Re: (TFT) Dwarven economy (was: Re: TFT Digest V4 #253)

[Joel BoardgameRpger <joel.siragher@gmail.com>]

I buy board games used or on sale. I have too too many. I actually broke
down and bought Civ boardgame (Nov 2010) NEW FULL retail at Barne$ and
Noble$. Why? Just impatient.

I was not unhappy opening and leafing through it. But, then  I couldnt
figure out how to play so I put the game on the shelve, and waited for
Boardgamegeek.com to come up with some online tutorials.

Last year I looked again and got something out of the VID tutorials but not
the full feel for the rules. It wasnt untill late april that I finally got
to play at Gamedays weekend in towson Md.

I completely agree with your FAIL assessment of Civ V and I and still
confounded by the rules and the positioning of the game. Im not sure what
they are trying to do, or what they are trying for, but CIV V certainly
isnt 'my' CIV, nor my fathers Civ (1915-2006)
Civ 3 was the 'it' game for me, but Civ 4 was very close. They could have
done a better job on multiplayer with C4, and i would have played on line
more.  Civ2 really was priceless 'just one more thing i have to do' time
stealer.  And of course I usually made the same dumb mistakes.

I guess I just really need to read the C5 manual. there just so many things
to do yard work. preparing for my TFT campaign, cooking.

I remember Titan. I have an unpunched AH at home.  It was republished
recently. And, Flopped. Unfortunatley.

I also have blue screens of DEATH. I dont even know why for sure, but its
happening more frequently. It might be the rat crap windows drivers. It
happens frequently under firefox.

Oh well. I might try CIV 5 again.

We played Civ board game last night, but not to completion.

Cheers :D


On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 1:10 PM, Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Joel
>
> I was curious about that one.
> It's like a John Waters production a movie of a broadway show of a movie.
> I recently broke down and got Civ V and Civ Revolutions but the price point
> on the board game has kept me from lookin.
> I was trying to put my finger on why I felt Civ V was a  fail (IMO) and
> babbled this.
>
>
> Okay, so I'm one of those old farts that have been playing Civilization
> since about a decade before Civ I came out.
>
> Needless to say that Civilization 1 was not what I was expecting but I got
> over that really quickly.
>
> Civilization II was... well, I guess you just had to be there to see it.
>
> Ever since the Civ II era I've met each new iteration of the series with
> growing trepidation and each new game, or major expansion, took a bit
> longer than the last to b grow on meb .
>
> I don't mean to imply I'm some kind of expert as I've never gotten massive
> scores, beat deity difficulty, or played much multi-player, but I have
> played through the scenarios and mods quite a bit and I've been using
> Civilization as a kind of campaign manager for other smaller scale games
> like war-games and RPG's since Civ II which has me messing with all the
> older versions from time to time, depending on which flavor best fits what
> I'm trying to do.
>
> Up until about a year or so ago I was mostly able to do some semblance of
> what I wanted using the editing tools that exist but the more I tinkered
> with things the more I started thinking about mod ideas of my own until I
> finally grabbed Python and started reading a few tutorials.
>
> I had already put off Civ V for some time owing to my machine coming closer
> to the minimum requirements rather than the recommended.
>
> In the interim I picked up Civilization Revolutions on my i-touch (that I
> need reading glasses to see further reenforcing my crotchity old manizm)
> and even bothered with whatever that CivWorld thing is over on the
> Faebookakie.
>
> I finally got to Civ V a couple of weeks ago after upgrading my primary
> machine a couple of months ago.
>
> So... yeeaaaahhh.
>
> After form filling for my new relationship with Steam and then some
> technical issues including a return to the old 'blue screen of death' days
> I managed a few starts.
>
> I was having a hard time liking this one.
>
> Still, I had said this before and had not even finished a game yet so I
> messed around some more and ended up winning a couple of times by reverting
> to a Civ III like strategy.
>
> There were a couple of interesting bits, and some oddness as well, but
> overall I just wasn't digging it.
>
> With the others there was always something niggiling at me to try something
> else next game, but I wasn't getting that with the vanilla Civilization V.
>
> This really bothered me.
>
> At this point in my experience I'm usually hooked, either just loving the
> thing or cursing it while trying to learn the new approaches, but with Civ
> V I was finding myself getting up for a cup of coffee and getting wrapped
> up with chores in the kitchen for an hour or so before remembering the game
> was still running.
>
> Was it the game, or was it me?
>
> After putting it aside for a few days I decided to look back at my roots
> for an answer.
>
> Way back in the day, before all these new fangled computer-thingies, we
> used to have to play our games on tabletops with components and real people
> together in a room in somebody's cave (still complaints about the AI).
>
> I already mentioned that we played a board-game called Civilization by the
> lickering light of our smoky fires.
>
> Another game that came out about the same time during the stone age was
> alled Titan.
>
> Titan was interesting in that it used stacks of units moving over tiles
> on  main-board.
>
> A major part of the strategy involved when to split stacks.
>
> When stacks engaged then the combat was shifted to a smaller-scaled board
> hat represented the terrain of the tile the combat was occurring in
> asically making combats something of a mini-game or second game within the
> larger strategic board and movement.
>
> What Civ V does with the one unit per tile concept is effectively what
> ttan did with combat, it solves the stack issues by a drop in scale that
> deploys each unit in the stack to individual tiles.
>
> But Civ V fails to swap maps/scales between strategic movement and
> tactical combat and tries to play both games on a single map.
>
> I realize that the scale of a given tile has always been abstract for
> flexibility purposes but Civ V abuses that flexibility to the point of
> breaking suspension of disbelief for me.
>
> It seems the world record for an arrow flight is just under 500m.
>
> That's not clout shooting for any kind of accuracy, just simple distance.
>
> In one of the smaller-scale scenarios in Civ IV, the American Revolution,
> a tile works out to something roughly over 40 miles across.
>
> At about 1600 meters per mile Civilization V can't slap down enough hexes
> to handle the American Revolution with just 128 by 80 tiles available max.
>
> At 250 meters across a tile, allowing a max bow shot of 500m, 128 tiles is
> only 20 miles, half the distance across an American Revolution tile in Civ
> IV (80 tiles is 12.5 miles).
>
> This gets much worse if one breaks things down to b effective rangeb
> rather than world record distance shots.
>
> This alone is sufficient to break Civ V as any kind of 'campaign manager'
> like I use previous Civ's for.
>
> One unit per tile, missile fire ranges, zoc's... it all implies MUCH
> smaller scales than I need to handle entire planets.
>
> A return of religion and espionage can't fix that.
>
> I'd be interested if I can use Civ V for smaller-scale tactical maps but
> the little I've looked at the SDK makes me think that dropping units from
> the almost unlimited combos available under Civ IV onto a Civ V map may be
> more trouble than it'd be worth.
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