civic tree is to be found in the Government screen, however. You start the game auto-researching Code Of Laws; once that’s done you get access to your first form of government, Chiefdom, and four potential policies – two Economic, two Military. Each policy card has an effect which is relatively powerful but extremely specific, such as +2 build charges for Builders or +5 Combat Strength when fighting Barbarians. Each government type has a certain number of policy slots in one of four categories — Military, Economic, Diplomatic and Wildcard, which can take any policy type — along with a passive bonus such as cheaper gold purchases. This being the start of the game, Chiefdom is fairly crap with just one Military and one Economic slot for your four policy cards, so you have to pick one of each of the two types that best fits your opening strategy. It quickly gets better, though; every single Civic that you research unlocks new policy cards, and as your options expand you find yourself chopping and changing policies according to short term goals – for example, those Builder bonus cards are less useful towards the mid- and end-game when most tiles have already been developed, so you’ll find yourself tossing those in favour of a gold, culture or science policy of some sort. After a couple of dozen turns your Civic progress unlocks the first real tier of Government types There’s three governments on each tier, and each set of three can be broadly summed up as “Military-focused”, “Economy-focused”, and “Middle of the road”.  A military-focused government will have more slots for military policies and fewer for economic policies while the reverse is true for the economy-focused government, and moving up a government tier adds two more policy slots to each government type. In short, the faster you go up the Civic tree the more choice you will have between policies and the more policy bonuses you will be able to enact.

This is essentially going back all the way to Civilization 1 and dragging the government system there kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and I have to say it works really well. The policies are a bit of a mixed bag and there are some pretty duff ones in there, but also some very powerful ones, and once you start opening up policy slots and stacking bonuses in a certain area you can really start to get an engine going, whether that engine is generating gold, culture, faith or is just really well optimised for kicking the shit out of other civilizations. The Government screen where you make these policy changes is locked most of the time and requires a gold fee to unlock — however, any time you complete a Civic it unlocks for free, and once it’s unlocked you can make any changes to your policies and your form of government that you want with no penalties such as unrest gumming up the works. Since you’re getting through the Civic tree at a rate of one Civic per 10-12 turns this means you have almost complete freedom to completely change your government and policies at will with very little bullshit involved.

This is why culture is now at least as important as science in Civ VI: it lets you do far, far more than it ever did before, and if you’re not interested in the military it’s probably even the superior of the two to invest in. It lends a new sense of purpose to the Great Works/Archaeologist shenanigans, which return from Civ V in a more-or-less unchanged format. Previously you only really cared about this stuff if you were going for a Culture Victory and wanted the Tourism bonuses, but now you want as many Great Works and Artifacts as you can stuff into your museums since doing so will boost your culture output to the max.

We have now reached the point where I stop saying complimentary things about Civ VI and start hitting it with my hating stick. Before I commence the beating, however, I should mention a few other bits and pieces: Great People have been overhauled so that they now provide unique bonuses when expended, and City States provide similar bonuses once you’re friends with them. Both types of bonus take a leaf out of the Explorer bonuses from Beyond Earth: Rising Tide, in that they’re split about 50-50 between “somewhat underwhelming” and “extremely goddamn powerful”; the latter group makes it well worth investing in both of these systems. Religion is back and basically unchanged save for Faith being slightly better-integrated into the game economy; ditto for the combat system, which lets you combine two units to create a single super-unit with a slightly higher attack value so that you can somewhat leverage a superior industrial base in the world of one-unit-per-tile, but which is otherwise the same apart from apparently removing ICBMs from the game, which made me sad (you have to drop your nukes from Bomber units now). This stuff is all perfectly functional and not really worth inflating the word count on this review any further for.

So! Time to start complaining. The first and most obvious complaint: you know all of that shit I just spent the last 3,500 words describing in detail? The game explains almost none of it to you. I wouldn’t have had a clue that Districts, Settlers and Builders all increased in cost each time you built one if I hadn’t read it on a forum. It genuinely took me some time to figure out that “Amenities” were simply a pointlessly-renamed Happiness system, which is now sort-of-kind-of-local again – each copy of a luxury resource provides enough for four cities, so once you make your fifth city you’d better make sure you haven’t traded away your second copy. Again, wouldn’t have known about that if I hadn’t read it on a forum. Yes, it is true that I haven’t played the tutorial, but I have literally thousands of hours invested in Civilization at this point and I really shouldn’t have to; the game should be perfectly capable of explaining itself through its tooltips and UI. I’ve been a huge fan of putting as many tooltips into the game as possible ever since Master of Orion 2, which is why I was utterly dismayed to find that Civ VI barely has any – and the ones it does have are so low-information that they might as well not exist at all.

Take city happiness – sorry, I mean Amenities. Click on a city and you’ll see its net Amenities value in the bottom right, which is basic functionality I don’t feel like giving any credit for. Try to mouseover it to find out what’s contributing to that net Amenity value and how it breaks down into positive and negative values, though, and you’ll be disappointed since nothing happens. If you go into the city report – which just summons a very small sidebar from the left of the screen — it’ll provide a partial breakdown, but the categories are very vague; it says I have one Amenity from my Civics, for example, but not which Civic. It says I have 3 from Luxury Resources, but not which Luxuries, or where they are. Viewing tile resource yields is a particularly important activity in Civ VI given the new city management, but the hotkey to summon them is inexplicably missing and you have to go in and check a box over the minimap. Once they’re turned on you’ll notice a strange omission: it won’t show you how many resources your districts are producing. Mousing over will show you the yield of any citizens currently working in a district, but there’s no way of seeing the contribution your buildings and adjacency bonuses are making to the yield short of going into the city report (again) and looking at the building tab. Yes, I know that technically these are buildings, but they exist on the map as tiles now and the UI should have been adjusted to take this into account.   Mousing over the various resource yields at the top of the city pane is a little more forthcoming, but even here there’s weirdly baffling stuff like +8 production from “outgoing districts”. I have 24 hours in Civ VI and four games completed, and I have absolutely no idea what this means.

This litany of woe is seemingly without end. There’s no way of seeing how close your cities are to claiming new tiles via culture, or which tiles they’re going to claim. The city production queue is completely absent. I had to figure out district adjacency bonuses through trial and error since the placement screen is so awful at telling you what’s going on. Some of the Policies you can enact double these bonuses, but they won’t tell you upfront what the net change in your culture/science output is going to be as a result; the only way to find out is to actually enact and confirm the policy (which locks the Government screen) and see how much your culture output goes up by. It might even go down if you’ve switched out another culture-boosting policy for that one, but there’s simply no way of knowing without actually doing it, and this cripples the interesting decision space created by the policy system since it’s impossible to judge the actual value of a lot of the policies you’re presented with. Still, even finding the policies you might want to enact in the first place is a bit of a challenge; even when you’ve got the selection filtered down to just Economic policies you still find yourself looking at a huge clump of twenty identical policy cards and reading through the very small text on each one to try and identify the one you want. I suppose Civ VI does try and help you out when you discover a new Civic by marking any new policies — but it does this with the tiniest, most adorable exclamation mark symbol in the world, and even when you’re actively looking for it it’s quite easy to miss.

Because the UI is so bad I found myself resorting to the Civilopedia far more often than I should have to see what was going on, but even this is fraught with risk. At the end of my Kongo game when I was making a final push for Tourism I decided to build some Seaside Resorts. Inexplicably, though, I couldn’t seem to build them on any of the coastal tiles I moved my Builders onto. Mousing over the improvement icon in the Builder menu was no help, so I opened up the Civilopedia and typed in “Seaside” and then clicked on the first item in the list, which was “Seaside Resorts”. This took me to a one-line description: “Seaside Resorts are a special improvement that can be built after researching the Radio technology. These generate Tourism based on the tile’s Appeal”. Thanks, Civ, but I already fucking knew that; what I want to know is where can I build the sodding things? I eventually found the answer in another Civilopedia entry for “Seaside Resort” which provided the detailed description that I wanted, but it failed me completely when I was looking up what to do with my Thermonuclear Devices. It was only because I’d built a couple of bombers in a previous game and had noticed the “Drop Nuclear Device” option in the Aerodrome menu that I eventually managed to nuke Sparta.

Final UI gripe (well, not final, but I don’t want to spend much more than a thousand words talking about this) are the unit controls. Civ VI repeats the Civ V mistake of auto-cycling through your units and having snap-to enabled – but on a short time delay. What that means is that the game will present you with a unit to move. You, perhaps, will move the unit, and then start moving another nearby unit – only for Civ VI to suddenly wrest control away from you; that’s not the unit it wanted you to move next; it wants you to move this unit over here instead. This would be annoying enough on its own, but the timing between selecting a new unit to move and the game interrupting you is just long enough so that you’ll be clicking the mouse button to commit the move order at the moment your unit control changes. This leads to a lot of occurrences of e.g. sending hapless Builders straight into the path of a marauding Barbarian unit. When you repeatedly do this over the course of a six hour game it becomes absolutely infuriating. It’s not okay to take control away from the player like that. It’s probably the number one UI sin you can commit, so of course Civilization VI throws itself wholeheartedly down this pathway to hell because this is Firaxis and, just like Blizzard will never hire a competent story writer, so Firaxis will never hire a competent UI designer. Or at least never let them do their jobs.

And as I said in the opening to this review, these issues with the UI are not a little deal. You are interfacing with it 100% of the time you are playing the game, which means you are constantly dealing with its shit. Nowhere is this more apparent than the trade system, which is pretty much just the trade system from the launch version of Beyond Earth. You know, the horribly broken one where the number of trade routes scaled exponentially with the number of cities that you had, but where they also expired after a certain period of time and the game gave no indication of what the previous route had been when it was time to manually reset it. That system rightly caught an awful lot of flak when Beyond Earth came out and Firaxis eventually did mark the previous route, but the fact that it’s been in three games now (Beyond Earth, Brave New World and now Civilization VI) must mean they think they’ve got this whole trade thing nailed when nothing could be further from the truth; I’m sick and tired of constantly batting away trade popups at the start of every single turn, and to add insult to injury they’ve used the same interface for counterspying. (In fact counterspying is worse, since you first have to confirm the city you want to “send” the spy to when in fact you want them to stay right where they are, and then you have to select which of the ten city districts you want them to protect. With three spies and an eight-turn timer on spy missions this gets old really fucking quickly.)  If you’re not going for a cultural victory — and so don’t need the Tourism bonuses from having active trade routes with other civilizations — I suppose it’s not too bad, just a matter of mindlessly clicking on the trade routes with the highest numbers, but if you need to maintain specific trade routes for whatever reason it’s an absolute nightmare to deal with.

The really annoying thing about this trade system, as ever, is that you’re forced to interact with it. Trade is an absolutely huge part of Civ VI, to the point where I suspect they’ve crippled other systems in order to “encourage” you to use it. It represents the vast majority of your gold income, and Firaxis have really taken a sledgehammer to production in this game; unless you have three cities with overlapping Industrial District bonuses and a shitload of hills the only way to get a decent rate of production going in the endgame is to bolster your cities with domestic trade routes. Even then it takes something like 60 turns to build all the spaceship projects for the Science Victory because you have to do a lot of them in series rather than in parallel; this constant mashing of the End Turn button triggered horrible flashbacks to Beyond Earth’s awful endgame. Whether you’re using caravans for gold or production you have to prioritise trade above all else, which means building Commerce Districts and Harbours ASAP (each of which lets you create an additional trade route). I thought this was a crying shame in a game that had otherwise managed to avoid having a One True Path to victory. Also, because you’re running so many trade routes it has the side-effect of massively boosting the value of the Policies that enhance them, to the point where you’re crippling yourself if you don’t have one or two active, It’s a system so bad it brings down other areas of Civilization VI where genuinely good work has been done. There’s basically nothing about trade that I like (save the fact that your caravans now create roads automatically) and it’s one of the areas that I really wish they’d streamlined a la the city improvements rather than cutting and pasting in a terrible system from one of their worst games.

Let’s wrap up by talking about Civ VI’s AI. It’s terrible. I suppose that doesn’t come as a huge shock; I’m a little more forgiving of weaknesses in AI than I am other areas as I’m very, very aware of how difficult it must be to make an AI that can play a game as complicated as Civilization VI in anything approaching a competent manner, and it’s one of the areas that tends to show the most genuine improvement once exposed to a wider playerbase who are very good at picking holes in it. Unfortunately Civ VI’s AI is nothing but holes, to the point where I’m struggling to see where the actual substance is. Strategically it’s not particularly coherent; the diplomatic AI is supposed to have set agendas that make it a bit more predictable, but I just got out of a very strange game as Qin Shi Huang versus Victoria and Teddy Roosevelt. Victoria has an agenda where she approves of anyone on the same continent as her, which I was. Roosevelt on the other hand is a big softy who wants to keep the peace and dislikes anyone who starts a fight. I hadn’t started any fights. I had a positive relationship score with them both. I also had a fairly decent standing army regardless of this as I’ve been conditioned by the psychotic Civ V AI to never display any weakness that might tip whatever algorithm governs war declarations over the edge, and this turned out to be a very good thing because they both wardecced me on the same turn despite our “good” relationship.

Of course because the AI still can’t handle one unit per tile and relies on what is informally referred to as the “unit carpet” to overwhelm the player it was a relatively trivial matter for me to take out twice my number of English Warriors without losing a single unit of my own, and once I’d done this both Teddy and Victoria seemed to lose heart and sued for peace – again, on the same turn. Not three turns later I received a Declaration of Friendship from Victoria; apparently my wholesale slaughter of her army hadn’t soured her on me any and it was all just a big misunderstanding. Teddy was also remarkably chummy after this as well, but I took it to heart as the same lesson I learned from Civ V: the agendas are just a flimsy camouflage and you cannot trust any of the indicators the diplomatic AI gives you as to its attitude because it still could go rabid and attack you at any moment. Relative military strength doesn’t seem to discourage them either; in other games I’ve had civs attack me with Warriors and Horsemen when I was fielding at least as many Musketmen, only to be eradicated from the map for their trouble. Even helping them out in a war doesn’t score you any points; I declared on a Qin Shi Huang that was midway through the the process of eating Victoria alive, only for Victoria to call me up and denounce me as a warmonger for having the temerity of joining the fight against a common foe.

The tactical AI is just as broken. Actually, back up a little bit: the way the AI deals with its armies in general is just plain weird. I don’t think it understands the Districts system all that well and so tends to undercook its science, but even when playing on Emperor where the inherent bonuses it got from the difficulty were enough to ensure it had rough technological parity with me I still never saw it upgrade a unit. It absolutely craps out Warriors and Spearmen and Horsemen (especially Horsemen) in the Ancient Age, but then once it has a standing army it refuses to keep them updated. If it suffers losses it’ll replace them with the latest and greatest version of whatever the latest horse unit is, but more often than not it’ll be 1600 AD (which in Civ VI’s timeline means you just hit the Atomic Age) and you’ll be gunning down hordes of Knights with Infantry despite the AI having had the capability to build Musketmen for quite some time.

Part of this I’m fairly sure is down to the AI’s weird obsession with horses. It fucking loves building horse units, and this is kind of a problem because while it knows not to attack a city directly with horses, it doesn’t know not to build armies composed 100% of horses. I’ve watched it roll up to a city-state with a dozen Knights, dispose of the defenders after a brief tussle and then sit impotently outside of the city walls because it didn’t bring any infantry or siege equipment. Anyway, I’m sure that even though it could build Musketmen there’s a significant chunk of the AI code that just reads “HORSES” and so it could do nothing but build the most advanced horse unit available to it, the considerably less-powerful Knight.  What this means in game terms is that all you have to do to beat the AI is survive until about turn 150, at which point its army of horses will be thoroughly obsolete and you can just roll over it with whatever passes for technologically modern units at that time.

I’ve intentionally omitted talking about quite a lot of stuff in Civ VI — both good stuff like the excellent visuals, and bad stuff like Sean Bean’s narration being fine but the content of the tech quotes he’s reading out being some of the most shallow and insipid horseshit I’ve ever seen in a 4X¹. This is already the longest review I’ve ever written by quite some way². The previous record holder is either Rome 2 or Stellaris, and you might notice something of a common theme here: both of those were pretty damn broken/incomplete on launch too. Despite my copious word-vomit I actually think Civ VI is the least broken of the three, though. AI aside all the working parts are there — sure, some of them are poorly-balanced and most of them are obfuscated behind an atrocious UI, but these will hopefully improve quickly. After all, the reason the constant UI fuckups enrage me so much is because they’re so easy to avoid, and the corollary to that is that they’re also quite easy to fix, or at least patch. That’s in no way an excuse and Civ VI deserves every word of the thrashing I’ve just given it, but the real reason this review turned out so long is because there are elements of Civ VI’s design that are just downright inspired; on paper, just speaking in terms of pure design, it is possibly the best game Firaxis have ever made. It’s so exciting to see the potential in how all the systems — science, culture, great people, city states, districts, faith, even the hated trade system — supplement and flow into one another, and even more frustrating to have all of these pointless fucking issues that simply didn’t need to be here constantly dragging the experience down. Both of these are emotions that induce me to write a lot of words. Right now I can’t help but be disappointed despite having had fair amount of fun with it, but there’s certainly a hell of a lot of potential here. Give Civilization VI three months and it’ll be a far more solid experience; give it a year and I strongly suspect it’ll be the best Civilization game ever. It’s just not there yet.

———————————————————————————————————–

P.S. if you need a quick injection of joy into your life try listening to the Civilization VI theme. Christopher Tin is really good at this stuff.

The post Thoughts: Civilization VI appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

A funny thing happened to the Civilization licence in the late 90’s. It started with Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds – designers of Civilizations I and II respectively — upping sticks and leaving a waning Microprose along with several other key staff members to form Firaxis Games in 1996. While Firaxis had the talent, though, what they didn’t take with them were the rights to the Civilization name, which remained firmly in Microprose’s clutches – not that Microprose could do a whole lot with it, seeing as their premier strategy game developers had just left the company. Enter a pre-CoD and WoW Activision, who nevertheless signalled their future bastardry by seeing that there was perhaps some money to be made by capitalising on the Civilization name and acquiring the rights to market PC games called “Civilization” from board game manufacturer Avalon Hill, who had been making a moderately-successful board game with the same name for decades.  Avalon Hill and Activision’s next step was to claim that they had sole rights to the Civilization name and sue Microprose for copyright infringement. Microprose were more than a little annoyed by this since they’d already licensed the Civilization name from Avalon Hill back in 1991 before releasing the first game in the series, and so they countersued. Judging by the results this did not go well for Avalon Hill, who had to settle out-of-court and acknowledge that it was Microprose, not Avalon Hill, who had the right to make computer games called Civilization. It didn’t go so badly for Activision, though, who came out of the whole sorry business with a licence from Microprose to publish their in-development historical 4X title under the name Civilization: Call To Power.

The subsequent journey of the Civilization licence is worth devoting a few lines to: both Avalon Hill and Microprose were acquired by Hasbro Interactive shortly after the court case resolved, thus cutting that particular Gordian knot by unifying both the board and computer game Civilization names under a company that, at the time, was interested in making both.  Hasbro Interactive were in turn acquired by Infogrames in 2001, who made the wise decision not to try and develop a Civilization game in-house and instead hired none other than Firaxis Games to make Civilization III. Finally, Take Two Games bought the Civilization licence from Infrogrames — who had since dusted off another old name and rebranded themselves as Atari —  in 2004. With it went the right to publish the already in-development Civilization IV, also developed by Firaxis, and in 2005 Take Two permanently reunited the Civilization licence with its developers by acquiring Firaxis themselves. Given the tortuous journey the licence has had, it’s actually bloody impressive that the Civilization series has been consistently developed by the same group of people throughout its 25-year history.

So that explains the existence of Civilization: Call To Power. It’s a bastard child in more ways than one, and it wasn’t helped by being released at almost exactly the same time as Firaxis’s Alpha Centauri. I remember the reviews at the time giving the edge to Call To Power, which is absurd in hindsight; nearly two decades later SMAC is fondly remembered as one of the all-time greatest 4X games and Call To Power has been all but forgotten as an evolutionary dead-end for the series. It did well enough to receive a sequel that dropped the Civilization prefix and was marketed solely as Call To Power 2 – this is presumably why you can buy the second game on GOG but not the first — but Activision was already taking the first few steps down the road to becoming the CoD-powered behemoth it is today and they really didn’t have time for boutique PC 4X games, so the Call To Power offshoot didn’t make it past that second iteration.

I would love to say that its obscurity is undeserved, that it’s some sort of diamond in the rough, but I would be lying. Call To Power was janky at the time and has aged terribly, both in terms of its visual design and its gameplay. Visually, well, people castigated Alpha Centauri for being a game rendered in various interesting shades of brown, but it at least had a coherent visual design, as well as — importantly — an actual Z-axis for its squares that gave its map an interesting sense of verticality that the Civilization series has been missing ever since. By contrast Call To Power arguably looks worse than Civ II, lacking any sense of clean visual design and just generally looking like a vomitous mish-mash of different cultures and art styles.  Meanwhile the gameplay is Civ II on steroids, with a kitchen sink full of extra features bolted on top of the familiar basic mechanics that add precious little to the experience except for a sizeable dollop of confusion.

Every time I play it¹, though, I get the feeling that it really didn’t have to be this way. When you look past the micromanagement of rations and wages; the silly War Readiness setting; the billion specialists per city; the ridiculous plethora of non-combat units such as lawyers and evangelists; the fact that you can’t upgrade units and instead have to disband old ones and build newer ones to replace them (I believe the upgrade feature was present in Alpha Centauri, so it has no excuse); the bizarre desire to differentiate itself from mainstream Civilization by having buildings and wonders that are the-same-but-different — so there are no Cinemas in CTP, but there are Movie Palaces; no Great Library, but there is Galileo’s Telescope — when you look past all that, there are, improbably, some rather good ideas in Call To Power. Ideas which, if leveraged properly, could have carved out a distinct niche in which the series could have coexisted relatively happily with Civ without coming across as the also-ran.

First, and most importantly, whoever was responsible for designing Call To Power had clearly just got done reading a lot of Neil Stephenson and was inspired to make a game that not only dealt with the existing scope of human history, but which took it beyond the present-day into the far future. The Modern Age in CTP is actually the third out of five ages of civilization: Ancient, Renaissance, Modern, Genetic and Diamond. The Genetic Age deals with your typical near-future cyberpunk concepts like arcologies and nanotechnology, while the Diamond Age contains the more far-fetched stuff – energy shields for your cities, war walkers, a pointless AI wonder that only exists to revolt and take half your cities with it, and space elevators and space cities. The future ages allowed you to colonise the ocean — indeed, it was probably the first Civilization game ever to treat sea spaces as legit, improvable tiles rather than dead space that merely existed to cut you off from other civs — and, later, Earth orbit via a somewhat janky space layer of the map (this was dropped for the sequel). The implementation of all this stuff is hamhanded at the best of times – in particular there’s no real consideration made as to the pacing, so the Ancient + Renaissance ages aren’t really condensed at all and the Genetic + Diamond ages are essentially extras bolted on to a typical game of Civ. Still, when you see cities you founded back in the Ancient Age grow larger and larger through the application of new buildings and technologies, eventually swelling to a truly preposterous size of 60 or 70, some of the intent behind the idea shines through; like Alpha Centauri, Call To Power is about using technology to smash all constraints on your civilization’s growth, except it’s just that little bit more powerful thanks to being placed within the context of the world we know.

(The future ages also let them play around with new government styles. There’s nothing as ahead of its time as SMAC’s Social Engineering, but the increased scope does allow CTP to include more fanciful/dystopian flavours of government such as Technocracies and Corporate Republics. The concept of discrete governmental systems has gone the way of the dodo in modern Civilization, but Civ V’s social policies, while well thought-out mechanically, are almost totally flavourless; there’s nothing quite like the feeling of setting loose unfettered free market forces to boost your economy and drive the pollution levels through the roof.)

The really interesting mechanic CTP adds, though, and the one that I’m surprised hasn’t made a single appearance in any of the main Civilization games, is Public Works. You know how a large part of modern Civ is telling your workers to build tile improvements, slowly and painstakingly filling out your borders with built-up tiles? It’s a bit of a faff even now, and back in the Civ II days it was even worse since only Settler units could improve tiles – and those things were a major investment. The constant mindless micro of repeatedly irrigating terrain got really old really fast. CTP’s solution is to toss the concept of a unit that you order to improve tiles straight out of the window, and to instead place a generic tax on your production. Just like the old Science/Taxes split for gold, production in CTP can go either to the usual making of buildings, units, wonders etc., or it can go into an empire-wide Public Works pool. Once you have enough hammers saved up in the Public Works pool you can use them to do something to change a tile – chop down a forest, build a farm, construct a road and so on. You do this by opening the Public Works interface, selecting the relevant improvement, and then placing it directly on to the map with no fiddling around with worker units required.

This is a cool shift in the way Civ works for a number of reasons, but the one that interests me is that it’s potentially a great balancing mechanic against expanding too far and too fast, something Civilization has traditionally had a lot of trouble getting right – while I’ve grown to accept the Happiness mechanic in Civ V it still strikes me as a bit of an awkward kludge even after six years of refinement. In order to build a new city and have it be something more than just a collection of huts in the middle of a swamp, you need to have an established industrial engine pumping out Public Works production to back it up. It’s natural. It makes sense. With a bit of tweaking of where precisely you could put improvements I really think it could have changed the series for the better. Unfortunately as with most other things it tried Call To Power’s version of Public Works is half-baked at best and hideously broken at worst; even with just a 10% levy on your production you’ll quickly build up an enormous pool of surplus public works production that’s enough to improve an entire city’s worth of territory and then some. And you can place these improvements anywhere within your borders, which in practice means you place them everywhere within your borders; again, this isn’t inherently a deal-breaker because if it had been done intelligently it could have been leveraged for some of that flavour that later iterations of Civ have had a little trouble recapturing, especially since you can upgrade improvements as your tech level increases (so you have the Farm, and then the Advanced Farm, and then the Hydroponic Farm) and they could have been a really cool visual representation of the advancement of your empire. Instead the improvement spam just makes the already incoherent visuals even more cluttered.

I don’t really fault Call To Power for getting so much of what it tried wrong, though. Yes, it’s very obviously built on top of Civ II’s mechanics, and yes, the good ideas it layers on top are more the result of the designers throwing the kitchen sink at it and hoping at least some of the stuff they added would be a success. They did have a fair few good ones, though, for all that CTP failed to execute on them particularly effectively. In retrospect it’s easier to forgive those failures when Call To Power itself has been mostly forgotten²; going back to play it feels precisely like an archaeologist uncovering the remains of a lost civilization (ha). It’s a snapshot of an alternative approach for the series that would probably have been viable if it had had some good designers refining it over 3-4 games or so, and even now I think Civ proper could learn a thing or two by sending some explorers into the ancient ruins of Call To Power.

The post In Praise Of: Civilization – Call To Power appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Firaxis are a developer with a reputation for releasing expansion packs that dramatically improve their base game. Yes, you can say that this is partly because the base games tend to be broken, unbalanced or otherwise underwhelming in some way, but there’s no arguing that Civilization V was a much better game after Gods and Kings, and while Enemy Within added some flab in the form of Exalt it did wonders for the pacing and balancing of the XCOM campaign as a whole. They’re commendably committed to improving and expanding on their games post-launch; even so, the existence of the Rising Tide expansion pack for Civ-V-In-Space ‘em up Beyond Earth surprises me more than a little. There was so much wrong with Beyond Earth that I was convinced that this time around Firaxis would just tie a rock to it and let it sink rather than send good development money after bad.

Still, it’s not like Beyond Earth didn’t have any good ideas. Yes, it’s true; you might need truly advanced sensing equipment to detect it as it’s buried some considerable way beneath many layers of mediocrity and blandness, but a really good expansion pack might have been able to burrow down far enough to reach those rich seams of potential. Bring the backstory to the foreground. Surface those civilopedia entries somewhere where the player can actually find them. Make the endgame missions less of a soul-crushingly boring End Turn clickfest. Give the faction leaders more than one line of voice acting which they endlessly spout ad infinitum. Make the aliens a little more than Barbarians 2.0. It’s a long list, but if they’d manage to improve enough stuff it’s entirely possible Rising Tide might have been able to drag Beyond Earth kicking and screaming into the neighbourhood of an acceptably-fun 4X title.

Instead they have gone with, uh, boats.

Not that this is without precedent, mind. Gods and Kings did a big overhaul of naval combat to actually make it worthwhile, while the Alien Crossfire expansion for Alpha Centauri introduced specific improvements for waterborne cities and a faction whose gimmick was that it was massively overpowered on the ocean. It’s a little surprising that this is the headline improvement for Rising Tide, however – of all the things wrong with Beyond Earth the fact that ocean cities weren’t included wouldn’t even have made my top ten list, and I’m a little baffled as to why Firaxis thought that it was *this* that required their attention rather than the now almost stubbornly-intentional lack of character riddling the rest of it.

I will grudgingly admit that the new sea cities in Rising Tide are pretty nice. The sea itself is a much busier place than it was previously, full of beasties to kill and resources to exploit, and non-combat units such as Explorers and Workers are now fully amphibious and can use their special abilities on the water just as well as they can on dry land. There’s a couple of new classes of ship (including a melee class that’s capable of taking cities), but all of this stuff largely exists to enable the sea cities. These are somewhat the same as land cities – although there are some city improvements and wonders that can only exist in sea cities, and vice versa — except their big gimmick is that they can slowly move about the map. In the production list for the city there’s a “move city” option; complete this as you would any other construction project and you gain the ability to move the city one tile. Any unclaimed tiles that fall within a one-hex radius of the city’s new location are automatically claimed as your territory, and the city then carries on much as normal.

This move ability strikes me as a nice idea that’s gone a little bit wrong in practice. I always founded my sea cities in an optimum location — at the centre of a nice fat patch of resources, say — and once they’re in the best location, why would I bother moving them? Firaxis have coded in something of a stick to make you use the feature as sea cities cannot slowly expand their city radius by claiming tiles via culture; you’re supposed to do this by moving the city around to hoover up the tiles instead. Unfortunately you retain the option to simply buy unclaimed tiles with cash money, and it’s much easier to do this than it is to faff about wasting valuable production on moving the city one space across the map. Sea cities are great on their own, and developed right they’ll easily rival or even surpass your land cities thanks to their special sea-city-only improvements – thanks to modern Civ giving all units an ampibious capability they’re arguably even more useful than the ones in Alpha Centauri as they can make a valid contribution to your war effort without having to worry about transporting land units from city to shore. It’s just a shame that what was supposed to be their signature feature ended up being a bit of a damp (ha) squib – I think it’s pretty telling that across three games played and at least twenty-five built, I moved my sea cities a grand total of twenty times.

Still, the mere fact that ocean cities exist at all has a surprisingly significant effect on the way Beyond Earth plays. Traditionally I’ve always seen sea tiles in Civilization as dead tiles, and treated the ocean as a sort of negative space – something to be crossed to reach a prospective target, but never a target in and of itself. Rising Tide changes that; not only does it enable ocean cities in the first place by clustering resource tiles in the sea just as much as it does on land, but by giving workers the ability to properly improve sea tiles it also means that your coastal cities are that much more effective. You can now utilise the entire map for your settlements (except for the polar ice caps), and as you tech up your ability to exploit tiles of all types increases further and further until your endgame cities are of a size you’ll never see in a stock Civilization game. Spreading out over the map and watching the population counter tick up and up and up did remind me of Alpha Centauri in a good way – that was a game about using future technology to thoroughly shatter any and all constraints on your expansion until you hit a runaway exponential growth curve, and now Beyond Earth sort of is too.

Rising Tide provides a number of other shots in the arm to further boost Beyond Earth’s previously-anaemic vitality. First, the diplomatic system has been completely overhauled. Gone are the ineffective culture/scientific/economic agreements and the relatively opaque attitudes of your AI opponents; instead, your relationship with them is governed by twin Fear and Respect scores. Fear is simply a measure of how much your military outclasses theirs, and the Respect value indicates how much your activities in the game align with their goals. This is something that Civilization has attempted to surface before, but never with the frequency that Rising Tide does; pretty much every turn you’ll get a little pop-up notification at the top of the screen telling you about something you’re doing that’s changing your Respect score with a given Civilization. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down, but the fact that the reasons behind the change are constantly visible makes it a lot easier to keep on the good side of your rivals – or not.

Meanwhile your actual relationship status – Neutral, Cooperating, Allied etc. – is altered by the investment of a new currency called Diplomatic Capital. This is generated by certain city improvements and all wonders, and is required to both improve your relationship status and set up ongoing agreements. Diplomatic Capital is also used to buy and upgrade traits for your faction – these start out relatively weak, but once they’re fully upgraded and you can get some synergy going on (like getting all the trade route bonus traits for Hutama, whose thing is that he gets more trade routes than anyone else) they can make a big difference to your faction’s power. These traits dictate which agreements will be available for the AI to make with you, and their traits will dictate what you can get out of them. Again, the agreements are fairly underwhelming to start with — a 20% decrease in the time it takes to complete covert ops, say — but they get more effective as your relationship status with the other party improves, with an agreement with an Allied faction being two or three times as good as an agreement with a Neutral one.

Sounds good on paper, certainly. I definitely did like the new faction traits as they provided a degree of customisation that I thought Beyond Earth had been sorely missing up until this point (no, the relatively weak options you get during game setup don’t weak). They’re powerful enough that they feel worthwhile to use, and there’s enough of them that every faction can find a combination that works for their playstyle. Unfortunately the same can’t be said of the diplomatic agreements; it’s pretty telling that I could call up the list of all potential agreements – and there’d be a good 15-20 of these available at any one time — and find maybe one that I thought was worth the investment of Diplomatic Capital. They’re not so much underpowered as they are ridiculously specific, and while a 40% increase in the rate at which an outpost grows into a colony has its uses, getting more orbital coverage from trade stations very definitely does not.

So the new diplomatic system has both good and bad points. The same goes for its new hybrid affinities, which are supposed to provide alternative unit upgrade paths for mixed affinity factions and make min/maxing the tech web for one specific type of affinity less necessary. For example, usually you’d need 12 affinity points in Purity to unlock the final upgrade for your tank unit, but you can also get that upgrade with 8 points in Purity and 4 points in any other affinity. Getting blanket upgrades for all of your military units is ridiculously powerful (you don’t even have to pay for them like you do in Civ) and it’s definitely a good thing that there’s less emphasis on *having* to go through the supposedly freeform tech web in a certain way in order to unlock them. I found myself judging the techs on their own individual merits rather than going “That’ll get me 20 points in Supremacy!” and treating the associated buildings and wonders as an incidental bonus.  It doesn’t eliminate this phenomenon entirely, however; the upgrade effect is too powerful to ignore affinity points completely and take a completely organic route through the web, and there were still times when I’d be researching a tech because I knew it would upgrade my 20 Cutter units into Broadsides rather than because I actually wanted the tech itself. Rising Tide will also try to market itself on the inclusion of a lot of new hybrid units in the game, but most of these are just different skins for basic unit types (the 8/4 tank will look different to the 12 point tank, but it’ll have almost exactly the same stats and abilities) and there’s *maybe* four new units that do something that’s actually new and different.

The last big change is the inclusion of artifacts for your Explorer units to dig up. Previously you’d send them out to find some alien remains, they’d set up shop for ten turns and use their single Expedition module to study those remains, and at the end of it you’d get 20 bonus culture or something equally shit. Now they have a chance to dig up artifacts of various types, which can be cashed in as sets of one, two or three artifacts to get either a big resource bonus (for one or two) or, if you cash in three at once, a unique building or permanent bonus for your faction that can’t be unlocked any other way. Some of these buildings/bonuses are really fucking good (+50% domestic trade route yield? Double speed on worker actions? Hell yes I’ll take some of that action) and so the artifacts do fulfil their intended purpose of sending explorer units out around the map to hoover them up before the other factions do – it also makes the cultural virtues that add more Expedition modules much more worthwhile. However, I found the biggest shakeup here was that you can also get artifacts out of alien nests, which meant I went from my previous attitude of live-and-let-live to purging and burning any and all alien filth whenever there was a chance I could get my hands on an artifact. It makes the early game much more proactive and disincentivises turtling up, and so while I thought the actual artifact cash-in mechanic itself was weirdly half-baked I’d say it was the single biggest change to the way Beyond Earth plays after the new ocean gameplay features.

Rising Tide’s various additions to Beyond Earth might not be unambiguous improvements to the formula, but they do move the game a lot closer to where it should have been in the first place – it now feels different enough from Civilization to merit being a different game rather than a simple mod using the Civ V engine. That means Rising Tide is something of a success, but it’s a very qualified one and this expansion pack has some very big weaknesses; namely that it does next to nothing to address the complaints I mentioned in the second paragraph. The fiction is all buried several levels down in the Civilopedia¹; you have next to no context for what the city improvements and wonders you’re building actually are besides the +1 to production or whatever they’ll add to your city; the faction leaders still have precisely one line of voice acting each and all the personality of a particularly dull brick; and – most criminally – every single one of the victory conditions is still an awful slog where you build the thing you need to win and then wait for a 40-turn timer to count down. It’s far quicker and easier to just kill everyone², which makes the endgame of Beyond Earth more than a little bit bland and samey. That the first expansion pack for Beyond Earth ignored these issues so comprehensively is a pretty decent indicator that Firaxis do not see them as a problem and they’ll never be fixed, which is why, despite the good work it does, I see Rising Tide as being particularly dismaying. It demonstrates that Beyond Earth can be a decent game, but it also indicates that it has no ambition to be a *good* one.

The post Thoughts: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Beyond Earth is a doomed-from-the-start attempt to shift the familiar Civilization empire-building action into the future. It’s doomed because no matter how good Firaxis made this game, by setting it around the colonisation of an alien world it draws inevitable comparison with one of Firaxis’ very first products: Alpha Centauri, a game that’s rightfully regarded as one of the genre’s absolute classics. Beyond Earth was never going to live up to Alpha Centauri’s better qualities, both real and imagined, and I’ve tried to take this into account when playing the thing; Beyond Earth should be judged on its own merits, not the nostalgia-fuelled remembrance of a sixteen year-old predecessor. What surprises me, however — and especially so for a Firaxis title — is that even if you take SMAC out of the equation, even when you compare Beyond Earth to the modern Civilization franchise that spawned it, I think it fundamentally still isn’t a very good game.

Given my recent tendency to randomly dislike 4xes for almost entirely subjective reasons, I have dragooned Jim into writing this review with me. Jim liked Endless Legend, so you’re getting both sides of the coin here.

Jim: I am the only man on Earth to hold that title, according to my Steam Friends list. But now I shall be…the only man…BEYOND IT

Hentzau: Jim, why not quickly sum up what Beyond Earth is about. Apart from rerouting trade convoys.

Jim: Well I mean the blurb is you and your fine faction being sent into deepest space to make Earth 2.0. You touch down, have a look around and realise you’ve accidentally landed in a game of Civ 5.

Hentzau: Yes, that’s rather sad, isn’t it. Beyond Earth boasts several features to distinguish it from its parent franchise, but nearly all of them are half-baked or just flat-out inconsequential. It’s six hundred years in the future, but you’re still building farms, sending out explorers to find goody huts and generating culture to buy social policies. Probably 60, 70% of Beyond Earth is you doing the exact same things you did in Civilization V, except with a palette swap.

Jim: It’s very similar to the Civ 4: Colonization experience, really.

Hentzau: Oh, I’d argue that actually went further in distinguishing itself from Civ IV. And I hated that version of Colonization, so I’m not often inclined to be kind to it.

Jim: Yeah I found Colonization boring and I hated Civ 5 because…I’m still not really sure why but it is really deep-seated at this point. So really I should find myself despising this. And yet, I’ve actually enjoyed these first thirty hours, there’s a decent game below the blank, botoxed facade

Hentzau: “First” thirty hours. That implies there’s going to be more, which is interesting because I’ve burned out on it after just twenty. I came to the conclusion after two playthroughs that the game was too limited to allow for really different playstyles, and that the differences between the factions were superficial at best.

Jim: And some of that is true, certainly. We’ve already referred to it off-hand a few times but it’s bizarre how little effort has been put into fleshing out this world.

Hentzau: The factions are just so underwhelmingly generic. You’ve got Space France, Space Russia, Space China, all with indistinguishable minor bonuses to their gameplay like “10% stronger in combat” or “Gets a free tech every 10 social policies” – bonuses so small that their impact on how a game unfolds is minimal, like Firaxis were terrified of letting the player have any fun with their faction.

Jim: I realised at some point that they’d found my notebooks from when I was 12 and pinched the names I wrote on pretend maps. Polystralia is a personal favourite. After a lot of play you do begin to notice some common threads between factions – Space France will always race into a tech lead, Space America will have three massive cities, Space Russia will make godawful decisions, but it’s nothing intrinsic to their bonuses.

Hentzau: That’s part of the AI personality that’s existed since Civ IV, I think – Montezuma is always a warmongering dick, Isabella is your best friend if you’re the same religion as her and a rampaging terror if you’re not etc. etc.

Jim: Fucking Gandhi and his technology. But maybe the point is that they don’t want to shoehorn you into certain playstyles, maybe they want every game to be a choose your own four-X-ture

Hentzau: I’d agree that they don’t want factions to really be limited to playing the game one particular way, especially given the way the affinities work. This comes at the great expense of any sense of personality about them, though.

Jim: I think if they’d had fill-in-the-blanks factions in an interesting world that’ll be fine, but…what’s the planet called. Space Earth is a bit rubbish.

Hentzau: It doesn’t have a name. It’d be nice if you could name it yourself or something, but as far as the game is concerned it’s just a random agglomeration of dust and water with resources sprinkled around every few hexes for you to exploit.

Jim: I particularly like how they palette-swapped horses with buggalo and everyone from Earth is just cool with it. “Better make a beetle paddock”, they say, “that’s what we did in Civ 5”

Hentzau: Exactly what you’re getting out of these paddocks is never really explained. One type gives you chitin, and another gives… beetle drugs? Maybe that’s what the developers were on when they decided it was a good idea to just give everything space names without really changing the way it worked.

Jim: Beetle juice. Remind me not to say that two more times. And then there are the aliens. Now, initially, I liked these. Civ’s barbarians are always so anaemic, and something Beyond Earth does differently is make expanding a right pain in the arse. Huge swarming nests of dinosaurs block your every move and your first instinct is to go kill them all.

 Hentzau: There’s no real downside to doing this, weirdly. I expected slaughtering aliens en masse to really piss off the rest of the alien fraternity, so there’d be a genuine decision you had to make: clear out the aliens now and claim that prime spot of land, but at the cost of all the dead aliens’ friends paying you a visit later on. I thought they’d react to me like the natives in Colonization or the mindworms in Alpha Centauri.

Jim: As far as I understand there is some Alien Fight-o-Meter running in the background, certainly it’s referred to, but you never see it or its impact. I think it’s a bit disingenuous to say you can just bat them out of the way though – the massive units like siege worms and kraken stay a threat to your expansion for a hundred turns or more. And taking down a nest complex is a lot of manpower.

Hentzau: That’s the major mechanical impact the aliens have. Where barbarians in Civ V forced you to build a military to fend off their attacks, aliens in Beyond Earth require a large standing army to eradicate so that you can expand your empire. One Wolf Beetle is the match of a basic human Soldier. The Drones and Raptor bugs are a pain to take on without tier 2 military units. And the nests will be spawning a new alien unit every three or four turns, meaning that you can’t just wear them down through gradual attrition. You need to go in and clean out the nests in one fell swoop, and this usually requires at least 4-6 military units per nest. More, if there’s multiple nests clustered together. And believe me, it’s hard to find good city spots that don’t have aliens sitting on top of them.

Jim: But yeah you’re right. It changes your behaviour but there is no coherency to the foreign fauna and flora. There’s green shit all over the place called miasma. It damages you a bit if you step in it, it takes three turns to clear, it means you change what you do but it doesn’t lead to anything greater.

 Hentzau: Hey now, it’s not just green. It’s a combination of green and purple that’s been cunningly chosen so that it effortlessly blends into whatever the underlying terrain type is, making it very difficult to spot and leading to a lot of accidental moves into it. Miasma blocks trade routes and heals aliens, and does precisely sod all else apart from inexplicably making the other factions upset when you clear this annoying blight away from your cities. I don’t get the feeling I’m taming an alien world, instead I feel like I’m playing Planet Janitor and doing tedious make-work to sweep away all of these obstacles in my path that have no real point other than to be obstacles in my path.

Jim: The problem we’re both having is that we’re mentally comparing to SMAC’s xenofungus and tutting. Beyond Earth’s sense of place is non-existent. I have absolutely no clue what I’m building most of the time beyond what bonus it infers. And the wonders are even worse – tiny little changes with nothing to hang them on. This matters to me! Science Fiction games need to go out of their way to give you a place to stand because you’re floating in space.

Hentzau: Plus four food in one of my cities! That’s not something that gets me particularly excited about building a wonder. A friend got it spot on when they said that while old-style Civilization wonders like Da Vinci’s Workshop may have been overpowered, they were far more interesting than the anaemic modern variety because building them feels like a powerful decision.

Jim: Though it does make for a more ‘balanced’ experience.

Hentzau: That’s not what I’m after, though. It’s taken Beyond Earth to make me realise it, but what I want is a game that is intentionally unbalanced in an interesting way. This is the only direct comparison to SMAC I’ll make in this review, but that was a game that spurned balance. Each faction was fundamentally broken if you played it right. Many of the wonders were potentially game-winning. But it was all held in “balance” because each faction was broken in a different way, and each of the wonders did very different things, making it very difficult to say that one was out-and-out better than the rest.

Jim: I can’t disagree with the joy of taking game systems and stretching them to the nth degree, I’ve always loved theorycrafting, minning to the max and so on. Thing is, this is still in Beyond Earth, it’s just hidden below a suspiciously pedestrian disguise. Our Clark Kent is…

Hentzau: Trade routes. Sodding trade routes.

Jim: The most powerful force on Space Earth.

Hentzau: The irony is that the trade system is pretty much a direct rip of the one introduced in Brave New World and there’s nothing really interesting or spacey about it. All they’ve done is whacked jetpacks onto the camels and dialed the yield up to eleven. You build your trade depot, which is unlocked by a really early technology, and then you can send out two trade routes from that city, and oh my god they are so broken. And not in the good way I just described, either.

Jim: Not broken, just…crucial to win. A normal size 1 city can produce maybe four of each of your classic civ resources (foods, hammers, glowing orange balls…). Buy it a couple of convoys and you can increase that by a factor of 10 or more. Done right, maybe half the resources of your empire will come from trade routes. But like all great power, this comes with a cost. You must manually resend these convoys, by hand, every twenty turns. So the game becomes this balancing act between how many resources you need and how arsed you are to select the same city from a dropdown menu multiple times every turn. WHAT WILL SPACE JANITOR DO NOW?

Hentzau: Later on you get a building that can increase number of trade routes per city by 1. That’s three trade routes per city, multiplied by number of cities, divided by twenty to get the number of times you have to deal with that bloody trade route popup every turn. The trade interface is terrible and doesn’t give you an option to auto-resend or even highlight your previous route, meaning you have to check through a list of all potential trade routes from that city – which, again, is going to scale in proportion to the number of cities that you have — to figure out where the hell you sent it last.

Jim: This is the reason that I recommend playing on a small map. I think a lot of these problems are problems of scale. You can just about deal with the busywork, you are cramped enough that aliens can’t just be routed around or ignored, civilizations get right into each others grilles from the get-go and grudges can actually develop. I’ve really enjoyed my small map games, whereas the eight player marathon broke my will to minmax. That’s not something I say lightly

Hentzau: I’d agree with that. But then I’d also say that half the problem with the game’s scale is that they’ve taken most of the brakes off of going wide (i.e. having a large sprawling empire). Happiness has been replaced by “Health”, and the malus for having low health is far less than the malus for having low happiness in Civ V. This is not an inherently bad thing, but when each additional city you build multiplies the number of tedious maintenance chores you have to do, actually taking advantage of the space available on a larger map will quickly burn you out unless you really, really like micromanaging cities.

Jim: Can I just mention that whoever did the UI for cities needs a good hearty slap? Somehow there’s a few steps backward on there from even Civ III. Everything’s hidden in the weirdest ways.

Hentzau: Like build queues. A fundamental feature of the modern 4X is locked away from the player by default in Beyond Earth. To unlock it you have to check a tiny grey box on top of a large grey background, and only then will it trust you with the fearsome ability to queue your build orders. I forget how renaming cities was hidden but it was even more laughable.  Firaxis have always had a problem with their UIs, but Beyond Earth is their worst effort yet.

Jim: I think they did want to do something different. I like a lot of underlying ideas they’re trying to implement to change the Civ formula (we’ve been playing that game for 20 years now, so fair enough) but in a lot of cases they fell short. However there are two new inclusions which I really love and they dovetail nicely with each other. First off, the tech web is the most magnificent sight in strategy gaming. I beheld it and I made the same noise as those aliens in Toy Story.

Hentzau: Hell, even I liked the tech web. It’s plagued by the same UI issues as the rest of the game, but it’s absolutely thematically appropriate for a game about future science. You start in the centre and progress outward via nodes which each have two or three techs on them. The first tech on each node is cheap, and gets you the basic buildings and improvements associated with this research area. The other techs are more expensive and give you more specific bonuses that are very powerful within their niche. The basic tech has to be researched before you can progress to the next node, but once you’ve done that you can just ignore the other techs unless you really really want them. The web is only about four nodes deep from centre to edge but you can go in literally any direction you want, through any route you want. It’s a tremendous amount of freedom to offer to player in their research choices.

Jim: It took me a few games to realise the implications of this, I must admit, and a few more before I actually roughly knew where stuff was on the web, but… you can beeline for anything. Every single tech in the game is unlockable in six or fewer steps. The amount of potential strategies this opens up is huge, and this is part of what’s driving me on at the moment. It makes me want to experiment and gives me the tools to do so.

Hentzau: What I particularly liked about it is how effectively it embodies the potential of future science to go haring off down any one of a hundred different paths. We don’t know precisely how technology is going to evolve over the coming centuries, and Beyond Earth wisely doesn’t attempt to constrain it with a narrow research tree. Instead it’s the one part of the game where it says “It’s your story – you choose what happens” and it actually works.

Jim: It’s also tied into the other new system – affinities. Some techs have a red/orange/blue marker that indicates you are making certain choices about humanity’s future, roughly corresponding to humans, robots and hippies. There’s this Bioware-esque tracker of how far down each path you’re going and the levels decide how your units improve or evolve, and the types of buildings you can construct. It’s hard to max out more than one of these in the time you have, so I think this is another solid way to make you choose the future.

Hentzau: Thematically the affinities are a great idea. They even bleed through into the everyday game narrative through quest decisions that occasionally pop up – I think at one point I ended up launching the uploaded consciousness of the population of one of my colonies into space where they could keep an eye on things. The big problem I had with them, though… well, I had two big problems. First was that they weren’t exclusionary enough; Purity (humans are the best) and Harmony (aliens are the best) should have been mutually exclusive, and yet there’s nothing stopping me from mixing and matching these affinities to get the advantages of both. Sure, I can’t max out both of them, but the fact that I can progress very far down both of these affinities in the same game means that my choice of Purity or Harmony as the “dominant” affinity has that much less meaning. It could just as easily have been the other one as far as the game is concerned, and so it ends up feeling rather superficial.

The second problem is the way you unlock affinity points. As Jim says, you get most of them by researching special techs that come with the affinity points attached, but in almost every case the affinity points were the sole reason to research that tech in the first place. So it’s not like you make the decision of “Let’s splice our DNA with that of an alien for improved combat performance” and pick up some Harmony points as a consequence; instead you just beeline for the points and unlock your hybrid units once you’ve progressed far enough down the tree. It feels less like these are reflections of the individual decisions I’ve made in the development of my society, and more like the affinities themselves are the be-all and end-all of determining how my society develops. And that’s just a matter of amassing enough points. It’s just inherently less interesting.

Jim: There’s certainly room for improvement on this system, but I don’t object to the points influencing you down certain paths – that just reflects the snowball nature of one ideology taking control. And similarly, while there is nothing to stop you mixing and matching purity and harmony, it is at the price of not getting the higher tier purity/harmony units and bonuses. As a balancing act, it’s executed quite well and it again ties into that “tell your own story” thing I keep harking back to. And there’s one more amplification of that idea: Quests

Hentzau: Quests are Beyond Earth’s way of making everything seem a little more organic. Most of them aren’t really quests in the sense that we usually understand them; mostly it’s a case of choosing additional bonuses granted by your buildings (do you want your Thorium Reactor to produce two extra energy or one extra production?), but there’s a few meatier ones unlocked when you’ve advanced far enough down the relevant affinity tree that provide some much-needed flavour to your affinity choice. The launching-colony-consciousness-into-space was a good one for Supremacy, and Harmony and Purity also get appropriately themed quests that reflect their respective evolutions of human society. The most interesting thing Beyond Earth does with the quests, however, is that it uses them to tie its victory conditions into a narrative.

Jim: Obviously you can just kill everyone and that takes no affinity whatsoever, but the others are different. Rather than tie your victory to culture/technology/gold, the victories open to you are dependent on the path you have taken. A harmony civ will attempt to hack into the planet’s conciousness, a supremacy civ will head back to cleanse Earth, and so on. These generally boil down to building the appropriate giant monolith and defending it, admittedly, and there’s a problem with the weak fiction of the game making it seem like these huge changes have come from nowhere. Still, more interesting and less secure than most of the Civ endgames I’ve endured.

Hentzau: I’m not sure I’d agree. Jamming units into the Emancipation portal for twenty turns was soul-destroying, while I resorted to killing everyone on the planet rather than sit through the Promised Land victory. However, the idea is interesting, even if the mechanical execution of it is a failure. I’d like to see another 4X take this idea and run with it, since I think that if you can make the conditions themselves sufficiently varied the narrative will do the rest for you. Even Emancipation wouldn’t have been so bad if the actual mechanic behind it hadn’t been quite so transparently shit; if I’d maybe had some indication that the robot armies I was sending through the gate to “liberate” the population of Earth from their weak, fleshy bodies were doing more than filling up an arbitrary victory counter. With a bit more interactivity they could shine. As it is, they’re just another example of Beyond Earth’s weird tendency to make the player repeat the same pointless task fifty times before they can get anywhere.

Jim: Yeah, weird how we keep coming back to that. There’s a genuine attempt here, despite that fact that it is in so many ways a slightly recoloured Civ 5, to make a different Civ experience with some genuinely nice ideas, but the execution, the surrounding fiction, isn’t strong enough for me to say “This is a game you should buy” – yet. But I am still enjoying the experience.

In Beyond Earth, you don’t make big sweeping decisions, you make hundreds of little choices. In some cases, those choices are needless busywork – trade routes being the prime example, but the compound effects are potentially very powerful, and mean that for the first Civ in forever, the endgame can be drastically different from one game to the next, because you’ve focused on completely different sets of technology and ideas. The problem is they haven’t gone far enough with this process, they haven’t committed to it.

Hentzau: I think maybe it was a question of resources. It may sound harsh, but Beyond Earth strikes me as a product made on a limited budget by the Firaxis B-team. It has a lot of fresh ideas that, if they’d been given the resources and time to be polished and refined, could have really lifted the game above its origins as a total conversion of Civilization V. Time and again, though, it’s held back by an apparently shoestring budget that ensures too much of that Civilization DNA shows on the surface for it to really be anything more than a pale reflection of its parent that lacks any real personality of its own.

The future of mankind is such fertile ground for the imagination, and I’m very disappointed that — tech web aside — Firaxis’s latest take on it is such a timid offering that’s afraid to take any real chances or make any worthwhile statements. The one potential lifeline for Beyond Earth is that the one thing Firaxis are consistently good at is polishing up underwhelming games through patches and expansion packs. Hopefully Beyond Earth will get the same treatment Civilization V did, and if it does it’s very possible that in two or three years it will have evolved into an excellent 4X. The raw material is certainly good enough. For now, though, I’d have to recommend that you steer well clear.

The post Thoughts: Beyond Earth appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I found myself cranking through yet another game of Civilization V the other day and a thought crystallised in my brain that’s been niggling me ever since I started playing it back in 2010: for a game that is based so much around cities and the civilizations built from them, a city in Civ V is a staggeringly two-dimensional entity. Open up the city screen for your capital and all you’ll see is a big list of numbers, symbols and building names. Open up the city screen for your newest colony and you’ll see exactly the same thing; the numbers might be smaller and the lists shorter, but there’s nothing to really differentiate the two as entities apart from the name. Cities in Civ V exist purely as resource gathering and production nodes, and while this is certainly how they are supposed to function mechanically I feel that the game loses something for not having them feel like places.

It was not always thus.

These days the original Civilization is an astoundingly clunky experience. It’s not actively painful to play, but there are a lot of ancient mechanics that make me wish I was playing one of the newer iterations in the series. Settler units being responsible for terrain improvements. Food and shield upkeep for military units. The horrible, horrible combat system that cannot be trusted. Mechanically speaking it was showing its age ten years ago, and today it is quite literally a museum piece that’s almost only worth playing as a historical curio. Despite this, though, I do keep revisiting Civilization once every couple of years, and it’s entirely down to one thing: the city view.

Look at a typical gameplay screen from Civilization. The visuals are fairly basic, even for a game from 1991; there’s very little time devoted to artistic flourishes aside from some animated waves sloshing around the coastlines, and otherwise every single visual detail is there because it communicates some kind of mechanical information – tile types, resources, improvements and so on. It’s the same problem facing Civ V’s city screens, albeit one imposed by the technology of the time and the limited resources of a small development team rather than bad design. However, there’s a big difference in the approach each game takes to its rather stark portrayal of game information. Civ V prefers to ignore the problem of its lifeless cities, and hopes you’ll be able to draw some sense of atmosphere from the world map and the emergent narrative at the core of every Civilization game. The original Civilization on the other hand – which, let us remember, was made nineteen years earlier — attempts to tackle it head-on.

A city in Civilization is represented by this horrible square graphic which is designed to pack in the city’s vital statistics and nothing else. Click on the city and you get the familiar lists of numbers, albeit presented in a visual style that I happen to think is actually more effective than that used in Civilization V (I especially like coins and bulbs being represented as actual stacks of coins and bulbs rather than a coin or a beaker with a number next to it). There’s also a little line of figures along the top of the screen that represents your assorted citizenry, and if this were all Civilization bothered to do I think it’d already be taking a superior approach to injecting some life into the city screen through actually portraying your citizens as people rather than an abstract number or a little coloured circle.

Civilization doesn’t stop there, though. On the city screen interface is this button marked “View” which, when clicked, takes you to this wonderful panoramic cartoon view of your city. It must have taken ages to implement since it contains what are by far the most detailed graphics and animations in the game, and to their credit the Microprose development team made very effective use of it since it’s not just a static representation of the city in question. When you found a city with a settler unit you get a cutscene where the settlers drive up to the city site in their wagons and build some huts. While all the buildings you have built are represented somewhere in the city and can be viewed at any time, when you build them you’re treated to a little scene where it materialises in place which gives you a feeling of having accomplished more than adding 10% to the city’s gold output. Building a wonder is even better, since these are ridiculously huge structures that really stand out in the bijou depiction of the city view (the Colossus in particular is great, since all you can see are the statue’s feet). When the citizens of a particular city are unhappy they’ll march through the streets with pitchforks and torches or – later on – placards and signs. When you invade an opponent’s city you get to see an animation of your military forces doing the same, which is a nice excuse to show you what it is you just managed to capture.

So the city view isn’t just a more detailed picture of your city (this is where Civs 2 and 3 went horribly, horribly wrong), but is also used in as many situations as the developers can think of to add a sense of place to the game that’s sorely lacking from what you spend most of your time looking at in the world map. The view even updates from time to time as you advance technologically, with the wooden huts and dirt roads being replaced by skyscrapers and tarmac and your soldiers progressing from legionaries to musketeers to modern infantry. Even the bog-standard citizens stood out front will update, and there’s unique graphics for nobles, entertainers, tax collectors and scientists. The game does this in a few other places too, with the terrifying Sid Meier-analogue philosopher eventually being replaced by a scientist wearing a lab coat, and your advisors changing their appearance with time as well as with successive government types, but it’s in the city screen that this change is most striking.

This one seemingly-cosmetic feature does much to imbue Civilization’s cities with a sense of liveliness that’s missing from the sequels¹. Civ V’s cities will visibly grow on the world map and the odd world wonder will show up outside them when you start construction, but otherwise one city looks much like another. Managing to build a wonder on the higher difficulty levels is a rare event, and so the game can’t rely on them to mark a city out as a distinct place. It has to do it through the features all cities have access to – their population and their improvements – and this is something that Civ V fails at in a rather abject manner, since both are barely represented on the world map.

From a game development perspective I can understand why this is so. Art assets are very expensive to produce, and coding non-interactive elements just to fulfil a sense of atmosphere is rightly seen as something of a lesser priority than, say, getting the AI to behave in a rational and sane manner.² What Civilization does with its city view is also a big no-no in modern game design; jerking the player away from what they’re doing and shoving them into what amounts to a cutscene at the end of every turn is something that I probably wouldn’t look too kindly on if I saw it in a modern game.³ Still, I can’t help but think that Civilization regresses slightly with each new iteration; lessons learned during the design and development of the previous games are jettisoned, ignored, or simply not implemented due to lack of time and resources, and so each time I buy a new Civ game I’m struck by what is conspicuously missing rather than the brand new features the dev team spent hours laboriously coding. I accept that Civilization does have to iterate and come up with new design elements, and that Firaxis can’t just make the same game over and over again with prettier graphics, but I would have thought that atmospheric touches like the city view and the cultural unit appearances seen in Civ 4’s expansion packs would be universal across the entire series. A new game built on new technology is an opportunity to implement more of these; it is not an excuse to toss out old ones. That’s something I think the designers at Firaxis would do well to remember as their recent games (including XCOM) have been particularly afflicted by this peculiar brand of amnesia, and it’s made them substantially less than they would have been had they kept their past firmly in mind.

————————————————————————-

The post In Praise Of: Civilization’s City View. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

“Procedural generation” is a phrase I’m seeing in gaming press releases increasingly often. Character names are procedurally generated. Loot and equipment is procedurally generated. Levels are procedurally generated. Entire games are becoming procedurally generated¹. Procedural generation has become shorthand for any game content that isn’t designed and constructed ahead of time by a human being, but which is instead created on the fly by an algorithm or two inside the game program itself. It’s hardly a new concept in computer games – even the earliest roguelikes incorporated it to a significant degree, for example – but it’s one which is getting more and more traction in today’s gaming market, especially on the indie scene. It seems that many of today’s developers look at procedural generation as a kind of holy grail of game development; because the algorithm outputs and the content they generate is pseudo-random it means in theory that you can provide a player with a potentially limitless amount of content for a game and in effect give it infinite replayability, as every time they load the game up they’ll be practically guaranteed to see something different.

In practice, it doesn’t quite work like that. In fact I’d argue that unless used sparingly and in very specific contexts procedural generation can end up achieving exactly the opposite, and I’d really like developers to stop trying to jam it in where it doesn’t fit – or, even worse, letting it stand in as a substitute for something they should really be doing themselves Let’s look at some case studies.

The Civilization games have been relying on procedural generation to create world maps ever since the first iteration in the series back in 1990. The player can pick what general shape or outline the map will have by selecting which world generation algorithm to use at game start, as well as fine tuning variables such as the planet age to determine the frequency with which certain specific tiles appear scattered over this broad outline. So you pick Continents if you want a game with two large, equally-sized landmasses separated by an ocean; Archipeligo for a set of small, scattered islands; Pangaea for a single enormous continent that guarantees plenty of conflict etc. The small detail of the maps is different but the broad structure is the same every time depending on which algorithm you’ve picked; the actual procedural generation part is only really relevant when considering the nearby terrain features and special resources of a potential city site. While this random aspect of the game is crucial for providing a spur to exploration and city development in the early epochs, Civilization’s map generation mostly does what it says on the tin and produces predictable, samey map shapes. As a long term Civ player I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a map feature that was unexpected or out of the ordinary. For Civilization this is fine. That is what the algorithms are supposed to do and the procedural generation meshes well with the overall game design. For other games, though, it’s not such an ideal solution.

Minecraft’s world generation is something that has undergone repeated overhauls since I started playing back in the autumn of 2010. Minecraft is a game built around the twin elements of exploration and construction, each of which feeds into the other. You explore the world to gather new resources for construction, and exploration can often present you with a striking building site upon which to build a nice new house/castle/terrifying skull fortress. As a result Minecraft would be nothing without a decent method of procedurally generating the world map as the player moves through it, and after years of refinement Minecraft’s worldgen is for my money one the best in the business, often recreating unusual real-world phenomena such as rock spikes, isolated mesas and pirate coves. (It also helps that if a player finds a particular area to be deficient in some way they can just slap down some blocks to remodel the landscape into something more to their liking.) However, one of Minecraft’s boasts is that it has a theoretically infinite overworld, and the sad fact of the matter is that as good as Minecraft’s worldgen is now and despite the number of biomes on offer, stretching even its excellent procedural generation over the massive worlds it creates results in an awful lot of repetition on a macro scale. Again, the small details are different but the broad strokes are the same; in the typical grass biome there’s always going to be a mountain less than sixty seconds away because that’s the way that biome is set up. Minecraft’s use of procedural generation is woven into the very essence of what the game is and it’s as good as it can be, but even here it the urge to wander over the horizon to see what’s there is somewhat diminished when you realise that nine times out of ten it’s going to be largely the same as what’s over here.

I love Dungeons of Dredmor to bits, but I have to admit that its level generation is somewhat lacking. The weakness here is that it assembles dungeon levels out of prefabricated rooms and corridors, each of which is memorable enough that you notice when it gets recycled for the second time, let alone the hundredth time. The actual dungeon layout is winding and labyrinthine just like any self-respecting roguelike should be, but Dredmor’s unusual level of graphical fidelity means that small details that might go unnoticed in your typical ASCII game are brought into sharp relief by the game’s cartoon art style.  A room with teleportation levels taking you round in a circle. A room with a magic item in the middle surrounded by water. A large room with lots of items and crates and statues punctuated by a water feature near the top. The thing is these can often come up a couple of times per level, and while the game tries to cover up its copy and pasting with different tilesets it’s possibly not the best way to put a roguelike together.

Pineapple Smash Crew. I still feel bad about putting the boot into this as harshly as I did, so I’ll just say that it was a collection of twenty-odd procedurally generated levels each of which felt and played exactly the same, and that it would have been far better off with twenty levels designed by a human being. PSC was a game that really wasn’t suited to random level design but which crammed it in nonetheless, and which ended up being the poster child for what happens when procedural generation goes wrong.

Did Diablo 3 have bad procedural generation? It was an odd mixture of random map features and fixed landmarks, with many map areas and dungeon levels having essentially the same layout each time. It was bracing to encounter a special event in the middle of an area where there was none before, but ultimately Diablo 3’s maps are static entities with a small random factor attached which determines exactly where you’re going to find the door to a given dungeon. More interesting is its generation of loot items from a table of the various properties they can have, along with other games such as Borderlands and every single roguelike in the history of the universe. Also of note here is Dwarf Fortress and its procedurally generated worlds and monsters, which only occasionally impact on the gameplay (because you spend most of it digging into solid rock) but which provide a wealth of background flavour and nightmarish mental images. This is the sort of thing procedural generation can excel at, in my opinion; it’s good at creating the details of a world and less good at creating the structure of a world, and that still applies when the detail comes in the form of text and not graphics. Procedural generation is great at papering over gaps in a game’s background or generating databases far too large for a human being to handle; the results tend to be slightly less fun than if a human had written them (I’ll take Baldur’s Gate and its item descriptions any day over picking up my seventeenth Slaying Axe Of Slaying in Diablo) but they wouldn’t exist at all otherwise and occasionally the computer can throw out some idiosyncrasies that a human would never come out with (again, Dwarf Fortress).

 Most of these examples ended up being decent, proportionate uses of procedurally generated content. Civ uses it to arrange terrain and resources on its map; Minecraft’s is largely successful if still slightly bland; Dredmor’s weakness is that it relies on procedurally generated levels stitched together out of content made by a human. There’s nothing wrong with the concept of procedural generation in and of itself, and if it’s used correctly it can end up adding a great deal of flavour to a game. The problems come when it’s used incorrectly, and by “incorrectly” I mean I’m seeing more and more games where procedural generation isn’t being used to achieve a particular design goal, but rather simply for the sake of using procedural generation. FTL and Pineapple Smash Crew are two of the major culprits which spring to mind here, while Frozen Synapse used procedurally generated maps for its tactical battles that utterly destroyed any gameplay value it might have had for me, as it was all too easy for one player to spawn in the open while their opponent started in a fortified position. Done badly procedural generation can end up killing a game, producing levels and encounters that are superficially different but otherwise identical in terms of tone and content and which end up boring the player (i.e. me) to tears.

This is why I get a little shiver down my spine every time procedural generation is heralded as the next big thing in gaming, or whenever I see people clamouring for the next Bethesda game to use “procedural generation” like Minecraft². These people are missing two points. The first is that Bethesda games such as Skyrim already use large chunks of procedurally generated content that are then tweaked and adjusted by a human being in order to iron out any kinks, which is honestly the best approach for a game world as big and detailed as Skyrim’s. The second is that Minecraft largely gets away with procedurally generating its worlds because it’s an unreal landscape constructed out of square blocks that nevertheless has a crude kind of beauty to it, and which a computer is very well suited to put together. If you tried to generate a landscape that had any sort of realism you’d end up with the kind of abominations I last saw in Spore, where the planets were so ugly and bland I wanted to hit them with another giant space rock to erase them from existence.  Games should be made by people with the computers filling in the bits they can’t, not the other way around. Procedural generation supplements well, and in rare cases it even creates well, but it’s no substitute for the human touch.

 —————————————————————-

1. This is fascinating and worthwhile research, and as long as he doesn’t actually try to sell the games ANGELINA spits out for money I won’t have to smother him to death with a fake Santa beard.
2. I know these people exist because I keep seeing them in internet comment threads. Perhaps if I stopped reading them, they’d stop existing.

The post The Procedural Generation. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Oh hey, that was serendipitous. After spending most of yesterday afternoon writing an excellent science article (oh, you are going to like this science article) I found myself at something of a loss for what to put in Wednesday’s slot. Usually I go on a nostalgia-filled ramble through my gaming past, but while I have several candidate ideas for things to write about they need a little bit of time to ferment while I clear the mists of blarney from my head. I was a bit stuck, so I did what I usually do in this situation: I said “Screw it” and went off to play a game instead. I went off to play Civilization V.

Why on earth am I playing Civ V after denouncing it in such vehement terms? I’ve not touched it in over a year. Steam says I have fifty hours invested in it so I obviously didn’t hate it that much when I started, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing Baby’s First Civilization – especially since the AI blatantly didn’t know how to play its own game. The great innovations of Civ V, hexes and non-stacking military units, was completely wasted on an AI which would spend turn after turn trying to get into the optimal position to attack your city while you cut it to shreds with entrenched artillery. This was coupled with a change in the empire management mechanic which was misguided to say the least; we were back to the bad old days of penalising the player for expansion with an awkward mechanism that made little sense except this time it was unhappiness rather than corruption. After whacking the difficulty up to the penultimate setting – a setting which, in previous Civ games, would have seen the AI turning all my cities into interesting rockeries before the AD years rolled around – and coasting to yet another easy victory, I deleted the game from my hard drive in disgust.

What induced me to reinstall it was a recommendation from a friend at the weekend (you know who you are, and I’ll be “thanking” you properly later). “Download Civ V,” he said, “we’ve got uncapped internet here and they’ve made lots of improvements!” Since Firaxis do keep working on a game even if it’s broken shit on release there was a slim possibility he might have been right, and so I acquiesced. Civ V is once again squatting in my Steam directory like a malevolent toad all done up in art-deco colours.

To be fair to Firaxis and my friend, there are some improvements present. Well, less improvements, more like a complete gutting and remodelling. Social policies have been entirely revamped, giving the earlier Tradition and Liberty trees some sort of point and toning down the overpowered Piety and Rationalism trees. I have to say the various trees as a whole are actually fairly well balanced now. There’s not so much of an insane focus on specialists either; the early science/money buildings now give flat rate bonuses in addition to specialist slots, so you don’t have to go down that route if you don’t want. The pace of the early game has been increased dramatically; building a worker no longer takes twenty-five turns in your first city and the increased science accumulation rate means that you’ll actually have researched the relevant techs to improve nearby resources once he’s out there. The unhappiness penalty for founding cities is still present and still bollocks, but it’s somewhat less obnoxious than it was before. All in all, the empire management side of things now runs fairly smoothly. Where Civ V still falls down is the two Is: UI and AI.

UI first. Since time immemorial Civ games have been controlled with the numpad keys, with each key corresponding to one of the eight directions. The presence of hexes in Civ V makes this impractical, but the first thing I tried to do when I loaded up the game was move my Warrior unit by pressing G. G. For Go. Usually this would bring up a track indicating the Warrior’s expected path to my cursor. Here it did nothing. It was at this point that I realised, to my horror, that the game expected me to move everything with the right mouse button. This is dumb for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it’s now very, very difficult to figure out exactly what path a unit will take to its destination. Since most units now move between two to four hexes a turn, it’s next to impossible to gauge how long it will take. And with the new combat mechanics it’s really, really goddamn annoying when you try to withdraw a wounded unit from combat only to watch them run happily towards an enemy unit brandishing a whole forest of pointy sticks. There’s also an odd UI bug (a bug? In Civ V? Never!) where it’ll show you as having selected one unit, but will in fact be showing you the predicted combat outcome of another, completely different unit. Then you attack, your unit dies, and you scream at Firaxis for being utterly unable to accomplish basic development goals like coding a functional UI.

Then there’s the biggie, the AI. The good news is that it grasps the rudimentary concepts of combat now. The bad news is that it’s reverted to the psychotic cheater archetype of Civs 1 and 2. Oh, Firaxis have tried to make diplomacy more transparent with a readout of the different factors affecting your relationship with a given AI, but – hilariously – this is worth exactly nothing because the AI will think absolutely nothing of stabbing you in the back at the earliest possible opportunity. One of Civ IV’s greatest achievements was that it made it possible for the first time to pursue a coherent diplomatic strategy which would let you make and keep AI friends. Here, that isn’t possible. Here you always have to keep an eye on them. Here, the diplomatic agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

An example. In my most recent game, as Harun al-Rashid, I’d just finished a war with Napoleon that ended in a white peace. A few turns went by. Napoleon’s status changed to “Friendly”, we signed a deal for an exchange of luxury goods, and Napoleon even proposed a long-term Research Agreement. Things were looking up. Then Napoleon came by with a proposition: he wanted me to join in a war against Suleiman up north. I said sure, since while the French armies were beating on Suleiman they weren’t beating on me and also mutual military struggle brings nations closer together, right? Anyhoo, I set up the bulk of my forces on Suleiman’s border (his empire consists of three cities, mine consists of five cities and five puppets) and wait for the war date to roll around. When it does Napoleon and I both declare, and I’m surprised by how many units Suleiman has lurking in his territory underneath the fog of war. I’m doubly surprised by the way he seems to be able to easily dispatch tanks with riflemen. But nonetheless I’m gradually grinding forward and after a few turns I manage to get artillery within range of Istanbul.

It’s at this point that I get a message from Napoleon. I’m paraphrasing here, but it basically goes “Ha ha, I never liked you anyway. You were a fool to trust me. Prepare for war!” And then a huge French army comes surging towards the (garrisoned) forts on my border.

Fine. Fine. I took Napoleon once, I can take him again. I’ve just researched Bombers. I can just bomb the shit out of him before he gets to me while my main army finishes up with Suleiman. Then two things happen.

1)      Napoleon’s Cannon and Musketeers start to shoot down my bombers. What. The. Fuck.

2)      Suleiman starts to massively, massively abuse the option to have a levelling up unit immediately heal to full health.

I don’t even know what’s going on with the first one. I know German Luftwaffe pilots got really annoyed when they were flying over the Eastern Front in WW2 because entire Soviet rifle regiments used to lie on their backs and take potshots at the enemy fighters as they passed overhead, but I somehow doubt that’s what’s happening here. Researching Flight first has always been Kind Of A Big Deal in Civ games since it provides you with a long range bombardment capability. After all, when Artillery bombards an enemy unit it doesn’t take return fire. Why should a bomber? Civ V doesn’t think airplanes are that big a deal, though. Civ V thinks they’re just rather weak combat units. And by taking that point of view, Civ V has reintroduced the age-old problem of spearmen versus tanks.

The second one is the one that did for me, though. Both Suleiman and Napoleon were at it. I’d make spoiling attacks with my tanks, I’d bomb them with artillery and aeroplanes, I’d finish a turn looking at an enemy battle line made of half-dead units, and then at the start of my next turn they’d all be healed to full again. It’s a little hard to fight under these conditions, you know? It’s like turning every single AI into the Japanese, only worse. I was still killing their units by the dozen – the AI still hasn’t grasped that it’s a bad idea to embark land units onto an ocean patrolled by a pair of predatory destroyers – but somehow it wasn’t enough. They just kept coming; the AI was obviously getting massive production bonuses or cheating them into existence or something because I checked Suleiman’s treasury and he had no money left, yet a unit appeared outside Istanbul every two turns like clockwork. The final kick in the teeth was when I finally tried to make peace with Suleiman so that I could turn everything towards facing the French threat, only to have the game tell me:

“You cannot make peace with this civilization because of an agreement with another player.”

To which my response was a muttered expletive and a ragequit. The AI doesn’t have to keep to the agreements it signs, so why should I?

This, now, is Civ V’s big problem. It’s similar to the one Shogun 2 had when it was first released; the computer players aren’t players in the true sense of the word. Unlike Shogun 2 the AI is trying to win, but the unfair methods it uses to do so make things seriously unfun. The diplomacy aspect of Civ V honestly might as well not exist for all the use it is; the game has actually regressed from the peak of Civ IV all the way back to the ground level of Civ I, only because it’s plummeting in the opposite direction this time it hasn’t stopped and is now tunnelling down to the Earth’s core. In the next game they should just drop the pretence and throw you in a pit with eight barbarian civilizations; that way the player won’t waste any time trying to make nice with them. The empire management improvements mean Civ V is a bit better than it used to be, but the schizophrenic AI ensures that it remains a fundamentally broken game.

Oh, and whoever bound the “Load quicksave” button to the same key Steam uses to take screenshots needs to be taken out back and shot.

The post The Two-Fingered Salute. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.