This may surprise some of you, since Civ5 got mostly positive reviews when it launched. I can only assume that those reviewers played very little of the game, and/or mostly hadn't played earlier installments of the series.
I really disliked Civ 5:
- I disliked the 1 unit per tile micromanagement of units, which reminded me of nothing so much as an Avalon Hill board game, and added a whole 'nother layer of tedious unit micro which Civ, already a game filled with fiddly micromanagement, truly did not need;
- I disliked that the game's AI just randomly did shit for no apparent reason, making it impossible to predict or plan for their behaviour, and reducing diplomacy to a complete waste of time;
- I liked the idea of the Policies system, but disliked the fact that it gave you no tools to change course if your earlier choices ceased to be relevant; in the world of Civ5, civilizations apparently didn't change or evolve over time at all;
- I disliked the fact that a "normal" paced game on a "standard" sized map took the equivalent of a work week to complete, and felt like longer. In fact, I don't think I ever actually finished a game of Civ5; I kept starting new ones, playing for a few hours, and then wandering away as boredom and frustration gradually mounted. I finally uninstalled the game.
I don't know why I was thinking about this today, but I found myself Googling Civ 5 for some reason, and discovered that I was not alone in my criticisms of the game; interestingly, Jon Schafer, who was Civ 5's lead designer, agrees with almost all of these criticisms, and posted about it at length in an effort to convince potential Kickstarter backers that his new game won't suck as badly as his last game did.
Among the Civ5 design choices that Schafer now admits were sub-par? The game's resource model:
One of the big changes I made to Civ 5 on the economic front was the shift from resources being "boolean" (where you either have them or you don't) to "quantified," where you can have zero of a single resource type, or two of it, or maybe eighteen. I still feel that making them quantified was a solid design decision, but for a variety of reasons the execution wasn't everything I wanted it to be.
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In Civ 5, players ended up with easy access to a bit of every resource and there was almost no reason to trade. In the real world, swapping goods is worthwhile because of the effects of supply and demand. In Civ 5 there was almost no demand since you could be virtually self-sufficient. This will be completely different in ATG, where the threat of critical shortages will always be right around the corner, and bringing in much-needed resources via trade might very well be necessary for survival.
My removal of the health system in Civ 5 also had repercussions elsewhere. This greatly reduced the value of non-strategic resources (like wheat), and in retrospect it's clear that I didn't manage to fill that void with something else. ATG has far fewer resource types than Civ 5, but the ones which do exist are all very important. The map is absolutely vital in a 4X game, and that needs to be the case for everything on it as well. If you see something on a tile and think it's not a big deal, that is a flaw that needs to be fixed.... the game's economic system:
My intention with the global happiness mechanic was to make it possible for smaller empires to compete with much larger ones. The problem was that a global metric butts heads with the natural cadence of the entire genre. I mean, the second X in 4X stands for "expansion" for crying out loud! I lost sight of this as I pursued other objectives.
The problem was that happiness strongly encouraged you to stay small and the penalties for not obliging with this demand were quite harsh. It was virtually impossible to build the large, sprawling empires which had always been a feature in the series and served as the entire point playing for many people. I still believe that there are ways to make smaller empires viable, but it shouldn't come at the expense of those who enjoy expanding. Penalties should be challenges to overcome, not an insurmountable wall to be frustrated by.
[ed. Yes! Challenges and obstructions are not the same thing, people.]
My removal of the research/commerce/culture sliders also came with positives and negatives. I've always found fiddling with sliders in strategy games to be boring busywork, and in that sense I don't miss them. But the sliders also had a hidden value that I didn't realize until later - they gave players the ability to shift directions at any time.
I've written at length about the importance of adaptation in strategy games. Unfortunately, once the sliders were gone players were basically permanently locked into their past economic choices. There was no way to sacrifice research in order to upgrade your army, for example. Rewarding long-term planning is certainly a worthy endeavor, but you still need to provide tools to allow players to change course when necessary.... and, of course, the combat system:
By far the most significant change I made with Civ 5 was to way in which wars were fought. Instead of large stacks of units crashing into one another as had always been the case in the previous Civ games, there was now 1UPT (one unit per tile). This forced players to spread out their armies across the landscape, instead of piling everything into a single tile.
This was a model very much inspired by the old wargame Panzer General. On the whole, I would say that the combat mechanics are indeed better in Civ 5 than in any other entry in the series. But as is the theme of this article, there's a downside to consider as well.
[ed. Wow... that Avalon Hill board game comparison was more apt than I realized.]
One of the biggest challenges unearthed by 1UPT was writing a competent combat AI. I wasn't the one who developed this particular AI subsystem, and the member of the team who was tasked with this did a great job of making lemonade out of the design lemons I'd given him. Needless to say, programming an AI which can effectively maneuver dozens of units around in extremely tactically-confined spaces is incredibly difficult.
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What made Panzer General fun was you blitzkrieg-ing through Europe while your enemies quickly and dramatically fell before your might. However, in a Civ game, the AI has to be capable of launching full-scale invasions, sometimes on different landmasses. Needless to say, we're talking about a challenge on completely different scale.
Speaking of scale, another significant issue with 1UPT was that the maps wasn't really suited for it. The joy of Panzer General was pulling off clever maneuvers and secretly encircling your helpless enemies. Unfortunately, in Civ 5 nasty bottlenecks aren't uncommon and this tempers much of the natural value added by 1UPT. Ultimately, there just wasn't enough room to do the fun part.
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Speculation aside, the reality was that the congestion caused by 1UPT also impacted other parts of the game. In every prior Civ title it was no problem to have ten, fifty or even a thousand units under your control. Sure, larger numbers meant more to manage, but hotkeys and UI conveniences could alleviate much of the problem. But in Civ 5, every unit needed its own tile, and that meant the map filled up pretty quickly.In short, almost everything that I hated about Civ 5 is something that the game's lead designer now admits is indeed a flaw, and that mostly originate from design decisions for which he now takes complete responsibility. And you know what? I can respect that.
To address this, I slowed the rate of production, which in turn led to more waiting around for buckets to fill up. For pacing reasons, in the early game I might have wanted players to be training new units every 4 turns. But this was impossible, because the map would have then become covered in Warriors by the end of the classical era. And once the map fills up too much, even warfare stops being fun.
This was one of the most frustrating things about my D3 experience: that Blizzard were utterly incapable of admitting that they'd gotten it wrong. This is why I'm not excited about the prospect of more Diablo titles; Blizzard still thinks they nailed it, which means that they're most likely going to keep all of the shit in the next game, too. Much like Firaxis did, when they made Civilizations VI, which basically just adds even more complications and bullshit to Civ5, but doesn't fix any of its issues. Civ6, in case you're wondering, was worse received than Civ5, netting both a lower metascore and a lower user score than its predecessor. I haven't played Civ6 at all, either; Civ5 left such a bad taste in my mouth that I want nothing further to do with the franchise.
So, will I be checking out Jon Schafer's new game, At The Gates? Well... to be honest, probably not. The brutal reality is that Schafer is best known for Civ 5, a game which I hated, and which is apparently so poorly regarded by "real" fans of 4X games that its Kickstarter pitch literally says "ATG is in no way Civ 5" [all emphasis Schafer's] ... a sentiment which he expresses multiples times throughout his posted comments. I'm glad that he's able to admit his mistakes and learn from them, but I'd be lying if I expressed any confidence in his ability to get it right next time.
Actually, now that I think about it, I haven't played any 4X games lately... which is depressing as hell, because I used to love them.
At The Gates is in the works, regardless, though... its Kickstarter raised $106,283 of its $40,000 goal.
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