I’m interested to see what changes they’ll be making from 6 to 7. 6 was kinda panned on release, and games like Humankind and Age of Wonders 4 have introduced serious competition to the 4x genre in the years since.
Ha, those friggin normies and their friendships. Whats up with that? Almost like spending time with people you trust and care about causes neuroendocrinal response of dopamine and endorphins resulting in feelings of happiness and fulfillment.
It’s not a constant 100% result, but yeah it’s kind of a well established natural phenomenon. Couldn’t stop it if you wanted to. Some people can get the same benefit solely from having their comments upvoted, we process it the same as regular human interaction. Bonus points exist for huggers.
I consider myself to have a pretty small social battery, but gaming online on discord isn’t nearly as draining as being physically with people at someone’s house or something, maybe I’m just weird.
Even then, had some great times on Civ5 with everyone over at my place playing on our laptops and chillin/watching TV or just talking at the same time
Being around people I know and like is incredibly pleasant and relaxing, particularly when we’re all engaged in an activity together - volleyball or board game night or watching a movie together.
The trick I’ve found is to do something everyone vibes with and that has incredibly low stakes. So, like, carving pumpkins during Halloween or splitting a bottle of wine and complaining about work together or visiting a museum.
Its nice to have people saying and doing things that you wouldn’t normally say or do. And its nice to have other people responding to your own thoughts and feelings.
Doscord friends! You can make quite a few friend groups to play games with that way. I’ve got a group where we are either playing DnD, or were finding the next coolest game for us all to enjoy.
…It occurs to me that I am interpreting “rush” in the RTS sense of attacking early before your opponent is ready, not in the sense of pressuring people to take their turns faster.
I’ve been playing couch co-op with my husband on both of our Switches. It’s not too bad if you don’t force a turn timer. The game will give you a ding when you’re the last one to play, but we both have ‘side games’ or play with our cats in the meantime if the other needs more time. I wouldn’t do it online or with a turn timer, though.
The play-by-email mode was broken to the point of uselessness in Civ5 and I don’t think they fixed in it in 6 (you had to have an always-on Windows desktop system running the server, and because the game logic was integrated into the graphics engine you couldn’t run it headless, and then on top of that there was basically no working system to coordinate active DLCs between players so most of the time people couldn’t join even if you did get the damn thing running) so my friends and I tried once and gave up. I would love for 7 to have a robust PBEM system so that we can play together without needing to spend hours a week watching paint dry while everybody else plots their turns, but I’m not holding my breath.
(you had to have an always-on Windows desktop system running the server, and because the game logic was integrated into the graphics engine you couldn’t run it headless, and then on top of that there was basically no working system to coordinate active DLCs between players so most of the time people couldn’t join even if you did get the damn thing running)
Jesus fuck. You should be able to run a game of Civ as a series of XML files, with the GUI being practically perfunctory. I am disappointed that the game isn’t backwards compatible, much less that you can’t integrate between DLCs.
What is functionally a feature-rich version of Diplomacy shouldn’t be this hard to integrate in Play-by-Post.
They should have it so if one player has DLC, everyone gets to use it in multiplayer. It Takes Two works for players that haven’t even bought the game, and that’s published by EA ffs.
They should have it so if one player has DLC, everyone gets to use it in multiplayer.
Or just gray-out DLC based options. I don’t even think that’s a big deal at the end of the day. The Total War series manages this just fine, and they’re a much heavier lift in terms of game structure.
2K really are the greediest mfs out there.
Blizzard is greedy, the way they shove “buy me! buy me! buy me!” links into every corner of their interface. But 2k is just sloppy, phoning it in on their catalog of accrued titles with marginal graphics improvements as stand-in for any kind of game play polish.
Occasionally they just give games updated graphics and audio. I’d be fine if that was how they remade it. They did that with Grim Fandango and it was just as fun as the original.
I can agree with that. In fact, I just played the System Shock remake and found it quite enjoyable. It kept the same vibe and feel while just updating the cosmetic aspects and having a few QoL changes for some of the mechanics. The maps and story felt the same, and I enjoyed the nostalgic feel of playing it again.
Maybe I wouldn’t mind an alpha centauri remake. They’d only have to update the cosmetics and the UI, after all.
Back in the day I used to check out civfanatics.com for mods. There were tons for Civ4:BTS that made it so much cooler. After playing that and then playing Civ5, I was incredibly disappointed. Civ6 is better, but not by much. I still go back to Civ4 when I need my “one more turn” fix.
Fall from Heaven 2? Rise of Mankind? Caveman to Cosmos? Rhyes and Falls of Civilization? Dawn of Mankind? Planetfall? Mars Now? How about all of them at once?
Civ 4 was a goddamn library of 4X games. I still reinstall it after every few years.
I hated the stacks. Idk why, but it was always confusing how big they should be. When they can’t stack it makes more sense to me. How many troops do I need? As many as I can fit.
Just enough to encircle the thing I want to eliminate/capture. It actually works with a stack, too. Like 8 dudes is enough for the default difficulty most of the time.
I gave up on Civ after you couldn’t automate settlers anymore. I really don’t need to spend time manually connecting my cities with roads. That’s just unnecessary grinding.
That’s definitely a little better, although honestly even doing the farmland stuff with every settler per turn is a huge PITA. It’s just not what I play Civ games for. It’s always been possible to not have them automated if you don’t want them automated and not automated was the default. I don’t understand why they took that option away.
It just felt like V was a huge amount more about grinding. Sounds like that’s been somewhat rectified at least.
On one hand it allowed you the freedom to manually decide if increasing tile upkeep was worth it and therefor gave rise to new strategies, but on the other hand it’s kind of not worth it 90% of the time.
But didn’t you always have that freedom? You could always play without automating any settlers or automating some and not others. Or am I not understanding what you’re saying?
Maybe a good balance could be a human voice actor for main dialogue, supported by ai trained on their main dialogue to voice sidequest and deep lore dialogue. It could enable fully voiced dialogue-heavy games that would otherwise be too expensive to produce, something like generative RPGs or Morrowind, if all the books could be voiced, and more easily translated while remaining fully voiced. But keeping humans to fill the main campaign contributions, emotional beats and determine character personality. I’m just comparing Morrowind to Oblivion, which was voiced, but the dialogue and conversation trees were heavily reduced in volume as a result.
Maybe a good balance would be hiring a person to speak lines into a microphone. It could employ a person and create art with an acceptable bare minimum quality standard. If you can’t afford that and would rather push the costs onto government subsidies for power and emissions, maybe instead just do text dialogue or pull a classic Banjo and Kazooie single dialogue line randomly jumbled up and pitch shifted for every interaction.
I assume you also only buy hand crafted porcelain items, only buy hand picked produce and generally avoid all automation amd modern convenience. Take your clothes to a local hand-wash rather than using a washing machine too do you? I agree that the energy cost should be taken into account before we declare it to be cheaper to use “AI” generated content.
Like LLMs just spontaneously create lines of audio? They need a human operator to direct them to generate audio just like machines that make most vases are human operated but allow the person to make far more and more quickly than they would by hand. An LLM is still just a tool that needs a person to wield it, it doesn’t replace them it just changes their role and makes them more efficient.
Using machine learning to clone voices required building upon millions or maybe even billions of lines of dialogue to reach the current point, and only now that it is here can you easily approximate a person’s voice without them even knowing. So yes, it does magically generate sound with minimal input, that is how that works.
The machines that are currently used to shape and paint ceramics are not Machine Learning models. They’re simple and precise automations. Like a program that packages audio to .mp3 format. The equivalent to that would be a machine that designs the vase based on thousands of older examples, designs the packaging, and designs the machinery that prepares it. It’s going to do a shit job that negatively impacts consumers but in the process it displaced thousands of workers in one go, so enjoy the profits.
You missed the point of what I said. Machines that manufacture goods put many people out of the job and yet you now very few people think that is an issue. At the time however the same kind of arguments I see made against LLMs putting people out of work were being made about these machines making soulless products that missed the human touch. LLMs are just a new tool we’ve invented to make life easier for ourselves. In time the same thing will happen with LLMs once the hype dies down and they just become part of the tool sets we all use without thinking about it.
If you understood my point why didn’t you address it rather than meandering around it asserting that somehow this particular invention is totally different to previous disruptive technologies that we accept as having been beneficial and no on opposes amymore? How exactly is it different this time in history where it never really has been previously? It may well be of course, but history is against it being so.
Using a robotic voice could make the game more accessible to blind, partially sighted, and dyslexic individuals. I’m not sure how an AI voice is inherently different than the voice that comes out of a screen reader, especially if it’s trained on the voice of employees or volunteers.
I don’t think the vast majority of games which could make use of AI Voice have the sort of accessibility features to be played by those individuals even if they could hear the dialogue. It’s such a rare occurrence for a blind person to beat halo or an RPG that news articles get written about the examples.
What about partially sighted or dyslexic individuals? Sure, a game like halo would need a lot of modification to be fully blind accessible, but a visual novel, for instance, might not. In my experience most visual novels are built as passion projects on shoestring budgets.
Lots of existing games have robotic narrators already (e.g minecraft), they just speak with a monotone voice. By incorporating more advance machine learning capabilities the same narrator could be capable of outputting a more nuanced and pleasant delivery for those that need it.
Everyone shits on 6 but never actually gives a reason other than “5 iS bEtTeR!”. The mechanics in 6 are a massive improvement on 5; civics tree > social policies, city loyalty > happiness etc. It has a bigger and better roster of civs/leaders. Combat and religion are more fleshed out. I love both games but I can’t think of anything that 5 does better
6 has many mechanics dumbed down, trade is just completely bugged, and it came wrapped in a very cartoonish style including several world leaders who were straight up mythological figures.
Comparing the Civs steals the joy they bring for their various reasons.
Civ 1 was unlike anything else and so legendary it created the 4X genre.
Civ 2 had the best espionage until an expansion for 4. Civ2 also defined the scope for all future Civs.
Civ 3 was fine. Resources were a good addition and tile quirks, like Floodplains on top of another base tile like desert, helped bring tons strategy and gave the ability to grow Tall.
Civ 4 was probably peak Civ for many people, especially including DLCs.
Civ 5 removed unit stacking and made happiness a resource.
Civ 6 emphasized the city development aspect and brought back the climate stuff from 2, 3, and 4.
They are all good but they are not collectively suitable for every person. Civ6 is amazing but it took me literally 30 hours to finally have it click. I also have 550 hours in Civ 6 and over 1200 in Civ 5. CiV is also a high water mark but it overshadows the real value and fun in 6.
It’s a shame most folks will ignore us and say 6 was bad for being too game like.
Yeah I prefer 6 over 5 any day, but there are a few small things that 5 does do better imo. I do prefer the more serious art style of 5, and I noticed that there is a lot less actual dialogue in a civs respective language compared to 5. While I do like automatic road creation, I do also miss being able to build it manually to have more control over where units can go. Finally, I think the happiness system in Civ 6 is a bit too easy, as it can be mostly ignored and very easily fixed compared to 5. Keeping your citizens happy was much more of a challenge there.
Civ 6 was made much more to be a digital board game. The combination of little to no multiplicative bonuses and generally small adjacency bonuses means you have to micro manage city planning all the time. It bombards the player with so many individual decisions that each make little impact.
Civ 5 felt much more like an empire simulator. The biggest bonuses come from making “big” decisions, like which policy tree, who/when to war, which ideology. As the game progressed, there was typically no need to micromanage.
The combat in civ 6 is atrocious after they removed the ability to build roads offensively for war until you unlock military engies (way too late in the game). Civ 5’s road system took ages to get up and running, but the payoff was immense.
The civics tree system is better, but the policy card system is broken. It gives players too much flexibility, so everyone ends up running the same/similar set of cards every time. Tradition + Rationalism is a meme in Civ 5, but it did offer more esoteric strategies with different trees.
It’s the micromanagement. When earlier games became tedious, I could just pick a quicker game speed, and I would suddenly feel like I was playing with more momentum. But in VI, it actually kills momentum, as if driving the slightly faster route to work at the cost of particularly frustrating traffic, since the most tedious micro isn’t turn-based, but city-based. You only have to plan districts/improvements once per city, so I find I can still have fun with VI if I play suboptimally (i.e., tall) on tiny maps and with mods that let me cram more civilizations into the game. I’ve probably put in a few hundred hours this way.
I like playing tall and I’m not a huge fan of the micromanagement that comes with the sprawling empires. Civ 5 limits this through happiness. Civ 6 doesnt. Throw in an artstyle that i dont like and i just dont want to play it as much
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