The_Biz

after ~100 hours of play I still don't understand how to set up the game so that it stays fun for more than a few hours. there are just too many variables: enemy difficulty monster difficulty victory conditions how I approach the game: many small armies? focus on 1 strong army of heroes? spam cities? conquer AI opponents? ignore the other empires? how good I am at the game what faction/heroes I pick</l

seems like it's a civ 5 mod rather than a new game kind of like colonization was for civ 4

can't blame nvidia for this they made it for supercomputing (i.e. researchers/scientists/engineers) it just happened to be good for gaming as well. the gtx 7## cards are the more mainstream ones

this is more about difficulty levels imo these games are really designed to be played where you and your rivals are equally skilled. if you are pulling ahead easily, then the AI is just too weak

I don't know why none of your games are getting past the openings... this is nothing like my SC2 experience when I played casually. some games would end when one player got too greedy with expanding, but that was uncommon and certainly not frustrating (you know it's a risk, so it's fine to lose because of it...) I don't know the current state of SC2 matchmaking, but I think ranked mode is best for casual play. it's counter-intuitive but that&

don't compare billiards or chess to 4X games... they are leagues apart in terms of complexity and thought-requirements. strategy game AI has to be more than a simple search algorithm... that's what makes the games actually strategic instead of just brute force computation. 4X game developers always make excuses to justify their incompetence when it comes to AI. at first the excuses actually had some validity. up until 2010 people could at least be tricke

it can grow as long as developers keep transitioning away from strategy and towards more casual / accessible concepts (like "look at the pretty spaceship" or "shoot lasers and blow up that planet") in terms of the actual 4X genre and its original target audience, it has been downhill for quite a while, mainly because of there being negative progress since civ4/galciv2 the money (eg. civ5's customers) comes from people who want to run an empire or look at cool things,

the parkour / vertical gameplay / insane speeds really set it apart from CoD it really is very different when you can move fast because you can actually do something besides pop in and out of cover

the suspense and decision-making involved with venturing into the land and not knowing for certain whether or not my heroes / cities will survive against the dangerous monsters originally, the quests/narrative added some level of interest but that went away once the quests were just repeats of what I had seen in earlier playthroughs

hope there's more asymmetry than the current elemental games have. the 4X model of starting with similar stuff and then racing towards victory just doesn't work when the AI needs massive cheats just to stay in the race more emphasis on magic / rpg-things / monsters would be better than some empire-building which the AI can't do

sonic racing, hearthstone, and scrolls really stand out devil may cry was great fun for a few hours shadow warrior, legendary heroes, heart of the swarm, and xcom were okay, but are either not polished enough or not much better than predecessors

I don't think I want the ability to micromanage individual planets' focus, because I will end up doing it all the time to make things finish 1 turn quicker (either local production or global research). Because everything will be useless until it's 100% completed, it will always be optimal to avoid spillover (even if there is carry-over). This micromanagement moves the focus away from strategy and towards time-consuming tasks. I th

galciv actually has decision-making... you can't number-crunch a decision-tree (exponentially-hard problem) I fully expect a non-cheating AI to lose simply because it won't figure out how to balance economy, military, and technology that doesn't change until the AI is designed by an expert player (or actually learns how to play the game over time, which needs very advanced learning algorithms which probably haven't been invented yet)

the AI doesn't need to cheat anywhere near as much as it does it only does that because the AI is bad and is so far away from competent that it uses stuff like 100% bonuses on everything just to compete with decent humans who are beginning the game

with meld, there's finally a reason not to just spend 1 hour on each mission by advancing slowly they didn't fix anything else though :( the balance is still horrible. satellites pay for themselves way too soon. research requires 0 adaptation it seems like no matter what you do, there's just a simple recipe to playing optimally that you follow every game the game just needs a more realistic choice between

sounds like another EA/Bethesda who are using Frostbite/idtech in many of their upcoming games It's nice to see attempts to do something similar for strategy games. We'll see how it ends up the key difference is that id software perfected action gameplay long ago. beyond graphics, it's just a matter of popularizing some combination of maps + weapons + movement ( respawning + matchmaking for multiplayer) meanwhile, strategy game

has any Steamworks multiplayer ever been good? they sell it to all these devs by namedropping stuff like CS, L4D, TF2, etc. but all those games use servers then when the games that actually use steamworks come out, the networking is complete garbage (eg. civ 5, aoe 2 HD)

it'll actually create more work as everyone will expect worlds to be bigger and units to be more detailed... developers will run out of budget for important things but more memory is still a good thing :)

try a different genere if you refuse to raise the difficulty, these games aren't designed to make you adapt

looks neat. it's a bit puzzling that something being presented as a fit for strategy or RPG games only solves a problem which would make the games less about strategy or role-playing... it's like saying Total War is a better strategy game if you have to control 10 times as many units in a battle.

civ 5 is a click war civ 4 is a TBS

so much theorycrafting. whether something "works" can't really be judged so abstractly for example, civ4 and civ5 use very similar turn-based methods. but the game design and how the unit control is set up is what really determines whether a system works well enough (civ4 simultaneous turns) or fails miserably (civ5 simultaneous turns) if galciv 3 is anything like galciv 2, i will say that the ultra-competitive games where players really would

the real answer is not to add fake penalties and arbitrary modifiers, but rather to put an AI in the game that actually knows how to punish you for overexpanding

I don't agree that asynchronous multi-month games are "the best way to implement multiplayer" it's just not feasible for most people. it's good for those iPhone games which finish in a few days (e.g. chess with friends), but unless Stardock is making a mobile app for Gal Civ 3 with push notifications, I don't see many people actually finishing games like this. it would just take too long for a single game (many months or even years) [quote who="G

finally multiplayer might actually get some decent opponents for a change. cheating AIs just don't cut it.