Links for 2010-12-05

Civ IV BTS Mod: History Rewritten

In History Rewritten a civilization does not necessarily represent a single ethnicity, period or nationality, but instead strives to represent the political and cultural diversity of the region and it’s people through the ages (This is a work in progress).

Also adds new victory conditions, including ‘Inquisition’ and ‘Religious Victory’
(tags: civilization civ4 mod history )
Fixing the Zone of Control (Influence) » Forum Post by CariElf
Excellent graphical explanation of why zone of control is hard to do on square grids. It is either mathematically correct, but looks wrong, or it looks correct to the player but is inaccurate.
(tags: zone-of-control tiles )
DESIGNER NOTES » Ancient Strategy Games
Soren Johnson on the combat problem in the Civ games I through IV:
Nonetheless, the simplified combat system has not been an overall success because – with infinite unit stacking and single city tiles – the game strongly encourages single-minded “island hopping” offensives, where the player concentrates their entire force on taking city A, then city B, then city C, and so on. The abstraction breaks down. Ultimately, Civ has succeeded over the years in spite of its combat system, not because of it. Overrunning knights with tanks is still enjoyable, of course, but the core fun of Civ comes from executing an over-arching strategy, not from the tactical military game.

So, Civ V is an attempt to make combat fun and to avoid the strategy above. All players play differently however, and a con for one player (or many others in this case) was neither pro nor con for me. While I could have done the city-hopping strategy, it was ultimately a boring way to play the game. So I didn’t use it.
(tags: civilization )