Absolutely what he said.......

I'd post more but no need...........

Seconded, the one thing I would dearly love to see is a split between unit and building production in a City. I always end up building a strong economy with almost zero armed forced, then late game, starting up the wargernaught and steam rolling, would be great if you could and had to contend with armies throughout without having to develop your city only during the lull between wars.

I'd prefer the game to have deep gameplay with meaningful choices rather than complexity for the sake of compexity just to keep the player busy. 

Civilization 4 combat wasn't very good. One of the main reasons they made the swich for Civ V was because no one appreciated doom stacks nor how hard it was to kill defensive enemies. Alowing for more specialization and all is good but you dont want to make cheap tactics the only viable ones.

What we need and are discussing is the game being challenging, meaningful, with depth and intelligence to keep us interested and wanting to figure it out while we invest time into it. Please, do not dumb it down!

But at the same time don't make it complicated just for the sake of being complicated. Accessibility and complexity are not mutually exclusive. 

Example: planetary tiles in Stellaris (where putting buildings in appropriate tiles would have sinergies etc). They did not bring much — if any — value to the game, and were just a puzzle game tackled onto the planet management system. They were later replaced by a system that made more sence.

I'm not advocating for pointless complexity simply for the sake of obfuscation or hazing new players. Rather when the devs are considering a feature that would make the game better, don't write it off because it would make the game harder to learn. A lot of the Civilization series was stripped away to make the games easier to learn. Paradox's games, by contrast, never had such a problem.

Idealy I think combat should be more detailed than just "attack". Throughout history smaller armies have defeated larger ones through tactics. Endless space had a simple "card" tactic system which was better than nothing. Crusader Kings 2 actually has a very complex tactic system but it was running behind the scenes and not directly controllable so it just came out to be more like RNG, although it could be indirectly manipulated for strategic advantage. It would be nice to have a system where you can choose *how* your troops attack, and if that makes the game harder to learn, so be it.

While I agree that complex games are fun, it is only logical for developers to target a larger number of potential players in order to get payed for a lot of work. I think Amplitude found a good way so far to make games easy enough to understand, but also challenging in the deeper levels of e.g. combat strategies. A whole other discussion would be how much rng is realistic and necessary or even usefull for such a game. If a good player beats larger armies on a reliable basis by using good tactics it might make the game against AI and new players too easy. On a certain basis rng has to be in a 4x game to make it fun for more than one or two scenarios, again my opinion. :)

A bit of a tangent, but out of curiosity, did you just play Civ V when it was first released or did you play it with both of its expansions? The game improved a LOT with both expansions and is now, in my opinion, the best Civ game yet and is very highly regarded by a lot of people. It might not try as hard to be a historical simulator as Civ IV did but imo is a much smoother, deeper, better balanced and generally more enjoyable gameplay experience. If you came straight from a fully improved Civ IV to base vanilla Civ V and then never touched it again it's not hard to imagine why you didn't like it. It's a huge mistake, imo, to judge any 4X game (or even strategy games in general tbh) on the basis of their initial release. Most get a lot better with time.

Onto the actual topic - depth is extremely important in a 4X game and not something to shy away from, I totally agree, but I think it's more important that this depth is implemented in the right way. Choices need to be meaningful and the game has to not get bogged down in micromanagement that slows the pace of the game to a boring crawl (particularly in the endgame). EUIV is a game I love and have invested many hours into but I have always felt that it fails on quite a basic level to implement systems that are actually meaningful and fun to interact with - instead it just bombards you with a huge over-abundance of game mechanics that by themselves are simplistic and don't really interact with each other. Instead of trying to simulate actual population and economics, for example, it just gives each province a number for "development" that you can spend a fixed amount of points to increase. I'd much rather they worked on making the game make sense from the ground up instead of adding yet another slider/currency that doesn't do much. 

Having a lot of cool systems is great, but quality is far more important than quantity, I suppose is what I'm trying to get at.

I played Civ IV and V both vanilla and with expansions. Civ IV was good even without it's expansions, Civ V was meerly less bad with them. I don't think I should have to buy a dozen DLCs before the game is playable. I liked all of Amplitude's games at launch without needing DLCs to feel like it is a complete game.

I'm not advocating for quantity over quality. I just don't like overly simple systems that are designed to be easy to learn, at any expense to replayability. The goal of selling the most copies of the game means watering it down so the general public finds it easy. It's a strategy game, and I hope it will be one that I find challenging, like Amplitude's other games so far. Civilization was one of my favorite game series growing up and I feel like it was taken from me because it's more profitable to target people with no patience to learn.

Eulogos wrote:

I played Civ IV and V both vanilla and with expansions. Civ IV was good even without it's expansions, Civ V was meerly less bad with them. I don't think I should have to buy a dozen DLCs before the game is playable. I liked all of Amplitude's games at launch without needing DLCs to feel like it is a complete game.

I'm not advocating for quantity over quality. I just don't like overly simple systems that are designed to be easy to learn, at any expense to replayability. The goal of selling the most copies of the game means watering it down so the general public finds it easy. It's a strategy game, and I hope it will be one that I find challenging, like Amplitude's other games so far. Civilization was one of my favorite game series growing up and I feel like it was taken from me because it's more profitable to target people with no patience to learn.

That's true for many series sadly. If you look at games like dragon age or mass effect e.g.. Those got less complex with each new title. I think Amplitude won t give us a game that is not challenging with HK. I think the hardest part for Devs is to make a game accessable for new players and still hard to learn in perfection.

Accessibility is a bad term because it doesn't define what is really being argued over which is learning curve in the game. And Learning curve is a preference player to player just like someone who wants to read a 10 book epic fantasy series versus someone who wants to read one single standalone book. By saying accessibility it feels like we are giving the developers only one option when really its just like anything, they are choosing the general consumer they wish to sell the game to.

To say that a high learning curve game wont be successful is kinda like saying a big epic fantasy book series could never be successful and we all know from proof (especially recently) that this isn't true. 

As a sort of aside on the Civilization critique thats kinda been going on: I feel as though Civilization did a lot to try and stream line decisions for multiplayer. To be honest I don't think there is any reason to make a 4X super stream lined unless there is a situation where the player might be waiting on someone else's decisions otherwise the player may as well take as long as they need. Also I think that Civ very much is happy being the gateway (low learning curve) 4X game which I hope that Human Kind can be very happy taking it further.

sorry for the ramble!

Pipps wrote:

Accessibility is a bad term because it doesn't define what is really being argued over which is learning curve in the game. And Learning curve is a preference player to player just like someone who wants to read a 10 book epic fantasy series versus someone who wants to read one single standalone book. By saying accessibility it feels like we are giving the developers only one option when really its just like anything, they are choosing the general consumer they wish to sell the game to.

To say that a high learning curve game wont be successful is kinda like saying a big epic fantasy book series could never be successful and we all know from proof (especially recently) that this isn't true. 

As a sort of aside on the Civilization critique thats kinda been going on: I feel as though Civilization did a lot to try and stream line decisions for multiplayer. To be honest I don't think there is any reason to make a 4X super stream lined unless there is a situation where the player might be waiting on someone else's decisions otherwise the player may as well take as long as they need. Also I think that Civ very much is happy being the gateway (low learning curve) 4X game which I hope that Human Kind can be very happy taking it further.

sorry for the ramble!

No worries! I think we re not trying to denie that there are different people out there, but the term accessibility rather targets an average. You re right though that real life works differently. ;)