Early 2015: Unnamed Terrestrial 4X...

[Teal_Blue]

Hmmm.... this looks very, very cool, with AIWar and now TLF doing well, it is good to see a 4X title mentioned. I'm hoping of course for a traditional TBS, but of course there will probably have to be something different to distinguish it as an Arcen title.    But wonderful to see it on the list! 

p.s. But if this is Terrestrial, does that mean, like Rome, Total War? Or Something like Hearts of Iron? Or maybe something with a space theme, but not in space, like maybe StarCraft...  interesting to think about. 

[x4000]

Futuristic, and TBS.  This one is not going to try to span multiple genres, unlike a lot of our games.  Instead it's just going to be our take on the genre, which is so broad there's plenty of room for experimentation anyhow.

And hexes!

[I-KP]

If it doesn't have unit stacking I'm not playing it.  Ever.  Ever-ever.  Civ V messed up so terribly (on many, many levels).

[x4000]

I really loved Civ V, actually -- and it does have some unit stacking.  That said, the unit handling in Civ IV was definitely superior.

At present, however, my plan is for no units at all.  We'll see if I can pull that off during the internal prototype phase, but I have a lot of ideas that I think will be really fun and also streamline some of the sorts of 4X issues that you are basically complaining about.

[Mick]

I, for one, do not miss stacks of doom.

[x4000]

I, for one, do not miss stacks of doom.

It's a problem without an elegant solution, in my opinion.

I'm also tired of having 4x titles with giant people or units standing on top of otherwise-to-scale buildings and terrain.  Not that there's anything wrong with that inherently, I play and enjoy plenty of games that use that and I will continue to do so in the future.  But I'd rather do something a bit different.

[Warpstorm]

I personally wish we would have shipped Civ V with the harsher upkeep we had during the alpha.  Unless your economy was really rocking you had a small army.  People wanted more, so they got more.

I'm really looking forward to a new take on the whole issue.

[Warpstorm]

I'm also tired of having 4x titles with giant people or units standing on top of otherwise-to-scale buildings and terrain.  Not that there's anything wrong with that inherently, I play and enjoy plenty of games that use that and I will continue to do so in the future.  But I'd rather do something a bit different.

You and me both, I keep pushing the designers on the games I've worked on to make a game where the units and buildings are to the same scale.  Maybe someday.

[x4000]

I personally wish we would have shipped Civ V with the harsher upkeep we had during the alpha.  Unless your economy was really rocking you had a small army.

Suddenly the no-stacking makes a WHOLE lot more sense.  This actually would have been a much more fluid and elegant game.  Shame that the majority opinion made this change away from that design, as that does indeed sound superior.  I've gotten to know Jon Shafer, the lead designer of Civ V, pretty well, and I bet he was pretty frustrated by that.  He can't talk about stuff that went on during dev of that game, but he's working on a new game as an indie that I think is really awesome looking.  At The Gates

[I-KP]

Civ V was a design disaster event.  Any 4X that has Archers firing 100 miles and populations that are happier to lose their own cities than to win a war is not worth my time.

As for stacking being a problem, see how Paradox do it; neat, tidy and most of all realistic.

[x4000]

Civ V was a design disaster event.  Any 4X that has Archers firing 100 miles and populations that are happier to lose their own cities than to win a war is not worth my time.

All I know is that it met what I was looking for.  My wife and I had a fun time learning it and playing it, and it had enough complexity that it was interesting to learn how to play and so forth.  We never had a particularly rough time winning on the standard difficulties, but we had pleasant trouble getting specific objectives and personal goals achieved.  That was a lot of fun for a couple of months, and maybe a few dozen hours.  After that it hit a point where it felt too slow and like a new campaign wouldn't really be much different from past ones, so we were done with it.  That was well before we got into issues such as you're describing, and I feel like we got our money's worth for the amount of enjoyment we got.

I'm not saying that negates what you're saying, I can't really comment either way.  But different people are looking for different things, I suppose.

[Mick]

Chris, your evaluation of Civ 5 more or less matches mine.

In regards to 4x in general, I think the "flaw" of the genre I'd love to see solved (and maybe yours will attempt to do so or not), is that you more or less reach a point where you know you have won/lost looooooooooooooooong before the game actually comes to an end. In Civ 5 (and Civ in general), it makes a lot of the cool late game mechanics feel kinda..... pointless. Once you've reached a dominant position over all the other players, your dominance is easy leveraged in order to ensure further dominance all the way through to the end. Your main rivals are not going to do anything (or be capable of doing anything) that will make you suddenly have to rethink your strategy at any point.

[x4000]

Yes, that is a common problem in strategy games in general.  AI War neatly solves that for RTS games, and it's something I aim to do here as well.  By cutting out any PVP play, that's a relatively simpler problem to solve.

[Castruccio]

This is Arcen's most exciting game yet.  If you can do for TBS what AI War did for RTS it's going to be a huge achievement.

[x4000]

We'll see!  It's a long road ahead to make that really happen, so we'll just have to see how it turns out.  I'm excited about the project, but there's a lot of prototyping and so on that needs to happen before I'm going to be singing the song of "this is awesome."