7. SOREN: On your previous note, isn't the problem of worker tedium more about not having enough “interesting decisions” for them? Let's give them two moves a turn (saving a lot of micro) and letting them build more varied stuff, like windmills and watermills.

YIN: Sorry on this one, Soren, but it's still plain old tedium, despite the very welcome addition of an added movement point. Added build options are crucial, of course, to other strategic concerns (Do I chop all my trees now for early growth or do I save some for lumber mills later when I really need the income?), and this is no small thing, but the worker system really needs to go away. About the ONLY thing going for the worker system is the need to protect your workers against attack, but this adds minute strategic value relative to the horrendous micro these units still require. By the late game, I have a dozen or more of these guys sitting idle or cluttering the map, slowing down performance.

And please consider this: The tedium of this approach actually encourages me to put my workers on auto by the mid game, and the results are always mixed. They usually kill all my forests, spam roads everywhere, build things differently from what I would have wanted, and often make the turns go MUCH longer than needed otherwise by watching them run back and forth between Point A and Point B like they were doing wind sprints at a basketball try out. Finally, because cities eventually have nothing very useful to build at certain points (or perhaps there are times you actually want to STOP city growth), these workers become generators of free tile improvements. It's a no brainer to spam these guys like crazy.

Eliminating them will, I believe, encourage players to think more carefully about how to place tile improvements (and these improvements should actually cost gold or nearby city production points!), all the while speeding up the C[entral] P[rocessing] U[unit (CPU)] performance and limiting map clutter.   SCORE: [-1]

8. SOREN: Well, Civics. You gotta give it to me on Civics.

YIN: While I often wonder why all civs wouldn't want the same (or nearly the same) Civics choices ASAP (does slavery really help you later in the game when you have far more productive options?), I do see potential here. On the other hand, Communism creates more food? I understand that you might not be shooting to have CivIV in history classrooms around the world, but let's not ride history's coat tails, either, if you merely want some abstract device for raising and lowering bonuses. Use SimTalk or something, but not real historical names.

Also, it seems like many of the civic choices lose any allure once you discover choices deeper down the tree, which seems to mean that all players (human and A[rtificial] I[ntelligence (AI)) will tend toward similar choices (or chose wrong paths foolishly). True, the fact that you can mix and match these to fit a certain strategy is a move in the right direction, but I think civics needs more work. Part of the problem, really, is that economies of scale begin to make most choices rather meaningless by the end game.   SCORE: [0]

9. SOREN: We introduced "or" gates into the tech tree, which "breathed new life" into it…agree?

YIN: I'm flying by techs so darned quickly that I hardly get to live with them very long before they are obsolete let alone worry too much whether or not I have an "and" vs. an "or" gateway to getting something. If anything, maybe the "or" gate made the tech tree too easy to manipulate? Also, while it's a great thought to give the player "alternative histories" in a Civ game, allowing me to think that artillery is sufficient inspiration for flight, frankly, pushed CivIV too far away from anything historical toward a disengaged feeling of simply running toward some tech goal the easiest way possible.   SCORE: [-1].   ... Previous Page | Next Page...

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