Civ goes hexagonal

[laclongquan]

You are all DAMNED by gods! Damned, I said!

Alpha Centaury and Alien Crossfire is two magnificiences that ever grace the genre turnbased strategy with free design of unit. Civilization series? Bah. wargame? bah. You should install the original and the expansion then leave it alone because once a year you will feel a hunker for good old TBS and you will play them for 2 months straight.

AC to TBS is as Fallout 2 to RPG.
Repent, sinners!

 

[janjetina]

Alpha Centauri grabs hold and won't let go. I've played it before, but decided to give it a go last month. I've finished it five times since then (thank God for the breaks in the academic season). Now I'm trying to play Civ IV with Rise of Mankind mod, which I've already played once. Playing Alpha Centauri puts things in the wrong perspective - it almost seems that Civ IV sucks, as it is inferior to AC in almost every aspect. Lack of zones of control is probably the worst shortcoming, though. It leads to situations where you can have a few naval vessels in and around the city, and it won't matter as the opponent will just make the amphibious assault (with cavalry!!!) on the city like those vessels don't even exist. I hope they will get smart and implement zones of control.
Right now, I rate Alpha Centauri as one of the best 3 games I've played.

 

[kris]

More great things about AC.

- Elevation.
- Unit automation (much more extensive than other games). You could send your ship to seek out enemies, only to build roads and so on.
- different approaches.
- factions play differently. (in Civ4 it hardly matters who you play)

 

[catfood]

As far as I know elevation influences the attack strength of units (units attacking uphill recieve a penalty) and moves (units going downhill move slightly faster. And the winds on the planet blow from west to east (I think) so the western slope of the mountain will be more humid thus more suitable for farming than the eastern one, or something along those lines.

 

[laclongquan]

If you station a fleet of super formers around a particularly well defended base, and lower the area, it will lose a huge portion of population in exchange for a quick build of pressure dome, therefore lower defensive capability. Or vice versa, when your build up the base so it change from a sea base to a single-land base, therefore reduce the invasion threats (landbase mean you can only invade with amphibious troops).

A borehole in the foot of mountains can greatly influence the rainfall of that area, making farms a good source of food. A forest user doesnt need that trick, though.

 

[Gondolin]

As far as I know elevation influences the attack strength of units (units attacking uphill recieve a penalty) and moves (units going downhill move slightly faster. And the winds on the planet blow from west to east (I think) so the western slope of the mountain will be more humid thus more suitable for farming than the eastern one, or something along those lines.

The humid slope is opposite to the wind direction. If the wind blows from the east, the eastern slope is dry and the western slope gets all the moisture.

 

[catfood]

Yeah, I knew I got something wrong.

 

[Gondolin]

SMAC lore and world were heavily inspired by Heinlein and Clarke so go figure

And it also has a unit constructor. If you like that in MoO2 - here it is done far better.
And there are no units that can become outdated (only their weapons). Even a mere infantry has a big bonus during sieges and later do drops right into the enemy city from sky (or space provided you have that one secret project)

Secret projects have cool videos, stolen from some art-house movie

There is one thing to dislike though. On the proper difficulty you are given only 300 years (read 300 moves) to play the game (compared to 400 on lower difficulties). So it makes it impossible to win the game via a world domination unless you play on a small map and who will want that. Arghh

The Mind Worms, at the very least, are Frank Herbert's.

 

[Tails]

Every time someone mentions Alpha Centauri, I feel strong need to play it.

 

[someone else]

So did anyone improve the AI for AC? The AI (or lack of) makes it no fun.

 

[laclongquan]

Transcendence difficulty? With aggressive AI turn on, and pods only around landing area?

 

[MetalCraze]

AI is there and it's OK.
Could be better but alas. And there are no mods because the game is completely unmoddable

 

[Trash]

Spamming Planet Busters and unleashing the apocalypse is one of my favourite memories of playing AC. You could do some seriously fucked up stuff in that game if your sick little mind felt like it.

 

[MaskedMartyr]

AI is there and it's OK.
Could be better but alas. And there are no mods because the game is completely unmoddable

Not exactly, theres one big conversion mod on Apolyton somewhere, I'll find the link tomorrow morning.

 

[OSK]

Awesome shit.

Hexagons are awesome.

One unit per tile gets rid of SoD's and makes combat more tactical, which is awesome.

No more tech trading is awesome. Instead, you can cooperate with another civ and you'll both get the tech.

Civ V is shaping up to be awesome.

Awesome.

 

[Kos_Koa]

So far everything I've heard about Civ 5 sounds great, it wasn't something I expected.

Some more info here.

- a whole new concept: "social policies". this comes directly from John Shafer:
You can "plan" your Civ now. Similar to the tech tree (i guess) there will be a "Civilization tree". You can choose which part you want to go and get several bonusses by this. You can either go deep into one branch of the tree or you follow several branches.

The only reason I had Civ 4 installed on my computer longer than a week was the FFH mod, but Civ 5 may actually be decent without being modded.

Dare I say, Civ 5 may be good for what it is.

 

[Firewrks]

This Jon Shafer was co-lead designer of BTS, which added loads of great features and was easily the best expansion in civ history. It got me into the game again as I was all but over it. And so far I'm psyched on pretty much all his decisions for V. ptimism:

 

[L'ennui]

ptimism:

 

[1eyedking]

ptimism:

Joined: 12 Jan 2010

 

[Damned Registrations]

No tech trading sounds great. Always pissed me off that the best strat in Civ was to research a few obscure useless techs, then trade them for techs you don't have, and trade away every tech you had to everyone with even a tiny bit of gold. Tech advantage was impossible to maintain because once one guy had it he'd trade it away for next to nothing.

The wonders could use a bit of a change too: making it so the first civ to start building it is the only one would be better imo. Emphasizes the importance of the tech required for it over having a big wonder churning resource city.

 

[Panthera]

Tech Trading never really made sense. It's not like it's the idea of the technology that costs money to develop, it's implementing it in a useful fashion in your civilization as a whole. You can't just sign a treaty for no additional cost and suddenly everyone in your civilizations has computers.

 

[Muty]

http://ie.pc.ign.com/articles/107/1074732p1.html

The game has obviously also been influenced by Civilization Revolution for the consoles, particularly in terms of the overall interface.

It's all an attempt to make the game more accessible without compromising on the depth or details.

:codexrage:

 

[laclongquan]

Tech Trading never really made sense. It's not like it's the idea of the technology that costs money to develop, it's implementing it in a useful fashion in your civilization as a whole. You can't just sign a treaty for no additional cost and suddenly everyone in your civilizations has computers.

Agreed. You can't just send some scientific papers with "How to Build Laser Rifles for Dummies" written on it, then expect the other nation to magically start pumping out armies of laser infantry. You need to acquire proper supply chains for necessary materials, then re-tool production and test the new tech to iron out any bugs, ect.

You substitute "How to Build Laser Rifles for Dummies" with "How to Make AK for Dummies" and you dont find it objectionable at all. Is there any country that has no capacity to make/build AK these days?

Dont forget they are members of a spacefaring Earth. Laser tech for them is about AK for us.

But yeah, if tech transference is as easy as that, USSR would have caught upto USA long time ago.......

 

[.Sigurd]

The trailer! The trailer! OMG IT'S HEAVEN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYFQRd1sY5E

 

[Hoaxmetal]

The trailer! The trailer! OMG IT'S HEAVEN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYFQRd1sY5E

Cinematic trailer, doesn't mean anything, really.