Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
My reaction was "What the frack?"
I think it's a glitch.
So if the camp is on a 1 move point tile and there's another 1 move point tile free, basically, it can be gotten from under you. (Unless the City State has horses I guess, then it's worse.)
That's not what I'm talking about. Check my screeenshots the unit was dead, and I was standing on the tile. Camps don't have hit points only the unit inside.
Yeah that kind of doesn't hold up because when they move into a camp on terrain, nothing happens automatically. It's just like a human player, and they either destroy the camp next turn, or fortify to heal, and very very rarely I've seen them move off it again without destroying it.
So clearly it's a bug, just one I haven't seen before. I trust you when you say it's been around since Clans hit, it's just an edge case I never saw. Thanks.
In Clans Mode you need to choose whether to raid (for gold, but leave intact) or disperse (destroy) the camp, using a unit's turn. Which means you choose that the turn after you move the unit onto it, if you don't have enough move points left.
I have played without the clan mode turned on a fair amount, with plenty of opportunity to observe this if it is possible with standard barb camps, have never seen it under those circumstances, so I assume it only happens with clans turned on. Please correct me if that's wrong, if it does happen under non-clan conditions.
This falls into a pattern whereby late add-on features like the modes and these recent monthly challenges, are just not carefully play-tested to the same extent as the base game and its standard features, which are more extensively checked for unintended game behavior. Camps in clan mode may look a lot like standard camps, but their behavior is quite different, specifically in the fact that if a non-barb unit moves into a standard camp it is immediately and automatically eliminated, while civs in clan mode get an opportunity to interact with the camp, and make choices about what happens to the camp after they move into it. They both look like camps to us, but they have to be programmed quite differently, with versus without the mode turned on. The devs got right all the details of how to make the different behavior work as intended when it's some civ's unit that moves in, but, it seems they didn't pay sufficient attention to this case of what happens when a CS unit moves in. This sort of oversight is caught in play-testing, not enough of which seems to have happened here.
The devs probably didn't intend to have monopolies mode break the game either, by making tourism victory too easy, and that's just a higher order example of the same pattern. They gave us fair warning that the modes introduced mechanics that were not fully play-tested by calling them "modes" and making them something you can switch on or off independently of each other, rather than expansions of the standard game.
Could the game modes work better? Yeah, of course. I don't really consider them any more broken than the rest of the game though. They have their place and the problems with each one can be mitigated. I play with Clans, Secret Societies, and Heroes in almost every game, and will continue to do so.
You could say that the whole damned game is broken because it doesn't have an AI that can give an experienced player a challenge unless the AI is given huge bonuses. At the other extreme of opinion, you could say the game is broken because it's so complex that people need several play-throughs to get competent at it -- despite the AI being so broken!
Broken or not from some standpoint or other, this sort of deficiency is clearly inherent in a game with this game's ambition. It's got be too complicated to be at all comfortable for beginners because only complexity allows the creation of the critical trade-off decisions you need to make a strategy game worth playing. At the other extreme, I doubt that an AI could be developed with any level of effort that could give an experienced human player a challenge without giving the AI bonuses, but I am sure it couldn't be done without a level of effort that can't reasonably be expected of Firaxis. Chess took a huge project over decades to get AI that could beat the best humans without requiring a supercomputer, and Civ is clearly more of a challenge in that respect. This kind of broken is what you have to accept to play a good strategy game.
The next level of broken you could identify is the failure of the game to do things well that aren't its core mission. The game actually is a simulation of reality, but inherently, unavoidably, in its detailed implementation it fails spectacularly to hew close at all to real life. It just strives to be, overall and from 30,000 feet, connected enough to quasi-realistic mechanics that it gives the player some intuitive grasp of what to do that is likely to work. If a close simulation is what you want, go play Gary Grigsby's War in the East (not that even that game does a good job of simulating things like the opposing economies of the combatants, things outside its scope), or some other game of equally limited scope. If you want to play a god game like Civ, well, you and I and the devs are none of us gods, so the game is again going to be inherently broken from the standpoint of letting us have godly sway over a universe that models reality at all closely.
The next level of broken arises because the devs are not, indeed, godlike. They have to make a game this complex for it to be a good strategy game, but the complexity of the mechanics makes it impossible to predict all the effects of all their particular design decisions. You have to have play-testing to bring out the unintended effects of even a simple game, and this one needs tons and tons of play-testing. An unintended effect that makes the game truly broken, unplayable or not worth playing because it lets in a dominant strategy, is something we should be able to expect the devs would catch and correct because even a bit of play-testing would bring it out. Lesser unintended consequences will slip through to the extent that the play-testing fails to go above and beyond into levels only the obsessive would devote to any game.
Sure, this particular game behavior you document, while surely unintended and therefore present in the game only because the modes didn't get the same obsessive level of play-testing the standard game received, is both so rare in occurrence and so trivial in effect, that -- who cares -- play around it. It's nice to have it brought to attention, and thanks for doing that, because no effect is so trivial or rare that the obsessive compulsive types who love this game will not want to be forewarned so they can play around it effectively.
The standard game seems to my experience to have been more thoroughly play-tested. If it's broken, it's broken in only the intended and unavoidable ways discussed above, without little issues like this one that seem clearly unintended. This behavior is too minor to make clans mode anything close to either unplayable or not worth playing.
The wider issue with all the modes is that, by intention, they have not been brought into the fold of the standard game -- and that not just in that there are these trivial issues that a more through play-testing would have caught and corrected. The AI's programming just hasn't been updated to make even what inherently inadequate use the standard game has the AI make of standard game mechanics. Monopolies is the worst of them in this respect, followed by Heroes, followed by Secret Societies, followed by Clans. The human player gets an extra advantage over the AI with any mode turned on. Not at all a criticism, much less an accusation of "cheating", because any human playing at Prince or above has spotted the AI substantial advantages, and is perfectly entitled to claw back the minor advantage you can get from the fact that the AI was never optimized for the modes.
There is certainly no judgment here, as I use Clans and Societies when I play at Deity as any civ other than Babylon. Even without any additional help, it's arguably cheating just to play as Babylon under any circumstances. Babylon is a kind of broken all its own.