Civilization VII Notes

Rarely do I spend so much time with a game cursing it every step of the way.  Whatever may be going through the heads of the developers of Civilization VII, I dont much care for their choices.  This is not a review of the game, look elsewhere for that.  This is just a list of things I find annoying.  Your mileage may differ.

I do not know if the issues I discuss here are to be considered bugs or features.  

1. It is not clear what the differences are between different versions of this game.  Civilization V vs Civilization VI vs ... why a new version?  What have they learned?  It isnt clear.

2. The cartography is dreadful although colorful.  It is impossible to get a simplified version that shows you an overview, for example.  It is awkward to get to the different versions that do exist.  There ought to be a simple way to cycle through the options.  There ought to be a way to pull back much farther to get a better feel for the comprehensive view.

3. It is tedious and difficult to figure out where your air assets are. 

4. It is tedious to move your air assets from airfield to airfield.

5. Very little thought has been given to organization and scalability of the armed forces.  There are army, navy & air commanders that are supposed to provide some sort of higher level organization but I didn't find them very useful.

6. The issue of where one can found a city is badly documented.

7. The cultural issues between civilizations are shallow.

8. It is very difficult to evaluate who is winning and why.

9. It does not seem to be possible to advance the game without going through endless random details.

10. It does not seem rational how the units move on the board.

11. So I take it all the way through, and without warning, even though I crushed my enemies, I am told I am defeated.  And this after I forebear from nuking everybody.  What a piece of shit this game is. Obviously you dont need much talent to be a major league game designer.

Theory About Why Cities Skylines 2 was Released Before It Was Ready

I have no excuses for playing computer games but it is the best way I know to procrastinate.  And when you have problems that you really can not solve no matter how hard you work, then what could be more appropriate than to dig your own grave a little deeper by wasting time with a game?  

What could it hurt?

So I was excited to get the second version of Cities Skylines, the current leading city simulation game.  I knew from the forums that all was not well in Paradise with CS 2 and they were right.  I really wonder if I can charge Paradox for testing their game for them.  

Here is a short list of what I find annoying and which feels like bugs to me.  This list is not comprehensive, many other people have identified many more problems than what is listed here. In no particular order:

1. Many neighborhoods are plagued with buildings being abandoned for no particular reason that I can see.  You have to go in by hand and bulldoze these buildings or it will lower the property values of the neighborhood.  The abandoned buildings never seem to get recycled on their own that I can tell.

2. It would not be possible to survive the first 15 or 20 levels of the game without extensive government subsidies.  Things are just too expensive until, suddenly, you are profitable.  But even then things are not all well because profitability seems to fluctuate wildly.

3. There never seems to be much demand for the more advanced buildings like apartment buildings and so forth.  You are pretty much stuck with suburban neighborhoods.

4. Service buildings are very expensive until you suddenly become wildly profitable.  Advanced buildings in each area are priced completely out of reach.  

5. The radio is very repetitive and, worse, just wrong.  For example, it is always complaining about power outages when there is plenty of power and water shortages when there is plenty of water.

6. People are always complaining about lack of health care even when there seems to be plenty of health care.

7.  The transit systems are totally manual.  There are never any trams, or cargo trains or anything else unless you explicitly create routes for them.  This gets tiresome.  Also the UI for trams and buses makes it hard to tell where track is laid when creating routes.

8. There used to be many more special buildings which are useful for attracting tourists and beautifying neighborhoods.

9. All the fun of watching people use the subways and buses seems to be gone.

10. But the best bug of all is that if you save your game, restart the program, and restore the game then 3 times out of 4 you will be promoted to the next level.  It beats working.

So, two things.  Why did they release this anticipated sequel before it was ready?  And is the original game really that much better.  My guess for the former is that they had to get the game out there by Christmas because that is when so much of the money in the game business is made and so they rushed it.  Or maybe they were under contractural obligations.

And finally, is the first game that much better.  So I tried playing it after maybe a year absence and yes, it is much better.  It has challenges and I may not be the best player, but one is a mature and interesting city simulation and the sequel is just a buggy piece of software that is not ready for prime time.

The Pernicious Impact of Frivolous use of Ancient Computers (JOSS #1)

draft

JOSS was the RAND Corporation's internally developed timesharing system to permit one computer to be used by many people (researchers) in their work and in a way that was more convivial than punching cards or paper tapes with machine code.   JOSS stands for "Johnniac Open Shop System".  In researching this important early system, I came across this beautiful description of an unexpected and, in the eyes of a key developer, an undesirable effect of making JOSS more available to researchers at RAND.

The researcher wrote:

In the summary and conclusions section of RM-5270-PR

Cities Skylines Covered with Dead Bodies and Trash

This is a mini-review of Cities: Skylines or is it Skylines: Cities.

I have been playing whatever it is called now since the day it came out. Most computer games hold no interest for me, but games based on the simulation of society or the simulation of conflict at the strategic level are interesting. I have my own ideas on such things which I may prototype one day, although only if I can stay out of the madness, greed and hypocrisy of the game industry.

Unfortunately, Cities Skylines just wasnt tested before release. About the time you reach the population of 10-15,000 people, your city starts getting mired in trash and dead bodies. The stupid tweety bird that tells you about it is useless. All you can do is put trash heaps every two feet and the same with crematoriums and pray.

Just as annoying is the bug in the model such that it is impossible to have enough workers of the right type around. Nothing you do will make a difference, you are just fucked. Maybe the developers just ran out of time or money?  Who knows.

Games such as this do not have to be realistic in order to be interesting. Nevertheless, this game, whatever it is called, will have lots of semi-realistic features and challenges to recommend it to those who enjoy such things, when, that is, they have fixed some of the problems.

We see by this example one of the problems with individuals, or small teams, modestly financed groups doing games: they may simply not have the resources to debug the problems that are caused by interesting internal simulations. Cities Skylines is a good effort, and shows promise, but is frustrating as hell in its current form once you get beyond the baby cities.

And then there is the bug whereby you can not save your game.  Lets not go there, its too frustrating to think about.  Presumably that one will be fixed sooner than later.

Save your money and your time and wait for them to fix the bugs. When these bugs are fixed, perhaps others will be revealed.  But nevertheless if they can fix it up to the 100,000 population level, that will probably be sufficient for the majority of players.   Shows an A- for effort but a B- for testing. Promising but frustrating in its current incarnation.

Maybe wait three months and see where things are?

Cities Skylines on Steam

http://store.steampowered.com/app/255710/