Gaming fleeting thoughts

[Felstaff]

As I pretty much use only Steam to access games (with the occasional GoG Galaxy title now and then--more then than now, I must admit.), I've ended up adding all my non-Steam games to the library. I just found a Flash game I've been looking for forever. A top-down, upscrolling Fixed shooter/bullet hell hybrid called Warning Forever (download it!).



Therum had the right idea. For so long the game I thought I'd got hooked on in the salad-days-summer of 2005 was GunRoar, which is also excellent. I played it in between bouts of Warsong Gulch.

Anyway, both games were already on my PC. Under C:/Games/Flash Games. A veritable library of .swf files that I'd been downloading between 2003-2011. (Blast Billiards! Remember that? It was the slippery slope gateway drug from mousebreaker.com)

[siloguist]

While we're talking about Civ5...

Hahaha, pretty much how most of my diplomatic victories go down! Not to forget merely bribing city states... 'plata o plomo' as Escobar says in Narcos. That's something I hope they change in Civ 6 actually, by the late game the city state tasks become more or less irrelevant if someone has a decent economy.

Talking of stacked units of death in Civ 4 though, Civ 6 will also have stacked units apparently, but only for things like battering rams, siege towers, anti-aircraft gun, etc. What do you reckon? A good compromise?

[Xanthir]

Yeah, Civ 6 "stacking" is really just upgrading units with extra abilities. Same as being able to merge several of the same unit together into a super-unit variant.

[Sableagle]

I would have thought siege towers and battering rams were the less stackable units. Archers can huddle pretty close together to get through a canyon or something, and swap places back and forth to increase the rate of shooting from the same length of wall, but a ram has a pretty fixed footprint.

Fleeting thought to throw in, something of which a new video about sarcastic achievements just reminded me: if you're going to put a laser sight on my weapon, please make it point where the weapon is pointing. If I move forwards and the laser is bobbing around in a small area entirely within the part of the screen covered by the target's chest, I expect firing the weapon to score a hit. That's kind of what those red-blob muzzle lasers are for.

Related: Tracer's fine. Instant bullets are fine. Instant tracers are fine (in Elite). Visible tracer no-effect bullets that follow the path of an invisible instant-effect bullet are weird and cause me to miss moving targets because I keep trying to adjust my aim to the point where the tracer goes through the target rather than doing what I actually have to do, which is aim right at him.

They are turny buttons that lie, basically.

Stop writing so much in small text. It's annoying to those without a set minimum font size in their browsers

[Xanthir]

I would have thought siege towers and battering rams were the less stackable units. Archers can huddle pretty close together to get through a canyon or something, and swap places back and forth to increase the rate of shooting from the same length of wall, but a ram has a pretty fixed footprint.

A single tile in Civ covers hundreds of square miles (minimum; this varies based on the map size). The no-stacking rule has nothing to do with people being physically close to each other, and everything to do with adjusting gameplay in more fun directions.

[Sableagle]

Spoiler:

Minimum ten miles to a side? That's "at least all of modern Leeds" to a map square. London's 30 miles wide now, sure. If you zoom in on Leeds, you can see towns that pre-date the city. Anywhere ending in "ley" is named for a waterside pasture. Zoom far enough in and you can see Westgate, Eastgate, Kirkgate, Bishopgate and the Headrow, giving a pretty good idea of how big the actual town of Leeds was at some point. Anywhere called "Lane" was outside. Angkor, to name a famous ancient city, is marked by a square of moat and wall, a two-mile square of moat and wall. The whole battle of Dien Bien Phu took place inside a ten-mile square. You could have four 81mm mortar positions inside a ten-mile square, all barely able to reach anywhere on the edges and none of them able to reach the centre. If you built a ten-mile square map of hills, forest/jungle, streams, rivers, bridges, country lanes, abandoned farms, deserted villages, rocky headlands, beach and abandoned coastal resorts and let people try it out for 8v8 Sniper War, you might get praise for the detail and amount of work, but they'd complain about the lack of action and how long it took to find anyone else. A ten-mile-square version of ET's Gold Rush would need ... hmm. Are those 50 foot squares? That makes that a 350-foot square map with 600 feet of vehicle route. The simple calculation is "150 times that," so 17 miles of vehicle route, maybe 200 (not the full 600) barriers to clear or build & repair, at least 150 spawn spots along the way, and probably 100 v 100 (not the full 225000 v 225000) to keep the action spread across even a tiny part of the map.
You could stack 100 archers, 500 spearmen, 100 heavy cavalry, 5 rams and an elephant into a group, send it through a ten-mile square and not even notice your enemy's similar force coming the other way through the same square because they used another bridge 5 miles downriver.
Inverting that, "It's not difficult to see how it could happen. We're somewhere in this grid square. He's somewhere in that grid square. On the map in the office we're a hundred kilometres apart and out here on the ocean we almost run into each other."

[rmsgrey]

I'm pretty sure there's a TV Trope about SF writers and no sense of scale. That goes double for video-games. The entire accessible area of Hyrule (and surrounding regions) in Ocarina of Time would fit inside Central Park with a little rearrangement (assuming adult Link is somewhere between 5 and 6 feet tall). It's small enough that you can plausibly visit everywhere in the game world. Compare that to Manhattan, with a population of 1.65 million (according to Wiki) - if each of them has their own personal space, and you visit those spaces at an average rate of 1 per minute, without stopping to eat, sleep, or anything else, it would take you over 3 years.

Breath of the Wild promises to come closer to having real scale, to the point where you wouldn't expect to be able to explore everywhere or do everything, but it's still (according to fan approximations) slightly smaller than the Isle of Wight (or about 6 Manhattans). For those who aren't familiar with it, the Isle of Wight is that small island off the South coast of Great Britain, and one of the places that the entire population of the Earth is sometimes said to be able to fit (though running the numbers says only about 2 billion people would fit...)

[New User]

How is "fit" defined? Do the people need enough space to move? To live? Can we not just pile them on top of one another? I know the people on the bottom would be crushed, but we can make them fit.

[Carlington]

I mean, I always figured stuff like that was deliberately done for a couple of reasons rather than a poor sense of scale? There's the obvious hardware constraints involved in making a realistically large and detailed environment, but there's also the fact that most of the travel is done, for example, by foot or on horseback in the LoZ series (magical ocarinas notwithstanding). The game would get pretty tiring if the Gerudo were 3 literal days' ride from Hyrule Castle.

[Tyndmyr]

I mean, I always figured stuff like that was deliberately done for a couple of reasons rather than a poor sense of scale? There's the obvious hardware constraints involved in making a realistically large and detailed environment, but there's also the fact that most of the travel is done, for example, by foot or on horseback in the LoZ series (magical ocarinas notwithstanding). The game would get pretty tiring if the Gerudo were 3 literal days' ride from Hyrule Castle.

Oh, it definitely is.

A huge part is that we don't want games to be primarily realistic, we want them to be entertaining. If, realistically, there would be a thirty minute boring commute between every action scene in a video game, well...you should probably cut that. Yeah, there's a ton of apartments in NYC...but what actual value is gained by simulating hundreds or thousands(or more) of similar apartments? How many apartments will someone want to visit before growing bored with them?

Shit, MMOs like WoW are really not all that large, even. They're maybe a modestly sized city at best. And they STILL have places that feel empty and deserted.

Occasionally, a game'll come out with giant, vast, realistic, samey terrain. They're mostly panned. Size isn't quality.

[Sableagle]

All the Zelda games, most of the Elder Scrolls games, the interesting parts of Asheron's Call, the whole of many games like that and all the Avengers stuff is quest-based, though.

Spoiler:

Unlock quest f stage 1, visit Quest f location 1, visit Quest f location 2, attempt challenge, visit Quest f location 3, make choice (possibly unlocking Quest j stage 1), visit Quest f location 4, attempt challenge ...
Completing enough of the local jobs to get enough cash to pay for the boat ride to the next location is actually a group of parallel quests, not Mediaeval Handyman Simulator 2016. You get on the boat, the "sailing-away" cutscene plays, the "arriving" cutscene plays, you get off the boat and you're back in the game. You're not required to manage food, water, trimming sails, the helm, watch rotation, scurvy prevention and the like as you go, because it's not Mediaeval Barque Simulator 2016. If there's a stealth section, it's a stealth quest.
When you're dealing with companies of archers, heavy infantry and siege engineers, squadrons of light cavalry and heavy cavalry and battalions of light infantry, things like movement speed across terrain, crossing points in rivers, availability of materials (i.e. trees), availability of food, frequency and diligence of patrols, messenger system speed and so on all matter and for rams to be useful you have to protect them from where they're built all the way to the castle gate. You can't just send twenty rams into a ten-mile square to flatten everything or have ten catapults in Ardon and fifty archers in Bricy support your twenty cataphracts charging from Loury to take Orléans. As three people on foot, you can skip the long walks between those places, but if you're trying to get from Au Ptit Bonheur in Saint-Martin-d'Abbat to La Fournée de Sigloy 4km (3.5 miles) away, there's a sodding great Loire in your way and you have to use the bridge at Châteauneuf-sur-Loire (making it a 6.9km trip), a boat (costing money) or a levitation spell (costing mana and giving off a magical signature) or swim it (getting cold and wet and making yourselves less presentable), none of which is free. Under some circumstances, you could skip that journey. Under others, you should have to make the choice. If Châteauneuf-sur-Loire is enemy-held, your forces in Saint-Martin-d'Abbat and Sigloy are not united. You could attack simultaneously from both places to split the defenders' attention, but they'd be two attacks. 400 pikemen in Sigloy would be no protection at all for 5 rams in Saint-Martin-d'Abbat.
rmsgrey mentioned Manhattan, so:
10 miles north: Oakland - Glen Rock - Tenafly - New Rochelle - Glen Cove
10-mile intervals: Fairfield - Passaic - Harlem - Bayside - Hempstead.
10 miles south: Chatham - Newark - Brooklyn - JFK - Freeport.
10 more miles: Plainfield - Carteret - Lower Bay - Atlantic Ocean.
Any important details missing?
Just for fun: 125 units "stacked" in under 1km², about 0.36 square miles.

[KnightExemplar]

All the Zelda games, most of the Elder Scrolls games, the interesting parts of Asheron's Call, the whole of many games like that and all the Avengers stuff is quest-based, though

The entirety of Skyrim is ~4.32 miles x 3.42 miles. The Witcher 3 may be larger IIRC, but not significantly (maybe only 30% larger or so)

When people want "big games", they don't mean "as big as the real world", because the real world is too big. Some of the most beloved exploring RPGs are really small once you line it all up.

Pokémon:

Spoiler:

Zelda Link's Awakening:

Spoiler:

[LaserGuy]

So I declared war on Gandhi within the first 8 moves.

It looks like Gandhi has renounced his philosophy of non-violence in favour of a philosophy of whoop-ass.

Gandhi had a glitch in Civ1 which made him the most aggressive character in the entire game. (basically, so many "negative" points added together that the "aggression" stat underflowed and then maxed out)

The Civilization community found this hilarious that they kept the "glitch" and have made it an explicit feature in every version of the game since then. Don't fuck with Gandhi.

Or actually, if Gandhi is in your game, kill him first. Before nukes are researched. Seriously, things get bad. Kill him before the nukes come out.

He's only aggressive with nukes, IIRC. I haven't played V, and haven't played III in ages, but my recollection is that in II and definitely IV, he's pretty peaceful prior to the nuclear era. In IV, he's always peaceful, actually, because the AI never uses nukes in that game unless you mod it.

Personally, I'd say IV is the best in the series. II is great for nostalgia value, but the mid-to-lategame is fairly lame because if you're doing even remotely well (like 3rd place or better), all of the AIs will ally against you for the rest of the game and refuse to engage in any diplomacy. V... it basically feels like they took all of my least favorite features in IV and built the entire game around them. Maybe things have gotten better since the early release, but my recollection is also that the AI in Civ V is quite weak both in terms of actual combat, but also in terms of diplomacy.

[Deva]

Prefers Civilization 5's diplomacy over 4's. Revolved heavily around religion in 4. Defined relationships more than anything. Acknowledges 5's warmongering penalty issues. (Hates you for every city you capture. Applies even in wars you did not start. Becomes a pariah after completely conquering one civilization.) Happens later in the game, at least.

[Xanthir]

Spoiler:

Minimum ten miles to a side? That's "at least all of modern Leeds" to a map square. London's 30 miles wide now, sure. If you zoom in on Leeds, you can see towns that pre-date the city. Anywhere ending in "ley" is named for a waterside pasture. Zoom far enough in and you can see Westgate, Eastgate, Kirkgate, Bishopgate and the Headrow, giving a pretty good idea of how big the actual town of Leeds was at some point. Anywhere called "Lane" was outside. Angkor, to name a famous ancient city, is marked by a square of moat and wall, a two-mile square of moat and wall. The whole battle of Dien Bien Phu took place inside a ten-mile square. You could have four 81mm mortar positions inside a ten-mile square, all barely able to reach anywhere on the edges and none of them able to reach the centre. If you built a ten-mile square map of hills, forest/jungle, streams, rivers, bridges, country lanes, abandoned farms, deserted villages, rocky headlands, beach and abandoned coastal resorts and let people try it out for 8v8 Sniper War, you might get praise for the detail and amount of work, but they'd complain about the lack of action and how long it took to find anyone else. A ten-mile-square version of ET's Gold Rush would need ... hmm. Are those 50 foot squares? That makes that a 350-foot square map with 600 feet of vehicle route. The simple calculation is "150 times that," so 17 miles of vehicle route, maybe 200 (not the full 600) barriers to clear or build & repair, at least 150 spawn spots along the way, and probably 100 v 100 (not the full 225000 v 225000) to keep the action spread across even a tiny part of the map.
You could stack 100 archers, 500 spearmen, 100 heavy cavalry, 5 rams and an elephant into a group, send it through a ten-mile square and not even notice your enemy's similar force coming the other way through the same square because they used another bridge 5 miles downriver.
Inverting that, "It's not difficult to see how it could happen. We're somewhere in this grid square. He's somewhere in that grid square. On the map in the office we're a hundred kilometres apart and out here on the ocean we almost run into each other."

I'm really confused about what point you're trying to make. Have you ever played a Civ game? A single turn represents anywhere from 100 years to 6 months of time (depending on era), and the world is gridded out to a giant scale. A single "unit" (a) represents a large corp, and (b) isn't actually trying for realism, but for good gameplay that gives the *feel* of war. One turn worth of "battle" (usually a single fight, taking 2-3s to animate) is meant to represent an entire war theatre over a long-term conflict; even in the quickest turns, it's still months of fighting. A "big" war (on the scale of our world wars) is still usually only 15-20 units per side in Civ 5; most conflicts (representing significant wars we'd record in history books and teach to youngsters in school) involve 5-10 units per side or so.

[Xanthir]

Prefers Civilization 5's diplomacy over 4's. Revolved heavily around religion in 4. Defined relationships more than anything. Acknowledges 5's warmongering penalty issues. (Hates you for every city you capture. Applies even in wars you did not start. Becomes a pariah after completely conquering one civilization.) Happens later in the game, at least.

The diplomacy is also *massively* helped by installing the "no denounce hate" mod. Denouncing gets to be *bullshit* in the late game - one denounce, with the treaty webs, can lead to several more denounces, and the accumulated hate from that can cause your "allies" to turn and denounce you, and then you're just stuck in a permanent hate spiral. There's still plenty of things you can do to get other civs to hate you for slightly more legitimate reasons; we don't need this artificial hate.

The Civ 6 diplomacy looks pretty interesting, from what I've seen of it. Seems like a big focus in on what sort of society each civ likes, bringing friendship or hate depending on how well you match it. Vikings like strong navy, Japan likes a strong army + high culture, etc.

[Sableagle]

Spoiler:

Have you ever played a Civ game? A single turn represents anywhere from 100 years to 6 months of time (depending on era), and the world is gridded out to a giant scale. A single "unit" (a) represents a large corp, and (b) isn't actually trying for realism, but for good gameplay that gives the *feel* of war. One turn worth of "battle" (usually a single fight, taking 2-3s to animate) is meant to represent an entire war theatre over a long-term conflict; even in the quickest turns, it's still months of fighting. A "big" war (on the scale of our world wars) is still usually only 15-20 units per side in Civ 5; most conflicts (representing significant wars we'd record in history books and teach to youngsters in school) involve 5-10 units per side or so.

Yes, I've played a couple. I won by building a very fast spaceship that overtook a rival's spaceship en route and got to the next star sooner.
If a single unit's meant to represent a corps, then "rams," "scout cavalry," "archers," "spare uniforms" and so on should be upgrades for a standard unit, and if a turn takes 100 years so should "midwives" because it takes a long damn time to march from one city to the next. Every fight I've seen is "unit a attacks unit b and one of them is completely destroyed without inflicting any damage at all on the other." That's not how six months of fighting between 25,000 Russian soldiers and 25,000 Axis soldiers in 160 square miles of territory goes. The bombers and fighters parts certainly didn't feel like six-month turns or like historical air war.
To me, it never gave the feel of war. It gave the feel of something between chess and accountancy.

For me, personally, if they can't do the world map and the units' nature better than that they shouldn't try to map the whole world and put all those unit types onto it. Age of Conquerors does pretty well with multiple unit types and upgrades to weapons and armour fighting for part of the Yucatan peninsula or Black Forest. Empire / Overlord did pretty well as a WW2 game with randomly-generated maps, just one type of city (O, X or * for friendly, enemy or neutral), destroyers (D), submarines (well, submersibles) (S), troop transporters (T), cruisers (R), aircraft carriers (C), battleships (B), fighters (F) and armies (A). That was it. Armies. Everything hit for 1 point, except S, which hit for 3. A, F and O were 1hp, S 2, T and D 3, C and R 8 and B 12, every took a city a number of turns to produce (A 5, F 10, D 20, S 25, T 30 etc) and fights were "one or the other scores a hit until one unit ceases to exist," which could leave a damaged ship still functioning or still functioning but moving at half-speed (with reduced carrying capacity if it was T or C). That worked. There was no way to use four A at once against a single X but it worked.

Civ had some really weird systems where a city was constantly losing resources to sustain a unit that was far away beyond several other cities, which couldn't contribute at all, and there were no supply lines. Also, that stage of the game thing meant you could be halfway through something and suddenly find you needed to abandon the whole plan because someone on the far side of the world had invented a steam engine and was using it instead of donkeys to extract copper ore from his mines.

[Xanthir]

So you played Civ 2 two decades ago and aren't familiar with the mechanics and improvements of 3, 4, 5, or the upcoming 6, don't understand the level of abstraction/metaphor that Civ employs, and prefer games with an actual battle-simulation focus. Cool, but none of that has anything to do with Civ stacking behavior, which, again, is heavily abstracted because Civ is an engine for historical narrative and strategic gameplay, rather than detailed simulation. So I'm still confused about why you're trying to make an argument about physically realistic troop sizes in a detailed, small-grid map depicting individual battles.

(Basically all of Civ gameplay is best understood as historical narrative. "Cities" actually represent entire economic regions, and can easily be separate kingdoms under an empire or treaty organization. "Trade routes" are metaphor for economic relations between regions. Sending troops to take over an enemy city is metaphor for decades of aggression and clashes that result in ceded/conquered territory. Only as you get into the 20th century does the timescale of a turn finally get short enough that military clashes can code for individual wars, but even then a single turn represents *an entire campaign*. All of this is represented with small, discrete units that make for good gameplay; you supply the historical gloss yourself.)

ETA: Oh wait, Civ 2 units got damaged after battle. Civ 1 units only had a single HP, so you were either "alive" or "dead". Is *that* the one you played?

[Thesh]

Decided to play some more Civ 5, after reading this. Apparently off by two errors are a thing (or is it two off by one errors?). I have more than enough horses, dammit.

I chose Pangaea for the map, and ended up in the middle. I'm just now finally doing some exploration near the edges; too little, too late - most of the land is taken, but this place looks pretty nice. Also, completely forgot how to micromanage resources, so I'm kind of in a bad spot, but whatever. I have held off every attack, haven't lost a city, took some of my own, and am currently friendly with everyone (which takes about two turns to go from "Hey, let's do some friendly trading" to "I WILL MURDER YOU!").

Persia declared war on me. We didn't do battle, but a few moves later he offered a peace treaty where he gave up all these concessions without me having to ask for them. I'd have been perfectly fine just taking a straight up peace deal.

[Diadem]

While we're talking about Civ5...

Spoiler:

In Civ4 there were no city states, and voting power was determined by population count. So one standard way of achieving a diplomatic victory was to build a stockpile of ICBMs and then rain down nuclear Armageddon on all other civs.

I'm a bit surprised to see so many people disliking Civ4 here. I mean of course Civ5 after two expansions is a better game, but Civ4 was excellent for its time. It introduced so many new concepts to civilization (religion, great people, unique bonusses for civs (other then special units)). Its culture system also worked great. The unit stacking was a downside, but it really wasn't as bad as people are making it sound. Stacks were dangerous, but there were also units that did damage to an entire stack (basically the civ equivalent of AoE), so stacks were also vulnerable. Oh, which is another great thing that Civ4 introduced. A multiplayer system that actually worked well. Civ4 multiplayer was awesome.

Civ5 is a great game now, but at its introduction it was missing a lot of interesting features that were only introduced later. It was also extremely buggy, and a giant resource hog. It really was a bit of a step down from civ4 on its release.

Which is also my worry for civ6. I'm in real doubt over whether I should buy it or not. I love civ games, and absolutely want to have it eventually. But if it's going to be the same as Civ5 I'm much better off waiting a couple of months.

Civ4's stacking behavior was simply nuts. A lot of fights ended up being left->right movements with HUGE stacks with one or two "mass damage" units (catapults or bombers). I didn't enjoy Civ4 at all. Losing units one at a time seems like a good way to fix the earlier stacking systems, but it just drew out combat to a glacial pace... and combat became horribly tedious and unfun.

Ok now that's just confusing. The current Civ5 combat system is certainly better than civ4's. But the civ4 system is certainly faster. Attacking with 20 stacked units at once if a lot faster than attacking with 20 units individually.

The 'games become tedious' has always been a downside of all civ games though. In single player it happens often that you do so well early game that you've basically won by medieval times. Playing that out remains fun for a while, but eventually gets tedious. Especially in modern times when you just have too much stuff going on. But luckily in single player you can always start a new game, and in multiplayer this tends not to happen.

[KnightExemplar]

While we're talking about Civ5...

Spoiler:

In Civ4 there were no city states, and voting power was determined by population count. So one standard way of achieving a diplomatic victory was to build a stockpile of ICBMs and then rain down nuclear Armageddon on all other civs.

I'm a bit surprised to see so many people disliking Civ4 here. I mean of course Civ5 after two expansions is a better game, but Civ4 was excellent for its time. It introduced so many new concepts to civilization (religion, great people, unique bonusses for civs (other then special units)). Its culture system also worked great. The unit stacking was a downside, but it really wasn't as bad as people are making it sound. Stacks were dangerous, but there were also units that did damage to an entire stack (basically the civ equivalent of AoE), so stacks were also vulnerable. Oh, which is another great thing that Civ4 introduced. A multiplayer system that actually worked well. Civ4 multiplayer was awesome.

The introduction of the culture system was good, but AOE was not a good response to well-managed stacks.

AOE damage was from catapults and artillery. Which are both 1-movement units with virtually no defenses. Only when bombers came about would AOE become a serious tactic against stacks of units. Otherwise, you just keep a high-movement stack (calvery, knights, etc. etc.) and own their catapults while they're moving in.

The only way to get the catapults close enough to the enemy's stack was to build a stack of units to protect the catapult.

The other time where your stacks are vulnerable are when you are taking a city, and the opponent has a stack of catapults / artillery inside of their city. AKA: The way to beat a stack was to build a stack of your own.

----------

Civ4, for all of its benefits, basically lost hard when it came to combat. Combat was very stale, tedious and repetitive. Death-stacks with AOE support were the only valid strategy. The stacking behavior also negated the most major usefulness of fortifications (one-unit dying per attack was THE REASON to build fortifications in Civ2).

Also, the concept of chokepoints didn't exist. Civ4 not only had stacks which could march wherever they wanted, but IIRC, the "Zone of Control" behavior was removed in Civ4 for some reason. (I dunno if it was removed in Civ3... but it definitely existed in Civ1 and Civ2)

[rmsgrey]

The buzz is that Civ 6 is releasing a lot more finished than Civ 5 (or Beyond Earth) did.

[Thesh]

So I played a few minutes of Civ 6 today... Umm... Do Builders just stand around most of the time, or am I missing something? Like they improved one tile, a wheat field, and there are no options to improve other tiles.

And as I write this, It occurs to me that my strategy of always researching the longest thing to research is might be related to this.

[KnightExemplar]

So I played a few minutes of Civ 6 today... Umm... Do Builders just stand around most of the time, or am I missing something? Like they improved one tile, a wheat field, and there are no options to improve other tiles.

And as I write this, It occurs to me that my strategy of always researching the longest thing to research is might be related to this.

I haven't played Civ6 yet. But typically, you have to research all of the tile improvements.

Irrigation for irrigation. Construction for Forts. Etc. etc. Typically speaking, you can have a road + general improvement per tile. (irrigation conflicts with mines). Once all of my fields are irrigated, I generally start building lots of roads. (Also, be sure to guard your workers with military units)

[Koa]

I heard something about builders being one-shot things now? I assumed the unit was consumed when construction was complete though.

[Deva]

(Disclaimer: Not first-hand information.) Disappears after three uses. Constructs improvements instantly. Creates roads through trade routes now, also.

Probably ought to start a Civilization 6 thread.

[Thesh]

So I played a few minutes of Civ 6 today... Umm... Do Builders just stand around most of the time, or am I missing something? Like they improved one tile, a wheat field, and there are no options to improve other tiles.

And as I write this, It occurs to me that my strategy of always researching the longest thing to research is might be related to this.

I haven't played Civ6 yet. But typically, you have to research all of the tile improvements.

Irrigation for irrigation. Construction for Forts. Etc. etc. Typically speaking, you can have a road + general improvement per tile. (irrigation conflicts with mines). Once all of my fields are irrigated, I generally start building lots of roads. (Also, be sure to guard your workers with military units)

Previously, at least in Civ 5 and (IIRC) Civ 4, farming was always available by default. That's no longer the case, except for this one tile with wheat, which might have been a bonus for my civilization.

[KnightExemplar]

So I played a few minutes of Civ 6 today... Umm... Do Builders just stand around most of the time, or am I missing something? Like they improved one tile, a wheat field, and there are no options to improve other tiles.

And as I write this, It occurs to me that my strategy of always researching the longest thing to research is might be related to this.

I haven't played Civ6 yet. But typically, you have to research all of the tile improvements.

Irrigation for irrigation. Construction for Forts. Etc. etc. Typically speaking, you can have a road + general improvement per tile. (irrigation conflicts with mines). Once all of my fields are irrigated, I generally start building lots of roads. (Also, be sure to guard your workers with military units)

Previously, at least in Civ 5 and (IIRC) Civ 4, farming was always available by default. That's no longer the case, except for this one tile with wheat, which might have been a bonus for my civilization.

Very strange. I'll have to try Civ6 myself to see what you're talking about then.

[Thesh]

I just pretty much lost on my first game. Brazil declared war on me in like no time while I'm still trying to figure out how everything works, and then while defending against them (and doing an okay job), Barbarians more advanced than either of us on horse back with archers basically just wiped out all my units, leaving my only city mostly undefended. That's when I decided it was over and quit.

EDIT:

Playing a bit more, you do need to do research before you can build farms now, which wasn't the case before. Builders work different - a single unit can build three things before getting consumed, but each thing takes only one turn to build. Each tile can have one thing built on it, and this can either be something created via a builder such as a farm or a mine, or it can be a building created through the city screen.

[Thesh]

Trading is totally borked in Civ VI. Like, I'll offer someone a deal, and they will almost always reject it unless it is ridiculously favorable. Then they will come back and ask me for a much much more favorable deal, where I'm giving them less and they are giving me a lot more. I once hit the button that said "What would make this a bit more fair?" after my deal was rejected and it changed nothing and said the deal was accepted. Also, when I do negotiate for multiple rounds, it pretty much always ends up with them agreeing to 1 gold per turn (their offer). I got Uranium from Spain for one gold per turn.

[Izawwlgood]

Warning Forever

OH MAN, I remember that game! I used to play it obsessively in highschool. How on earth did you dig that one up? That it's a fucking flash game now is wild.

I've been obsessively hammering away at Salt and Sanctuary lately, basically a Dark Souls meets Metroidvania platformer. It is phenomenally done, and many new areas or enemies/bosses have made me actually gasp for various reasons. There's an item (which I feel is common to the Dark Souls games) that lets you write a brief message and it'll get posted to other players games, and you tend to find them scattered around the game with sometimes funny, sometimes helpful, sometimes trollish blurbs. I climbed a giant pyramid at one point, and at the very top was a single bottle with the message "You are not alone". Definitely frowned, put down my controller, walked around the room, checked the closet...

Anyway, rocking the Paladin build after getting a little bored of the Mage build. There's a larger diversity of heavier armors and shields and weapons in game than magic spells/items and light armor, but now I'm reading that light armor and dodge builds are the way to go. It's definitely fallen under the category of 'games I don't want to beat just yet because I still have goals I'm pursuing'. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I haven't had that impetus in a game in a while.

[Zohar]

I have had similar experiences, Thesh.

I'm always at a loss in Civilization games. I never have a clear plan to victory, and domination (in the past at least) always seems very tedious. I'm playing France now and seeing if I can get a cultural victory.

[Thesh]

I did manage to nuke three of Spain's cities, and take the rest, including the uranium mine, before the 1 gold per turn uranium trade ran out. Anyway, I've got to raze the three cities I nuked (Phillip II still won't surrender everything). I think the number of turns for nuclear contamination is a way too short, which is 20 turns with my game settings (I'd prefer it be permanent to discourage nuking people as a good way to steal resources).

EDIT: I also had trouble a few times with units that formed corps/armies not healing when fortified. This happened to a couple of tanks that didn't make it to the Spain battle; still sitting in my territory, damaged after Kongo decided to give me all their cities (I didn't lose a single unit conquering them, since they were renaissance and I had researched all the tech, and was in the process of building a massive army to take down Spain, which was fully advanced like me, but didn't yet have nukes [I'm playing on a low difficulty until I learn how to properly manage everything - the housing and amenities are killing me this game]).

[Xanthir]

The magic of "luxuries get automatically spread out to your cities as needed" and the non-obvious sources of amenities still have me a little hinky. I get around it by just putting in some entertainment districts, but still don't really know how things work there. (In general, there's several bits of mechanics where the formulas aren't spelled out and this annoys me.)

But shoot I love so many parts of this dang game. Pretty much an across-the-board improvement to full-DLC Civ 5, which is amazing.

[Zohar]

I feel like stuff is very expensive. I also don't understand the logic of a second builder being more expensive than the first. Inflation?

I may have done a terrible mistake. I built a city with many desert tiles (had some good resources next to it) and, naturally, it has very little production. I should be able to build Petra soon, I hope by cutting down forests I'll be able to hasten that process.

[Xanthir]

Since my first Prince game was super easy (accidental culture victory in 1910?!?), I turned off culture victory and went up to King for this game. WOOF, that's a noticeable difficulty curve. I'm holding my own as a middling power, but my neighbors on my continent are all better than me.

I finally got armies (and built Terracotta Army just in time to upgrade my field cannons to 2-attack-per-turn!), so I'm gonna go take over some of the underdeveloped yahoos on the other continent (who've hated me anyway for a long time). That should give me a nice power boost, and help me prep for attacking the Americans back on my continent, before they pull off a science victory.

[Thesh]

I'm going to come back to the game when I can get a feature to wake units when a threat is in their visible range and when they make it so that the little [next thing to do] button automatically selects all units and cities when a threat is in range for them to attack (even if optional, like the Alert vs Fortify in Civ 5).

[Xanthir]

Yeah, I've definitely accidentally skipped attacking sieging units with the city defenses before, because it doesn't show up in the "next thing to do" rotation. And the loss of an "Alert" action is keenly felt at times for similar reasons.

[Thesh]

I'm wondering how many fortified units had a chance to attack but I never knew about it.

[HES]

Does Civ 6 have modding support?