Forum Overview :: Civilization 4

Thoughts on Civ 5: BNW by pinback 07/21/2013, 9:08pm PDT Brad Wardell spoke once on the 4x issue of "squishiness" of 4x games versus clarity and obvious number-crunching. Squishiness was not the term he used, but I can't remember the term he used, so I'll just go with it. It meant, having enough vague options to make it feel like you were really trying to make the best decision, without knowing what was going to happen. With BNW, Civ 5 has added enough stuff to itself to become almost ultimately squishy. There are so many vague choices to make at any one moment that the idea of min-maxing the thing becomes absurd. Of course, there are those who probably min-maxed BNW within hours of its release, as they've done for all previous releases. As for creating an entertaining 4x game, I think Frogboy got it right. There are games where min-maxing is appropriate and even encouraged. StarCraft II is a game, at its heart, concerned with little else than min-maxing. But we have Civ 5: BNW, where at any one time we can choose to upgrade a unit, or enact a tenet suggesting that dedicated scientists only eat half the normal food, or decide whether this great artist should paint the Mona Lisa or instead teach painting classes, churning out culture for years to come, or should you build a church, or maybe adopt a policy where if you did build the church, your army would add a little happiness to your empire. It seems all terribly squishy and vague, and you for a moment can consider yourself a great leader, making the tough choices. But the jaded gamer in you knows that there's a right answer, mathematically speaking, to beat the AI on its current level. Civ 5: BNW throws enough shit at you that you can let yourself travel back to a time where there weren't perfect "beat the computer on Ultimate" strategy walkthroughs within a day of release, if you try hard enough to forget. I miss those times, because as much fun as Civ 5: BNW can be, the magic will always, in some ways, be dead for this sort of thing. Someone min-maxed it already. You know in your heart that the game is already broken. So you either pretend, or go play SC2 and drop the charade. I hate nerds. Now everything sucks.

Thoughts on Civ 5: BNW by pinback 07/21/2013, 9:08pm PDT     Read that as Civ 5: BBW, your post seemed to confirm the impression. Time to by level up to paradox grand strats. 07/22/2013, 3:05am PDT     Enjoying this now by E. L. Koba 10/14/2013, 11:46pm PDT