Partnering with the Shawnee Tribe for Civilization VII

Seems like a fair play given the history...

couldn’t you just ignore them?

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Imagine also knowing that if you don't teach your language, few else can, and fewer will.

> In English and many other European languages, the principal means of distinguishing between multiple third-person referents is using gender or (lack of) reflexive. Thus, in "she saw him", it is clear that there are two third persons because they are of different genders. In "she saw her", it is clear that there are two third persons because otherwise, one would say "she saw herself". However, "she saw her mother" is ambiguous: it could mean that she saw her own mother or that she saw someone else's mother. This is because it is not clear, in some contexts, if "she" and "her" refer to the same person. An obviative/proximate system has a different way of distinguishing between multiple third-person referents. When there is more than one third person named in a sentence or discourse context, the most important, salient, or topical is marked as "proximate" and any other, less salient entities are marked as "obviative". Subsequent sentences that refer to previously-named entities with pronouns or verbal inflections can then use the proximate and obviative references that have already been established to distinguish between the two.[0]

[0] - https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative

All words are invented?

The problem is, I don't think their new ideas are good ideas. Civ switching was really not fun when Humankind did it, and the eras system doing a lot of progress resetting seems to undermine the entire point of playing well in the early eras. And to make matters worse, these things are in service of solving a problem I don't even agree is a problem. I think late game Civ has always been fun and enjoyable, it didn't need them to completely overhaul the formula to make it so.

I do want to be open minded - maybe these things are more fun than they seem to me. But I'm also not going to drop $70 just to find out. So until they release a demo, put it on game pass, or have a deep discount sale, I'm not going to risk my money on this one.

I would argue the bulk of Civ VII's ideas were actually taken from Humankind

Civilizations switching is a bad idea stolen from Humankind.

I’m Sid Meier’s memoir he mentions how intentionally this certain amount of change each game is done.

> The game has civilizations transform into other ones.

This is the most significant gameplay change for this edition, and from a concept point of view it's not a terrible idea, but the execution is extremely jarring. As you progress into the next age the game basically gets a reset. Alliances are gone, trade is reset, city states disappear unless you've pulled them into your civilization, most buildings become obsolete, units get reorganized in a rather dramatic way.

I get what they're trying to do, they're trying to balance the mid and late game to prevent snowballing. The problem with the way they've done it is that as you progress towards the end of the second age, as a player you have very few incentives to actually build most improvements. Outpace the AI in research and culture, or outproduce them and lay waste to their big cities.

The settlement limit as you go into the second age also tends to penalize early expansion, another balancing measure. You find the "new world" but you can't just go ahead and do the massive landgrab because doing so comes with a set of penalties which you'll have to offset by building things that'll compensate and in turn stunt growth. As you approach the end of the second age that limit is raised drastically which I can only guess is to promote conquest at that point, since the existing factions on the other continent will tend to expand but not be powerful enough to stop you from steamrolling them.

It leaves you with the impression that ages are just designed to stunt growth and expansion and you're fairly confined unless you want to stack penalties. I got the impression the AI doesn't deal with the reset particularly well either, since some AI players which were fairly strong early on started faltering in the second age.

Finally, the ages mechanic comes with an end-age crisis, which rather than an interesting challenge turns into a bunch of busywork. In the second age the crisis I got was religion related, where you get to pick your poison and then deal with your choice. In my case I had a choice to invest into a lot of buildings to boost happiness as the AI sent out waves of missionaries to stamp out my religion, or just churn out missionaries. The latter was cheaper and didn't take up precious space.

> you need to spread improvements across tiles instead of building tall.

I have mixed feelings about this in the long game. It's nice to see cities sprawl out into districts/quarters, but at the same time you're trading resources for growth. Overbuilding is a nice mechanic, but in the end I feel that buildings becoming obsolete at the end of an age makes me not want to invest too much in certain buildings despite having a massive amount of production. A particular game I played I ended up with Rome next to the sea, which grew and grew until there was no room for expansion anymore until the end of the age. Maybe it'd have been better to have one or two more buildings in a district?

In Civ 6 I felt it was a neat feature with some nice gameplay mechanics, but in 7 I feel the mechanic has expanded so much that you're constantly weighing options trying to plan ahead that it weighs things down. Maybe I'll feel differently about it over time.

> I’m pretty happy with Civ VII, and I think popular opinion is 50-50 right now

Honestly, this is the first time I'm really on the fence about Civ. There's a lot of ideas in there that kind of work, but at the same time kind of don't work. If I were to summarize my sentiment in a single sentence: the motto "a civilization to stand the test of time" has been supplanted with the dread of looming impermanence whispering "this too will pass".

makes me wonder if valve has a publisher protection service you can pay extra for.

I'm a big paradox fan, especially eu4 and hoi4, but their dlc policy is downright toxic. There are tons of dlcs, they are all overpriced and they all break the base game in their own ways, and the only way to "fix" it is to buy the dlc. Oh and often time the quality of their dlcs is shit because it's all outsourced to other firms who don't know the game, or the code and are stuck with tight deadlines and budgets

It also sucks that all the Paradox competitors seemed to have failed so far. The genre really needs some innovation.

I really wish they believed in UX, though. Going from Civ to EU4 is like going from one of those meal kit recipes to someone handing you some raw olives, grain, and a live chickens and expecting you to figure out the details.

I heard this from so many people that I bought it, and ultimately sought a refund. I had similar problems with its UI that I did with Civ VII. The row of 15 unlabeled icons, a parade of numbers. Font pairings that do not work together. It was hard to see the likely good game underneath.

I wish Humankind was a better game because its presentation is so good.

I especially like that they’re still making substantial improvements. It’s quite the contrast to Civ V having game-breaking bugs which were never patched.

Specifically by Soren Johnson, lead designer of Civ 4, so naturally OW has Civ 4 vibes. I will say that Civ 6 and OW seem to appeal to different audiences, so if you absolutely loved Civ 6 plays then OW might not be to your liking.

I am playing this right now and love it, though the learning curve is steep even for a Civilization veteran. This is what Civ VI or VII could be if they didn't try to dumb down the game to increase the audience.

Do not forget Humankind, from which a lot of ideas in Civ VII seems to come from. The others are borrowed from Millenia.

Their AI is atrocious though. F.ex. Endless Space has a mechanic that to take over a planet, you to have to put this bomb upgrade into a ship. The AI just... doesn't. Their fleet meta sucks, their individual ship designs suck. All harder difficulties do is generate larger piss-poor clumps of ships which attack without any strategy.

It is authoritatively debunked in Sid Meier's (excellent) memoir - there was no such integer underflow bug in Civ I, it was all a rumor that went viral. The franchise did embrace the meme, though.

I played a lot of the original Civ but it was in the early 90's so my memories are a little hazy now. Units on the world map had a "zone of control", you couldn't move units through tiles adjacent to an enemy unit, so the behavior you mention where you could juke past a stack of units wasn't possible, you could put units around cities and similar to create blockades, cut off reinforcements etc (including with naval units).

There was even a tile improvement you could build "fortress" which was useful to build in chokepoint areas as it gave defenders a big advantage. It made this blockading tactic more effective.

The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this.

Alpha Centauri was the peak civ game for me had so many cool things you could do like nerve stapling (removed the cities unhappy population permanently but also removed specialists), population booms - where you could grow cities extremely fast by funneling a massive amount of growth resources into them, Supply crawlers (could ferry resources from any tile on the map to crawlers home city), multi tiered social civics (for example rather than just playing a constitutional republic, you could be a combination of Democratic/Planned Economy or Fundamentalist + Free Market, Police State + Green Economy etc.)

That's kind of the niche Age of Wonders occupied, a civ-lite strategic layer and xcom-like tactical layer. Too bad 4 is hideously bland (I'll blame paradox and focus group testing for that)

The problem is that Civ has never modeled military logistics.

That gap means death stacks are magically logistically-supported.

But fair, as that's not the kind of game it wants to be.

You can pick the world size.

Knowing how to concentrate your forces is a tactical element. Once you get railroad you can move your units across your territory easier.

I have to agree: Humankind has a much better base for combat.

How big do you think a single square in civ takes up? It's about 80 km wide[0].

And Normandy was multiple units moving against multiple defensive units occupying the same space. This is far better approximated by the original of many units in one spot moving into a singular space occupied by many other units, than the new method of singular units spread hundreds to thousands of miles apart.

[0] Post in thread 'How much area does a single tile cover in Civ?' https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-much-area-does-a-...

That might be an interesting mechanic. Allow unlimited stacking but make artillery pieces hit every unit in the tile. Civ kind of has that mechanic with nukes, but they have all sorts of other implications that make them impractical in most games.

Thinking about this some more it might be possible to make "doomstacks" that actually have some tactics.

Idea:

Unlimited stacking is allowed. Units are ordered in the stack based on melee attack power * current health. When stacks attack one another only one melee type unit and one ranged unit may attack any particular single unit on the other side. Both attackers and defenders work from the top down. If an attacker or defender destroys their unit then leftover attack power will be used against the next available unit, after all initial attacks have been completed, but that melee unit will take return damage based on the percentage of the attack they have remaining.

For example, side 1 has a stack with 3 warriors and 2 archers. Side 2 has 1 warrior and 4 archers.

    Initial attack:
    side 1 archer 1 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
    side 2 archer 1 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
    side 1 warrior 1 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 50% damage to warrior
    side 2 warrior 1 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 50% damage to warrior
    side 1 archer 2 vs. side 2 archer 2: 60% damage to archer
    side 2 archer 2 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
    side 1 warrior 2 vs. side 2 archer 2: 40% damage to archer, 60% attack remaining
    side 2 archer 3 vs. side 1 warrior 3: 40% damage to warrior
    side 1 warrior 3 vs. side 2 archer 3: 100% damage to archer, 0% attack remaining
    side 2 archer 4 can not make it to the battle lines and does not take an action

    Followup attacks:
    side 1 warrior 2 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 3% damage to warrior (10% health, 60% attack), takes 3% damage in return

I think this could be an interesting way to do combat, but it is relatively complicated and the AI would probably be even worse at managing it.

They were never boring for me at all and there was lot of strategy and planning involved in troop composition of such stacks. Civ4 was a game about research, development and relationships between civilizations and not an turn based strategy game like latter iterations try to be.

This seems to be the biggest (gameplay) complaint across the web, so I would be shocked if it’s not addressed in an update fairly soon.

I preferred it because I considered the point of Civ to be building up your economy/tech such that you were superior to your opponents, and then using that economic/technological advantage to out-produce them in military and defeat them that way.

The shift from death-stacks to one-unit-per-tile made economic advantage relatively less important and battlefield tactics relatively more important. Tech is still important, though.

Some players like the old feel where battlefield tactics were abstracted away, and some players like the new feel where battlefield tactics are a big part of the game. But they are two very different feels from the same franchise, so we get into this debate.

Imo one way it was desirable was it was much easier for the AI to play (most people only play against the AI). It has never reeeally gotten the hang of routing and positioning units around in a 1-unit-per-tile model. Consequently they struggle to pro-actively fight each-other even.

Civ 1, 2, 3, 4 all played the roughly the same.

Civ 5 onwards plays completely different because how tile movements are restricted.

In real life those silly restrictions they added do not exist and get in the way of simulating a war.

You've got it right: it comes down to personal preference.

Civ 4 is cheap on steam. I decided to buy that and go back and run a campaign on there while I wait for VII to mature a bit.

Civ 4 Colonization is a lot of fun.

> Nihshanáhkwa nehi neelio ku nitehowski, wa nitho nitanawitshili.

Asked a random online translation service [0], I have no idea if this is accurate or if I just insulted someone's mother. The translator service also has the input field labeled "normal language", which is pretty oof.

[0] https://anythingtranslate.com/translators/shawnee-translator...

Firaxis’s team is quite skilled, and many of its designers also code, which helps them build features more intentionally than at many other studios. I’m pretty sure they considered doing more autonomous AI for Civ VII, but there are really good reasons not to.

In most strategy games, rule-based AI is easier to author, contextualize, and theme. Players usually prefer AI agents with memorable and varied traits instead of excellent high autonomy (complex utility, HTN, ML) AI. They like evident strategy more than complex strategy. Smarter and harder AI sounds appealing on paper, but it’s often less fun for most players who want a predictable, beatable opponent.

High-fidelity human-level opponent AI is only really appreciated in eSports, where it serves a training purpose. However, eSports people have fun in an aim trainer—they are not the “normal” gamer.

Most people want “really weak chess” and wouldn't enjoy hard or complex chess. They like game AI opponents acting in simple and vulnerable patterns they can outsmart and feel clever. And the more they dominate the agents by learning them, the more they like the game. Even if they say they don't, the user testing shows they do. The cheat bonuses that are super easy to win against are probably intentional :)

There is also another reason for building simple game AI — the illusion of intelligence is not created by complexity but rather by anthropomorphization/personification. It's the same as with LLMs — the big breakthrough was when they started speaking like humans, and all further complications aren't adding much to the broad and intuitive feeling of their intelligence. Similarly, a game AI agent that tells you what they are thinking achieves more perceived intelligence than an AI agent that is actually more intelligent. With this in mind, game developers don't waste much time on deep intelligence. This time is better used making agents bark, animate, display human reactions, show context awareness, etc. It is very much about the agents being showhorses, not workhorses.

I say this from pretty long AAA game AI design and architecting experience. It’s wiser to do what Firaxis did.

I've been playing a game called Old World, which is basically Civ with decent UI and AI. The UI is intuitive and uses a nested tooltip system similar to Crusader Kings 3. The AI is pretty decent at war, it will flank you, use its strengths against your weaknesses, and will retreat to heal units that you don't finish off instead of fighting unwinnable battles.

It's set entirely in the ancient time period instead of having multiple ages, which I find this to be a strength since units and technologies remain relevant throughout the entire game. Also, ethical sales practices: the base game is very complete and DLC only adds small changes unlike most games in this genre (looking at you Paradox). The game's also on GOG, which itself is a green flag in several ways.

The developers are active daily on all support channels (Discord, Steam, forums etc). I've seen people attach saves asking for help, and a dev always respond a couple hours later in great detail.

Most strategy games are like this. If the game were simple enough to be amenable to the AI competing on an equal playing field, it wouldn't be marketable to strategy gamers. If it becomes more complex, it's dubious that AI could be developed at a reasonable price point in the first place, or that it could be run on consumer hardware.

People looking for novel strategy gaming generally just go online, and those people are such a small minority of users it wouldn't make much sense to develop the game around their preferences. It would be interesting if an AI could be trained on ingesting data from multiplayer and single player games to come up with novel strategies, but the training costs probably exceed the total value of the market for any particular game.

Civ IV was interesting in that it patched its AI across multiple expansions based on playtesting and user feedback. The AI in IV is generally predictable, but it doesn't fall for a lot of cheap feints that you might expect because of this.

I always thought there might be some model that could support development like this - something like the season pass model, where the same game gets updated with novel content every year. Minecraft does this for free, FIFA does it every year by retailing what is effectively the same game with updated content, and Fortnite operates a traditional season pass. Microsoft has kind of done this by revamping some old titles like Age of Empires II, but the only studio I can think of that operates on this model is Paradox. That does get expensive though - Crusader Kings II with all of its expansions retailed for around $250 USD. Not bad for a game you play over the course of years (comparable to many MMORPGs), but a lot to pay for a game all at once.

That's essentially what they were doing at least as far back as Civ2 (I think there was a cheat menu for creating custom maps?) — the shields the AI needed for a unit or building, the bushels needed for city growth, were reduced on higher difficulty settings.

(I've not seen the original game, dunno what they did for that).

Absolutely.

Not only they turned Civ6 into a board game for PC, they equipped it with extremely dumb AI which can be easily beaten even at the highest difficulty level.

Now I'm looking at the gameplay of Civ7 on youtube and no way I'm buying it. Maybe I'll play Civ5 when I feel nostalgic.

That is also my main problem with the game. Playing deity difficulty is finding a way to game the game in order to overcome the bonuses your rivals get, it is not about creating brilliant strategies because your rivals are cunning. In fact the AI is rather dumb.

This is always a challenge in video games; the goal of enemy AI is not to beat you, but to make for an interesting and fun challenge.

I'm sure there's a community where they build alternative enemy computer players though. And else there's always online multiplayer, but that's not for everyone.

They do have huge amounts of whitespace everywhere so I guess they did do some modern UI design.

> get it working as quick as I can

That’s certainly what it looks like. When I first tried the game, before getting a refund shortly after, my first thought was “wtf, did they accidentally ship an old build?”. The UI feels so u finished, lacking feedback and visual clarity.

If you don't mind this unsolicited product-recommendation, I use Kagi now and I'm won-over. Turns out that when users pay for a search-engine it ends-up focused towards the users' needs and not advertisers; funny that.

(Though Kagi isn't perfect: I find it slower than Google: it'll take maybe 500ms for a result compared to <100ms on Google; Search-autocomplete is also less responsive, and their privacy-first approach means they don't save your search-history, whereas I want them to save my search-history for me, but anyway).

The way Google randomly deletes words in your search term drives me insane.