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Friday Fun Thread for August 16, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Civilization 7 gameplay footage in a few days on August 20th.

I only ever played 6 because I thought these games weren't for me. I tried to backtrack to 5 but never really felt it - I hate going back and playing older games.

Stoked for 7 though.

Civ 4 was peak Civ for me. I miss unit stacking, and the live level editor was excellent as an addition to the sandbox, though I remember Civ 3's world editor just as fondly.

Never really got into 5, and 6, while initially addictive, ended up losing it's lustre when everything took so bloody long.

Something I'd love is having a small local LLM plan actions and personalities for the AI, I suppose it would add too much latency now to be worth it, but I look forward to future strategy games where the AI can be a worthy opponent while having more consistent "character" (say personality goals and agendas other than winning a game), since actual multi-player in Civ takes too damn long and is hard to organize.

Was 4 your first game in the series? No Civ out of 4, 5 and 6 recreated the magic of 2 and its clones and spinoffs (ToT, Freeciv, c-evo) for me, with the obvious theory being imprinting on whatever I experienced first.

3 was the first I played. Loved everything about it except the Global Warming system which would get in the way of me playing a game indefinitely (I never particularly cared about the win conditions or if I nominally lost a match). Couldn't figure out any way to turn it off at the time. I also found the corruption mechanic chafing when it cut down on my sprawling empire and aggressive expansion, I can never really get myself to play tall.

Ck 2 and maybe 3 had an amazing mod that let you play out battles in Total War and then imported the results. Ah, what I'd give for that to be the case for Civ too, with Warhammer 3 you can even pull off the attack helicopters going up against barbarians!

Another thing I wish Civ embraced was more in depth diplomacy. In many regards I wish it was more simulationist instead of the glorified tabletop strategy game it is right now, but I know purists would scream.

Loved everything about it except the Global Warming system

This reminds me that by some standards I have been a global warming denier longer than most people. My best friend and I used to play and laugh at how comically overwrought it was to just have whole tiles going underwater. Like, sure, we can talk about just how much sea levels are or aren't rising, but the notion that during the modern era they're going to just dunk New York City under water always seemed very stupid to me.

Tell me about it. The designers of Civilization, with Ed Beach coming to mind, have specifically said that they refuse to have any in-game solutions to the effects of climate change because it's apparently far too complex a problem in reality for "easy solutions".

A load of horseshit that is, and you're right that anywhere remotely important such as NYC would have a sea-wall put around it posthaste. That's assuming more general geoengineering doesn't work to boot.

SMAC let you geoengineer global cooling and global warming and invest into pressure hulls so that your cities survive while everyone else drowns. It's a pity the balance in the game was so out of whack that ICS with forests was the winning strategy most of the time.