A reddit user has made some really interesting Civ6 pixel art, in a style of a beat-em-up. Have a look at the original reddit thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/pruvri/i_made_pixel_art_versions_of_a_few_characters_in/
Soren Johnson has again published a blog post about the development work in Old World, this time about the end of the game. He describes the thoughts which went into the ambition system, the relationship to a role-playing AI, and how to make each game more dynamic and unique.
An excerpt:
“Of course, one might ask, wouldn’t the player lose if the AI fulfills their ten ambitions first? Well, they would if the AI actually got ambitions, but I knew that would be a mistake. One of the other problems with specialized victory conditions is that because they either measure internal progress (cultural or scientific victory) or something orthogonal to most of the game (religious or even diplomatic victory), an AI victory can come as a sudden surprise. I was sure of one thing above all – a surprise ending to a 20-hour 4X game is not a good ending. Without ambition victories, the AI would clearly be playing a different game from the human, which meant that Old World would be an asymmetrical game. In reality, it just meant that we were admitting that the game was asymmetrical because there is no such thing as a symmetrical 4X game. The genre likes to pretend that it’s symmetrical, like chess or most board games, but a single-player 4X always orbits the human.“
Read the whole blog post here: https://www.designer-notes.com/?p=1748
Discuss his blog post in our forum here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/old-world-designer-notes-11-soren-johnson-on-the-game-end.673707/
Aspyr, who are doing the ports of all Civ games to Mac, are now 25 years old! There is a Steam sale with 85% discount on Civ6, and 75% on Civ: BE, until October 18.
You can find the whole sales overview here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/aspyr25
In addition to this they also have a celebratory give-away: You can win a new gaming PC and 25 Steam keys. You can find all the information about the anniversary and the give-away here: https://aspyr.com/25years
Discuss Aspyr’s birthday in our forum here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/25-years-aspyr-big-discounts-on-civ6-civ-be-and-win-a-new-pc-and-free-games.673705/
The developers of Old World have released a new patch, which includes 14 new events, performance improvements, and other balance changes and bug fixes.
You can find the whole log here: https://mohawkgames.com/2021/10/13/old-world-update-74/
Discuss this patch in our forum here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/old-world-patch-74-october-13.673702/
The “Game Of The Month” is a competition series organized by a very dedicated team here at Civ-fanatics, to bring you each month an exciting game. Play the same initial game as your fellow players, and see if you can beat them!
This month, you will start as Louis XIV of France on Noble level on a standard size oasis map. You have until November 10 to send in your final savegame. You can find all the other details here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/news-botm-222-louis-noble-starts-10-oct.673600/
GOG has currently a sale on various games from Blizzard and Activision. The main item of interest for us Civ-fanatics is the old “Call To Power 2” game, which had “Civilization” scraped from its name due to licensing rights, but is otherwise a very civ-like game and worth a look for fans of old games. “Call To Power 2” is currently discounted to 3.29€.
Otherwise the series of historical city builder starting with Caesar I to IV, Pharao, Zeus and Emperor is on sale as well. These games focus on building up your city in an ancient scenario, and are probably also interesting for some people. The price for these games reanges between 2.79€ and 5.09€.
You can find all these sales here: https://www.gog.com/promo/activision_blizzard_sale .
The “Game Of The Month” is a challenge for every Civ player: Take a pre-set savegame, play your best game, and send in the end result to see if you’re the best Civ-fanatic here!
This time you play as Mvemba a Nzinga of the Kongo on Prince level on a standars size continents map. You have time until November 1 to send in your savegame.
Read all the details here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/news-6otm-120-announcement.673519/
Soren Johnson has published another blog post about the development of Old World, this time discussing diplomacy.
He talks about how the systems in Civ3 and Civ4 were independently flawed: In Civ3 the AIs would simply trade techs with each other no matter what, letting them get ahead of the player. In Civ4, this was fixed, but your best strategy would be to contact the AIs every turn to get whatever you wanted out of them, making the whole interaction feel not very diplomatic. To fix this in Old World, they didn’t incorporate a bargaining table to exchange items, but let instead events take this task, and gave a cost for diplomacy, leading to more careful planing of your diplomacy. The whole blog post is very well worth a read.
An excerpt:
“Fortunately, Old World had a system in place that could do all of those things easily – namely, the event system, which is both inherently unpredictable yet also reactive to the current game state. The event system became more flexible and robust the longer we worked on it, and we already used it for both the tutorial system (teaching you about harvesting the first time your Scout steps onto a neutral resource) and the mission system (every assassination has a small chance of triggering an event which can spin the game off in unpredictable directions). Using events to manage all diplomatic interactions between the human and the AI was perhaps a risky decision – players had gotten so used to the bargaining table that leaving it out could come across as a step backwards – but it would make diplomacy more dynamic and also force us to expand the event system to include more diplomatic triggers, requirements, and effects, which could pay off in the long run for scenarios.”
Read the whole blog post here: https://www.designer-notes.com/?p=1742
Discuss this blog post in our forum here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/old-world-designer-notes-10-soren-johnson-on-diplomacy.673613/