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Post by Ellestar on Apr 19, 2006 5:35:56 GMT -5
This game needs balance. ps. Fix these damn connection problems you Computer science newbs! lol The problem is that this game is more or less balanced for an average singleplayer game. And Firaxis will never balance it for competitive multiplayer, especially if it will break their singleplayer balance. And i doubt that they'll ever make a mod or scenario for us themselves. It will not improve their sales, they don't have enough betatesters for it and they release patches too infrequent so to be able to balance it according to player feedback. So, the only way is to make our own ladder community mod. After all, Counter-Strike was a mod and Battlefield was a mod (two most popular online multiplayer FPS according to xfire statistics). DotA is a Warcraft 3 mod. So, multiplayer mods may be quite popular and they may be even more popular than original games. I think we can make a good one as well. In fact, If I have horse and my opponent doesn't have horse or Bronze, I can pretty much guarantee victory. This shouldn't be the case in strategy games. It doesn't guarantee victory in singleplayer games so i doubt they'll do anything about it. That's because generally there are only 2 sides in multiplayer and significantly more than 2 in singleplayer. Maybe allow Ivory to have a special kind of military unit in the beginning who has a bonus as long as they are inside their culture borders, or with the Cow resource you can build Cow archers or something, nuts, maybe even make Iron Working have a second Military unit you can make that would make it somewhat worth it to go for instead of Math or even make Metal Casting give a super special unit or something that can compete with 50% bonus for chopping. Than on top of that Make Monarchy give something great to compete with 50% chopping. All you are doing is adding more "Kremlin" and "Liberalism" things to this game and that makes for a boring game. Half-serious Cow archers Let's then add stone golems, elven fighters, goblin warg riders, halfling pig riders Well, actually i doubt that it's possible to add enough historical units. I like Fantasy because there can be practically everything Organized should be -50% Gold for Civics and -25%- -50% gold for costs of having multiple cities. And probably 75% army support cost. Though Organized is about equal to Financial when you have a big empire so it's too weak only in multiplayer games where empires are smaller and commerce isn't that important. Also, in multiplayer Financial gives a better boost if only because Financial gives a better percent bonus when cottages aren't grown yet (3 instead of 2 is much better than 7 instead of 6). In singleplayer, cottages are at their full power during a bigger part of the game so Financial bonus is effectively smaller. Spiritual Only has to wait 1-4 Turns instead of the 5 to change civics or religion. Spiritual is still a very good bonus for rushers in later starts. And i don't think that this change will make it significantly higher. Creative should give 5-50 Culture ( Making it easier for them to get a culture victory or expand like crazy) (There is a reason why you don't see Culture victories, thats because its almost impossible to get them, make it easier for creative people. (Id take Finacial or Indutrious or Agressive over creative 99% of the time) this shoulnt be the case. And (No you wont be converting enemy cities liek crazy, especially when an Instant 2500 Culture cant even do it 99% of the time. Well, creative is weak because it doesn't multiply culture from buildings and +2 culture adds next to nothing to later culture expansions. Culture victory is hard to get because you need to focus on it, stopping research at some point in the game so to focus on culture. It will never work in standart multiplayer games because it's balanced versus a spaceship victory. Instant 2500 Culture is overpowered in multiplayer. As i see, on land maps everyone tries to make early Great Artists for that. It's not a good sign as well. IMHO it should be significantly nerfed in multiplayer. Agressive should be 1 free rank for (all Units) IMHO it's too much. Only idiot game creaters would resort to taking Gandhis Fast Worker away from him. Why not bring everything up to his fast workers level. Well, by adding more imbalances we'll not make a game better balanced. With the bigger bonuses, it's harder to make other bonuses equally powerful in a wide variety of situations.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 18, 2006 11:28:39 GMT -5
another poor respond - u just dont want to see the problems in your game design By the way, do you have any ideas how to fix it? We can try to make a mod.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 18, 2006 3:51:33 GMT -5
To everyone who misunderstood my post: train your reading comprehension skills. Ok? Thanks In short, Sidhe said that french ladder has a lot of beautiful mods and it's just a paradize here on Earth. And we evil c4players ladder players purposefully chosen not to use these mods. I replied that actually we're not aware of that, we can't read their sites etc. because we don't know french (or at least most of us). And so it's actually not our choice, but their (french player's) choice not to bring their mods to us.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 17, 2006 3:41:43 GMT -5
Also, i don't think that it's hard to make mods. Most mods will require only small changes in XML files (may be done in a matter of minutes). It's harder to change map scripts, but it's not that hard as well if we don't chage actual map generation. It's much easier to change a starting location only or other changes that don't involve shapes of the continents etc.
So, if we want mods, we need experienced players who'll decide which kind of mods are worth trying. And we need support from a players who host games so these mods will actually be played.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 17, 2006 1:46:56 GMT -5
lol. I didnt play on ladder before 1.52, so I dont remember any complaints . All I know is, the game is now all about who has the highest production, more so than before. The value of having a high GNP is significantly lower than high production. You say that, but I'm gonna keep teching and winning ;D Nah i can remember only several Ren Inland Sea games where one of the teams survived until Riflemans. It's so rare it's not even funny. All water maps end with a kill, most likely even before cavalry. In Modern you'll be lucky if you'll research 2 techs In Ancient teching is still semi-important but noone focus on research there anyway. Well the French are way ahead of you. They had new balanced mods before the patch by at least 3 or 4 months, games where you could choose to play with at least one of the resources, say iron horses or bronze and two were within reach, they also had 20% less build costs. The deciding factors in these games in all scenarios were, versatility, skill, and adaptability, it's a shame that these sort of mods weren't picked up by those on cases, they've been around since not long after 1.51, and there the reason I stopped playing 1.51. That and the exploits. nm too late now, but the modders can't all be French, if you don't like it mod it. Stop whining. The mods are out there, you can chose to play with them or not. But you do have a choice. Well, we can't communicate with them because we don't know french. They can communicate with us, bring their mods (say, if it will be popular then maybe it will be in CCC). But they don't do it. It's their choice, and so be it. I don't see how we're responsible for their choice. If they want to be completely separated from a world's Civ 4 ladder community, it's their problems.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 14, 2006 2:50:47 GMT -5
I know this was fixed post early beta testing patches, so I'm hoping there all fixed. Otherwise I've been lied to, oh the horror ;D One question, how long does it take to get purged for inactivity from the ladder I have been inactive for 42.9 days? How much longer have I got before I lose my ladder account? I will be trying to play later, but if I don't am I liable to find my account deactivated? I guess you'll lose your account next time a script will run. By the way, gold account will not be purged. So if you're too lazy to play you can just upgrade your acc to gold.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 14, 2006 1:01:44 GMT -5
Damn! . I'll let them know asap, and lets pray that they fix it. In expansion ;D Well, we expected that expansion will be a 50$ patch, aren't we?
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 13, 2006 13:19:25 GMT -5
Fantasy realm is funny. I got a Flood Plains (=desert) / Ice / Cows combination on one title in a capital first time i tried it. Hills / Desert / Jungle / Pigs is nice as well.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 13, 2006 10:43:08 GMT -5
Heh something told me to check updates today in Civ 4 menu. I did it only twice before - when i installed Civ 4 and just before last CCC. I guess sixth sense does actually exist ;D Or how did i knew that i should check it today?
P.S. Why that stupid patch doesn't have an option "I already have xfire for a loooong time"? ;D
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 3, 2006 3:36:56 GMT -5
I have not found a trainer yet that works in MP Sidhe. Those ones you have found work fine in SP, although they are still rather limited. They will OOS games in MP. The only real problem right now is that modified assets only cause a warning for the joining player, this will end when the patch comes out, when all players will know when someone joins with modified assests. CS There will be exactly the same warning if someone installed Civ 4 on FAT32 partition because of a bug in Civ 4 (Civ 4 doesn't sort a list of files that should be checked, NTFS returns a sorted list but FAT32 returns an unsorted list). But it should be fixed in the next patch (how many times we heard it already huh?). I made a 2 Gb NTFS partition solely for Civ 4 because of that bug, all my other partitions are FAT 32. This I'm told is caused by people who installed 1.52 straight over the top of 1.00 instead of installing 1.19 first, or it's caused by slight corruptions in the download. No, IIRC it's because 1.19 patch unpacks one of the data files and packs it to 5 smaller files (it was made so to fix just another Civ 4 bug, i don't remember which). 1.52 doesn't do it. So, game works in either case and content is the same but file check gives different checksum and same warning. That said, whenever I (rarely) get an "incorrect version" message when I join a game, the host generally says that it's a bug with foreign-language versions of civ, which makes some sense, and everyone says that same thing, so I figured it was probably accurate. Is that plausible? AFAIK localization files aren't checked so they're wrong.
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AHAHHAA
Mar 31, 2006 6:43:00 GMT -5
Post by Ellestar on Mar 31, 2006 6:43:00 GMT -5
hey thats civ4 ... but i still have sometimes fun when plaiyng ... Considering that you're playing it 24/7 you do have a lot of fun anyway ;D
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 12, 2006 8:18:11 GMT -5
It was swap memory (cash) not connection issue and it is not bug. When is comp lack of psyhical memory its use disk for it. After 50 turns game is slowest. Host must rejoin (free memory-swap file) or others who fell slow. In theory it should help only if a game has memory leaks. And in theory Civ 4 memory leaks are fixed in the previous patches. Maybe it may help if there is something else that is resident in a memory, but in that case you should close all unnesesary programs before starting a game if you don't have enough RAM. Anyway, RAM is cheap. I upgraded my computer from 512 Mb to 1 Gb and then 1.5 Gb.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 12, 2006 3:03:32 GMT -5
Elle if u think that i8 m dumb - wtf u reply to me then i was in several games where pings were all bleow 200 but game was superslow - and non of the players were known as laggers. 1) Ellestar 2) No i don't think so but if you insist ;D 3) I never saw it. Someone may have temporary troubles with their connection so ping may jump from 200 to 1000 (as it was yesterday) or someone have a big packet loss (it causes even more slowdowns than a big ping, that's true for any game, but it's hard to notice it if you'll look only at a ping). Also, if someone is on a modem it may be slow even if ping doesn't look awful. I guess in that case there may be not enough bandwidth for Civ 4 in big teamers. I doubt that it's possible to fix it. The only fix is to host a dedicated servers instead of p2p - in that case only a lagging player will suffer from lag.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 12, 2006 1:06:57 GMT -5
the main problem imo arent the connection issus - reboot of civ helps most times - but these small superanyoing bugs - hostdrop, retire, weired slow timers, takeover ki for example. Slow timers do happen solely because two or more players do have a ping of 450+ (or one players with a ping 1000+). The problem is that there is no way to check if there will be such problem before the start of the game. Considering that there is a significantly higer chance (from my experience) that someone will crash or drop from a game with a players with such connection issues, rejoins etc. will waste a lot of time, as is a timer that advances at half speed. So a total time wasted may be enormous even if such game will be scrapped relatively early.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 10, 2006 14:53:41 GMT -5
Sorry could be wrong I was quoting someone involved with the testing. Do we have a timeline on the patch then? Sure pal. All these betatesters who know what are they saying™ said that patch will be Soon™ several months ago. I don't understand how you missed it. They even said that we should believe in what they say ;D
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 15, 2006 16:38:36 GMT -5
Now that was THE random. Ghandi gets such an insanely lucky start so he RUSHED SALADIN! They spawned several squares away from each other though. Saladin chopped 2 workers then only Camel archers but Ghandi got Knights before Saladin. I never ever saw such a bull sh it in Ren Inland teamers (or any other teamers for that matter).
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Post by Ellestar on Mar 27, 2006 5:02:29 GMT -5
2 galleons vs 2 galleons on ocean. My galleons dealt 0 damage, that means that they lost 10 combat rounds in a row. 1 in 1024 chance. Chance of not killing any of the galleons was 25% but zero damage was funny I had a game today where I had a Agr. Warrior in a hill Cap. w/20% Def. 2 Non-Agr warriows attacked and I died. First warrior left mine with 0.1 health from a 99.2% battle. Well, overall you had about 25% chance to die. It's hard to blame random in this situation. 1 in 4 chance isn't rare. i lost a 100.1 percent battle before Bug in calculations for units with first strikes
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 28, 2006 1:45:28 GMT -5
It's unlikely that the basic peer to peer mechanics of Civ4 are going to chance and we have to assume that there will always be problems with the game. We will have to learn to deal with and over come them. It's either that or you can decide to dump MP until Civ5 comes out For me I'd rather try and build a MP community despite the difficulties just like we did for C3C. WOW! Betatesters finally admitted the truth. I hope i'll not read any more lies on this forum about how a new patch that is being tested by betatesters will fix a connection issues. But you forgot one thing here. In EXACTLY the same situation Hamachi works and Civ 4 doesn't. That obviously proves that even with p2p mechanics Civ 4 may be fixed. Besides, now we suffer from random bugs when a known good peers can't connect to each other at random moments (even if it's a reload, i had only one successful reload after a patch and i do play 45+ hours per week on average). Well, "random" isn't a right word in this case. "Persistent bugs" fits it much better. They're so blatant that i don't know how it was possible to miss them in beta. It's not a problem with p2p or something like that. It's a software bugs, pure and simple. We should be discusing the problems and how to document them, to take a logical and detailed case to the devs. I've always said that if you come with problems you should come with your solutions as well, and that is the problem I see here, we are willing to yell alot but not willing to help improve the game. How exactly we can help to improve it? They didn't release a network code in their SDK. Besides, THEY're not willing to improve the game. Unfortunately, we can't force them to do it. You know, all that crap about that they'll not get any immediate profit by fixing their game. After all, they already sold it so why bother fixing it? It's much better to sell an expansion. But i agree that Firaxis need help. Any company that doesn't know how their own game works so their engine creates 100 copies of exactly the same object in a graphical memory if there are 100 objects in the game really needs some help. And they got that help from a customer who also was a programmer who reverse-engineered their libraries and made a fix for their graphical engine (that they released later as a patch). I guess they do need another non-Firaxis programmer who will fix their network code the same way their graphical engine was fixed. And finally, we do warn others who hoped that that game will be fixed with patches. We say that this game still sucks, quite unlike betatesters who told others fairy tales about how it rocks starting from pre-release stage. I believe that truth is always better than lies, even if it's unpleasant to read it.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 27, 2006 1:15:07 GMT -5
Unfortunately we are in a "chicken and the egg" problem, Take2 isn't going to spend alot of money on MP unless it sees a big return, MP isn't going to become a big community unless alot of money is put into revamping the MP mechanics Unfortunately for Firaxis, others somehow make a lot of money from MP games. So, we have a "competent vs incompetent developers" problem. We got incompetent ones. Civ 4 lobby is comparable to a The battle for Wesnoth lobby. Wesnoth is also a TBS but it's free, open source, and almost unknown for PC players. But, surprisingly, it works somehow. And internet games are popular despite that it's also a TBS.
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Post by Ellestar on Apr 27, 2006 1:12:29 GMT -5
there was some hope and waiting for the patch but after it was as bad as everything before - it s kinda over with this game. Wait a second. How exactly it's as bad as before? Before the patch there were absolutely no problems between peers known as good ones (that is, if they restarted Civ to clear cache and avoided one of the bugs that way). Now, even reconnects and reloads are a challenge because there are random problems between good peers, including the ones that successfully connected to each others several seconds earlier. You can't say that it's as bad. IT'S SIGNIFICANTLY WORSE!!!
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