that I was too lazy to buy a new game when the state of clockwork empires had turned me away from playing.
Yeah, I just don't know how much after launch before the Mac version will be released. I have about 20 games in my steam wish list that I have some interest in, but I refrained from pulling the trigger.
So...am I the only one who intends to play both Civ VI and CE both? I mean, I've been playing Civ V and GalCiv3 too this whole time.
Oh I expect to play both... But I have a limited amount of gaming time that I must allocate appropriately. I have been fairly exclusive with clockwork empires though
In other related news dominions 4 just went on sale on steam for 60% off... So I will be knocking one of my wish list items off soon
The point of my initial post is that I am glad I didn't lose faith in gaslamp. I have a clear pattern of diving into games head first and living and breathing them until... I don't. The recent changes in Clockwork Empires seemed like they could knock me out of orbit... But they did not.
If Civ 6 ends up being anything like Civ 5, then you be able to play it..... forget about it after 48 hours and continue to play CWE and completely forget all about Civ and its progressively lazier way of handling AI difficulty with each game in the series to such rule breaking extremes that they don't even attempt to pretend it's anything but just throwing game mechanic rules out the window and going "Fuck it" any more.
It really is, with 4x games, very hard to find one that has genuinely challenging AI that equates to being more than just increasingly ridiculous bonuses (boni?).
Indeed, when Civ 5 got to the point where I was playing on just above average difficulty and all the AI nations were operating along the lines of -500 gold reserves and incomes of -60 gold per turn yet fielding stupidly huge armies and dozens of cities filled with buildings they were able to keep going through magic, I just had enough at how sloppy it was all being held together. If Firaxis or any other developer for that matter can't be bothered to come up with mechanics that work in and of themselves and present the player challenge through them, then I can't be bothered to play their game. Whilst I did enjoy it, their XCOM reboot to some degree had similar issues. A lot of really hacky shit going on there with how they were handling alien spawn locations and line of fire detection (The sequel has even more rule breaking goings on sadly). Where every now and then it would throw out something that made absolutely no sense and made it obvious how haphazardly things were duct taped together. Most obvious example I came across was searching a area of an squad of aliens. The spawning behaviour places them in a location for a certain number of turns and if you don't find them in that period then it will magically teleport them to another spot on the map and repeat that loop until a encounter happens. In this one situation I was exploring a building and searched it all to find it was empty, moved my 2 man scout group out of the building and ended my turn. The spawn behaviour for the undiscovered aliens kicked in on their next turn, teleported them into inside the building I had just scouted completely, they stumbled out triggered their "Free movement to cover" trigger and as it then continued to be their turn they then had open season on my ass. Even more annoying is the thought that some developer somewhere who came up with that idea is nodding and going "Exactly! That's X-Com!".... when it really isn't. X-com was about having the odds against you against superior enemy, they'd hit harder, hit easier, cover ground faster and have you outnumbered until you turned their tech against them slowly but surely... it was never all that much about silly piddly rule breaking mechanics that forced unavoidable loss on the player for things they could have done nothing about.... and as said the sequel was even worse for it, yet even more offensively they tried to balance the rule breaking attributes of the AI by adding player-beneficial rule breaking behaviour as well if your losses or misses stacked up. When they got to the point of adding hack-arounds to aid the player to balance out the hack-rounds introduced as the foundation of challenge to the AI, you'd think someone would have stopped everyone and said "Look, this is just silly now". But they didn't. *shrug* Wish more developers in the 4x/strategy genres would warm up to the idea of properly tackling challenge properly instead of duct taping bits on and removing which parts of existing behaviours apply to AI to patchwork it all up. </rant>
Aside from the above mentioned "AI" issues, I kinda liked Beyond Earth. I was hoping for more of an Alpha Centauri experience from it, but....eh.
