New Civilization game currently at a 51% rating on Steam
(store.steampowered.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (64)
sorted by:
its because all these map-painting games encourage the player to make his country great. thats a mindset the globalists don't want to encourage. hence all the clumsy attempts at anti-snowballing balance, "pushing playing tall as a valid playstyle", and now the whole nation-switching schtick.
While I'm OK if Wide is the optimal/meta approach, I will die on the hill that Tall should be a valid playstyle for these games. I like taking over a couple islands or a section of a content with a choke point and focusing on making my cities glorious a lot more than just conquering everyone. (And, well, if there is a later-game resource that doesn't exist in my area, I guess it's time to make a new colony to get it).
The nation-switching thing is complete garbage though. If I'm playing Civ I want an alt-history thing going, and I want to play as a particular nation not just as a numerical bonus. If all I care about is the numerical bonuses, there's much better 4x games out there (I'd highly recommend Age of Wonders 4) for that.
The concept of building tall is great, but it's really hard to execute in a way that forces the player to choose between tall vs wide.
I though MoO3 had an interesting mechanic where new colonies ran a deficit for a long while before being able to produce a surplus.
Wide play definitely becomes tedious, especially from a colonizing perspective.
If you don't continually pump out Settlers to claim every last square of the map, your AI opponents definitely will.
But most of the cities and territory you claim in the latter 2/3 of the game are irrelevant to your actual victory because it is so resource-intensive to make newer cities productive enough to matter.
For me, this reality alone tends to limit me to the smallest map types (the other is hardware performance) so that the race to colonize every last inch ends quicker.
Tbh that's why Civ has never grabbed me such as other games, and i realize I'm crossing genre here, but I've always been drawn towards small, brutally effective vs the encompassing unstoppable legion as a vision. I will without hesitation make a superstar with support before I make a well rounded and balanced team.
Yes your archers support your melee and calvary on the flanks, meanwhile I have no Frontline infantry and have only built stealth snipers.
Point being, I don't think it's actually THAT hard to balance, homm did it pretty well, the roadblock to tall in Civ imo is that you hit a production ceiling for each city where there's nothing useful left to build.
And I'm not even saying I want an non-military victory from it, I just want to build an as effective but different tall based military. Make it possible to have one awesome city, and I raze every other city I conqour.
Well this game harshly limits your ability to settle new cities to a point where Tall is almost the optimal/meta playstyle for a long chunk of it.
But it shows the problem with the Tall/Wide balance. Anything that might make Tall viable either comes by gutting Wide with harsh restrictions or will also apply to a Wide player anyway and keep the gap alive.