I beg Firaxis to at least not hard-code this so that fans can tweak it in the config files or something. Silly as it may be, this was one of the /main/ things I wanted improved over the earlier versions. The world always seems more empty then I'd like. My preference would be, ideally, to on a map of Earth have at least two or three Civs per continent.

I'm sorry, I just don't buy that adding a couple more Civs on top of the `base' seven is going to suddenly swamp our computers to a crawl. Maybe running 32 or 64 would be a little rough, but how `bout 10 or 12? You're telling me that my nifty new computer which can run Black & White at lighting speeds and NINTY odd nations in Europa Universalis is going to choke and die trying to run 14 CivIII nations at once?!

Maybe I'm totally off base, but my suspicion is that there's a limit of seven Civs at once because seven is the traditional number from Civ,CivII, and SMAC. Not because of any intense gameplay issue or computer slowdown.

I really hope that Firaxis allows us to, if we choose, mod our game in such a way as to be able to play with 20-30 or so Civilization, even if we have to add all the extra art and such ourselves. I'm hopefull that they'll leave the CivNum flag open.

Nothing could make me happier then hearing that was so.

Er... nothing computer game related that is.

quote: Originally posted by The diplomat on 04-27-2001 02:16 PM The burden on the AI would be too much!

I certainly agree to that.

quote: Originally posted by Ralf on 04-27-2001 02:40 PM Perhaps they leave a unofficial backdoor open for added AI-civs in some text-file.

I bloody well hope so.

quote: Originally posted by Fintilgin on 04-27-2001 02:37 PM You're telling me that my nifty new computer which can run Black & White at lighting speeds and NINTY odd nations in Europa Universalis is going to choke and die trying to run 14 CivIII nations at once?!

In EU the whole game plays on one and the same default and pre-analysed map, again and again. Not only that: the locations of ALL provinces (= cities) are also pre-defined and known in advance by the AI-programmers. Also, the rules how to move around; what you are allowed to do; how the diplomatic start-out conditions are layed out, and finally how all the basic game events are going to appear - are all things that are much more known in advance, by the EU developing team, then similar variables in the Civ-3 game. Just consider the armies (euqvivalent to units) in EU: How many units and armies (per city and per empire) is there in Civ-3 for the AI to keep track of? Compare with EU: The last time I played as England I had between 4-8 of them only (including fleets).

My only hope now (if they don't change their mind) is a backdoor in the .txt files for those of us who want more.

:: prays and begs to Firaxis not to make this poor CIVer cry this Christmis. ::

quote: Originally posted by Roman on 04-27-2001 05:16 PM I think that the new barbarian model where barbarians have cities is what they mean by minor civs...

I certainly hope not! It's obviously far from definite at this stage, and I can understand your cautiousness, Roman, but the talk of minor civs taken in conjunction with the statement that revolts and secessions will occur, leads me at least to hope that when cities revolt they will be able to become a new minor civ, opening up all sorts of possibilities for diplomacy, reprisals, etc. etc. However the quoted statement in Snapcase's thread about the PCG article that cities can "revolt and rejoin their former civ." is a little discouraging, as it might mean that's the only option: i.e. no minor civs...

Whilst I understand that the processing requirements increase almost exponentially with each civilization added, so does computer power. Therefore, this reason for not including more than 7 civilizations per game is pathetic. Moreover, nobody is forcing anyone to play with more than 7 civs anyway, so people who don't want to wait for the computer to make its turn can simply play with fewer civs.

I am still hoping for this limit to be rectified by the possibility of editing the text files, but I by no means certain Firaxis will allow this.

Maybe, Firaxis feels that 7 is the perfect number of civs for a standard game. they are looking at the gameplay effects too. Remember that they have a new ressource model where ressources are more bunched together and where they are requirements to build things. if you had 32 civs, then you would have 4 or 5 that have good ressources and everybody else with nothing. So you can't have too many if you want every civ to have fun. Just speculation on my part.

quote: Originally posted by MarkG on 04-27-2001 06:48 PM [QUOTE]Originally posted by The diplomat on 04-27-2001 02:16 PM you have to look at how the number of civs in a game will affect the AI and the computer requirements. I am sure that Firaxis would have increased the max civs if they could have but I don't think it is possible. The burden on the AI would be too much!

so please, explain me: forget 32. forget 16. not even 12? 10? 8??
can we get one (1) more civ in the game 10 years after civ1??? [/quote]

I also agree with Mark's point, with todays technology, there should be the option for more "major" civilizations in play. But let's not forget about what roll the "minor" civs will play in the game. Actually, I would like to know what the maximum number of "minor" civs will be. If the minor civs can be up to, say 10-14, then 7 major civs would be enough for a VERY interesting game. Or how about the multiplayer side of the house? What if you can have up to 7 Human (major) civs and still play with 10 AI (minor) civs - that would actually equate to 17 nations in the game!

Fact: SMAC had seven civs.

Fact: When asked why the SMAC expansion - which added more civs - didn't allow those to be played in a game with more civs the response was that "seven" was hard-coded into the engine.

Fact: Civ-III only allows seven civs.

Assumption: After knowing we've wanted more civs for years, if they were going to rebuild the engine for CivIII they probably would have added more civs.

Inference: They didn't significantly retool the SMAC engine that governs the interaction of civs and are using it again.

Ok, I'm exaggerating their counter-arguments, so sue me.

Seriously though, as others have pointed out already, we should have a game that takes into consideration the medium ranged computers of today, not the medium ranged computers that existed in 1994.

Most people's computers will be able to run today very well with a maximum civilization number of 12 in every game. If anyone from Firaxis is reading in on this, please reconsider this.

quote: Originally posted by The diplomat on 04-27-2001 10:31 PM But why such a high priority? It seems to me that there are higher priorities, like the trade model, diplomacy model etc... I think that having more civs would be nice but it is more important to focus on the gameplay.

I'll give you that: In the big scheme of things, number of civs doesn't sound like such a big deal. But ask yourself this. How hard would it be to add two or three civs compared to creating a whole new diplomacy model? I'm no coder, but it seems like all that's necessary is just more of the identical code that applies to the existing seven, plus the additional linkages. We're talking about a game that's been on the drawing board for YEARS and they couldn't set aside a week or two of Level One programmer time for that task? C'mon! That's why so many of are absolutely OUTRAGED by such an obvious omission.

You guys have to remember that the AI in Civ-2 & SMAC wasnt that great to begin with. Even with only 6 AI-civs, only 3-4 was resonably active, while the other ones more acted as filling stopgaps in the game. It happend to
me again and again in Civ-2 that I, in late-games encounted AI-civs that have been living alone on a big fertile islands, but still only occupied and utilized perhaps half of it. Also, halfway through SMAC; all the AI-bases had only half as many base-improvements as I had, but twice as many resource-draining, but still more mediocre mil-units than I had.

Now, the PC-requirements for SMAC stayed around P166 Mhz, if I remember it correctly. And the recommended requirements for Civ-3 will perhaps stay around P3-500 Mhz tops (yes, they have to maximize their potential customer-base, so any gigahertz top-of-the-line requiremements is commercially stupid and obviously out of the question). Anyway, this means that they in realty only have little more then 3-4 the processing power to play around with then they already had in SMAC. Add to this that much of this added CPU-power is already gobbled up in advance by the increasing demands for updated/animated graphics and nice added game-features.

I take it for granted that most of you civ-fans want Firaxis to trim/upgrade the old AI-weaknesses connected to the already existing 6 AI-civs, before they add any new additional extra AI-civs? Am I wrong in this assumption?

quote: Originally posted by Roman on 04-28-2001 05:57 AM Henrik, since computing deals with binary numbers, adding one or two more civs is the same as as adding eight in this case, so why not ask for 15 straight away.

on the other hand, they could have such things in text files....

They should at least bring out a patch to allow more civs at once..
I think 24 would be good..

Turn speed shouldn't be a problem.. most of say 24 civs would be dead or tiny. If its coded well it should be very fast, or they could calculate some AI routines in the time the player is doing his turn.. or maybe this is too advanced for them.

People with ancient computers can just turn down the number of civs.

Hey FIRAXIS give me a job, i'll show you what coding is all about ;>

But on the point of not having much more power than SMAC had , that depends opon how they are changing the graphics..
if they drop the SMAC voxel system (which would be a shame, but they are hard to edit so it might be for the best) or the polygon rounded terrain then they could get more proccessing time for other things, but seeing as its turn based Processor calculations aren't as relevant as in Real time.

I suppose path finding routines could take up most of the Computers AI time.. calculating routes across a big map could take a while for 50 units.