Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1608
Thousands of words about Civilization VI, VII and VIII and AI. I had to restrain myself.
(Originally mis-numbered as 1597)
Good morning good morning. Man. I am tired. And it’s my day off. I was going to go back to sleep after dropping Jane off, but my ridiculous dedication to this leading newsletter in noble pedestrian domesticity forced me to stumble down here and write this issue for you. I am so dedicated. But I am totally going back to sleep as soon as I write this.
The parents and teachers who make up the volunteer corps at Jane’s school who assist at school drop-off were all dressed as traffic cones this morning. That was pretty clever and cute. But there are no costumes for the kids today? Not sure what is up with that. They had a “spirit week” of assorted Halloween themes, but that was last week, and they had a PTA-sponsored “Trunk or Treat,” but that was last weekend? No costumes on actual Halloween? Weirdbo.
In any case Jane will go trick or treating in the big neighborhood next door tonight with all her friends. Emma and I and my friend Nick will tag along and hopefully there will be, per uszh, a few generous adults handing out jello shots for the grown-ups. Then Nick and I are off to see two awesome metal bands at the old mill in the woods and I am very excited.
Good insights on the Burton travel hoodie from the readership yesterday. Reader Nick (west coast Nick, different Nick) says it was great and he travelled with it across the globe, but that the pillow part had an unfortunate tendency for the seam to come undone and he had to re-glue it a few times. Reader Jennifer points me to this travel hoodie by a brand called Cmfrt, but it is a pull-over not a zip-up and that is a dealbreaker for me, though maybe not for you! Maybe you would like this hoodie it does look pretty awesome and that eye shade is sweet.
In the meantime I have added an eBay alert for Burton Travel Hoodie XXL. Cmon eBay don’t fail me now.
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
We are listening to a band called Newmoon today, a pretty sweet shoegaze band. Album is called Temporary Light. It is swirly and etherial and a solid Slowdive circa Just for a Day and me likey. Good stuff.
Been playing a lot of Civilization VI again. Civ VII is useless to me. There has been a lot of discourse about why Civ VII failed, and most of the critiques are valid: The UI is absolutely terrible, the game was shipped unfinished, the effort of making it the same code base for console and PC diminishes the PC experience. The maps suck. And it’s interesting, because Firaxis has been doing a lot to address these critiques, the ones they keep hearing. But there are a few that really bug me that haven’t been addressed:
The graphics are deeply problematic. I mean, they are beautiful, gorgeous, look like real cities. But the fact of the matter is that people do not play civ at the immersive ground level, they play it at the “strategic” level, up in the air. And they need everything to be recognizeable from up high. And you absolutely cannot tell what the fuck is going on in Civ VII from up high. Which generates this massive cognitive dissonance as you desperately try to get an idea of the big picture, of your entire civilization as well as the competition, but you just can’t. The way Civ VII had the subtle different colors for campuses, commercial hubs, etc. was brilliant. They obviously moved to a “quarter” paradigm rather than districts in Civ VII, that is fine, seems cool even, but they did nothing to make it so you could fucking tell what buildings are where.
Not only does this make the game far less playable, but it has the secondary effect of making the game almost completely incomprehensible from lean-back mode watching let’s plays on Youtube or Twitch. No one is watching Civ VII let’s plays, and that was an entire industry with Civ VII. It taught people how to play the game, and lured them into it, when many of these people were just casual let’s play viewers. Now all that is wiped out. Gone.
Civ VI had a “strategic” view that no one used because it was completely abstracted. I don’t think that’ll work either. I think you need a partially-abstracted view, not dissimilar to when you hit the “Y” key in Civ VI and get yields overlaid on the map.
I think a thing that could work is if you hit some “lens” key and the map radically desaturated and some sort of color and or iconographic highlights overlaid on the map to tell you what the fuck you are looking at.
Or another option would be the detail level changes as you zooms: beautiful detailed graphics when you zoom in, more maplike when you zoom out. Go to Zillow and zooom in on a map. It is a map when you’re zoomed out, and then when you zoom in it automatically switches to satellite view for a more detailed rendering. Something like that would be amazing. Difficult, of course but light years better than the current situation.
The other major underdiscussed problem is that the game has become too much Catan and not enough “epic sweep and scope of Civilization.” A giant segment of Civ’s community loved the historicity of the game, loved the empire building, cared less about the battling and wonky numeracy. With the separation of leader and civ, the historicity has been impcted. I mean, it might be interesting to think about what would happen if, say, Abraham Lincon lead the ancient Egyptians, but we are losing the game’s connection to reality. People liked that, parents loved that because it was so educational.
I loved occasionally laughing thinking about actual people in history doing the stuff that is happening in my game. I thought about the citizens and rulers and things felt personal. That is lost, I feel like.
Another thing that contributes to the lack of historicity are the shitty maps. Now, much has been said about the maps and their shittiness: all the maps are the same. Two big continents and some small islands between them. That is a drag to be sure, and they have been doing work to rectify this but still, two giant problems remain. There is nowhere near the range of map types as Civ VI. That is a bummer, to be sure.
But the even bigger problem is that the maps are just too fucking small. All of them.
This ties into the historicity because it is fucking tedious to play this game where you get, like, seven tiles and run into some other civilization, every fucking time. Sometimes I just want to expand, I want a solid base of a Civ before some shitty-ass AI starts attacking me. I am playing this game to relax, dude. I want story, I want drama, I want to build. In Civ VI you could accomplish this by selecting a huge map and it would give you a little time, even on Diety, to get your footing before some asshole attacked you.
Now, the tiny maps just force conflict. The game, as it always has, has a bias towards war, which has always been unfortunate. But of course, humans love war both in reality and in their games, so you can’t really fault the historicity of this bias. But give me a little time, man. Gimme a giant map. The biggest maps in the current game and the planet is, like, seven cities wide. Bitch Ohio is seven cities wide. Give me a map literally 100x the size of these things.
I do think you could save Civ VII: a new strategic view that is pretty, and you can zoom in to see some lovely detail, but makes the game comprehensible from a distance and vastly, vastly bigger maps I think would go a long way — in addition to all the fixes they’ve made this year that they should have launched with. It is a real bummer because I am deeply attached to Firaxis, I love the employees, I love Carlbarian and Ed Beach and the rest of them. They are doing good work.
I’ve also been thinking about Civ eight, and the whole AI mess-slash-revolution we find ourselves in in the world. In a lot of ways, Civ I (I have played them all, every single one, I am old) was maybe my introduction to AI? Or maybe Sim City or something like that. But by Civ II we were definitely already calling our computer opponent in Civ “the AI.” But now we have a whole different school of AI, and it is interesting to think about who they can apply AI to the game in the future. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hate modern transformer-based AI and the whole thing is an IP theft machine, but that doesn’t stop me from an academic exercise here.
Now, with Cities Skylines or Sim City, AI application is probably most relevant to image generation and city buildings, which would be awesome, we finally might get non-rectangular lots and realistic row houses. And Cities Skylines already does absurd things with rendering of image assets, so the absurdities of Midjourney-like image rendering wouldn’t be a big deal, provided each individual building was its own render.
But I don’t think image generation is where AI will really make an interesting impact on Civ. Indeed, the graphics are already too confusing, adding an additional layer of hallucinations and unique-looking buildings will make it worse. Imagine a map that makes up symbols.
But I do think it could be interesting in the actual AI of the game. Maybe? Historically, the AI has been threefold: a set of fairly predictable guiding paramaters based on a civs “agenda” and a set of biases programmed into the AI, a random number generator, and a massive advantage in starting resources and bonus multipliers. The Deity, or hardest, level of AI in Civ VI starts with three settlers and five warriors whereas you get one of each.
Looking through the modern AI prism, though, it would be kind of interesting if, for example, they trained the AI on the hundreds of thousands of hours of let’s-play footage out there (and paid Game Mechanic, Potato, Saxy and the rest for the footage) and the AI learned how to play from the best. Of course, they’d have to revert to a more VI-like game to get enough content since no one is making VII content but hey that’s fine with me. And then, of course, over time, the AI could learn from the community.
Would any of this make a difference in playability? Make the hardest levels harder? Maybe? I don’t know. But it does seem like the moment is coming where games like Civ are gonna have to reckon with it.
But I can’t even imagine the economics of it, AIs are so expensive to run, never mind the power and carbon footprint, and the whole thing would have to be a paid add-on since it’s a continuous ongoing expense and would anyone even want it or is the current AI fine?
I actually feel like I would desperately want it in Cities Skyline — I think graphical generative AIs could radically transform that genre. But Civ? Less so. I’m def not challenged by Diety level in Civ VII anymore but that doesn’t mean that a more “90’s”-based AI couldn’t still do the trick.
I cannot convey to you how much I have been thinking about this lately. I think I would love to work at Firaxis or Colossal Order on this stuff. From home. For about 15 hours a week.
Jane is very excited for this weekend. Halloween trick-or-treating and birthday party. Friends coming from out of town. Lots of kids over. Gonna be great. Overwhelming. Thank god the rain ended.
Another “Clearing out the queue” playlist, only the best tunes, distilled through multiple re-listens, every one a banger. Enjoy.
Have a lovely weekend. I have visitors and trick-or-treating and rock shows. Will I get any chores done? WHO KNOWS! Find out Monday!
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.