Traitor - Page 3

Barnacle Bill · #21 February 3rd, 2001, 03:42 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Tenryu:
Hey Bill. You must be an old-fart!

Yep, the old man of the sea. Bought my first wargame about 1972, at JC Penny's. It was Avalon Hill's "Blitzkreig". I was in junior high school. They still had some of those old-time "squares instead of hexes" games from the 60's in print back then, though, which is how I learned what a great inovation hexes were

The board game thing is probably also why I like games you can mod yourself so much. When the "rules" are printed on paper instead or hard-coded, and the units are cardboard counters instead of 3D animated graphics, anybody can mod any game all they want.

ColdSteel · #22 February 3rd, 2001, 04:27 PM

Hey Bill, I graduated from high school in 1973. Guess we're the same age. So, there's at least 2 old farts here.

Sabre21 · #23 February 3rd, 2001, 04:58 PM

I guess there's 3 old farts....probably a few more hiding out there

I graduated HS in 74. I have to agree with Atrocities, MOO2 was OK but no where as good as the original. Also I too liked BOTF...I liked the Star Trek theme. Besides, the varity of unique installations really made each race different to play. I wish we had the ability in SE4 to make unique facilities, ships, and components for a specific race.

DirkHowitzer · #24 February 3rd, 2001, 06:17 PM

I too liked BOTF, if only because of the combat which I thought was cool...lol. What I didn't like was the clumsy interface and the pacifist to the extreme AI...I could never get anyone to fight me!!!

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"He's dead, Jim."-- Lt. Commander Leonard "Bones" McCoy |Chief Medical Officer / USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

Darwin · #25 February 3rd, 2001, 06:36 PM

I havn't read the entire thread, so I'm OT here just wanted to put in a little note.

Sid Miers has said that he never had any intenion of working on CivIII.

He is create an undisclosed project that is the true CivIII

He wasn't truely happy with CivI so he replaced it with CivII but they are both to be considered CivI.

Alpha Centuri is to be considered CivII becuase it is next in story line order. It would have been named Civilizaion if he hadn't have had a falling out with the company.

His next Project is the only true CivIII it comes in storyline after Alpha Centuri.

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Lord Darwin,
Space Empires Fan since
Space Empires 2 in 1995

pathfinder · #26 February 3rd, 2001, 06:52 PM

hehe, ya'll a buncha yougins. ah gradumacated from College in '75.

bmills · #27 February 3rd, 2001, 07:10 PM

In many ways, SE4 is the game I hoped MOO2 would be, but MOO2 itself was a seriously flawed game. I got so frustrated I kept a tally for several games and discovered that the player was about three times as likely as any other empire to be the victim of a harmful "random" event, and that the Antarans "randomly" chose one of my colonies as the target of their raids between 40% and 60% of the time. I *hate* that kind of AI cheating. But the real problem was that command point system. In MOO you could too easily build an instant fleet of thousands of ships, but in MOO2 they went so far the other way that you were lucky if you could support a few dozen. My planets were constantly getting attacked because I just couldn't build enough ships to protect my borders. Then there were the umpteen colony production enhancements. You had to build each one to remain competitive with other empires, but there were so many of them that just keeping the queues full was a full-time job.

In contrast, SE4 suffers from none of these problems, and best of all, most of the game is customizable. Having played a couple of Trevor Chan's massively optioned games (Capitalism & Seven Kingdoms), I think this is one of the best ways to capitalize on the power of computers, and I hope it's the way the rest of the gaming industry will go.

Drake · #28 February 4th, 2001, 01:40 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Darwin:
Sid Miers has said that he never had any intenion of working on CivIII.

He is create an undisclosed project that is the true CivIII

He wasn't truely happy with CivI so he replaced it with CivII but they are both to be considered CivI.

Alpha Centuri is to be considered CivII becuase it is next in story line order. It would have been named Civilizaion if he hadn't have had a falling out with the company.

His next Project is the only true CivIII it comes in storyline after Alpha Centuri.

Ummmm, you might want to look at http://www.firaxis.com/civ3/ and http://www.firaxis.com/team.cfm

Yep, that's Sid. Yep, that's Civ III. Hmmm.

Barnacle Bill · #29 February 4th, 2001, 02:28 AM

In addition to command points, MOO2 also addressed the swarm thing by economics. You couldn't afford to build thousands of ships.

I do agree that Alpha Centauri was a successor to CivII. There were a few things about it I did not like. One was that the scenario was too fixed. Another, related to that, was that you could not turn off PLanet. The great thing about CivII was that you could make scenarios about almost ANYTHING. With AC, no matter what you changed in the part of the game easily accessible to modders, you were still stuck playing in the AC storyline. The other thing I did not like was about units. Even for a game on that sort of scale, units should represent more that 1 vehicle or squad. I mean, a bae is obviously a domed city with thousands of inhabitants. The way things were set up, you really couldn't do mods on any of the things units were built of, either. I think the concept is good, but it needs some modification.

If I was going to do a 4X game that takes place ON a planet (which I'm not, never having programmed in anything more advanced than Turbo Pascal), I would let you design vehicles & squads similarly to AC, only without the graphics for every chassis & component so you could roll your own easier. However, units would be built out of squads & vehicles as in Norm Kroger's TOAW series. I would use a somewhat simplified combat system based conceptually on TOAW, as well.

Of course, I would use a hex grid. I've never understood the irrational predjudice of most computer gamers against hex grids. A square grid creates a huge movement distortion because of diagonals, which hex grids eliminate. The earliest board wargames used square grids, and often introduced complexities like charging you 1.5 MP to move diagonal instead of just 1 to deal with the diagonal problem. Hex grids became nearly universal once introduced because they solve that problem so cleanly.

Tenryu · #30 February 4th, 2001, 02:49 AM

Hey Bill. You must be an old-fart!

Maybe if we told them that they can shift each successive line of squares first right 50% then the next left 50% they'd feel better 'cause they're not hexes!