CivWorld Gameplay changes: June 13, 2011

[FXS PeteMurray]

Hello CivWorld Beta Players!

The latest Beta version of CivWorld is going live today! Along with bug fixes and stability improvements, the new build also includes the following:

• New Friends Screen.
• Allow Call to Arms and Secret Weapon during battle ramp-up phase.
• Instead of a 2 minute lockout for culture puzzle, you can now get 10 extra swaps for a CivBuck.
• Golden Age payout capped at 10,000 gold.
• Voyage of Discovery bonus capped at 5000 science.
• Minimum of 2 Great People required for mini-wonders.
• Overall gold amount capped at 200,000,000. We should not wrap around to negative numbers any more.
• Current CivBuck amount and daily CivBuck limit numbers are swapped when displayed in the UI.
• Masonry tech required for Closed Borders.
• Closed Borders cause -25% to trade.
• Maximum number of civs increased from 10 to 15.

[spacechampion]

nice set up updates, bravo!

though I think your VOD cap is a little low, would like to see something proprotional to the tech - perhaps 10-25%

[Grzechu]

Cant enter the game... Temporary problems?

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We're sorry. The page you requested cannot be found.

[DanM]

Yay, thanks for updates

[ChrisT]

Cant enter the game... Temporary problems?

404 NOT FOUND

We're sorry. The page you requested cannot be found.

I'm getting the same thing. Are other people getting in?

[sparek]

nice updates

[AlibechM]

Thanks for the updates!

though I think your VOD cap is a little low, would like to see something proprotional to the tech - perhaps 10-25%

Agree with that, techs at the end of the tree are really expensive, so some sort of proportionality will be nice.

[FXS PeteMurray]

In addition to those changes, hotkeys have been re-enabled in the city screen for quick building:

‘h’ -> Build a house
‘r’ -> Build a road
‘m’ -> Move/Recycle
‘g’ -> Build a Garden
‘c’ -> Build a Cornfield
‘o’ -> Build an Orchard
‘p’ -> Build a Pasture

[Glinda]

So, basically, the biggest civ will now win all the time. Makes the game much less interesting.

[stai]

Glinda: I understand how you feel especially when players will choose to hop to the winning big civs at the first opportunity. But how would having small civs win against the big civ be interesting? We all know how the small civs can win before this and to me that's no fun at all. Unless one is part of that winning small civ...

[Glinda]

One person wonders were the only real advantage small civs had, is all.

[stai]

I would sympathize if a player was forced to be in a small civ but it's those that chose to be in a small civ, closing borders to prevent people from joining so that they could utilize the mini wonders knowing that's the way they can beat the big civs that's making me welcome these changes.

[Jimmy058910]

Completely agree Glinda, I knew all the whining would make things so the small civs have 100% no chance at all.

So now the game comes down to picking the best big civ, and there is only so much you can do so you have to hope and prey that the other 40 or whatever members aren't inactive and can contribute.

I shouldn't assume though, going to have to try things out first.

[myemail21479]

They are adding 5 civs, to 15 total. I would like it if civs cap faster than 33%, at maybe 15-20%, with bonus spots if you actually attack someone and win. The 1 game I am in, 2 capped civs and 1 moderate civ are vying for all the power. The third civ makes it more interesting, but I would like having 4-6 civs battling for money, wonders, research, etc, not just 2 or 3 which is what it seems the current format gravitates towards. My game has 7 civs with 1-4 people all fighting each other with legionaries, while the big 3 have tanks and artillery.

[Furiey]

Other changes I have noticed:

Dots by names indicate who's online or recently played. - Nice!
You can no longer build a road not connected to a main road, and roads already built that don't connect will not give road bonuses until connected. - Makes sense
Descriptions of the wonders have been removed. - Why? This must make it very confusing for new/casual players
Tech maze: players from competing civs are shown faded and without revealing the maze around their position.

[Glinda]

The update seems to have messed something up on the GP/culture screen, at least for some people. Effects of wonders are not showing up.

Also, max size civs now have de facto closed borders without the economic penalty.

[Bantams]

still no window expand option or no fix for horses killing tanks = still crap compared with Empires & Allies

[myemail21479]

Horses killing tanks, has been in Civ games forever. Catapults have been known to hold off tanks.

Latest update is slick. There is missing information on wonder page, bonuses no longer listed next to wonder, just blank area.

[DanM]

If the mini-wonders are scaled properly based on civ size (1-10 people = 2 gp, 11-20 people = 3 gp, etc) then the wonder events reward coordination rather than a massive stack of great people. I support that completely! I think having GA and VoD capped will slow the end of the game down considerably... for better or worse

Hopefully Economic Victories at the latter stages of the game are scaled accordingly.

DanM

[NickV]

How do the Golden Age and Voyage of Discovery caps work? Is that the max payout per player or per civ?

[Jimmy058910]

Per player Nick, same as Fertility is capped

[NickV]

these sound like inelegant patches to an inherently broken gameplay mechanic. I say scrap Wonder Events altogether.

[Glinda]

Did this update fix the problem with the Political Minister having no actual effect?

[dkk]

These changes look like a step in the right direction overall, but there are still some glaring issues. The mini-wonder changes stop the problems people have been complaining about, yes, but they don't actually balance the game like they could/should.

New Friends Screen.

Excellent improvement. It could still use some work, but it's much better than before.

Allow Call to Arms and Secret Weapon during battle ramp-up phase.

This will make things interesting...especially with the wonder events STILL cycling.

Instead of a 2 minute lockout for culture puzzle, you can now get 10 extra swaps for a CivBuck.

Why? 10 extra swaps is worthless. It's rarely going to get you more than 250 culture, and the best ways to set that up are still when nobody else is playing. Locking other people out was a unique and creative use of the civbuck, and allowed you to either ramp up the multiplier to get the 125+ culture swaps or set up the 5x double swaps. Using civbucks on almost anything else and then buying the culture on the market is going to work better than the 10 extra swaps.

Golden Age payout capped at 10,000 gold.

OK, so it Golden Age from doing much of anything late game...while stopping almost nothing in the early game. An arbitrary value isn't likely to help balance the game.

Voyage of Discovery bonus capped at 5000 science.

See above. This stops the accumulation of ridiculous amounts of science, yes, but it doesn't scale with the game. This remains a great wonder event for the first half of the tech tree...and then becomes worthless later.

Minimum of 2 Great People required for mini-wonders.

This is good. However, wonder events can still be cycled. That is still a big, BIG problem. It's not that difficult to do - in my current game, I'm in a 9 person civ, so we only need 2 GPs, and three of us have over 10 GPs, so we could burn through a lot of them if we really wanted to.

Overall gold amount capped at 200,000,000. We should not wrap around to negative numbers any more.
Current CivBuck amount and daily CivBuck limit numbers are swapped when displayed in the UI.
Masonry tech required for Closed Borders.
Closed Borders cause -25% to trade.
Maximum number of civs increased from 10 to 15.

All nice changes. The -25% to gold doesn't really do much, as gold is almost pointless to produce, but that's a different balance issue that needs to be addressed.

[Ravi Mendis]

nice set up updates, bravo!

Hey @RockyP i just realised that your username is a play on spacechimp! D'oh!
I watched Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton's) the other day in preparation for the new Rise of The...prequel/movie.

[Mega-Dolphin]

From a user interface perspective, this update has improved the game considerably. The Friends screen is neater, more usable, and just more appealing. I like the rearrangement of the achievements to the throne room (fits better there). I love the activity indicators at the civ screen to show who has been active lately and who has been online. And I like how the Civ button takes you to your civ rather than the last civ selected in the World panel. Now about the chat, we still need chat to remember the last channel the player used.

My only dislike, which has already been mentioned, is the loss of Wonder descriptions at the Wonder construction screen.

[ChrisF]

Making changes to the game is a good idea, as many of us have demonstrated how to abuse features such as the Wonder Events.

However, I was reading the specific changes and comments and wow. I really, really think that somebody needs to go to a basic game design course. Setting hard caps in a game that scales over time obviously makes the events redundant later on, which is poor design.

Small civs were obviously superior until these changes, but it's clear that large civs will now dominate the field. By varying the number of great people required for wonders/events you introduce a scaling factor to bring things into line. However, this scaling factor is missing in many of the other game features. The hard caps on Events, for instance, mean that larger civs gain more. I would say that you have in fact over-compensated for the small civ advantage. The suggestion to set the maximum civ size lower was a sensible one, as it reduces the need for scaling.

I would go back to the drawing board and think about the basic design of a game in which teams of people work together. Do you want to reward efficiency and good play or having a bigger team? Do you want each of the victories to be equally achievable or do you want deliberate asymmetry (but still balance)?

[ChrisF]

I thought I would make some specific suggestions to illustrate my points:

Wonder events are fine, even triggered by one great person, if they do not provide too much benefit. Depending on how you feel they ought to scale with civ size, you could make them +25% of current reserves or +X fixed amount (perhaps divided amongst the players in the civ). Golden Age already does this and was abusable, but that's obviously because gold is the most trivial resource to generate (so trivial it makes merchants a bit useless). This is an altogether different issue.

Wonders themselves, many players find, are unattractive to construct. You build it first and it's cheapest, yes, but how long will you have it for? Who can say. They need to be fixed with a civ for a significant period of time to be useful. Oh and make it clear with an icon - who is getting the medal for completion of the wonder.

Science, well, is directed almost entirely by the age victory requirements, which are predictable. Some advances are amazing, like University or Gunpowder, whilst others you leave until you absolutely have to discover them. Small civs will never ever get past the first page of advances. This is something that scaling could help with.

Battles are quite fun, and there will be less Event cycling with the 2-gp limit, but again, I just don't see how small civs are supposed to compete.

In fact, that's probably the summary of my thinking too much about this game: it does not scale with the number of players or correctly over time. You grow quickly to size 8-10, then you are at your production limit. Science costs increase, the market inflates prices, units cost more to build and the only increase you get is advanced buildings about a 3rd of the way into the game. Small civs get the minor benefit of cheaper wonders and events, but as they are rigged to provide more to larger civs anyway, it's barely an advantage. They produce less of everything, but the absolute costs and victory requirements are the same.

If there's no intention of scaling either of these factors then, well, it's a poor game.

[Sarcerok]

Having spent some time with the new patch, I have some thoughts which should be confirmed in gameplay within a few days. By remedying the closed nation compound interest exploits I (and others) reported previously in the way you did, it suggests to me that you either did not read, or did not understand, my 4 page analysis of the problem I sent you a couple weeks ago.

The remedies introduced in the 6-13-11 patch do stop the aforementioned exploits, at least later in the game, but they slow advancement almost to a halt, leading to player boredom. Games will not complete for the following reasons:

1. Tech advancement will slow so much that not enough tech era advancements will occur. Cost per tech should be adjusted down in the end game.

2. Without tech advancements, not enough wonders will be in play to allow enough cultural era advancements to be achieved.

3. Without Golden Age in the end game, and to a lesser extent due to player inactivity, economic era advancements will not likely occur in the 7 digit range.

4. The % necessary on domination era advancements was already inappropriately steep. Now with lower caps, and more nations, at most only 4 domination era advancements will occur. The game would be a lot more interesting if this was doubled or tripled. Perhaps make the % required go up by 2% per victory instead of 5%.

The last issue is complicated by the fact that older large nations are going to be filled with inactive players unless they were smart enough to pass meritocracy while a vote was still possible. Meritocracy really should be automatic on some level. I realize I am not the first or last to point this out. Thus large really has little to do with combat force. Really I think a domination victory should be granted to ANY nation in ANY battle that defeats an enemy with at least half of their force. Since others can assist defenders, this can be quite challenging.

[Jimmy058910]

I'm in a 9 person civ, so we only need 2 GPs, and three of us have over 10 GPs, so we could burn through a lot of them if we really wanted to.

What are you really going to gain by cycling your over 10 GP? Ultimately nothing with the new changes.

Absolutely love the points that ChrisF and Sarcerok mentioned.

@ChrisF

who is getting the medal for completion of the wonder

Everyone does that contributes a GP.

To be honest, I haven't even played a game with the changes mainly because of what Sarcerok mentioned. I mean, how long are the games going to take now? It's set to 'rabbit' speed (the quickest) but to go through that many eras with these changes seems like every single game will go to 3000+ AD. Especially with the potential to SKIP era wins (as I mentioned in another post).

For example:
Big Civ 1 has 5 Wonders
Big Civ 2 has 4 Wonders
Next cultural victory is at 6 wonders

Big Civ 2 beats Big Civ 1 and ends up with 9 wonders. They win ONE era and set the cultural victory bar up to 10 wonders, effectively flat out skipping 3 era's. Not to mention... no domination victory.

[Bantams]

how long have you been making this again ?

cant even make a good flash in 12 months game kinda says it all rip firaxis

[Sarcerok]

If you are willing to implement caps on Golden Age and Voyage of Discovery, then I have solutions to the problem at hand that I have not previously presented that should work for you. Consider:

Golden Age: Increases each player's gold by 25%, to the limit of 1% of the entire world's gold. Analysis: If everyone had the same gold, each person would have 0.5% of the world's gold. The 1% of world gold cap would only kick in when a player had more than 4% of the world's gold, or eight times the world average. Anyone under eight times the world gold average would get the full 25% increase. In small nations running the closed nation golden age exploit, they quickly acquire 10% or even 20% of the world's gold for each player running the exploit. Thus this cap would increasingly bind them and still benefit everyone else, eliminating the exploit as rising GP costs make the exploit unsustainable.

Voyage of Discovery: Double each player's current research, to a maximum of 10% of the total research required to complete their current tech. Analysis: This allows VoD to scale as the game progresses, and discourages players from attempting to exploit the wonder event by buying up a ton of research prior to VoD then selling it back. I feel this also gives a good balance of benefit to both small and large nations. VoD becomes less powerful especially in the early game, where one VoD previously could lead a nation to at least four tech breakthroughs. The patch did nothing to curb the power of VoD in the early game, but this modification would.

[Glinda]

The patch means the only time to use VoD is early game. Stealing tech is probably a better strategy, though.

[Duncan Colby]

@Sarcerok, These are some great suggestions.

I have stopped playing but can see the potential in the game. Latest patch doesn't do enough to progress the game to make me want to play again. Hopefully suggestions like this and others will be implemented soon.

[илко илиев]

Just finished game 201 .We 3 players need 6 GP for a wonder . If 9 players need also 6 GP for the same wonder ,than is something wrong . The advantage of small civ is the extra harvest from the interior minister .....but harvest is like first 198,24,8,8,8,8,8 so what was the point send this extra 8 production and build before that ginourmos building for over 1000 production ???? Big allyances rule ,althou crazy ppl like me won the last late galactik era by invasion . I was the strongest by army and ended 40th by fame after 6 invasions . Lets count not fame but MEDALS !!!!!!!!!!! As i see it medals are sent randomly btw , i used 2gp a friend use 1 gp ,and he gets the medal and culture minister for the wonder event and i lost titles king and culture minister ))) . I always sent twise the unit size on the battle field but it is not me to get the medal :::: too many strange things here ------500 riflemen killing only 2 infantry,1 simple plane killing 12 tanks,400 tanks killing 3 tanks , wellcomme to Alisa from the wonderland )) ,never seen the bomber,the jet fighter,battlship(just for minutes),modern artilery . Last 3 eras finish in 1 hour ! And how a person have 427 FAME and 0 MEDALS ???? Answer me please !

[DanielR]

I have say that having played the game with the changes, Sarcerok is right. The game does have a stagnation problem after the first page of tech. I was finally on a team where everybody participated in the team, and I can tell you that the game is 10 times more enjoyable.
Here are my suggestions:
All of the Ministers need more power and should be elected.
The war minister needs to be the person who can stay up till 6 am to fight not some random person who pops in at 2 am and beat the barbarians.
All of the ministers abilities need to be similar.
The cultural minister should have the ability to move peoples cards around where he/she sees the most good.
The war minister should be able to shuffle the troops where needed in a combat
The Science minister needs to be able to direct users research. We literally had a problem where a player who was out (darnit why do people need to sleep?) and he had too much tech so that if any of us solved the maze it would throw us way over, but we couldnt sell off our science and solve the maze.
The politcal minister has no point (mentioned before I know)
and really the king has no point He/she should. They should be able to direct a harvest to a key player, maybe change research minister etc. But if you think about it what is really the point of the king?
The combat is almost always in the middle of the night with the 10 hours before the start. Even if we all agree at 8 am the fight wont start until 8 pm and could easily go until 3 or 4 am. Some of us work.
The wonders moving around just ends up being annoying.
The changes where a good start but your game developers should just play the game one round. I cant imagine they wouldnt come to the exact same conclusions everyone has in this forum over and over.

[JingL]

500 riflemen killing only 2 infantry,1 simple plane killing 12 tanks,400 tanks killing 3 tanks
And how a person have 427 FAME and 0 MEDALS ???? Answer me please !

How much units a side lose does not depend on the attacking unit chosen, only on their stances and the overall strength of both sides.

And the guys with no medal but lots of fame point probably just happened to be an inactive player in the winning civ, even being the lord in a consistently winning civ will eventually give enough fame points to be well ahead of others...

[илко илиев]

Thank you Jing ! Never realised that the moving units actually do not have any efect how many units they kill . Respect !