Quoting: PangaeaCivilization 4 is the best version in the series, with depth and so, so many ways to achieve your goals (and a damn hard AI/difficulty level). This game is available DRM free on GOG, so I see little reason to try out the inferior, dumbed down versions that came after it.

Hopefully they bring the series back to its roots at some point in the future, but I won't hold my breath.

Maybe it's time to re-play all of them to get the complete picture. :)

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Quoting: ColomboRegarding growth limitations, they were there since at least Civ 2. In Civ 2, you get unhappy citizen when you city reach certain size depending on difficulty. You also get additional unhappy citizen when your empire reaches certain size. See:
https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Civilization_II/Getting_Started#Citizen_happiness [External Link]

and

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/hapiness.322213/ [External Link]

There is also corruption, which decrease the trade income (which can be converted to luxuries, money and research)

So its not like this wasn't in game before.

Uh... sorry.. I meant city numbers, not size!

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Quoting: Colombo

Quoting: NeverthelessI really never counted mouseclicks for micromanagement in any Civ I played. I also did not define where exactly the difference between management and micro management is. I only kbow that I find Unit movement and work order wise I find Civ6 far less annoying than Civ5. There are far less workers to move, nagging for orders and to secure from enemies. Streets are built automatically by trade routes, military units can be stacked as corps and armies later on.
Of course the number of cities influences the amount of decisions you have to make (also influenced by the map size), and of course you don't just have to tell what is built into a city, but sometimes (for districts and wonders) you also have to decide where they shall be built, but I find these decisions rather interesting than annoying.
I would like it if they'd highlight new policy cards for a better overview, but I like it to be able to fine tune the direction I want my civ to go.
I like Civ V too, I just find Civ6 more "managable", even if (should I count) I found out, I had to click my mouse even some more to play it.

Mouseclicks is essentially how you are doing any actions in a typical strategy game (unless you are using keybinding for everything). In AoE, you can send your lumberjacks to cut wood by selecting them all by click and drag and sending them to tree. And you can also micromanage every single lumberjack by sending them to the nearest tree, correct side of tree and so on... with a littre extra gain, but a huge amount of clicks. So any micromanagement will always boil down to increase in the number of clicks, time and decisionpower.

Regarding builders, thats not true. If you assume that each worker will build more than 3-5 improvements (it will), you will always have less workers over time than builders. I thought that the mechanics of builders is nice, especially with the like of China or Aztecs that could build wonders or districts by spending chargers. But I started to hate it in practice.

Same with districts. It sounded like a good idea, but the sheer amount of different bonuses means that trying to play it somewheat efficiently is incredibly demanding and building districts (especially with their ever increasing cost) is ever present and annoying decision. And thats basically the most important and interesting thing on districts, they don't serve any other purpose (except the military one)! I think they could have been done much better and more interesting, especially from long-term perspective (once you place them, there isn't much more interaction with them).

Civ 6 have some nice mechanics and some nice ideas, but a lot of it is done in a quite annoying way. Not that Civ 5 didn't have annoying mechanics (such as the nonexisting UI showing you local happiness, inability to claim land in any other way than to put city on it, but a strict penalty for taking cities).

True, m.m. increases the amount of things you have to do yourself. That means you choose to do so, although there is an automatic system for it. And you do it because the automation is not good enough for your taste (or for almost everyones taste, like the automated workers in Civ 5).
This does not apply in the same way for systems like the civic cards, although of course you can say that the system is too cumbersome for your taste. I just did not regard it as micromanagement.
Like @Purple Library Guy said, the limitations to city number growth makes sense, but always felt a little artificial in terms of game mechanics to me too. Maybe a realistic system would make things more cumbersome by itself. So maybe by not implementing it, the more cities with more management work to do is a tradeoff Firaxis (like me) didn't even think of...
I still like the builders system a lot more than the workers, because you (efficiently) build roughly as much as you need of them, while I constantly tended to find new work for all my existing workers, putting work and time and clicks into it, just because they were sitting around in my cities.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: PatolaI am curious. What is so special about Civilization V mechanics (compared to other versions) that is so worth mimicking? Tried to find that on the project page but couldn't.

They took out a number of gameplay elements in civ 6 and oversimplified the military aspects small and big changes really. In civ 5 you can create and stack an army in civ 6 you can't

It's the other way around. There is no stacking of military units in Civ5. In Civ 6 there are corps and armies. I think it's a good middle way between Civ4s stacks of doom, and Civ5s no stacking at all.

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Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: NeverthelessCall to Power was a nice approach, but especially CtP2 was a complete code mess. They never got stable network gaming running..

Haha, I remember me having looked at the code. It's a really a mess. Don't ask me how that game even managed to run halfway stable. Never tried the multiplayer mode, though. Tbh, I think Civ is not a great game for multiplayer.

To be honest, what I would love to see is CtP2's core systems paired with Civ 5's hex map. CtP2 pretty much solved Civ combat, otherwise.

I played Civ as a network game since Civ-Net, the Win 3.11 network variant of Civ1. Always loved it. :)

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Quoting: ColomboNevertheless: What kind of bull is that? Civ 6 has far more micromanagement and overwhelms you with all these tiny choices that neither previous civ had.

The insane micro of Civ games comes from two primary sources: units and cities. Governments are usually not micro intensive (except in Civ 6 with the policy cards, which can add quite a bit if you try to play efficiently).

Both of those primary sources have micro stemming from quantity and complexity. Civ 1,2 and AC were well known for ICS -- Infinite City Spam/Sprawl (also called Smallpox in Civ2), where you tried to paste as many cities (even bad cities) to on your land as possible. With so many cities, managing them all added quite a bit of micro. Fortunately, the city management, as well as tile improvements, were braindead simple. You could easily queue the same buildings and some other games like Master of Orion 2 had even custom build-order-queues you could set for each colony. The complexity of city-management slowly increased as many buildings were made useful in certain occasions and a variety of tile-improvements also increased. So Civ 5 came with the idea to reduce the number of cities (and units) and make their management more important or rather to move to empire management instead of city management. This was done by introducing global happiness, and later capped local happiness (so that you cannot spam infinite cities just by building some happiness buildings), and by introducing one-unit-per-tile. Fortunately, city management was still relatively simple.

Civ 6 abandoned this and instead went to making city management more important, introducing districts, more tile improvements, builders that have chargers instead of workers, while spamming cities was yet again of primary importance. Which means not only that you have more micro than in Civ 5 just due to the amount of cities, but the new mechanics like districts, builders and policy cards constantly bombards you with these tiny decisions that are nontheless important. This is not helped by the scaling cost of all these things (workers, settlers, districts and who knows what else). Add to that disasters, which might be interesting, but in the end are just random events that force you to do more work.

Sure, Civ 6 might have some neat features, especially with the latest expansion. But claiming that Civ 4 and Civ 5 had insane micromanagement because of the horde of workers, while Civ 6 is somehow cleaner in this regard doesn't make any sense at all.

I really never counted mouseclicks for micromanagement in any Civ I played. I also did not define where exactly the difference between management and micro management is. I only kbow that I find Unit movement and work order wise I find Civ6 far less annoying than Civ5. There are far less workers to move, nagging for orders and to secure from enemies. Streets are built automatically by trade routes, military units can be stacked as corps and armies later on.
Of course the number of cities influences the amount of decisions you have to make (also influenced by the map size), and of course you don't just have to tell what is built into a city, but sometimes (for districts and wonders) you also have to decide where they shall be built, but I find these decisions rather interesting than annoying.
I would like it if they'd highlight new policy cards for a better overview, but I like it to be able to fine tune the direction I want my civ to go.
I like Civ V too, I just find Civ6 more "managable", even if (should I count) I found out, I had to click my mouse even some more to play it.

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Quoting: KimyrielleI will get burnt at the stake for saying this, but having played every single Civ game there ever was, the one with the best overall features and mechanics was Call to Power II (which isn't even an official part of the franchise). IMHO of course.

They introduced waaaay too many micromanagement features in the later releases. For starters, I absolutely hate having to build my nation around randomly distributed resources and managing city districts. Yes, I get the idea it's realistic, but sometimes simpler is better.

I agree with you, there has been too much micromanagement inside too many systems. There is also too much specialization needed to get anything out of those systems in my opinion. But I think this applies mostly to Civ 4 & 5. You could either micromanage hordes of workers, or you automate them, letting them do all the stupid things you never would have done yourself.
Civ 6 is a much cleaner approach imho. You have to micromanage far less and with more significance. The civics system is transparent and easy to grasp, and the two tech trees for cultural and technological advances make complete sense to me too. I regard Civ 6 as the best Civ since Civ 2 (or Test of Time, which was Civ2 with network support).
Call to Power was a nice approach, but especially CtP2 was a complete code mess. They never got stable network gaming running..

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: NeverthelessMohandevir said it should support 64bit Linux and Vulkan only.

False... You assumed. I meant x64 hardware. Our actual hardware configs are such devices. As for Vulkan, I meant for future releases... This is my bad, this time, I wasn't clear enough.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe major problems with Steam Machines were not, even then, that there weren't enough games in terms of numbers. The problems were lack of multimedia integration, lack of polish/finish, insufficient big high profile current AAA games, lack of a massive marketing push, and price. And some technical issues around graphics and drivers.

Exactly. As for the price, this is whre I think that Valve could have a major advantage with a specific set of harware; it's possible to produce it in large quantity... Economies of scale, they say in english? Add to this some form of promotion... Sell it under cost or give some form of Steam store credit... Just ideas.

Thing is, 1000$ USD for a mid range mini gaming rig... The PC gamers said "I can do better on my own" and the console gamers said "Way too expensive". It missed both marks.

Ah.. sorry! I in fact misunderstand you. So in short you want heavily discounted back-, forth- and cross-compatible Steam Machines, with completed infrastructure (drivers, Vulkan, Proton) built by Valve?
While I have a pretty good idea why no one did this until now, I'm also not sure if it's a good idea to heavily subsidize open systems, that could be put to uses you never dreamed of, that might not include buying games from your shop to refinance the subsidies.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Nevertheless

Quoting: MohandevirGoogle Stadia... Atari VCS... I still wonder if we'll ever see a Linux gaming system that starts with a "Bang! Nailed it!".

It's not impossible... Sony's Playstation is similar to a BSD platform... They did it.

They did it because they could legally own the underlying pre-existing operating system, and because it's relatively easy to support uniform hardware of dedicated vendors with drivers. It did not help people wanting to play games on their BSD boxes.
To support Desktop Linux means wanting to support open gaming on a wide variety of hardware and drivers.

Totally... Still, I'm wondering what would have happened if Valve decided to go all in in the Console market with a Steam Machine initiative like Microsoft's Xbox. I mean, with a dedicated Steam Machine store that's a subset of what you may find in the desktop client (100% Linux/Proton and controller supported titles only) and optimized for the Steam Machine (dedicated hardware built by Valve)... But the games you buy on the Steam Machines' store are then available and synced on any other desktop clients...

Well we'll never know, I guess...

Maybe Valve is sort of "all in" already. The question is what they want to achieve.
I think you have to look at the revenue side and the expenditure side. Someone who wants to market a closed console system like XBox, has to spend money to solve a manageable technical problem. The more defined the hardware and OS to be supported, the smaller the amount of money needed. Much more money is needed to get developers to support the console with games and to establish the platform on the market. In return, the owner of the platform earns an exclusive share on the software, while the hardware is often sold at a loss in the beginning.
Valve seems to pursue (or have to pursue) the exact opposite goal with its Linux initiative. An open system consisting of various hardware and OS variants, which even starts the (partly outdated) software of other platforms, sometimes even coming from other distribution platforms. It is the approach which needs the biggest technical effort, but has the advantage of lots of existing software. They get money for all they sell on the Steam shop and support the software they already sold. The Steam Machine plus Steam Controller could have been an attempt to standardize the hardware and the controller concept. This didn't work very well, baybe partly because the Steam Machines weren't nessessary to use the software.
I also see the VCS as a kind of in-between thing with a uniform controller concept for Atari retro software and the possibility for other more open uses, which probably will be very limited considering the performance of the hardware, and from which Atari won't earn anything or at least not much.

You got my point. Thing is Valve tried a "middle" solution that resulted in a confusing offer... Was it to bring PC gamers to the console market, or console gamers to the PC market? They failed at both. Nobody knew who it was for.

I think it could have been possible to create a pure Linux based console (SteamOS, remember?), based on one or two sets of x64 PC hardware built by Valve (Just like the Atari VCS) and support the PC market as two separate offers, that would benefit both, software side (it's all open source afterall); one for the console gamers and one for the PC gamers. Yes, it requires more investments and that's what I would have liked to see. More investments also means more determination.

This said, don't get me wrong, Valve is doing awesome things for Linux on the desktop and I'm really thankful for that, but for the Steam Machine thing, they seem to have got it off the door, and never looked at it again. Like they knew, from the start, that it would fail. Just maintaining SteamOS looked like it became a burden, early on.

But I'm no insider and I don't want to underestimate the work of anyone. The guys who worked directly on the project have all my admiration (PLGriffais, Timothee Besset, JVert and others I can't remember)... It's just my impressions.

My point is: If Valve did create an open console with a narrow set of hardware and just 64bit Linux, then most pre existing software on Steam would not run on it, and the software made for this platform would not nessessarily run on existing Steam-users Linux boxes. I don't think such a platform would take off any more than Steam Machines did.

I really don't see why this should be true . . . unless maybe by "just 64bit Linux" you mean leaving out 32 bit compatibility libraries, but I can't imagine Valve doing that since Steam itself needs them.
I mean, my computer has "a narrow set of hardware" (specifically: one set) and runs 64 bit Linux, and lots of pre-existing software on Steam runs on it. And I've never even used Proton! Once you add up the Linux-native, the stuff that works well in Proton, Dosbox and Boxtron, not to mention a few more specialized engines (plus, these days, for better or worse it'd run Stadia stuff because everything does), I don't see why one solid hardware configuration shouldn't be able to run pretty major metric buttloads of stuff.
The major problems with Steam Machines were not, even then, that there weren't enough games in terms of numbers. The problems were lack of multimedia integration, lack of polish/finish, insufficient big high profile current AAA games, lack of a massive marketing push, and price. And some technical issues around graphics and drivers.
Most of those were issues around Valve not doing a great job with the release, basically. The other issues are significantly smaller now, although they are not gone. They wanted Wine to handle the missing AAA games, and Wine was not ready to do that; but currently, Wine/Proton is getting close. When Proton handles anti-cheat, I think the technical underpinnings would be there for a re-do of Steam Machines which could succeed if Valve took it seriously and executed well (and dropped a major wad of cash on marketing). I'm not totally expecting them to do that, just saying they could.

The discussion so far revolved around the question why no one goes "all in" with a Linux console, which would neither be a closed down platform nor a Steam Machine (which tries to support most PC hardware and 32bit, 64bit Linux and Windows software with DirectX versions, OpenGL and Vulkan). Mohandevir said it should support 64bit Linux and Vulkan only. I concluded most Steam software would not run on it, and most software aimed at such a device (which had a narrow hardware variety) is not likely to run without issues on other hardware and other OS variants than the ones used by the console.
What you describe is a better Steam Machine.

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It's appreciated! Still I won't buy from EGS, nor take their gifts. While I never thought Epic hates Linux, they keep using the monopolists toolbox to fulfill their self made up market liberation story, where they fight the evil Steam monopoly to grant developers a bigger share and to make everyone happy.. well, not everyone at the same time.. first Epics shareholders, then developers, and of course the gamers who should be happy because of more competition in the market.
I still think competition is good, but using monopolistic tools like exclusive contracts, locking potential competitors and whole platforms out, is not competition, it's micro monopolies instead.

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