The Civilization (Civ) series has a long and storied history, pioneering a genre (4X games) and serving as an introduction to turn-based strategy games for a large number of folks. The most iteration of the franchise (Civ 5) was not particularly well-received by the community, with many singing its praises, but a large number turned off by the changes to venerable mechanics, as well as the DLC model, and general AI jankiness.
Gods and Kings is the recently released expansion to Civ 5, bringing the return of two subsystems from Civ 4- religion and espionage, along with an assortment of new civilizations. Will it bring the Civ 4 holdouts back into the fold, probably some, but I feel like a lot of the old guard are going to keep going their own way. In my mind, there are a lot of similarities between the Civ 4/5 struggles and the D&D edition wars which raged hot during the switch from D&D 3.5 to D&D 4.0. In both cases, you had a group of designers come in and make mostly beneficial changes to a system which was creaky and in need of an update, changes which a significant percentage of the community rejected due to some poor implementation (in D&D, the Monster Manual ) and nebulous "flavor considerations," as well as a general resistance to change. In this piece, I'm going to wrap a review of Gods and Kings in with a larger exploration of the parallelism between the two edition changes. Join me, won't you?
To begin with, I want to establish that although I prefer Civ 5 to Civ 4, and 4th edition to 3rd (or pathfinder, for that matter), I don't HATE the previous editions. They were a hell of a lot of fun! I would like to acknowledge that, in a lot of ways, I find many aspects of 3rd ed/pathfinder (henceforth, 3e) character creation more engaging than their 4th edition (4e) counterparts, though the same cannot be said about city micromanagement in Civ 4. Both 4e and Civ 5 are not images of mechanical perfection (more on what I mean by this in a moment), but, and this is significant, they FIX MORE PROBLEMS THAN THEY MAKE.
I don't want to draw broad political analogies here, but systems are generally imperfect. There are always funny little edges and perverse incentives and all manner of funniness. Moreover, in the systems being discussed, the systems tended to pick up more and more "stuff" over time, either splatbooks in the case of D&D, or expansions in the case of Civ 4, expansions which varied widely in quality and synergy with the basic machine. Now, I've been throwing around a lot of normative terms here- "quality", "synergy", "perfection." Many of these terms are things that reasonable people can disagree about. However, I feel a good first approximation to the "goodness" of a game system is the degree to which it delivers the core "experience" simply, understandably, and in a way that ensure that there is a wide "space" to explore.
To handle each of the points in turn, a simple system is one in which nothing can be removed without compromising the core experience, or, to put it slightly better, doing things isn't a big fucking production. An understandable system is one in which a naive entrant has a reasonable chance to "move around" in the strategic space. This has a little bit of overlap with simplicity, but not necessarily, as a system can be simple but opaque (see non-party fighting games), or understandable but cluttered (see Risk- it's easy to understand how the rules work, but actually doing things [invading countries] takes a million years). An expansive system (one with a wise "space" is one in which there are many non-degenerate (in the math sense, that is, non-identical) options. The "perfect" system is one in which a new player can do anything that relates to the core experience with a minimum of fuss.
So, how does this relate to the two system switches, and, specifically, to Gods and Kings? 3e was a system which began as fairly simple and understandable, with two major exceptions- the magic system and the feats system. The magic system was a legacy system, which survived basically unchanged from the prior version, with a small addition of specific rules for the making of magic items. The feat system was new, and was intended to expand the strategic space, by offering options for characters to differentiate themselves. The problem with both of these systems is that they naturally tended to accumulate options of widely varying power, especially in relation to other parts of the system, and tended to reduce the strategic space markedly. By the time that the last generation of splatbooks was being released, people had gotten really good at sifting through content, and the power gap between optimized characters and unoptimized characters was uncrossably vast. A new player had no real way of knowing that certain options (melee characters, which were presented as being the "easy option") required much, much, much more time and effort to be comparable to things like SoD wizards, Buff-stacking clerics, etc.
Similarly, Civ4 was plagued (though not to the same degree) by a seemingly broad landscape of economic choices which collapsed down into two real choices, both of which required super-unusual, counter-intuitive play - cottage spam and the specialist economy. Moreover, combat times (units moves at 1 tile/turn) and distances (stack of death) meant that all combat collapsed down into sieges, with field battles being an extreme rarity. Cities were "janky" in that infinite city spam was a solid tactic and, in the early game, lots of resources had to be devoted to city defense, or else a wandering barbarian would come in and ruin all your pretty buildings. Expansions added concepts which both "hit" (great generals) and "missed" (almost all of Beyond the Sword), adding lots of additional rules and concepts all the while. Finally, while the system was, at the lowest level, understandable, mostly due to the fact that the concepts were relatively intuitive, once you got past the lower difficulties, a lot of non-intuitive tactics and tricky micromanagement were required to progress.
Despite their flaws, both systems were enormously popular in certain circles for quite a while. However, as the years marched along, the two systems began to both show their age and stop making money. In both cases, the companies responsible for developing the systems were acquired by larger corporate entities, who wanted more out of the license than the drips and drabs of another expansion/splatbook. Therefore, new editions were released, developed with the aid of modern designers.
The new editions of both systems (4e and Civ5) fixed a number of long standing issues with their respective series (in the case of D&D, caster superiority, in the case of Civ, the shitty combat model and squishiness of cities), in addition to wiping the "opaqueness" slate clean, eliminating years of built up cruft. They were pilloried, however, for certain "game-y" changes to the underlying mechanics- Empire-wide happiness and game-y diplomacy for Civ, changes to the healing model, monsters, and the power system for D&D.
I am sympathetic to these claims, because, to a certain extent, they are "game-y." However, I feel critics miss the point- both systems are incredibly "game-y" at core! In a way, both games are victims of the prior edition's success- certain simplifications and "game-y" elements had been used so much they felt "natural" to people, when, in reality, they are incredibly artificial!
Let's examine D&D at first- the powers system was derived from earlier experiments with characters that could "shoot all day," for example, the warlock. It was designed to use a single "grammar" to handle all characters, rather than having a weird reverse "to-hit" used by one type of player, who used a giant set of "corner case" rules in contrast to everyone else. There was a great deal of "a-bloo-blooing" about everyone being the "same" and about the silliness of people not being able to use their best powers all day (not that there weren't arbitrary, non-intuitive restrictions on the usage rates abilities before) etc. However, critics were right about one thing- the monster math was slightly off. Moreover, some of the legacy mechanics that were held on to (like feats!) were still problematic!
In short, you have a system that fixes a lot of problems while introducing some other things that need to be dealt with. It simplifies, increases understandability, and enlarges the strategic space available, while staying more or less true to the "goal" of the system- the murder hobo pack, killing, stealing, and generally living out power fantasies! However, to long-term players of the series, the increase in simplicity and understandability don't really matter. They're used to the old system, so any change is a net reduction in understandability and simplicity. The enlarging of the strategic space is noticed, but it's counterbalanced by a change to the existing space, they're familiar with a certain landscape, and that landscape has been reduced.
Civilization suffered from the same sort of change, in my mind. The enhancements to the existing series were not easily apparent to someone who was familiar with the old model, while the diminution in others was easy to see. Civ 5 introduced a somewhat janky diplomacy model, and had a couple of rough edges, which Gods and Kings has gone a fair way to either fixing or at least making less apparent. Problems still remain, (see DLC civilizations) but, overall, the experience is much improved. I would recommend this expansion. If you want more detail with less words, see the other post.
Gods and Kings is the recently released expansion to Civ 5, bringing the return of two subsystems from Civ 4- religion and espionage, along with an assortment of new civilizations. Will it bring the Civ 4 holdouts back into the fold, probably some, but I feel like a lot of the old guard are going to keep going their own way. In my mind, there are a lot of similarities between the Civ 4/5 struggles and the D&D edition wars which raged hot during the switch from D&D 3.5 to D&D 4.0. In both cases, you had a group of designers come in and make mostly beneficial changes to a system which was creaky and in need of an update, changes which a significant percentage of the community rejected due to some poor implementation (in D&D, the Monster Manual ) and nebulous "flavor considerations," as well as a general resistance to change. In this piece, I'm going to wrap a review of Gods and Kings in with a larger exploration of the parallelism between the two edition changes. Join me, won't you?
To begin with, I want to establish that although I prefer Civ 5 to Civ 4, and 4th edition to 3rd (or pathfinder, for that matter), I don't HATE the previous editions. They were a hell of a lot of fun! I would like to acknowledge that, in a lot of ways, I find many aspects of 3rd ed/pathfinder (henceforth, 3e) character creation more engaging than their 4th edition (4e) counterparts, though the same cannot be said about city micromanagement in Civ 4. Both 4e and Civ 5 are not images of mechanical perfection (more on what I mean by this in a moment), but, and this is significant, they FIX MORE PROBLEMS THAN THEY MAKE.
I don't want to draw broad political analogies here, but systems are generally imperfect. There are always funny little edges and perverse incentives and all manner of funniness. Moreover, in the systems being discussed, the systems tended to pick up more and more "stuff" over time, either splatbooks in the case of D&D, or expansions in the case of Civ 4, expansions which varied widely in quality and synergy with the basic machine. Now, I've been throwing around a lot of normative terms here- "quality", "synergy", "perfection." Many of these terms are things that reasonable people can disagree about. However, I feel a good first approximation to the "goodness" of a game system is the degree to which it delivers the core "experience" simply, understandably, and in a way that ensure that there is a wide "space" to explore.
To handle each of the points in turn, a simple system is one in which nothing can be removed without compromising the core experience, or, to put it slightly better, doing things isn't a big fucking production. An understandable system is one in which a naive entrant has a reasonable chance to "move around" in the strategic space. This has a little bit of overlap with simplicity, but not necessarily, as a system can be simple but opaque (see non-party fighting games), or understandable but cluttered (see Risk- it's easy to understand how the rules work, but actually doing things [invading countries] takes a million years). An expansive system (one with a wise "space" is one in which there are many non-degenerate (in the math sense, that is, non-identical) options. The "perfect" system is one in which a new player can do anything that relates to the core experience with a minimum of fuss.
So, how does this relate to the two system switches, and, specifically, to Gods and Kings? 3e was a system which began as fairly simple and understandable, with two major exceptions- the magic system and the feats system. The magic system was a legacy system, which survived basically unchanged from the prior version, with a small addition of specific rules for the making of magic items. The feat system was new, and was intended to expand the strategic space, by offering options for characters to differentiate themselves. The problem with both of these systems is that they naturally tended to accumulate options of widely varying power, especially in relation to other parts of the system, and tended to reduce the strategic space markedly. By the time that the last generation of splatbooks was being released, people had gotten really good at sifting through content, and the power gap between optimized characters and unoptimized characters was uncrossably vast. A new player had no real way of knowing that certain options (melee characters, which were presented as being the "easy option") required much, much, much more time and effort to be comparable to things like SoD wizards, Buff-stacking clerics, etc.
Similarly, Civ4 was plagued (though not to the same degree) by a seemingly broad landscape of economic choices which collapsed down into two real choices, both of which required super-unusual, counter-intuitive play - cottage spam and the specialist economy. Moreover, combat times (units moves at 1 tile/turn) and distances (stack of death) meant that all combat collapsed down into sieges, with field battles being an extreme rarity. Cities were "janky" in that infinite city spam was a solid tactic and, in the early game, lots of resources had to be devoted to city defense, or else a wandering barbarian would come in and ruin all your pretty buildings. Expansions added concepts which both "hit" (great generals) and "missed" (almost all of Beyond the Sword), adding lots of additional rules and concepts all the while. Finally, while the system was, at the lowest level, understandable, mostly due to the fact that the concepts were relatively intuitive, once you got past the lower difficulties, a lot of non-intuitive tactics and tricky micromanagement were required to progress.
Despite their flaws, both systems were enormously popular in certain circles for quite a while. However, as the years marched along, the two systems began to both show their age and stop making money. In both cases, the companies responsible for developing the systems were acquired by larger corporate entities, who wanted more out of the license than the drips and drabs of another expansion/splatbook. Therefore, new editions were released, developed with the aid of modern designers.
The new editions of both systems (4e and Civ5) fixed a number of long standing issues with their respective series (in the case of D&D, caster superiority, in the case of Civ, the shitty combat model and squishiness of cities), in addition to wiping the "opaqueness" slate clean, eliminating years of built up cruft. They were pilloried, however, for certain "game-y" changes to the underlying mechanics- Empire-wide happiness and game-y diplomacy for Civ, changes to the healing model, monsters, and the power system for D&D.
I am sympathetic to these claims, because, to a certain extent, they are "game-y." However, I feel critics miss the point- both systems are incredibly "game-y" at core! In a way, both games are victims of the prior edition's success- certain simplifications and "game-y" elements had been used so much they felt "natural" to people, when, in reality, they are incredibly artificial!
Let's examine D&D at first- the powers system was derived from earlier experiments with characters that could "shoot all day," for example, the warlock. It was designed to use a single "grammar" to handle all characters, rather than having a weird reverse "to-hit" used by one type of player, who used a giant set of "corner case" rules in contrast to everyone else. There was a great deal of "a-bloo-blooing" about everyone being the "same" and about the silliness of people not being able to use their best powers all day (not that there weren't arbitrary, non-intuitive restrictions on the usage rates abilities before) etc. However, critics were right about one thing- the monster math was slightly off. Moreover, some of the legacy mechanics that were held on to (like feats!) were still problematic!
In short, you have a system that fixes a lot of problems while introducing some other things that need to be dealt with. It simplifies, increases understandability, and enlarges the strategic space available, while staying more or less true to the "goal" of the system- the murder hobo pack, killing, stealing, and generally living out power fantasies! However, to long-term players of the series, the increase in simplicity and understandability don't really matter. They're used to the old system, so any change is a net reduction in understandability and simplicity. The enlarging of the strategic space is noticed, but it's counterbalanced by a change to the existing space, they're familiar with a certain landscape, and that landscape has been reduced.
Civilization suffered from the same sort of change, in my mind. The enhancements to the existing series were not easily apparent to someone who was familiar with the old model, while the diminution in others was easy to see. Civ 5 introduced a somewhat janky diplomacy model, and had a couple of rough edges, which Gods and Kings has gone a fair way to either fixing or at least making less apparent. Problems still remain, (see DLC civilizations) but, overall, the experience is much improved. I would recommend this expansion. If you want more detail with less words, see the other post.
For people who are super-interested in the mechanical weirdnesses of pathfinder/3.5, this post (not by me) is the place to look, though it is a little bit.... overzealous:
ReplyDeleteHere
I've played far too much Civilization (mostly 2, but also quite a lot of both 4 and 5) and not nearly enough D&D (all 3.5). I definitely like Civ 4 more than Civ 5, and I think I liked D&D 3.5 more than I would 4.0, but my only point of comparison is having read through the big three sourcebooks for 4.0. So I'll focus on Civilization.
ReplyDeleteThere are significant improvements from 4 to 5 in my mind, and you named most of them. The one-unit-per-hex and ranged units system of Civ 5 makes combat markedly more interesting in 5 than the stack-of-doom in Civ 4. Cities being able to defend themselves is an enormous and sensible change. And I am a big fan of the social policy system.
But I would argue that Civ 5 (and D&D 4.0) contract the strategic space, not expand it. In both reboots, the number of decisions players must make and the number of options they have for each decision seem to me to have decreased substantially. I suspect that what you may mean is that they made a larger percentage of the possible strategic options viable, whereas in Civ 4 and D&D 3.5 there were many very poor choices you could make.
I wrote my own review of Civ 5 (mostly comparing it to its predecessor) back when it was first released, and while Gods & Kings changes a few things, I mostly stand by it: http://chadhogg.name/~chad/wordpress/?p=885. All that said, in the past year I've played perhaps 20 games of Civ 5 and 2 of Civ 4. I'll comment more about the expansion on your other post.