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In the expansions of Civ 3 (or 4?) in the late game you can lose tiles to effects of climate change and desertification. Though it was never a huge issue for my
by twright 9y ago
In the expansions of Civ 3 (or 4?) in the late game you can lose tiles to effects of climate change and desertification. Though it was never a huge issue for my cities, a little production lost here, a little food there. I'm wondering why they took that out and what other set-backs they can add to Civ to prevent this perpetual growth gameplay. The article touches on the challenges of this, that with these balances the game still has to be fun. Civ 5 balanced (some might say over-balanced) perpetual expansion of civilizations by making new cities a pretty heavy resource sink until they were of a certain size. I'm not as big of a fan of that iteration because of that mechanic.
- nafey 9y agoAFAIK it might have felt like unfairly penalties to the player. Sid Meier has discussed in an old interview the prototyping rise and fall of civilizations in the game. He concluded that it was not fun for someone to see the civ they built over the course of hours being taken from them.
- ben_w 9y agoHe’d be right. That’s one of the reasons I dislike the standard browser-based civ-inspired games such as Travian. Not to say there is no was around that — when I last did game development I had an idea, but I don’t want to risk breaking my NDA by saying what, only that a potential solution might exist.
- glenstein 9y agoI agree. As a person who has not played Stellaris but is aware of its excellent reputation, I got to the part of the article where it said Stellaris breaks up it's late game bloat, and was expecting the second half of that sentence to be very different. I thought it would be something about abstracting away the tedious low level details, and shifting toward supermassive macro scale problems, maybe going up a higher level like Spore, but in some salient strategic sense that fits the feel of Stellaris. I was disappointed to learn but the actual solution was just random punishments.
- breischl 9y agoIt's not really random punishment, it's challenges. eg, if you use certain dangerous technologies extensively (eg, strong AI, subspace drives) then a strong late-game enemy may appear at an unpredictable time (eg, rampaging AI bent on killing all races, rampaging fleets from another dimension). I think this actually works well for Stellaris, because of the vassalization dynamics. In most 4X games, if you get defeated then you're dead and may as well quit. In Stellaris you can get defeated, become a vassal of another nation, and later break out to defeat your former masters. Having a powerful late-game enemy appear makes that sort of shakeup much more likely, as the smaller/vassalized empires may be able to pick off systems from the more powerful, but weakened or distracted, empires.
- dtech 9y agoThey're not really punishments, but difficult crisises that the player must overcome. For example, two ancient powerful but inactive empires might become active and start a war. This allows the player to align with either one of the powers, or form an independent coalition with a chance to become the new "leader" of the galaxy. These events throw existing borders up relations up in the air, thus effectively making the game interesting again right as its becoming stale.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago"not fun for someone to see the civ they built over the course of hours being taken from them." Depends on the definition of "fun". A DwarfFortress-like definition might say "fun" is desperately trying to prevent or simply deal with things falling apart.
- oblio 9y agoI guess the player numbers for both games kind of clarify the appeal of both types of games :)
- emiliobumachar 9y agoI remember that video. Playtesters would simply load a previous save when struck with serious calamity.
- eterm 9y agoCiv V(maybe 4?) deliberately removed a lot of "un-fun" mechanics such as riots, pollution, global warming, etc. I can't find the article now but there was a deliberate shift to focusing on positive reinforcement rather than hurting the player.
- jccooper 9y agoSimilarly they removed the Civ 4 culture flipping in Civ 5. And, way back, the "militia defeats battleship" after Civ 1. Unpredictable minor penalties that increase the micromanagement burden aren't especially fun.
- yxhuvud 9y agoCulture flipping WAS fun though, for the advanced player who got to flip AI cities.
- Ono-Sendai 9y agoI think Civ 1 has climate change/desertification as well. it has been a while since I have played it however.
- craigsmansion 9y agoCiv II did as well, climate changes, through pollution and nuclear fallout, with enough global effect to use it as a strategy against more modernised but smaller rivals. Such grim game progression was made all the more poignant by the space race game mechanic, where you could technically still "win" by sending a ship with settlers to a different star system which translated in many games to: "We're all doomed, but you were the first to avert complete extinction of the species. You Win!"
- vanderZwan 9y ago> with enough global effect to use it as a strategy against more modernised but smaller rivals. In a way, you could argue that Civ II (and Alpha Centauri) mechanically included the problems of externalising cost better than any Civ-like since.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoGlobal warming is a game mechanic in the original Civilization. You have a pollution indicator in the UI measuring how likely it is.