I am one more turning really hard this week.
I finally got around to installing Civilization 6, and it is a beast of a game. Unlike Civ 5, 6 is actually super complicated right out of the gate. 5 had fairly simple mechanics, not much more challenging than the earliest Civ games, and had some really enormous balance problems. 6, on the other hand, is ridiculously complicated in all kinds of ways. I am a veteran gamer, played 5 for 1500 hours, and I am struggling to keep everything straight.
It is marvellous.
Hell, there are still a couple of major mechanics and victory conditions that I have absolutely no idea how to handle. Starting a religion and having religious battles is a core mechanic in the game and yet because I didn't get in quickly to found a religion I can't do any of that stuff at all. There is an entire subgame that the AIs are playing against one another involving pushing their various religions and while I can see them bashing away at one another with religious units I have no idea how all that works.
There is this thing about tourism that is apparently a win condition and I have no idea how that works. How 'come visit my booth' is a win condition on par with 'conquer every other civilization on the planet' I don't know, but even if you set aside how bizarre it feels I don't know how it works. I know how to hang paintings in my buildings, and apparently people like to come look at those, but there is all this stuff about stealing tourism from other people and trade routes and geez I have no idea what I am doing.
I decided to just go for a scientific victory since that seemed at least vaguely similar to previous Civ games. Just stack a lot of science, build a spaceship, win. Doing this made sure I would have competitive units at least, so if I get attacked I won't be sitting there with a bunch of fancy artwork and books while the enemies burn my cities to the ground.
There are just so many things to think about. Some districts want to be near mountains, some near rivers, some near other districts. Some like pretty settings, and others want to be nestled in the mines. Farms want to be in tight groups, and every city needs a mix of production and food to go along with all the districts. Plus you have to factor in which districts your cities each want based on your win conditions and what tiles they currently have access to and which they will eventually have access to... it is just so much.
I have to keep in mind also all the random stuff the city states are demanding and the Eureka criteria for all of my scientific advances and my cultural stuff. Some of these rewards are building related and some are about using specific units.
Usually when I play a Civ game I can figure out how everything works. Finding the optimal strategy can take time, but the mechanics themselves have mostly been easy. 6 is not like that. I have multipliers all over the place for various things and I just don't know where it all comes from.
This complexity is overwhelming, especially when I consider that I am playing on easymode - Prince difficulty should be a cakewalk for anyone with the amount of hours invested into Civ that I have.
I think this is a worthy entry into the Civ lineup. Anyone itching for more complex gameplay is going to find it here. There are so many things to think about and to do - you could spend an hour analyzing a single city placement to consider every thing it might build in the future to pick the perfect location. Whether or not the numbers are all correct isn't something I can figure out with not even a single playthrough under my belt, but so far nothing felt egregiously wrong.
Civ 6 feels like a game I will need one hundred hours of play in before I will really know how things work. That is a good feeling, to be delving deep into something really challenging to master.
So far, two big thumbs up.
Showing posts with label CiV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CiV. Show all posts
Thursday, August 31, 2017
Friday, February 8, 2013
Bloat and splat
Today I am wrestling with the conundrum of how much is too much when it comes to system bloat. DnD is the best game example though this crosses genres very nicely. In every version of DnD from ADnD to Pathfinder there was an incredible amount of additional material put out for the game that added in spells, classes, weapons, feats, and other options that drastically increased the power level with time. For a new player these things eventually became overwhelming and the simple act of picking one feat at first level was impossible to do in an informed fashion. On the other hand the hardcore players seem to love having endless permutations of options to peruse to make bizarre (and usually overpowered) characters.
System bloat in other formats is usually a lot more benign. For example, in MMOs there is generally a constant stream of expansions and updates that add content and options. While the enormity of the system can still be a big challenge for new players at least the new content often obsoletes the old and new players can ignore much of what has gone before. Magic: The Gathering is similar to an MMO in this sense because maintaining a comprehensive collection continues to get harder and harder but the great majority of cards will someday become totally irrelevant. Still though a new player these days who wants to play Magic competitively will have a brutal time getting caught up with the veterans because there are so many expansions.
It is clear that adding content is mandatory to generate a large revenue stream but I don't think all of this churn is actually good for the games themselves. Certainly in a subscription model MMO churn is necessary because otherwise they could not maintain the revenue stream necessary to keep the servers on. In a tabletop game the rules are very different though. The publisher obviously wants lots of money and that requires new expansions but the game itself can be perfectly fine without them. Whether the expansion in question is Gods and Kings for CiV or Cities and Knights for Settlers of Catan the usual effect is to increase the complexity without really improving the game experience.
While having no expansions seems fine for the game itself it does appear that it makes for a small community. If you look at the most popular games and franchises out there it becomes clear that people really want to be doing the same thing as yesterday but bigger and shinier and are happy to shell out for that. Games that never expand or change do develop loyal followings but those followings are very small. The lesson I take away from this is that you don't need constant expansions and the problems that those generate to make a good game but if you want to make a lot of money or if you want a huge following you simply must produce a constant stream of product to take people's money. If you don't take their money somebody else will and they will go play the game they just bought.
System bloat in other formats is usually a lot more benign. For example, in MMOs there is generally a constant stream of expansions and updates that add content and options. While the enormity of the system can still be a big challenge for new players at least the new content often obsoletes the old and new players can ignore much of what has gone before. Magic: The Gathering is similar to an MMO in this sense because maintaining a comprehensive collection continues to get harder and harder but the great majority of cards will someday become totally irrelevant. Still though a new player these days who wants to play Magic competitively will have a brutal time getting caught up with the veterans because there are so many expansions.
It is clear that adding content is mandatory to generate a large revenue stream but I don't think all of this churn is actually good for the games themselves. Certainly in a subscription model MMO churn is necessary because otherwise they could not maintain the revenue stream necessary to keep the servers on. In a tabletop game the rules are very different though. The publisher obviously wants lots of money and that requires new expansions but the game itself can be perfectly fine without them. Whether the expansion in question is Gods and Kings for CiV or Cities and Knights for Settlers of Catan the usual effect is to increase the complexity without really improving the game experience.
While having no expansions seems fine for the game itself it does appear that it makes for a small community. If you look at the most popular games and franchises out there it becomes clear that people really want to be doing the same thing as yesterday but bigger and shinier and are happy to shell out for that. Games that never expand or change do develop loyal followings but those followings are very small. The lesson I take away from this is that you don't need constant expansions and the problems that those generate to make a good game but if you want to make a lot of money or if you want a huge following you simply must produce a constant stream of product to take people's money. If you don't take their money somebody else will and they will go play the game they just bought.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Being awesome while gaming
On my main blog I wrote a piece about being awesome. This wasn't a call to be somebody else's idea of awesome, mind, but to be awesome in a way that you believe in. I think it will normally be associated with the idea of flow, of total immersion in the activity at hand. I have been awesome while gaming many times in my life but looking back at it with that in mind I see great swathes of time I really did waste on nothing at all.
Raiding in WOW has mostly been awesome. It took a lot of time and resulting in no real world benefits but pushing to the limit of my abilities to down monsters and especially leading raids to do the same required me to be the best I could be. I definitely found flow when working on the hardest things like the Alone in the Darkness, A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity, or Sartharion 3D achievements. Doing things like that were amazing and awesome. Grinding out terrible random achievements like The Diplomat or The Exalted titles on the other hand were not awesome. I did not have to push myself nor did I ever get that feeling of flow - it was just something to do and I don't think I will ever do it again.
Civ V was mostly awesome, but especially so when I was building my mod. Playing the game to test my innovations and constantly doing my best to find new ways to make the game better was tremendous fun, a good learning experience, and hard. Although I built a mod that I was proud of and lots of people downloaded it I don't feel like it matters at all how many people used it. The pursuit of awesome is not about download numbers or revenue or anything else of that sort - it is within the person doing the activity.
Building games has mostly been awesome. Testing and physical construction both forced me to stretch myself and do better and I am really excited about where Heroes By Trade is going. I want to make them the best they can be and I am passionate about what I do. There isn't so much awesome in grinding out things I am less interested in like world design and flavour text and such but the overall project makes them worthwhile.
There are a few other games that were completely awesome like Portal or Plants vs. Zombies for the first few hours but most other games I have played end up seeming pretty lame from this perspective. So many of them I just played with half attention, putting in the time but not pushing myself to the edge. Sure, Mass Effect was fun, but did I gain anything by playing it? Diablo 1, 2, and 3 looked at this way seem like a complete waste. There are thousands and thousands of hours locked away there in things that I can't get back and I probably shouldn't have invested in the first place.
I am not one for making New Year's Resolutions (aside from my annual Achieve Total Self Mastery goal that is quite impossible) but I think I have a game resolution for the coming year: More awesome time and less passing time while playing games.
Raiding in WOW has mostly been awesome. It took a lot of time and resulting in no real world benefits but pushing to the limit of my abilities to down monsters and especially leading raids to do the same required me to be the best I could be. I definitely found flow when working on the hardest things like the Alone in the Darkness, A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity, or Sartharion 3D achievements. Doing things like that were amazing and awesome. Grinding out terrible random achievements like The Diplomat or The Exalted titles on the other hand were not awesome. I did not have to push myself nor did I ever get that feeling of flow - it was just something to do and I don't think I will ever do it again.
Civ V was mostly awesome, but especially so when I was building my mod. Playing the game to test my innovations and constantly doing my best to find new ways to make the game better was tremendous fun, a good learning experience, and hard. Although I built a mod that I was proud of and lots of people downloaded it I don't feel like it matters at all how many people used it. The pursuit of awesome is not about download numbers or revenue or anything else of that sort - it is within the person doing the activity.
Building games has mostly been awesome. Testing and physical construction both forced me to stretch myself and do better and I am really excited about where Heroes By Trade is going. I want to make them the best they can be and I am passionate about what I do. There isn't so much awesome in grinding out things I am less interested in like world design and flavour text and such but the overall project makes them worthwhile.
There are a few other games that were completely awesome like Portal or Plants vs. Zombies for the first few hours but most other games I have played end up seeming pretty lame from this perspective. So many of them I just played with half attention, putting in the time but not pushing myself to the edge. Sure, Mass Effect was fun, but did I gain anything by playing it? Diablo 1, 2, and 3 looked at this way seem like a complete waste. There are thousands and thousands of hours locked away there in things that I can't get back and I probably shouldn't have invested in the first place.
I am not one for making New Year's Resolutions (aside from my annual Achieve Total Self Mastery goal that is quite impossible) but I think I have a game resolution for the coming year: More awesome time and less passing time while playing games.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
An endgame for D3; it isn't enough
Diablo 3 patch 1.05 is due to arrive fairly soon. It has all kinds of interesting changes in it, the most notable of which is the addition of a real endgame targetted at players who already have extremely powerful gear. This comes in two parts: The first is the ability to set Monster Power to make the enemies much tougher than normal and to increase rewards. The second is a rehash of Diablo 2's Uber Tristram where you farm powerful enemies over and over to gain access to a extremely difficult fight with unique rewards.
I think that Blizzard is doing some good work here but unfortunately there is one key thing missing. People will be very happy with an endgame that gives them a goal to work towards and something concrete to build on once they reach level 60. Even if an individual player never gets to try to fight the Uber encounter themselves they do enjoy the idea that there are things to reach for and nobody can deny that the Uber encounters set to maximum Monster Power are very challenging and require excellent gear and substantial skill. There are lots of other small additions to the game here and there which all seem good so I cannot complain about anything that is actually in the patch notes.
The thing they are missing from this patch, which I complain about every patch, is communication. We have all the downsides of online play like rubberbanding, disconnects, maintenance, forced internet connection, etc. but we still lack decent communication which is by far the single most important upside. I don't know if adding in chat channels or guilds at this point would actually get my community of friends back into the game or not but I do know for sure that without it the chance of us getting back in and consequently pulling other players into the game is zero.
I suppose this isn't the case for everyone. There is a big community of people still playing CiV out there and the game itself is single player but a lot of people do spend a ton of time communicating on various forums. Modders and people who use mods were a huge reason I played as much CiV as I did because I could chat and interact with them to get feedback, give opinions, and just pass the time. There are people and games that get played a ton without any sort of community at all but they are tiny and insignificant compared to the social games. Just consider sports bars, which people go to for games but which have nothing *but* the social element and we can see how powerful the attraction to talking about games is.
The easier it is to build a community around a game the more successful that game will be. Companies that successfully leverage that will make a ton more money that companies that simply produce another good single player game.
Pictures from Blizzard at: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/7597724/New_Event_The_Infernal_Machine-10_15_2012
I think that Blizzard is doing some good work here but unfortunately there is one key thing missing. People will be very happy with an endgame that gives them a goal to work towards and something concrete to build on once they reach level 60. Even if an individual player never gets to try to fight the Uber encounter themselves they do enjoy the idea that there are things to reach for and nobody can deny that the Uber encounters set to maximum Monster Power are very challenging and require excellent gear and substantial skill. There are lots of other small additions to the game here and there which all seem good so I cannot complain about anything that is actually in the patch notes.
The thing they are missing from this patch, which I complain about every patch, is communication. We have all the downsides of online play like rubberbanding, disconnects, maintenance, forced internet connection, etc. but we still lack decent communication which is by far the single most important upside. I don't know if adding in chat channels or guilds at this point would actually get my community of friends back into the game or not but I do know for sure that without it the chance of us getting back in and consequently pulling other players into the game is zero.
I suppose this isn't the case for everyone. There is a big community of people still playing CiV out there and the game itself is single player but a lot of people do spend a ton of time communicating on various forums. Modders and people who use mods were a huge reason I played as much CiV as I did because I could chat and interact with them to get feedback, give opinions, and just pass the time. There are people and games that get played a ton without any sort of community at all but they are tiny and insignificant compared to the social games. Just consider sports bars, which people go to for games but which have nothing *but* the social element and we can see how powerful the attraction to talking about games is.
The easier it is to build a community around a game the more successful that game will be. Companies that successfully leverage that will make a ton more money that companies that simply produce another good single player game.
Pictures from Blizzard at: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/7597724/New_Event_The_Infernal_Machine-10_15_2012
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
How far down the rabbit hole shall I go?
I have been looking for a game to play. I am pretty much done with Mass Effect 3 as this last playthrough will complete Insanity difficulty and do everything I ever missed before - importing a perfect save to do everything took a lot of doing! The tricky thing about picking my new game is that whenever I do pick a game I tend to fall pretty far down the rabbit hole and I need to be concerned about just how deep it goes.
When I played Portal or Plants vs. Zombies there just wasn't that far to fall. Both games were fantastic and I spent quite a few hours getting myself set up to do 65 flags on Infinite in PVZ but in the end there is only so much you can do. There just isn't enough momentum to spawn endless forum posts and build a community like you find around big MMOs or games like Mass Effect. Those communities are what really catch me and keep me in a game for long periods, like the years I spent building spreadsheets and running raids in WOW (elitistjerks) or my Civ V modding (civfanatics). I have been moderately captured by D3 but it has some real issues with community in that the forums are a cesspool full of mindless whining and bumping and almost entirely bereft of interesting debate. I am having a lot of fun with the game but I really want to talk about games with people and chatting about D3 on the internets is more awful than amusing.
All that has me thinking that I will probably relapse into WOW once again. Getting back into the game is hard because I have to go through the newbie phase all over again. I hate being the guy who doesn't know anything and I am not impressed by stumbling around and sucking. I want to be perfect, I want to be beautiful, I want to play right! I want to be the one who has all the answers, not the guy who doesn't even know what questions to ask. That slow climb back up the hill of knowledge is painful and I know very well just how long it will take to get back to the top of the heap.
I started reading the elitistjerks forums again and it really got to me; the people there were using acronyms I don't know and talking about strategy that I can't quite follow. They were speaking about specific fights as if I should really know and understand them and instead I am quite in the dark. Looking into a community that I used to be an integral part of and not even being able to understand their language is a harsh reality check. I really want to be back in that mode, being an expert player who knows all the ins and outs, but without hurling my spare time bodily at the game there isn't any way to be there again. I should really spend my time instead writing my book or exercising or doing something else productive but all I really want to do is find a game to be awesome at again.
It seems that I will end up falling very hard, very far down the hole of WOW. I know how far down that rabbit hole goes but there doesn't seem to be another game on the horizon that offers a gentler landing.
When I played Portal or Plants vs. Zombies there just wasn't that far to fall. Both games were fantastic and I spent quite a few hours getting myself set up to do 65 flags on Infinite in PVZ but in the end there is only so much you can do. There just isn't enough momentum to spawn endless forum posts and build a community like you find around big MMOs or games like Mass Effect. Those communities are what really catch me and keep me in a game for long periods, like the years I spent building spreadsheets and running raids in WOW (elitistjerks) or my Civ V modding (civfanatics). I have been moderately captured by D3 but it has some real issues with community in that the forums are a cesspool full of mindless whining and bumping and almost entirely bereft of interesting debate. I am having a lot of fun with the game but I really want to talk about games with people and chatting about D3 on the internets is more awful than amusing.
All that has me thinking that I will probably relapse into WOW once again. Getting back into the game is hard because I have to go through the newbie phase all over again. I hate being the guy who doesn't know anything and I am not impressed by stumbling around and sucking. I want to be perfect, I want to be beautiful, I want to play right! I want to be the one who has all the answers, not the guy who doesn't even know what questions to ask. That slow climb back up the hill of knowledge is painful and I know very well just how long it will take to get back to the top of the heap.
I started reading the elitistjerks forums again and it really got to me; the people there were using acronyms I don't know and talking about strategy that I can't quite follow. They were speaking about specific fights as if I should really know and understand them and instead I am quite in the dark. Looking into a community that I used to be an integral part of and not even being able to understand their language is a harsh reality check. I really want to be back in that mode, being an expert player who knows all the ins and outs, but without hurling my spare time bodily at the game there isn't any way to be there again. I should really spend my time instead writing my book or exercising or doing something else productive but all I really want to do is find a game to be awesome at again.
It seems that I will end up falling very hard, very far down the hole of WOW. I know how far down that rabbit hole goes but there doesn't seem to be another game on the horizon that offers a gentler landing.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
A bad launch - GW2
Hobo was trying to get me to check out Guild Wars 2 when he visited earlier this summer. I managed to be away from home during launch and I figured I would peruse the internets and find out if people think the game is good or not. I like fantasy genre roleplaying games and I have never tried an MMO other than WOW so I am a good candidate to give it a go. Unfortunately it looks like GW2 is going the way of Diablo 3 upon launch - lots of fun gameplay and total failure in terms of player to player communication. It is not a good sign when players feel the need to justify your MMO's total community failure by saying that it is a good single player game. After reading a few more reviews I decided that GW2 is not going to get my money, Free to play or not.
Awhile ago Ziggyny posted about his extreme frustration with recent game launches, MMOs in particular, when players are effectively beta testing a product that doesn't work. Civ V needed major mechanic overhauls to be playable, FFXIV was a unmitigated disaster, and D3 and GW2 launched without functioning player communication... in games that are pitched as primarily multiplayer! There is no arguing that game companies regularly ship games that they know aren't ready to get the revenue booked and plan on patching in necessary changes later but I don't think that shoddy games getting launched is a new phenomenon. Old games had all kinds of terrible decisions and game issues but they just never got fixed! The big change in the past few years is that player expectations are far, far higher than ever before. The cost and time committment to a company to meet or exceed modern player expectations is extremely high and that means that the temptation to launch and let the players figure out what needs most to be fixed is ever rising.
What this all means is that players are incentivized to ignore a game at launch when it is likely to be buggy and wait half a year until the biggest issues are fixed. This strategy also gives players time to avoid games that never manage to stop sucking like FFXIV and focus only on the games that get quickly upgraded like CiV or D3. This has big drawbacks however for player community. Many players are simply going to play at game launch regardless and waiting for six months in will often leave a player without a community. This isn't an issue with CiV and its ilk but it is a major issue with games like D3 or GW2. Barring me somehow convincing my entire gaming community to ignore a game for half a year I am not going to be able to arrange a 'wait for the sucking to stop' strategy.
Thankfully Blizzard has a stable platform on which to launch expansions and a solid history of smooth WOW launches so I won't have to worry about that for Mists of Pandaria. I did kind of figure I was done with WOW when I quit eighteen months ago but it looks like there is some sort of interest left. I want to see what it is like and I particularly want to play again if they fix their 'questing on rails' fiasco from Cataclysm.
Awhile ago Ziggyny posted about his extreme frustration with recent game launches, MMOs in particular, when players are effectively beta testing a product that doesn't work. Civ V needed major mechanic overhauls to be playable, FFXIV was a unmitigated disaster, and D3 and GW2 launched without functioning player communication... in games that are pitched as primarily multiplayer! There is no arguing that game companies regularly ship games that they know aren't ready to get the revenue booked and plan on patching in necessary changes later but I don't think that shoddy games getting launched is a new phenomenon. Old games had all kinds of terrible decisions and game issues but they just never got fixed! The big change in the past few years is that player expectations are far, far higher than ever before. The cost and time committment to a company to meet or exceed modern player expectations is extremely high and that means that the temptation to launch and let the players figure out what needs most to be fixed is ever rising.
What this all means is that players are incentivized to ignore a game at launch when it is likely to be buggy and wait half a year until the biggest issues are fixed. This strategy also gives players time to avoid games that never manage to stop sucking like FFXIV and focus only on the games that get quickly upgraded like CiV or D3. This has big drawbacks however for player community. Many players are simply going to play at game launch regardless and waiting for six months in will often leave a player without a community. This isn't an issue with CiV and its ilk but it is a major issue with games like D3 or GW2. Barring me somehow convincing my entire gaming community to ignore a game for half a year I am not going to be able to arrange a 'wait for the sucking to stop' strategy.
Thankfully Blizzard has a stable platform on which to launch expansions and a solid history of smooth WOW launches so I won't have to worry about that for Mists of Pandaria. I did kind of figure I was done with WOW when I quit eighteen months ago but it looks like there is some sort of interest left. I want to see what it is like and I particularly want to play again if they fix their 'questing on rails' fiasco from Cataclysm.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Gods and Spies
The expansion for Civ V has been out for awhile but what with a minor addiction to D3 I never picked it up. Since my interest in D3 has waned very dramatically recently I figured I would buy Gods and Kings and see what changes came to CiV. I must say I am pleased with the changes they have brought in at first glance. Many of the things that I fixed or tried to fix in my CiV mod have been implemented in G&K like reducing the power of Great Scientists and improving little used military units; I can't really take credit since many other mods did the same thing but I do like it when things I did end up in the game.
The addition of religion to the game works pretty well mechanically I think. You can still play the game pretty much as you always have if you really want to but there are a lot of new options and styles available when you dive into religion. The fact that I could play the way I used to but dip into religion carefully when it seemed useful is a great way to introduce a new mechanic; it means that players won't be overwhelmed with new choices and that the balance that has been achieved is easier to maintain. When a new expansion adds completely new concepts to the core of the game it often ends up being either incredibly badly balanced or very confusing to current players or both.
Unfortunately with all of the really good changes there are still some things that stand out as not working well to my mind. There are still buildings that are fantastically bad and which will never, ever be built by a human player playing optimally. Having buildings that are mediocre but which have situational abilities is fine since we do want players to make meaningful decisions but I don't like it when you make a decision precisely once and then never revisit it regardless of what is going on in the game. I am still going to build a mod and try to correct the flaws I see in the game but I suspect that it will be a much lighter touch this time as I make minor tweaks instead of major overhauls.
If you liked CiV but haven't picked up G&K then I would recommend you do so. It gives a whole lot of new life to the game and makes it feel very much new and shiny again. The complexity level has gone up a notch or two but I think that this is a good thing; at this point in CiV's life cycle it is mostly the hardcore players who are still going on it and they like a little extra meat on the bone.
The addition of religion to the game works pretty well mechanically I think. You can still play the game pretty much as you always have if you really want to but there are a lot of new options and styles available when you dive into religion. The fact that I could play the way I used to but dip into religion carefully when it seemed useful is a great way to introduce a new mechanic; it means that players won't be overwhelmed with new choices and that the balance that has been achieved is easier to maintain. When a new expansion adds completely new concepts to the core of the game it often ends up being either incredibly badly balanced or very confusing to current players or both.
Unfortunately with all of the really good changes there are still some things that stand out as not working well to my mind. There are still buildings that are fantastically bad and which will never, ever be built by a human player playing optimally. Having buildings that are mediocre but which have situational abilities is fine since we do want players to make meaningful decisions but I don't like it when you make a decision precisely once and then never revisit it regardless of what is going on in the game. I am still going to build a mod and try to correct the flaws I see in the game but I suspect that it will be a much lighter touch this time as I make minor tweaks instead of major overhauls.
If you liked CiV but haven't picked up G&K then I would recommend you do so. It gives a whole lot of new life to the game and makes it feel very much new and shiny again. The complexity level has gone up a notch or two but I think that this is a good thing; at this point in CiV's life cycle it is mostly the hardcore players who are still going on it and they like a little extra meat on the bone.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
CiV modding, D3 and WOW memories
My new CiV balance mod is up on the mod hub. Search for orangecape and you will find it easily. I have discovered that the best way to get myself to dream up all kinds of great new changes is to publish something; despite the fact that it makes a lot more sense to come up with great stuff *before* publishing that doesn't seem to be the way things work in my head.
I have been trying out lots of builds for the Witch Doctor on the D3 character builder and I like this one the best. It has a ton of pets, the extremely overpowered Soul Harvest and what seems to be the best spammable attack spell, Zombie Charger (Undeath Rune). The thing about this build is that it leverages what is likely to be a really overpowered passive ability: Vision Quest (VQ). VQ increases your mana regeneration by 300% while at least four abilities are on cooldown. It is a fairly sizable constraint to get 4 abilities that have cooldowns, though obviously not *that* hard, and it is a significant disadvantage to need to keep them on cooldown all the time. I might want to save my 2 minute cooldown for something hard, for example, rather than just casting it as soon as it comes up. Increasing mana regen by 300% is so enormous a benefit though that I can't help but think that using this ability will be mandatory at endgame.
The WD has some abilities that cost virtually no mana but which are weaker and some that are very expensive but stronger. This allows the WD to pick some of each and be able to regenerate mana while casting weak spells and blow mana as needed. VQ increasing mana regen by 300% means that you probably won't need any cheap spells and can spend all of your time casting powerful spells instead. The powerful spells look to be twice as good at least as the cheap ones so having VQ active is an enormous increase to overall damage potential. My build leverages VQ pretty heavily, even including Pierce the Veil, a passive ability that gives 20% more damage at a cost of spending 30% more mana.
It is difficult to say exactly what mana will look like at high levels without having seen the gear and mana pool formulas but if mana cost is meant to be a significant factor in spell selection (which it certainly seems to be) then I can't see how increasing mana regen by 300% won't be the best build. This is particularly true when you can then ditch all of your cheap spells to make room for 4 spells with cooldowns. If I had to really warp my build to squeeze in VQ then it might be a bigger question but I am definitely going to be playing with 3 cooldown abilities anyhow so fitting in the fourth hardly seems like a stretch.
This feels like a very strange sort of situation because I don't see comparable situations with other classes. There are certainly passive abilities that are better than others but I certainly don't see classes other than the WD broken down into two distinct groups: VQ builds and non VQ builds. Also in the case of other classes you could remove a particular passive effect and the build would still be playable but in the case of VQ the build is utterly dependent on it; you will run out of mana and be fairly useless if VQ is removed. It is possible that other sources of mana regen will make it such that VQ is merely a noticeable boost to mana instead of a total game changer; in which case it is possible that it will be a good design. Right now though it looks like you play an entirely different and much more powerful game when you have VQ and people without it will be drastically worse off.
Maybe I shouldn't be pointing out broken stuff about the class I intend to play prior to launch? Blizzard might be listening after all and I could well get myself nerfed to the ground baby! ;)
/reminisce
I remember back when Wrath launched for WOW and ret paladins got a really savage and necessary nerf; Hobo messaged me to ask if my class was bad now. Well, I replied, I am pretty sure I am still the best dps class but now the margin is about 15% instead of 40%.
/reminisce
I have been trying out lots of builds for the Witch Doctor on the D3 character builder and I like this one the best. It has a ton of pets, the extremely overpowered Soul Harvest and what seems to be the best spammable attack spell, Zombie Charger (Undeath Rune). The thing about this build is that it leverages what is likely to be a really overpowered passive ability: Vision Quest (VQ). VQ increases your mana regeneration by 300% while at least four abilities are on cooldown. It is a fairly sizable constraint to get 4 abilities that have cooldowns, though obviously not *that* hard, and it is a significant disadvantage to need to keep them on cooldown all the time. I might want to save my 2 minute cooldown for something hard, for example, rather than just casting it as soon as it comes up. Increasing mana regen by 300% is so enormous a benefit though that I can't help but think that using this ability will be mandatory at endgame.
The WD has some abilities that cost virtually no mana but which are weaker and some that are very expensive but stronger. This allows the WD to pick some of each and be able to regenerate mana while casting weak spells and blow mana as needed. VQ increasing mana regen by 300% means that you probably won't need any cheap spells and can spend all of your time casting powerful spells instead. The powerful spells look to be twice as good at least as the cheap ones so having VQ active is an enormous increase to overall damage potential. My build leverages VQ pretty heavily, even including Pierce the Veil, a passive ability that gives 20% more damage at a cost of spending 30% more mana.
It is difficult to say exactly what mana will look like at high levels without having seen the gear and mana pool formulas but if mana cost is meant to be a significant factor in spell selection (which it certainly seems to be) then I can't see how increasing mana regen by 300% won't be the best build. This is particularly true when you can then ditch all of your cheap spells to make room for 4 spells with cooldowns. If I had to really warp my build to squeeze in VQ then it might be a bigger question but I am definitely going to be playing with 3 cooldown abilities anyhow so fitting in the fourth hardly seems like a stretch.
This feels like a very strange sort of situation because I don't see comparable situations with other classes. There are certainly passive abilities that are better than others but I certainly don't see classes other than the WD broken down into two distinct groups: VQ builds and non VQ builds. Also in the case of other classes you could remove a particular passive effect and the build would still be playable but in the case of VQ the build is utterly dependent on it; you will run out of mana and be fairly useless if VQ is removed. It is possible that other sources of mana regen will make it such that VQ is merely a noticeable boost to mana instead of a total game changer; in which case it is possible that it will be a good design. Right now though it looks like you play an entirely different and much more powerful game when you have VQ and people without it will be drastically worse off.
Maybe I shouldn't be pointing out broken stuff about the class I intend to play prior to launch? Blizzard might be listening after all and I could well get myself nerfed to the ground baby! ;)
/reminisce
I remember back when Wrath launched for WOW and ret paladins got a really savage and necessary nerf; Hobo messaged me to ask if my class was bad now. Well, I replied, I am pretty sure I am still the best dps class but now the margin is about 15% instead of 40%.
/reminisce
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Rules systems that try to do too much
Today I was reading a bit about CiV AI on the civfanatics forums. There are plenty of complaints about the AI, which I have talked about at great length before, but something came up this time that really got me understanding what a brutal problem the designers face. It is somewhat similar to the problem faced by Wizards in trying to design the next generation of DnD - that is, both are trying to design systems of rules that can literally cope with anything a person's imagination can throw into them.
As a counterexample, the AI in Starcraft 2 has a very limited set of options to take and can assume many things. It can simply follow a script to build 4 Zealots, 3 Stalkers, 1 Immortal and then rush. Nothing wrong with that build and as long as there is some land route to the enemy base everything works out fine. The SC2 AI has several different sets of approaches it uses to play a game but it does follow some simple scripts each time; this works because it always has the same buildings and units to choose from. If you changed Zealots to come out of Forges instead of Gateways the AI would fail completely and wouldn't be able to play the game at all.
This is exactly the problem CiV faces since it is a game built from the outset to be moddable. The AI cannot be assigned build orders or any specific strategies surrounding what to do because any unit, building, improvement, terrain feature or even mechanic might not be there in a particular mod and the AI still needs to be able to play. How can you possibly design a strong AI for a game where you don't even know what the rules are? You could tell the AI to build specialized cities where one city for example tries to make lots of gold by building buildings and improvements that maximize gold output. This utterly falls apart though when there aren't any buildings in the game that give a % increase to gold output or when all cities can get them. You can't even hardcode in endgame strategies like building spaceships for victory because that victory condition might be turned off or changed to something else entirely!
DnD is in a similar boat. Some people want it to be a rules system for optimizing drop in games that are mostly dungeon crawls with ad hoc rules for noncombat situations. At this task DnD 4th is great. Some people want erotically charged sexventures. At this task DnD 4th is .... lacking. No matter what the system tries to do it will fail much of the time because nobody can actually tell you what it is *supposed* to do without being contradicted by a thousand others. This really hit me when I read the design statement for DnD Next which pretty much said that they wanted to make DnD better for what people wanted. They left out what exactly it was that people wanted, and wisely so, because there just isn't any sort of useful answer and I think they know it. There is no consistent vision for what DnD is supposed to do and this leaves it in a very difficult place.
I don't have a good answer for these situations. It is great that CiV is moddable and that the AI really does play the mods quite reasonably (if you count its normal play as reasonable!). It is fantastic that so many people with different desires can play DnD and have fun. It is, however, guaranteed that because both the CiV AI and the DnD rules try to please everyone and let people's imaginations roam free that they will forever be mired in mediocrity for pretty much everyone.
Penny Arcade has a fantastic comic about this from which I stole the phrase "erotically charged sexventure". From: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/11
As a counterexample, the AI in Starcraft 2 has a very limited set of options to take and can assume many things. It can simply follow a script to build 4 Zealots, 3 Stalkers, 1 Immortal and then rush. Nothing wrong with that build and as long as there is some land route to the enemy base everything works out fine. The SC2 AI has several different sets of approaches it uses to play a game but it does follow some simple scripts each time; this works because it always has the same buildings and units to choose from. If you changed Zealots to come out of Forges instead of Gateways the AI would fail completely and wouldn't be able to play the game at all.
This is exactly the problem CiV faces since it is a game built from the outset to be moddable. The AI cannot be assigned build orders or any specific strategies surrounding what to do because any unit, building, improvement, terrain feature or even mechanic might not be there in a particular mod and the AI still needs to be able to play. How can you possibly design a strong AI for a game where you don't even know what the rules are? You could tell the AI to build specialized cities where one city for example tries to make lots of gold by building buildings and improvements that maximize gold output. This utterly falls apart though when there aren't any buildings in the game that give a % increase to gold output or when all cities can get them. You can't even hardcode in endgame strategies like building spaceships for victory because that victory condition might be turned off or changed to something else entirely!
DnD is in a similar boat. Some people want it to be a rules system for optimizing drop in games that are mostly dungeon crawls with ad hoc rules for noncombat situations. At this task DnD 4th is great. Some people want erotically charged sexventures. At this task DnD 4th is .... lacking. No matter what the system tries to do it will fail much of the time because nobody can actually tell you what it is *supposed* to do without being contradicted by a thousand others. This really hit me when I read the design statement for DnD Next which pretty much said that they wanted to make DnD better for what people wanted. They left out what exactly it was that people wanted, and wisely so, because there just isn't any sort of useful answer and I think they know it. There is no consistent vision for what DnD is supposed to do and this leaves it in a very difficult place.
I don't have a good answer for these situations. It is great that CiV is moddable and that the AI really does play the mods quite reasonably (if you count its normal play as reasonable!). It is fantastic that so many people with different desires can play DnD and have fun. It is, however, guaranteed that because both the CiV AI and the DnD rules try to please everyone and let people's imaginations roam free that they will forever be mired in mediocrity for pretty much everyone.
Penny Arcade has a fantastic comic about this from which I stole the phrase "erotically charged sexventure". From: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/11
Friday, January 6, 2012
Making the AI work in CiV
I am doing more modding on Civ 5 lately. I have a lot of things worked out well now but the real issue that I am ramming my head into is my inability to tell the AI how to use its resources. The trouble spot is aircraft largely on the basis that using aircraft requires a lot more thought and strategy than other unit types. If I make a bunch of Swordsmen and just keep pushing them towards your city attacking any units I see along the way then nothing too much can go wrong. The real problem comes when the AI makes air units and then tries to figure out what to do with them because they don't work the way other units do. In particular they are ranged units that take damage when they attack whereas normal ranged units do not. Fighter jets also have a really low attack strength which means that the AI looks at its jets, thinks that they will ranged strike for very little damage and has them attack. Because the jets are very weak in combat though they die instantly when they attack the enemies instead of the 'projected combat result' of them just doing a little bit of damage. What the AI should do is use jets to attack incoming planes but it is actually pretty challenging to figure out where to place them and how to use them effectively.
My current options both are unpalatable. Firstly I could just remove fighter jets entirely. If they aren't there, the AI can't build them stupidly and throw them away for no benefit. The trouble with this is it really messes up all the other balance and backstory surrounding the way bombers work - bombers are supposed to be weak to defensive fighters which is tricky when defensive fighters don't exist. The other problem is that planes are ideal for the AI because they allow it to avoid chokepoints and unit clog and as such I really want the AI using planes. In the endgame it is really problematic when the AI just creates ground units because it can support so many of them. It ends up completely unable to get its units to useful places and is quite flummoxed by mountain passes. The second option is to make fighter jets good at smashing cities and ground units. There wouldn't be much difference between jets and bombers at that point but at least the AI would be able to use its jets to bash away on things usefully and it wouldn't be such a chump. Of course one might question how exactly a squadron of fighter jets attacks a city in any useful way, and rightly so, so this option is clearly not much better in terms of flavour and backstory than the other.
The answer I would really like is 'Sky can fix the AI' so that it would build sensible comps of units and use them properly. I don't expect miracles of course but having some way to tell the AI to spread out its fighters and use them for scouting and anti air defence would be nice. An interface improvement that tells the AI that attacking with its fighters will kill them would also be a good idea - the computer is already quite competent at not attacking with units that will just die when it *knows* they will die.
I will say though that the CiV AI (and the game in general, really) is hugely better than it was at launch. There are all kinds of idiotic things it used to do that it doesn't do anymore and many of the really huge abuses have been fixed. That said, there are still some problems that need fixing and I won't stop until all the ones that can be fixed on my end are quite squashed. If that requires me to play hundreds of games of CiV to test out then so be it: I will make the sacrifice for the greater good.
My current options both are unpalatable. Firstly I could just remove fighter jets entirely. If they aren't there, the AI can't build them stupidly and throw them away for no benefit. The trouble with this is it really messes up all the other balance and backstory surrounding the way bombers work - bombers are supposed to be weak to defensive fighters which is tricky when defensive fighters don't exist. The other problem is that planes are ideal for the AI because they allow it to avoid chokepoints and unit clog and as such I really want the AI using planes. In the endgame it is really problematic when the AI just creates ground units because it can support so many of them. It ends up completely unable to get its units to useful places and is quite flummoxed by mountain passes. The second option is to make fighter jets good at smashing cities and ground units. There wouldn't be much difference between jets and bombers at that point but at least the AI would be able to use its jets to bash away on things usefully and it wouldn't be such a chump. Of course one might question how exactly a squadron of fighter jets attacks a city in any useful way, and rightly so, so this option is clearly not much better in terms of flavour and backstory than the other.
The answer I would really like is 'Sky can fix the AI' so that it would build sensible comps of units and use them properly. I don't expect miracles of course but having some way to tell the AI to spread out its fighters and use them for scouting and anti air defence would be nice. An interface improvement that tells the AI that attacking with its fighters will kill them would also be a good idea - the computer is already quite competent at not attacking with units that will just die when it *knows* they will die.
I will say though that the CiV AI (and the game in general, really) is hugely better than it was at launch. There are all kinds of idiotic things it used to do that it doesn't do anymore and many of the really huge abuses have been fixed. That said, there are still some problems that need fixing and I won't stop until all the ones that can be fixed on my end are quite squashed. If that requires me to play hundreds of games of CiV to test out then so be it: I will make the sacrifice for the greater good.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
I'm gonna get that Bismarck
I was playing CiV today and Bismarck was talking the smack. Out of the blue he pops up onto my screen and informs me that:
"I couldn't help but notice how pathetic you are. And when I noticed, I couldn't help but share."
Oh, so you wanna talk some trash, eh Bismarck? Time for me to cram some battleships up that ugly German butt of yours. Despite the fact that Bismarck is not angry at me because he is an AI and has no emotions, and the fact that I really cannot get any revenge on anything that will notice, I send my battleships after the evil dictator Bismarck and smash him mightily.
Lots of people hate this. They get really angry that the AI dials them up just to spew insults, but interestingly the reactions are split into many quite opposing camps. Some people just hate the fact that the AI does this at all because it upsets them; they are willing to engage in warfare and destruction but being directly insulted is not something they want out of a video game. The most amusing camp to my mind is the camp that wants the ability to insult the AI back! They clamor for the option to call up an AI leader and pick from a list of insults to hurl at them, acknowledging all the time that this option doesn't even have to have a game effect. The final group is simply angry that the programmers did this at all because it breaks immersion; they feel like leaders of nations don't act that way towards one another.
I do not fall into the 'hate this' camp. I think it is wonderful! I get all irritated by the AIs that choose to call me up just to act vitriolic and bitter and I either declare war to teach them a lesson or nurture deep dark hatreds and plan to destroy them when the time is right. Mwahaha! The pure game of numbers and tactics holds my attention well enough, and sometimes I just ignore the personalities being simulated and just play the game. Other times though I get really personal with my civ and I have a lot of fun reacting in entirely emotional ways. Sometimes it makes tactical sense to kill one civ but instead I go after another just based on these illogical, emotional responses triggered by AI cutscenes. I even have my favourite leaders, and my favourite punching bags. I get along just fine with Gandhi and Montezuma but Oda Nobunaga and Bismarck are high on my hit list - you just can't trust those guys!
I suspect a lot of the haters are just bitter that they got insulted and couldn't do anything about it. Their natural irritation at being insulted appeared but there is no option to insult back and open warfare often isn't possible if you are trying to win. I think adding in the ability to counterinsult the AI would be a hilarious and awesome addition to the game, though at this point it isn't the most pressing issue by any stretch. Perhaps there could be a minor diplomatic penalty for doing so that only lasts a little while, just enough to cause leaders on the verge of war to go over the edge and attack.
"That's right Bismarck, Germany has bad food. And beer sucks. What you gonna do about it, punk?"
Also, I have many battleships and a desire to use them.
"I couldn't help but notice how pathetic you are. And when I noticed, I couldn't help but share."
Oh, so you wanna talk some trash, eh Bismarck? Time for me to cram some battleships up that ugly German butt of yours. Despite the fact that Bismarck is not angry at me because he is an AI and has no emotions, and the fact that I really cannot get any revenge on anything that will notice, I send my battleships after the evil dictator Bismarck and smash him mightily.
Lots of people hate this. They get really angry that the AI dials them up just to spew insults, but interestingly the reactions are split into many quite opposing camps. Some people just hate the fact that the AI does this at all because it upsets them; they are willing to engage in warfare and destruction but being directly insulted is not something they want out of a video game. The most amusing camp to my mind is the camp that wants the ability to insult the AI back! They clamor for the option to call up an AI leader and pick from a list of insults to hurl at them, acknowledging all the time that this option doesn't even have to have a game effect. The final group is simply angry that the programmers did this at all because it breaks immersion; they feel like leaders of nations don't act that way towards one another.
I do not fall into the 'hate this' camp. I think it is wonderful! I get all irritated by the AIs that choose to call me up just to act vitriolic and bitter and I either declare war to teach them a lesson or nurture deep dark hatreds and plan to destroy them when the time is right. Mwahaha! The pure game of numbers and tactics holds my attention well enough, and sometimes I just ignore the personalities being simulated and just play the game. Other times though I get really personal with my civ and I have a lot of fun reacting in entirely emotional ways. Sometimes it makes tactical sense to kill one civ but instead I go after another just based on these illogical, emotional responses triggered by AI cutscenes. I even have my favourite leaders, and my favourite punching bags. I get along just fine with Gandhi and Montezuma but Oda Nobunaga and Bismarck are high on my hit list - you just can't trust those guys!
I suspect a lot of the haters are just bitter that they got insulted and couldn't do anything about it. Their natural irritation at being insulted appeared but there is no option to insult back and open warfare often isn't possible if you are trying to win. I think adding in the ability to counterinsult the AI would be a hilarious and awesome addition to the game, though at this point it isn't the most pressing issue by any stretch. Perhaps there could be a minor diplomatic penalty for doing so that only lasts a little while, just enough to cause leaders on the verge of war to go over the edge and attack.
"That's right Bismarck, Germany has bad food. And beer sucks. What you gonna do about it, punk?"
Also, I have many battleships and a desire to use them.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Designing upgrades
In my last post I talked a bit about CiV design decisions. Ziggyny questioned my stance, at least in part basing his criticism around the idea that upgrades that come later in a game don't have to be as good as earlier ones - in fact they can cost more and be worse and still be good to take. His primary example was Starcraft 2, which uses that exact model. For simplicity, SC2 upgrades look like this:
Attack1
Cost: 100
+1 damage on all attacks.
Attack1
Cost: 100
+1 damage on all attacks.
Attack2 (requires Attack1)
Cost: 200
+1 damage on all attacks.
Attack3 (requires Attack2)
Cost: 300
+1 damage on all attacks.
Now since the player in SC2 generally starts with a small army and gets bigger as they go along the upgrades make a lot of sense. The later upgrades are still very much worth it because they affect so many units. Of course they aren't as necessary as the early ones; you might skip the later levels of upgades. This system works fine. To extend this to CiV mechanics though, imagine that there was a set of upgrades just like the ones above, but there were also two other sets of upgrades available.
Defend1
Cost: 100
-1 damage on all damage taken
Defend2 (requires Defend1)
Cost: 200
-1 damage on all damage taken. Heal 1 damage every 2 seconds.
Defend3 (requires Defend2)
Cost: 300
-1 damage on all damage taken. Heal 1 damage every 2 seconds. -20% damage taken.
Speed1
Cost: 100
+20% movement speed.
Speed2 (requires Speed1)
Cost: 200
+20% movement speed. +20% attack speed.
Speed3 (requires Speed2)
Cost: 300
+20% movement speed. +20% attack speed. +20% training rate.
Nobody is ever going to take Attack2 or Attack3. They cost a lot, just like the other upgrades, but they aren't even remotely comparable in power. On a really huge map, if you were doing a mission for an hour, you might run out of other upgrades to take and eventually break down and take Attack2 or Attack3. Until you get to that point where all the useful things are taken though you are never going to be interested. The Defend and Speed trees above are roughly analogous to the Science, Culture, XP, Food and Production building tracks in CiV. The more modern buildings have really powerful effects and large costs to go with them. However, their powerful effects are so good that you definitely want to acquire and build them as soon as possible. You can't get them all, so you need to figure out which ones are best in which cities, but unlocking a new building is important - you probably want to build them right away.
If you have a building track that looks a lot like the Attack tree it is going to be absolutely ignored. The later buildings will never get built since you won't run out of actual good things to do so having them there just isn't relevant. Of course, you might not really know this in your first game and you might well build them. I don't think 'trap for newbies' is a particularly good niche though. Lots of games get by on very shallow gameplay where after a few tries a good player will know exactly what to do in every game because so many of the options are so terrible. The best games have a number of options all of which will be selected by good players depending on game state. This means that games will take many different forms and lots of strategies will be feasible.
In the unmodded game of Civ, for example, the only buildings that are relevant are universities and colosseums. Nothing else matters. If you are playing optimally you will never under any circumstance build more than 3/4 of the buildings in the game because they simply aren't good. This leads to incredibly repetitive play and poor replayability. A big focus in my modding has been to make sure that lots of different things are reasonable. Sometimes I need more money so I build some banks. Sometimes I need more border expansion so I build temples. Sometimes I need a powerful army so I build barracks. I know I have done something right when figuring out the optimal choices is difficult and I know that small changes in the game would have changed my choice.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Fixing it wrong
At launch CiV had some really interesting balance choices. It is possible to justify some of them based on bizarre logic but it is clear that mostly they were made pretty much randomly as exhaustive testing wasn't done. Example:
Marketplace:
Cost: 120
Effect: +25% Gold in this city
Bank
Marketplace:
Cost: 120
Effect: +25% Gold in this city
Bank
Cost: 220
Effect: +25% Gold in this city
Stock Exchange
Cost: 650
Effect: +33% Gold in this city
Who the hell thought that this was a good design decision? The trouble is that Marketplaces come along when your city may well be producing 2-4 Gold a turn so their return is wretched. The other problem is that Banks and SEx cost so much and are quite likely to never recoup their cost because their effects simply aren't big enough. When I built my mod to try to make this chain of buildings decent I changed them to:
Marketplace:
Cost: 120
Effect: +3 Gold
Bank
Cost: 220
Effect: +33% Gold in this city
Stock Exchange
Cost: 450
Effect: +50% Gold in this city
Note the SEx is cheaper and better, the bank is better and the Marketplace is entirely different - a fixed Gold income is useful in the early game when the building appears. Firaxis apparently agreed with me that Marketplaces didn't work because low % returns on early game buildings are terrible (in the early game). Here is their solution:
Marketplace:
Cost: 120
Effect: +25% Gold in this city
Effect: +2 Gold
Bank
Cost: 250
Effect: +25% Gold in this city
Stock Exchange
Cost: 500
Effect: +33% Gold in this city
They lowered the cost on SEx, good. They gave the Marketplace +2 Gold, good. Wait a minute... the Bank is identical to the Marketplace except it costs twice as much and has a strictly inferior effect! What the *hell* guys, don't you look at your changes before publishing this crap?
The crazy thing is they made lots of good changes in this patch. I actually went through and deleted a ton of my code in my mod because they fixed things up so that my changes weren't necessary. This is a good sign! It sure isn't a good sign though that a single person can look over the new game for an hour and come up with a stack of ridiculous contradictions and bad decisions that they made with their updates. I guess I need to start hassling them to hire me to the coding team.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Crushing some dreams
Everything should be awesome.
This is the mantra Blizzard uses when designing talents and I think it is a good one for building any sort of game. When you have a choice in a game that essentially boils down to being good or being bad players will choose to be good (mostly) and the choice ceases to be one. This has been my essential guideline in redoing a bunch of the units in the modern era in my CiV mod. In the early game it is fairly clear that when you first get Horsemen or Swordsmen they are very strong and your opponents will fear them. In the later game the options are much more widespread though and it is much more difficult. I must make sure that bombers, fighter planes, submarines, antiair guns, artillery, surface ships, missiles, tanks and basic infantry *all* have this characteristic that as soon as you get them you immediately want to build a bunch of them and go crush some dreams. I don't entirely understand why I love the phrase 'crush some dreams' so much but it really epitomizes to me that moment when everything looks to be going well in the game and then you see the one thing you really, really didn't want to see and you think 'Oh no, not like this'. Your dreams get crushed! I want to deliver that moment to my opponents and I want every unit that can be built to have the feeling that if you get there before the other guy you are going to make these units and crush his dreams.
It is challenging to do this because the units interact in a lot of complex ways. Submarines should be good at wrecking ships, ships should be good at controlling waterways for land units to cross and to bombard coastal positions, bombers should be good at smashing cities, fighters and antiair guns should wreck bombers, etc. There are so many different interactions that it is easy to have just one small thing be wrong and suddenly whole classes of units are utterly rubbish. In the base game the standard modern infantry unit (Mechanized Infantry) has 4 speed just like a tank. The trouble is that once tanks aren't faster they are useless since they lack many things an infantry has. This means that no one should build tanks, so anti tank guns and helicopters are useless. Artillery are overpowered and are the best solution to breaking down cities so bombers are junk and when bombers are junk there is no reason to build fighters or antiair guns and no use for carriers or other heavy ships to support the bombers. Even a small miscalculation in this giant mess of dependencies can make nearly all units not worth building and reduce a very complex rock/paper/scissors type matchup to a simple game where everyone builds artillery and infantry and nothing else.
I think it is the fine balance of making things awesome right away but counterable down the road that is so hard to find. Submarines should be great as soon as you get them and you should have fun sinking lots of ships (or getting your ships sunk, depending!) but there needs to be an answer. That answer needs to be decent in and of itself though, otherwise the game gets too swingy depending on if you have the rock to the opponent's scissors. The trouble with this sort of stuff is it requires tons of testing to get right. It is really hard to figure out just how high a bomber's attack strength needs to be to make it useful - 40 and it is useless, 60 and it is okay, 80 and it is unstoppable. You can't figure all this out from looking at a chunk of code, either, you have to actually play it out and see how the game works. That is the sort of testing that is very hard to fit in with rushed production deadlines of course which is why CiV shipped initially with such incredibly terrible balance in the modern era. Dozens of units and only two of them were really worth making... such a waste. I guess they needed to release it when it was done and not before.
This is the mantra Blizzard uses when designing talents and I think it is a good one for building any sort of game. When you have a choice in a game that essentially boils down to being good or being bad players will choose to be good (mostly) and the choice ceases to be one. This has been my essential guideline in redoing a bunch of the units in the modern era in my CiV mod. In the early game it is fairly clear that when you first get Horsemen or Swordsmen they are very strong and your opponents will fear them. In the later game the options are much more widespread though and it is much more difficult. I must make sure that bombers, fighter planes, submarines, antiair guns, artillery, surface ships, missiles, tanks and basic infantry *all* have this characteristic that as soon as you get them you immediately want to build a bunch of them and go crush some dreams. I don't entirely understand why I love the phrase 'crush some dreams' so much but it really epitomizes to me that moment when everything looks to be going well in the game and then you see the one thing you really, really didn't want to see and you think 'Oh no, not like this'. Your dreams get crushed! I want to deliver that moment to my opponents and I want every unit that can be built to have the feeling that if you get there before the other guy you are going to make these units and crush his dreams.
It is challenging to do this because the units interact in a lot of complex ways. Submarines should be good at wrecking ships, ships should be good at controlling waterways for land units to cross and to bombard coastal positions, bombers should be good at smashing cities, fighters and antiair guns should wreck bombers, etc. There are so many different interactions that it is easy to have just one small thing be wrong and suddenly whole classes of units are utterly rubbish. In the base game the standard modern infantry unit (Mechanized Infantry) has 4 speed just like a tank. The trouble is that once tanks aren't faster they are useless since they lack many things an infantry has. This means that no one should build tanks, so anti tank guns and helicopters are useless. Artillery are overpowered and are the best solution to breaking down cities so bombers are junk and when bombers are junk there is no reason to build fighters or antiair guns and no use for carriers or other heavy ships to support the bombers. Even a small miscalculation in this giant mess of dependencies can make nearly all units not worth building and reduce a very complex rock/paper/scissors type matchup to a simple game where everyone builds artillery and infantry and nothing else.
I think it is the fine balance of making things awesome right away but counterable down the road that is so hard to find. Submarines should be great as soon as you get them and you should have fun sinking lots of ships (or getting your ships sunk, depending!) but there needs to be an answer. That answer needs to be decent in and of itself though, otherwise the game gets too swingy depending on if you have the rock to the opponent's scissors. The trouble with this sort of stuff is it requires tons of testing to get right. It is really hard to figure out just how high a bomber's attack strength needs to be to make it useful - 40 and it is useless, 60 and it is okay, 80 and it is unstoppable. You can't figure all this out from looking at a chunk of code, either, you have to actually play it out and see how the game works. That is the sort of testing that is very hard to fit in with rushed production deadlines of course which is why CiV shipped initially with such incredibly terrible balance in the modern era. Dozens of units and only two of them were really worth making... such a waste. I guess they needed to release it when it was done and not before.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
What to do after you win
I have been doing a lot of CiV modding this week and have run into a real dilemma, both in terms of philosophy and execution. When you capture a city you have three choices: Burn it down, puppet or annex. Burn it down is obvious, of course, but the others have some really fine points. Puppetting means the city will be stupidly managed. It will be like a normal city except it will do everything in its power to make gold ahead of any other resource. This means it will grow slowly, build slowly, and end up being fairly weak. It also can't be used for any military production and you can't control it. Annexing a city means that you have to build a courthouse to make the city function and you can completely control it from that point forward. The trouble with annexation is that the city then counts towards 'cities you control for real'. This is important because there all your social policy costs scale by 'CYCFR', and to build the powerful National Wonders you have to have a specific building in each CYCFR. This means that annexation is simply not worth the cost in most cases - you are much better of puppeting the vast majority of your conquests.
I don't like this situation much because having a big empire and being a conqueror is fantastic when you puppet everything. You get lots of social policies, more even than a small, focused empire, and you have drastically more science and gold and can make National Wonders just as easily. The question is, how much do I want to reward attacking? In CiV the attacker has many disadvantages. The defender can see all the attacker's units and positions, heals faster, can use the local roads for mobility, has a city to do damage, and several policies/wonders give defenders huge advantages. So if attacking and capturing territory is not particularly advantageous then the player would be well advised never to do so; just hold your initial territory and let the computer throw its hordes of dudes against your defenses. This is also great because the computers get angry at you for destroying other civs, declaring wars and taking out capital cities. That would mean that militaries were just for defending against dumb AIs who attack and I don't think I like a Civ game where attacking is just pointless. Question is, where is the line?
The other confounding factor is that it is rather tricky to penalize puppet cities with the tools I have available to me. I know that it is possible to assign flat penalties to puppet cities using LUA code but I don't know anything about that yet; learning it would be a long process. Other coders are doing pretty much exactly what I want to do but I don't want to use other people's mods because they aren't *perfect* dammit! Now that I have invested all this time into building my own system I can't deal with the choices that other people made that aren't quite the same as mine. I am at a crossroads of challenge - I don't want to spend the hours and hours and hours it would take to learn LUA coding to make this happen, I don't want to just use other people's stuff and I don't want the game to be imperfect. Something's gotta give, not sure which way it is going to go though.
I don't like this situation much because having a big empire and being a conqueror is fantastic when you puppet everything. You get lots of social policies, more even than a small, focused empire, and you have drastically more science and gold and can make National Wonders just as easily. The question is, how much do I want to reward attacking? In CiV the attacker has many disadvantages. The defender can see all the attacker's units and positions, heals faster, can use the local roads for mobility, has a city to do damage, and several policies/wonders give defenders huge advantages. So if attacking and capturing territory is not particularly advantageous then the player would be well advised never to do so; just hold your initial territory and let the computer throw its hordes of dudes against your defenses. This is also great because the computers get angry at you for destroying other civs, declaring wars and taking out capital cities. That would mean that militaries were just for defending against dumb AIs who attack and I don't think I like a Civ game where attacking is just pointless. Question is, where is the line?
The other confounding factor is that it is rather tricky to penalize puppet cities with the tools I have available to me. I know that it is possible to assign flat penalties to puppet cities using LUA code but I don't know anything about that yet; learning it would be a long process. Other coders are doing pretty much exactly what I want to do but I don't want to use other people's mods because they aren't *perfect* dammit! Now that I have invested all this time into building my own system I can't deal with the choices that other people made that aren't quite the same as mine. I am at a crossroads of challenge - I don't want to spend the hours and hours and hours it would take to learn LUA coding to make this happen, I don't want to just use other people's stuff and I don't want the game to be imperfect. Something's gotta give, not sure which way it is going to go though.
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