83 replies to this topic

[Rob Zacny]

Popcap’s Jeff Green joins returning guest David Heron, Troy, and Rob for a discussion of the Civilization V expansion Gods and Kings. Together, they discuss why Civ V was so controversial, how G&K changes it, and whether its major changes seem quite as meaningful now that they’ve put some time into it. Be sure to listen to the episode for details on a little contest to give away some spare Sins: Rebellion keys. Which we should have done last week, but we forgot. Because we’re disgraceful. But still pretty great.

Listen

[Gormongous]

I'll listen to the podcast more thoroughly later, but I figure I'd duck in here to tell a quick Civ story so I don't miss this contest like so many others.

I don't own Civ V, but I tend to play on small-continents-and-large-island maps in Civ IV, mostly because I like stumbling on whatever political situations have developed on other landmasses by the time I'm advanced enough to cross the sea. I was playing the Byzantines in a game where I had every player's nightmare scenario: alone on what had to be the smallest island. Thankfully, I figured it out soon enough to bootstrap to Astronomy and contact the neighboring islands before I fell too far behind. By the dawn of the modern era, the Byzantine Empire spanned a handful of fairly rich islands to the west of a single, giant continent filled with infidel nations that would dogpile me the moment I tried to carve a foothold in any of them.

At this point, I was the most technologically advanced, but I was maybe half the size of the biggest of my enemies, and half my territory was recently conquered, to boot. I had to find some way of destabilizing that continent while I retooled for a Space Race victory.

Then I discovered Arabia in the cold and barren north of that foreign country, the only non-Buddhist nation besides my own. They'd clearly been losing border wars for the past hundred years, but that stopped once I began funding money, matériel, and technology their way. I've always been really stingy with gifts to enemy or neutral nations, so I was amazed how effective this was. Gifting the Arabs with two nukes and a handful of tanks stopped the Buddhist riflemen of a half-dozen hostile nations in their tracks, while my money and tech allowed the war as a whole to stalemate for almost fifty years, plenty of time for me to build every part of the rocket and launch it before anyone could redirect their war machine my way.

As I closed down the game, I marveled at what real-life parallels even an abstracted simulation like Civ could produce. I'd made my own Israel, more or less, though I think I profited from it more than actually was the case.

[ryepunk]

God's and Kings seems pretty fun, but $30 is just a touch too much for me to consider at this point. I shall tell you a civ story though.

This is a tale of my first Civ 5 game. A game I started up on a slow sunday afternoon and then wondered why my stomach was aching a few turns later. At 2am. I finished it a few days later.
I picked france because culture seemed interesting and I wanted to indulge a Napoleon complex. Difficult was normal, i think they call it Prince. and it was random continents.

I spawned in a location that I initially was shocked to discover was remarkably terrible in all aspects. No rivers. No coasts nearby. Hell no forests or trees in sight. Rocks, rocks and more rocks.
Scouts/warriors found the coast, but being lazy I had already settled my first city into the barren landscape. Something like 30 turns passed before I discovered another civ. It turns out I had spawned very close to the northern reaches of that world and my 3 cities were all pretty much stuck there. Food supplies were low. Production/gold was decent enough. It turned out that the bulk of my civ existed within a peninsula that narrowed to 2 tiles, and hence would prove impossible for any AIs to ever cross. Eventually I managed to induce a war with someone who flung some units against my entrenched knights in a fort and then I blew his civ away in the counter-attack. I found the americans hiding behind a great wall of... america; I suppose you'd call it that. They never really bothered me much, so I left them and their 2 cities alone for much of the game. I followed my western coast down and discovered it basically was like the West coast North & South America in that it spanned the entire planet, It lacked any mountains though. I conquered two city states along it. And wiped out a civ who was bothering the Americans. I think it was persians. Meanwhile my reports began to mention word of the mighty Iroquois civ. Who had single-handedly wiped out every other civ on the world. By the time my navy found them on a separate supermassive continent they were wiping out the greeks last bastion.
Not much liking this turn of events, I immediately launched my navy and landing parties. It was roughly WWII era when my units left my eastern coast. Those who made it to the Iroquois mainland didn't put up much of a fight.
But he never bothered to try and wipe me out. Occassionally my navy would see him land a few units, my cities would defeat them and then he'd repeat it in 15 turns. I gradually developed nukes and put them on bombers. nuking the shit out of his continent, while I decided if I couldn't beat him with brute force I'd do it with science since I could push my cities that way. I think the americans got uppity about all my nuking of half the planet. So I conquered them and began the space race.
Although admittedly Hiawatha's decision to pursue Science seemed half hearted at best. I had 90% of the work done when he finished his first component. And thus I won my first match of Civ 5.

I learned much in that first game. Culture is downright impossible to pursue half-heartedly. Competing continents struggle greatly to successfully invade each other. The AI has no desire to provide a decent tactical opponent.
But it was fun, and blew through a Sunday like nobody's business. Yay Civ.

[robc]

I hope the drawing for the Sins key is purely random and not based on the merits of the story. I've been playing Civ since its inception, losing countless hours, days, weeks, months and I would even guess over a year of my life to its call. I've played 593 hours of Civ V and it is probably my least favorite of the series when viewed through my eyes at the time of their prospective releases. In every single version except for Civ V I found myself playing a game when the sun started to peel back the darkness of the night before. When I emerged from my trance I felt like a vampire peering through the a crack in a coffin, the light burning my very being. In reality Civ was the vampire, leeching away my life as I slowly succumbed to its spell. The radiation from my monitor damaged my skin more than the sun. Does monitor light cause the body to produce vitamin D? I polluted my Civ world and tried to mop up the mess later with my workers, like little antibodies trying to stem the tide of infection. My roads spreading my own disease - my religion - it may be the only force strong enough so Montezuma doesn't attack me once again, bound by a similar belief system. Relations + 4! As the sun sets once again a stack of doom casts a long shadow across the room or is it the shadow Civ casts across my soul...

On a more serious note, there is one thing that has remained constant through every iteration of Civ. When my wife enters the room and sees a game of Civ up on the screen she asks what city I named after her. In the beginning I would name one Tammyville, Tammysota, Tamlet, etc. She still will ask me for her city. Now my response is usually, ummm how about Boston, Athens, or London. I must win a key of Sins so I can have grander aspirations. I will name for her a planet!

Good show guys. I haven't been able to articulate what it is about Civ V that is less captivating than prior iterations and I think you hit upon the big one. Feeling pigeon holed from the early part of the game. I like games where you have to think on your feet more and react to changing conditions. I like to take things as they come. I no longer remember how the tech tree was in the prior versions, but in this one it seems like you can only go so far down one branch before you have to backtrack and research everything else before you proceed through a tech tree bottleneck. Was it always like that? I thought there was more freedom in prior versions, but maybe I'm not remembering correctly.

[jennoa]

Great episode guys! There were some great points raised, and I always loving hearing from Jeff Green. Truthfully I wasn't planning om pick this expansion up, as I was thoroughly disappointed in Civ V when it came out. It's unfortunate that Gods and Kings perhaps isn't the panacea the game needs, but maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to dismiss it out of hand.

I've been playing Civilization since the beginning, but it was Civ II that really grabbed me and never let go. For about two years, everyday, after I first got the game I would come home from school and play until my parents would have to come in and drag me off the computer. I wasn't the most original player, I had my Civilization of choice, the Japanese, and would invariably go for a Space victory. Nothing was cooler to my teenage self then flying off to Alpha Centauri. Embarrassingly enough though, what I remember best about Civilization II after all these years is the videos that would play for each adviser. I slavishly tried to follow their advice, even after I realized that they were often times less then useful and counterproductive. Though I don't have a story like the guy who played the same game for ten years I can still go back to Civ II from time to time and get lost in it's depths.

[Chris]

The criticism most of you levy against Civ 5 is something that I recognize but don't really think has to be seen explicitly as a criticism; Civ V is simply about different things than other Civ games are. I don't subscribe to the notion that each game in the series needs to capture the same dynamics--Civ IV still exists, after all. I too have been playing Civ since the first game (Civ 1 was probably the game that really got me into gaming in a big way, and I suspect I've still played it more than any other game in the series), but to me, Civ V is simply a game that is more about capturing a national character from the start, and working within the constraints that implies. I don't think that's inherently a bad thing. It's just a different game.

[Gormongous]

The criticism most of you levy against Civ 5 is something that I recognize but don't really think has to be seen explicitly as a criticism; Civ V is simply about different things than other Civ games are. I don't subscribe to the notion that each game in the series needs to capture the same dynamics--Civ IV still exists, after all. I too have been playing Civ since the first game (Civ 1 was probably the game that really got me into gaming in a big way, and I suspect I've still played it more than any other game in the series), but to me, Civ V is simply a game that is more about capturing a national character from the start, and working within the constraints that implies. I don't think that's inherently a bad thing. It's just a different game.

I wonder if it's not that gaming as a medium hasn't reached the point where "different" and "better" aren't expected or even required to be the same thing, at least within a single franchise. My own issue is just that I still really love Civ IV, and I don't know if I have room in my heart (and schedule) for a similar game made by the same company with slightly divergent design goals and themes. Even if I did, I think Alpha Centauri is probably higher on the waiting list.

Also, seeing robc's post, I wonder if my story should have been how I once passed a world history test on the Spanish conquest of the Americas in junior high because two of the questions could be answered by naming an Aztec city off the top of my head. The Aztecs weren't such unforgivable assholes in Civ II, but I still remembered every city their antics forced me to raze...

[Procyon Lotor]

I disagree with the assertion that Civ5 puts the player in a "straight-jacket." Troy was right -- if there's a straight-jacket, then you are putting yourself in it. The use of the cultural victory to illustrate that point was particularly unfair. If I recall, the cultural victory in Civ IV was also something that you needed to decide on somewhere around turn 1 if you playing at a reasonable difficulty level.

Here's my "Civ Story," but first, my Civ Credentials: I've owned and played every Civ game, including Alpha Centauri and Civ Revolutions. It all began with Civ 1 on my parents' old 286 when I was in middle school. Every iteration has been better than the last.

And so this is my story. It is the story of the holdouts, those who will not admit that the latest Civ is better than the last. Alas, this is nothing new. If you dig in the Civfanatics forums, you will find similar sentiments when Civ IV came out, as Civ III pro's absolutely hated everything about Civ IV. Heck, you can probably find gripes from Civ II holdouts when Civ III arrived. And, sometime in the next decade, we will hear people mumbling about how Civ VI ruins everything that made Civ V the Greatest Game of All Time.

Why does this happen? I have two theories. The more generous one is that folks become so versed in the old version of the game that it takes a long time for them to break the shackles of their pre-existing expectations for how the game should work. When the new version does something different (like policies over civics) the difference frustrates the old gamer. As time passes and gamers learn to love the new system, however, the number of holdouts begins to diminish. The second theory (the theories are not mutually exclusive, btw) is that some people nee dto prove their hardcore badassery and status by claiming secret, counter-intuitive knowledge. In this case, that the old game was better. Only n00bs like the new game. Real Gamers know that the old one was the best. I guarantee you, somewhere a 40 year old manchild is sitting in his mother's basement playing Civ III, doing that thing where you build a city every other tile and running only specialists, micromanaging every city on every turn. That man still thinks that Civ IV is a hot pile of blasphemy.

The Moral Of The Story -- Civ 5 is way better than Civ IV. It is not a difference in kind, it is a difference in quality. Civ IV did not play out with THAT much variety, and the combat was excruciatingly boring (build SoD, send SoD at enemy city). The diplomacy is MUCH better -- Civ IV was all about religious blocks, and you did not have the city-states to offer alternative options for expansion, trade, etc. Finally, the Civs are much more and better differentiated. I much prefer a step towards Alpha Centauri's factions than continuing with the same-game-experience-with-each civs from Civ IV. You can disagree with me on all of this if you like. If you do, I just hope you don't take such a curmudgeonly attitude towards your mother, whom you still live with.

[robc]

... You can disagree with me on all of this if you like. If you do, I just hope you don't take such a curmudgeonly attitude towards your mother, whom you still live with.

Good comments marred by childish statements.

[Chris]

You can disagree with me on all of this if you like. If you do, I just hope you don't take such a curmudgeonly attitude towards your mother, whom you still live with.

If your argument is substantial, you shouldn't need to be this dismissive of any potential disagreement.

[Procyon Lotor]

Sorry. Attempt at Humor = Failed. That came out hilarious in my head. On the screen, it just makes me sound like an a$$hole. That was unintentional!

[robc]

Sorry. Attempt at Humor = Failed. That came out hilarious in my head. On the screen, it just makes me sound like an a$$hole. That was unintentional!

It's cool. Thanks for being big about it, a rarity on the internet

[Gormongous]

Here's my "Civ Story," but first, my Civ Credentials: I've owned and played every Civ game, including Alpha Centauri and Civ Revolutions. It all began with Civ 1 on my parents' old 286 when I was in middle school. Every iteration has been better than the last.

And so this is my story. It is the story of the holdouts, those who will not admit that the latest Civ is better than the last. Alas, this is nothing new. If you dig in the Civfanatics forums, you will find similar sentiments when Civ IV came out, as Civ III pro's absolutely hated everything about Civ IV. Heck, you can probably find gripes from Civ II holdouts when Civ III arrived. And, sometime in the next decade, we will hear people mumbling about how Civ VI ruins everything that made Civ V the Greatest Game of All Time.

I've heard the "gamers hate change" argument used to dismiss all sorts of complaints for every stripe of game. And yeah, it's a big problem, because the attitude does exist and it discourages innovation, since change can alienate fans without convincing skeptics that there's something new and interesting to be had.

The thing is, it's almost perfectly counterbalanced by the "cult of the new" effect in the gaming culture. You talk about people who've dragged their feet on every new iteration of Civ, but I'm reminded of the glowing reviews Empire: Total War received from the same people who would describe it as a buggy misstep when Napoleon came out a year later. The games industry as a whole has a fierce positivist streak where change is new is better, which is especially incongruous considering that, compared to books or movies, games in a single series or franchise are seldom manifestly better or worse as media, once you factor out the technical aspects.

Civ seemed like one of those few franchises where every iteration was received as a qualitative improvement by the majority of the community. Civ V broke that streak by being a different take on the same themes that its predecessor laid out, which explains to me its mixed reception as much as the drawbacks of one-unit-per-tile and the diplomatic AI.

[Troy Goodfellow]

The criticism most of you levy against Civ 5 is something that I recognize but don't really think has to be seen explicitly as a criticism; Civ V is simply about different things than other Civ games are. I don't subscribe to the notion that each game in the series needs to capture the same dynamics--Civ IV still exists, after all. I too have been playing Civ since the first game (Civ 1 was probably the game that really got me into gaming in a big way, and I suspect I've still played it more than any other game in the series), but to me, Civ V is simply a game that is more about capturing a national character from the start, and working within the constraints that implies. I don't think that's inherently a bad thing. It's just a different game.

I sort of tried to make this point - Civ V is a very different game than IV and not necessarily a worse one, though I think IV's civics system opens up the gameplay in ways that the perk social policy system in V does not. It's not as great a break as Civ Revolution was, but along the same lines, it is clearly descended from but answering different questions than the other Civs were.

There is a lot of room for both IV and V, and V is such a radical departure for the series in so many ways, that it's easy to see where it would turn off long time players and also take more time to mature as a game - remember how "black box" everything was at launch? You knew nothing about what your enemies were thinking or doing until they did it, which was certainly a step back.

That said, I only play V now for the most part, unless it's a mod or something for IV. I can't go back to stacks of doom. I can't go back to culture bombs and unhappiness in cities and riots. V is a beautiful bunch of systems that I think show the direction that Civ can go.

Oh, and keep the stories coming! Love reading these.

[Troy Goodfellow]

Civ seemed like one of those few franchises where every iteration was received as a qualitative improvement by the majority of the community. Civ V broke that streak by being a different take on the same themes that its predecessor laid out, which explains to me its mixed reception as much as the drawbacks of one-unit-per-tile and the diplomatic AI.

It was a long time ago, but IIRC, Civ 3 wasn't greeted with open arms at the beginning.

[Procyon Lotor]

Gormongous, please explain what you mean when you say that Civ 5 is a "different take on the same themes." (In case I sound like an a$$hole again, I am genuinely curious to hear you out on this. I spent 5 minutes on that sentence to try and make is sound less confrontational. I hate the internet.) I ask because I don't think that the change from 4 to 5 is so different than the changes between previous versions. I'm grinding my brain trying to remember the mechanics from 2 and 3, but my recollection is that from 3 to 4 was a very big leap in many, many ways. Civ 5 seems like a much smaller change.

[Procyon Lotor]

....and Troy Goodfellow intercepts the answer! Doh! Type faster!

[Chris]

I sort of tried to make this point - Civ V is a very different game than IV and not necessarily a worse one

Indeed--I intended to back and edit my post or add a new one acknowledging your statements to that effect, then I forgot.

[Gwardinen]

I've enjoyed every Civ game since Civ II, and I really have no problem with V. I play it most now because of two simple factors; firstly, it is what most of my Civ-playing friends play, secondly, it has the best UI. By which I mean the most friendly, easy to use interface. It was touted a lot during development, but I really believe Firaxis did learn a lot about what to show and what not to show, and how to present a user interface, from making Civilization Revolution. User interfaces are actually my number one problem with trying to go back and play older games, not graphics or even weird options or technical problems. Maybe they just fit my tastes more, or perhaps I'm just so accustomed to them now, but I think user interfaces in games have improved vastly during the most recent console generation and they bug the hell out of me in older games now.

My story is pretty short, it's not really about the narrative of the game so much as how it affected me afterwards. I occasionally play Civ V multiplayer with my friends, and in one of our early games I played as Germany. Having been born in Germany, and still being a German citizen, is always one of the first things people learn about me here in the UK since differences from the norm always get zeroed in on. A tie-in to this is that jokes within circles of friends often revolve around the established "known attributes" of the members of that circle. So when we're talking about one of the gay guys, the jokes are often vaguely referential towards that, or the fact that one of my friends had a full beard at 16 gets brought up a lot more than it probably really deserves, for example. So it also goes for me and being German.

So obviously, cue lots of friendly jokes about me taking Germany in this game. Then it settles down as we're all getting further and further into it. However - since I'm playing Germany, a civilization with a marked lean towards military might, I'm playing a fairly warlike game. I begin to conquer city states and even absorb some of the smaller civilizations. Eventually I roll up to the borders of one of my friends. I begin to demand resources and gold from him in return for not attacking him. He appeases me. Eventually appeasement is not enough, and I begin a campaign of incredibly fast conquest by way of huge numbers of panzers followed by infantry waves. You may be beginning to see certain historical parallels. Unlike in history, however, my Germany goes on to conquer the entire world and win the game.

It happens, right? Someone has to win. No reason to feel guilty, even if the way I bizarrely recreated the bad faith beginnings of World War II are a little uncomfortable for a moment. Sure, but then I really think about it. In Civilization, unlike most competitive multiplayer games, the field is genuinely not even. It's not chess, you don't have symmetrical abilities. Even if you did, the very rules of the game effectively allow you to be playing different games. What I did is not a complete world away from full body tackling someone who is trying to hit a tennis ball. This actually brought to light one of the things I dislike about military victories in Civilization; they're consuming. Once one person goes completely military, everyone has to, or they will simply lose. You can't keep happily building culture buildings in your three city empire when there are twenty military units knocking on your door, much as you couldn't keep focusing on your slice if your opponent had people tackling you in tennis. This is also one of the problems of war in real life - when a country goes to war, many of its resources have to be diverted to the war effort, and those resources obviously are then not going to be spent on improving the lives of its domestic citizens. Yet, this is not just the tradeoff for the country starting the war - the country that has war declared upon it must spend as many or more resources to defend itself. War, like all forms of violence, is insidiously self-perpetuating if allowed to be.

Anyway, not trying to preach a message of "no one should ever declare war in multiplayer Civ", but it has certainly made me choose to go military much less often since.

[Gormongous]

Gormongous, please explain what you mean when you say that Civ 5 is a "different take on the same themes." (In case I sound like an a$$hole again, I am genuinely curious to hear you out on this. I spent 5 minutes on that sentence to try and make is sound less confrontational. I hate the internet.) I ask because I don't think that the change from 4 to 5 is so different than the changes between previous versions. I'm grinding my brain trying to remember the mechanics from 2 and 3, but my recollection is that from 3 to 4 was a very big leap in many, many ways. Civ 5 seems like a much smaller change.

Yeah, but vast majority of the change between previous installments were all additive and iterative: tweaking how civics are used, refining how borders work, and so on. Civ IV to Civ V fundamentally alters how a lot of these basic mechanics have always worked: civics are now irrevocable decisions, culture is now spread by tile increments, tiles are now hexes that only support one unit, and so on. Valid or not, there's a distinct sense of discontinuity that is easy to be reactionary towards.

It was a long time ago, but IIRC, Civ 3 wasn't greeted with open arms at the beginning.

It seems even longer to me, but I recall the backlash being over missing features that were popular in Alpha Centauri, already a two-year-old game at the time, as well as a general lack of stability. People weren't disagreeing over design decisions per se, and complaints disappeared once features and fixes were patched in. I don't think there's a patch that could resolve many of the disagreements I've seen over Civ V's design, though fixing the diplomatic and strategic AI has gone a long way anyway.

I'm making some sense here, right guys? Granted, I've only been playing since Civ II, so my pedigree's not as perfect as some, but it does feel to me like Civ V is the first game in the series where the question is not "more" but "different".