Civilization

[Winthur]

Well, yeah, at least terraforming was interesting. The idea that you could create rivers, or level mountains, or drill into the crust of the planet on a massive scale for minerals and energy appealed to me. I felt that SMAC's terraforming system had the right amount of complexity. Also, wind impacted rainfall, but you could overcome that with condensers. I don't know, I liked the terraforming options in SMAC, they felt simple, flexible, intuitive, and powerful.

I liked them too, but optimizing them to suit your needs was difficult and often fidgety as hell... except for the fact that, for the most part you were better off beelining Tree Farms and planting Forests on every single tile for a strong, efficient tile that can by its own merits carry you through any Transcend game, and if you do not enjoy micromanaging (which is important in SMAC because there is no such thing as production overflow, and you also likely have a ton of supply crawlers for optimal play), you will just spam Forests on every single tile.

I like terraforming, I just do not think that from the user interface perspective it doesn't look anything like busywork, especially considering how many different terrain types and interactions with them you are encouraged to remember in Civilization, let alone SMAC.

Didn't mind it. It makes sense, a larger, more far-flung empire is harder to control, and you can counteract that with good policies and or institutions.

Civ4 did that better simply by stifling expansion with a flat City Maintenance rate that cut into your treasury, and, again, it didn't prompt you to fidget endlessly with tiles until you hit just the right, optimal spread. As much as I am in favor of having control in these games, SMAC, especially with certain possible ICS strategies (since the game's penalties for # of colonies aren't nearly as big and colonies are pretty much instantly productive / pay themselves off the moment you raise them) may force you to manage 30-40 colonies at once fairly early into the game. Civ4 was pretty much the first game in the Civ series that put an effective brake into "bigger is always better" playstyles, actually making the management of the expansion engaging for me beyond just checking off every colony and manually figuring out which tile it should work right now. To say nothing of the moments when you discover a new tile improvement that you now have to tell your workers painstakingly to improve - I do not miss the Industrial era of replacing every Road with a Railroad (vide Civ2 and 3), and I do not necessarily want to defungalize or terraform every single piece of land in my huge empire.

I just find Corruption/Waste to be an unsatisfactory roadblock on expansion. It's still likely better than the flat science rate penalty imposed on larger empires in Civ5, though, because Corruption/Waste or Civ4's City Maintenance are at least controllable and can be fought off with no issue. Civ5's flat science rate penalty is always there after a certain point, and there's not much you can do about it, leading to pathologies like having to adhere to an optimal city count for certain victory types.

I'd say they were less intuitive, being no longer based on a shared basis of human history, rather a wide bit of creative invention. But they were really quite simple. Planet rating was really just a re-imagining of the old pollution system from Civ2, except now the pollution spawns barbarians. Plus, with deliberate play, causing pollution to farm planetpearls supported a particularly machiavellian strategy.

It's nice, but it's also hard to tell exactly how Planet Rating can be increased or decreased and what the math behind it is. It feels like a magic number that you look at and if it's green and at 0, you're doing great, and if it's orange and above that then you aren't sure what to expect now. On the plus side, though, it's much better than Pollution because all that crap does is increase the amount of Worker management you need to do.

But then, I also rarely send units exploring on auto-move. That's the interesting stuff, I want to be in control. Moveto orders were for getting stuff from one city to another, over an existing road.

Me too. There's a documented bug for Civ2 (and to a smaller extent in SMAC) where units told to walk over certain coordinates can get stuck on them because they have a hard time comprehending how the planet wraps (e.g. an unit that tried to walk from a coordinate y=255 that is next to y=0 would try to walk backwards 255 tiles to complete a distance it can do in one turn) That said, "being in control" in this case is also not necessarily my cup of tea, because even if Copter warfare is fast and effective, I don't feel like moving every single Copter, with its 8, 12 or however many moves, with my Numpad. So, the GoTo function allowing for imprecisions to occur is a minus. It was much worse in Civ2, though. But still, I'll gladly take my ability to just take the stack of units I amassed and move the entirety of it with a single click after grouping them together, without any hassle.

No, Zones of Control prevented the now common nonsensical interaction where your own armies stand still like a statue while enemies ride by them into your interior.

Cool, ZoC still didn't prevent some of the more exploitable forms of warfare that the AI, or the player, could do. In Civ2, the AI could even cheat and have planes staying infinitely in the air and use the City Revolt feature to flip your capital city. In SMAC, you can likely completely ignore ZoCs by simply using the enemy's own roads and flipping the colonies with Probe Teams. Subverting entire empires with just fat coffers and the power of Diplomats/Spies/Probe Teams/what not still works. ZoCs also do not really make the AI any more threatening because it just plops a few units outside of its borders into forts that you can't ride around and you often have to figure out which unit you're allowed to strike while a message or popup once again patiently explains that you can't attack something because of ZoCs. ZoCs also aren't even more engaging for the defending player, because they involve usage of tile improvements like forts or bases which players don't want to waste Former turns getting. It's an illusion that it makes warfare interesting. If your enemy is trying to zoom past your army, great, he placed his armies right in the middle of your territory and you can obliterate the grouped up guys with collateral damage.

Even with ZoCs gone, Civ4 still favors the defender heavily, after all. You don't get to use the enemy's roads/railroads but he does, and he sees your army's movement. ZoCs look cool, but have failed in practice, in my opinion. With current movement mechanics in place and simple facts like the fact that the defender has access to a fresh supply of units often on every turn, the power of artillery, the inability of the attacker to use roads etc., ZoCs would have made defense banal (and would, for example, likely kill strats relying on, say, mass mounted units) and the game more frustrating than anything. The mechanic adds too little to the game (the AI is too stupid to use it and having to deal with neutral units imposing their ZoC on you is especially obnoxious), was nerfed once in Civ3 because of it, then removed completely as a tradeoff. It was a worthy tradeoff.

Right, so when given the choice of neutering the player or improving the AI, they neutered the player. Great move. The problem is that the AI has the foresight, strategy, and awareness of a slime mold. The solution should not have been to lower the player to the AI's level.

Great, by that logic you should love the 1UPT, because it has all of the promise for engaging warfare on the player's side, but in practice it turns the AI's movement into a struggle with clogged rush hour traffic that you can run in circles around, even on high difficulty levels. Civ5 and 6 are games with complex mechanics that look cool on paper but that the AI absolutely cannot use, but it's nice they are there. Meanwhile, older Civ games let the AI get utterly ripped off on everything as you constantly violate Right of Passage to park stacks of doom that eradicate entire cities without any chance of retaliation from the computer.

Because resources are fungible. The resources you're spending building monuments or churches or whatever come out of your army budget.

So what? If the ZoCs actually worked well, then I am wasting Former / Worker turns on building tile improvements related to it. If I get unhappy people due to constant warfare (esp. if I'm trying to do it while being Democratic), I have to waste my production on building entertainment for them. I don't get this argument.

But more importantly, all that's happened is that the culture expansion has simply supplanted the use of armed forces.

Try telling that to the units plopped in a forest or in a tight chokepoint. My experience with Civ multiplayer, primarily 4, shows that the defender's advantage is still alive and well. All you have to do is occupy the tiles you want protected with your own units instead of allowing a magic zone that not even tanks or planes could get through.

Not to mention the headache that is neutral units (even from a friendly AI) that walk all over your tiles and deny you production from them (or movement towards them), but you can't tell them to sod off because the AI gives you the frownies over this crap.

Now you don't have to roll your troops into enemy territory, just build big screen TVs at the border and spam propaganda. Suffice to say I was not charmed by the "feature".

Are you referring to culture flipping cities? Because that is such an inefficient way of converting enemy cities to your side that it's irrelevant beyond screwing around, and if you're talking about the way culture impacts borders, I addressed it before.

The main reason I'm participating in this discussion in this way is because I value the replayability inherent in climbing difficulty levels, and whereas I can complete SMAC or Civ2 on Transcend or Deity quite handily and need additional challenges, I am still not a consistent Immortal player in Civ4, and I think one of the reasons for that is that levelling the playing field between the player and the AI makes for a tighter experience even if it looks streamlined. In comparison, Civ5, I've beaten on Immortal within two days of release, without much knowledge of what I'm doing, and it was disappointing to me.