Civ 5 Will Let You Import and Convert Civ 4 Maps 142
bbretterson writes "From an interview Bitmob conducted with Civilization 5 Lead Designer Jon Shafer: 'You can import Civ 4 maps into the world builder and convert them into Civ 5 maps, including all the units and cities and stuff on it — the conversion process will just do that for you automatically. We're hoping that the first week Civ 5 is out, people will use that function and port all of the Civ 4 stuff over to Civ 5, so everything will be out there already.'"
THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM !! (Score:1, Insightful)
This is a good thing for all concerned !!
YO DAWG (Score:4, Funny)
YO DAWG, we heard you like things that stand the test of time, so we made a game that could stand the test of time, whilst you built a civilization to stand the test of time.
Wow (Score:1, Insightful)
Wow, this new game must offer a lot compared to the old game..
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You're right though... there is no "intimidation" victory mode. Sounds like a hybrid between conquest and diplomacy, which is the way most games go.
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i did play civ 4. it seemed identical to civ 3 but with slightly better graphics. in fact the only reason i bought it was on the hope that the AI was better. i was disappointed.
You really missed out on Civ 4 then. It wasn't at all "Civ 3 with slightly better graphics." I mean, first off, the graphics were alot more than "slightly" better. Second, it introduced a slew of game mechanics, games inside of the game, customizations. To say that it built upon Civ 3 would be an understatement.
On the other hand, Civ 3 really was Civ 2 with slightly better graphics. The same cannot be said for Civ 4. Not at all. I played both Civ 2 and Civ 3 extensively, and I can't describe how m
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it was civ 3 with some window dressing. and i don't care whether you believe that i played it.
It absolutely wasn't. Only in the most superficial examination is what you said true.
Unless you also think that chess is checkers with some window dressing.
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I won using culture. Granted, I only managed it on lower difficulty settings, but still...
Square to hexagon conversion (Score:5, Interesting)
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What probably would be more interesting is ability to create, convert and design your own custom units.
Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:5, Interesting)
Try looking at how the game Elemental, War of Magic [elementalgame.com] development is going, that might be more your cup of tea.
Its been developed with the Mod tools, and they are realeasing them with it, its currntly in a true Beta, you know the kind where one can post feedback, and sugest changes that are more then cosmetic or extreamly minor.
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Every previous Civ game has allowed modding pretty much every detail including units, what makes you think this one would be different?
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Previous games did only offer that in a very rough form - you were somewhat limited to what you really could do and not.
Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:5, Interesting)
Units will be interesting though. If you import a map with huge unit stacks they'll have to be spread out to conform to the new one-unit-per-hex requirement. Suddenly a stack of doom will become a huge traffic jam across your civilisation!
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Even with just cities, simila implications are still valid because there are going to be quite a few mechanic changes:
Culture is said to be working differetly -> new borders?
Religion is going to be removed -> what about religion buildings and political ties?
What about general building not found in new versions?
Somehow, I just can not get excited about this feature at all: Why would I want to play old Civ4 map in brand new Civ 5 instead of starting new game?
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That's what I was thinking myself. Why not just start again... it is, after all, a new game...
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If you have Civ 4 savegames, the chances are you have Civ 4. If you have Civ 4, why would you want to play Civ 5 modded to work like Civ 4 instead of just playing Civ 4?
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Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:5, Informative)
From a computational chemist point of view, who uses both square and hexagonal lattice all the time, it isn't that difficult/strange actually. Thanks to the fact that periodic boundaries are used, it will just be a 'simple' conversion. The main issue one might encounter though is the fact that you'll go from 8 neighbours to 6 neighbours (if I am not mistaken the diagonals are also counted as neighbours in Civ4..., otherwise it's 4 to 6).
Plus I believe they actually wanted to limit the diagonal travelling, so it makes sense to prevent the diagonal 4x4, instead of encouraging it.
No, I am not worried about the conversion of the lattice/map. What I am worried about is the fact that in Civ5 it won't be possible to have more than 1! army per tile. So what will happen to the other dozen armies that were on the converted tile?
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I wouldn't be opposed to Civ5 having both hexagon and square modes. That would solve the conversion problem, too.
Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:5, Funny)
Hexagons? What are they doing to Civ? :D
Heh, a true fan I see, learning of new features through a comment on Slashdot, months after the developer released this info to the world.
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Hexagons? What are they doing to Civ? :D
Heh, a true fan I see, learning of new features through a comment on Slashdot, months after the developer released this info to the world.
And a true Slashdotter - as we discussed it several times since then.
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Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:5, Funny)
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Modded funny, but it actually makes sense, if Sid & Co. ever decides to model the sphericity of the globe - in such a case, some sort of Penrose tiling would make a lot of sense.
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Or prevent the "the" from it, allow multiple maps in the same game, and let me colonize Moon!
Seriously: Undersea cities, orbital habitats, space-based weaponry, Moon colonies... Call to Power tried some of this stuff, so why not expand the scope of the game to hypothethical future worlds? It would be a lot of fun being able to retreat to the moons of Jupiter and prepare to retake the Inner System while they are sabotaging your attempts to extract hydr
Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:5, Insightful)
Making it so that moving in every direction uses the same amount of movement to go the same distance. Unlike the diagonals on squire tiles in Civ 4.
The real question is why hexes weren't in use all along.
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>>The real question is why hexes weren't in use all along.
Because hexes look ugly?
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Oh come on now, ShakaUVM, clearly I was only joking. I'm sure your mother is a handsome woman. :P
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Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:4, Informative)
No, you're right. The very concept of using a hexagonal grid would have been far beyond the computing power of any such system. To even begin to display a hex map like this requires at least a 3.0 GHz, quad-core processor and a DX11 video card with a minimum of 512M DDR3.
Or, of course, you could have just played Sword of Aragon [mobygames.com], Battle Isle [mobygames.com], Conflict: Middle East [mobygames.com], or just about any other authentic computer wargame from that era. You could even have played Advanced Squad Leader back in 1985, which despite being a board game still has more lines of code in the rulebooks than most computer games.
Hexes are nothing new, and they're not complicated.
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Hell, even Genghis Khan for the NES used a hex system.
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You could even have played Advanced Squad Leader back in 1985, which despite being a board game still has more lines of code in the rulebooks than most computer games.
ASL was one of the most amazing simulations of all time. The improvements it made over the Squad Leader system were incredible. I'm pretty sure I can still find my maps and counters in my garage of one of the closets if I looked hard enough. That might be a project for the upcoming weekend.
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Civ 5 will only have hexagons. Hexagons are superior because moving in a diagonal direction in a square grid is essentially cheating. It allows you to cover more distance by skipping a tile. If today's Civ was using a square system legitimately, you would only be able to move up, down, left, or right.
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Meh.
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"Mkay -- 6, 3, 6, 3, 6, 3, 6, 3..."
See?
Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:5, Informative)
Civ 4 map plots are squares. Civ 5 are hexagons. I don't see an easy conversion process that won't produce real not-just-semantic map differences
Someone at reddit posted a diagram of how to do this fairly easily: http://i.imgur.com/lpJRd.png [imgur.com]
The only problem is with moving resources out of city limits, etc... things which may or may not be practical problems.
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Wow, that diagram was actually really informative. In hindsight it's amazingly obvious :D
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Hard to know how resources are allocated to a city in the new Civ, but at very least we know that's going to change. Moving resources outside of the city limits may be an issue - but then again, it may not.
My guess is that a city will be able to control tiles up to two tiles away (the hexagon system makes this pretty easy to define) as opposed to the "fat cross" system of before. Based on that image, if you place a city dead center and imagine it's "fat cross" as it would have been
Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:4, Interesting)
Going from a 8 neighborhood to a 6 neighborhood bears implications that are interesting but make conversion non ideal in most cases. If what you want is a nice map of Italy that looks about the same in Civ5, this is fine. But in the random map you loved so much in Civ4, some straits will disappear, some part of the sea will become lakes and just don't count on roads to be correctly converted.
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In Civ4 going from (0,0) to (1,1) was possible through a diagonal move. In your conversion, this becomes impossible. This can have real importance in the game. A diagonal waterway in Civ4 will appear as non practicable in Civ5. Going from a 8 neighborhood to a 6 neighborhood bears implications that are interesting but make conversion non ideal in most cases. If what you want is a nice map of Italy that looks about the same in Civ5, this is fine. But in the random map you loved so much in Civ4, some straits will disappear, some part of the sea will become lakes and just don't count on roads to be correctly converted.
Yes, it'll doubtless need some tweaking and it won't be exactly the same. But versus not converting it at all, it would presumably be easier than starting from scratch again.
Sheeze, just because it's not perfect, doesn't mean it's worthless. If you really want to play the old maps, stick to Civ IV.
Re:Square to hexagon conversion (Score:4, Insightful)
Sheeze, just because it's not perfect, doesn't mean it's worthless. If you really want to play the old maps, stick to Civ IV.
Sheeze, if you don't want to see people notpicking on algorithmic and graph theory questions, don't read slashdot ;-)
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If I were doing it, I'd "render" the terrain, then re-divide it into the new hexes , and infer the new tiles by the contents of the new grid, including cities, rivers, bonuses, etc. I don't know whether that would work cleanly, but it gets rid of that problem, at least; what used to be in 1,1 is still geographically close to 0,0, even if cell contents get moved, merged, or divided. Further, if a waterway runs between diagonal squares, it's likely that the corresponding hexes will also be contiguous.
I have
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Square to hexagon conversion is easy (Score:2, Informative)
A hex grid can be thought of as a square grid with every second line shifted by 0.5 * squareWidth on the X axis, so the conversion can be rather straightforward. But yes, it will produce semantic map differences as some squares that were previously diagonally adjacent to each other no longer will be after conversion.
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Simple, direct conversion from square - hex (Score:2)
There's a very simple way to convert a map from squares to hexes. Just shift every alternating row down half a unit. This is known as offset squares [wikipedia.org] and it's homomorphic to a hexagonal tiling.
It would mean a very slight difference in the shape of things, but overall it would maintain the same gameplay. The only difference from the original, square-based map is that the rows that stay the same would lose their two bottom diagonal connections, and the rows that shift down would lose their two upper diagonal c
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Well my only wish... (Score:5, Interesting)
It should really get a more heatfriendly graphics mode.
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Perhaps you should go back to Civ III :)
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Well, I'd like to be able to run Civ5 on my netbook. Civ4 isn't really playable due to interface lag, even though blinding framerates aren't necessary for turn-based strategies. I'd like to use Civ3, but it can't run at anything but 1024x768 (netbook screens are 1024x600).
Maybe I'll just wait a year, see how the x200 series tables handle Civ5, and upgrade instead.
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My netbook (Acer EEPC 1000) will let you render at 1024x768, and "scoll" with the mouse cursor. I know this with Windows, and I think it works under Linux too, but I haven't tested (because I prefer to shrink stuff and use the native resolution without scrolling).
Yours might do this as well - do you have all the drivers/utilities installed? (I'm assuming you do what most do and wipe it on purchase, and do it yourself to avoid crudware etc)
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Oh. Well, you said netbook, not tablet :P
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Heat only becomes a problem if you have a lousy energy policy after the industrial revolution.
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Linux support (Score:1, Interesting)
I love Civ, and I've got the anthology + Civ IV expansions. Thing is, they all currently run under wine (with no-cd patches), mostly.
I hope (but not too highly), the same can be said for Civ V. 2000 bonus points for no DRM. I would buy it then.
Company does something good? (Score:4, Funny)
How can this make a headline/slashvertisement on Slashdot? That sounds like they're doing the right thing and giving the gamers a better gaming experience by not just ditching all of the hard work from previous games. I'm sure there must be some flaw or lie somewhere - it's just not the corporate thing to do!
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Rumours (Score:5, Funny)
Reliable rumours say that civ5 will use a super close view where most of the screen is filled with face of the selected unit. This enables the player to fully see the facial expressions and and have richer gaming experience. Of course You can take a bigger view, but then you will see only clouds.
And the "Large World" consists of 20 hexagons.
To give all the equal opportunity to fight in wars, all unit are of same power. The Phalangs will successfully defend against Warships. This is good, because it would be sad if rich people would win all the wars.
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See here [civfanatics.com] for more details on the above mentioned mods.
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How about combining that with Master of Orion?
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The Phalangs will successfully defend against Warships.
So what's different than previous versions?
Anyone remember SimCopter? (Score:4, Interesting)
Its not exactly the same, but I remember enjoying SimCopter a lot because I could take SimCity 2000 maps and load them up in SimCopter and fly around them in 3D. The nostalgia feeling of loading my best cities and being able to play in them was fantastic. I could see people not wanting to lose their custom maps in Civ4, and this is an excellent solution.
I loved loading up a SC2000 map with the army base and stealing the army chopper. This was the closest thing you could get to 3D GTA at the time.
Alpha Centauri II (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never been into the Civ games, but I'd buy Alpha Centauri II. I wish Firaxis would develop it.
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You might give Civ 4 a try if you haven't already -- I loved the hell out of AC and Civ 4 is the first game in the series to hold my attention the same way. Even if I can't commit atrocities against my own people.
That being said, I too would deperately like to see AC2, but I gather the intellectual property rights for it are all tangled up in an ugly way. The AC user interface has not aged well but overall that was such a great game. I think the biggest thing for me is how differently you needed to play
The Alpha Corollary to Godwin's Law (Score:5, Insightful)
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As a discussion about topic X increases in length, the probability that someone will suggest Y approaches 1.
It's true for any X and Y. It's the old monkeys and typewriters thing.
Alpha Centauri was the best Sid Meier game ever (Score:2)
My wish: AC2 with hex maps and some of the features of Civ (culture is pretty nice, but it'd be cool to mate it with the "UN" feature in AC)... that or a modern remake of Master of Magic.
While we're at it (Civ 5): can tactical combat be. (Score:2)
...turned off? That is, does anyone know if tactical combat will be made a feature that can be disabled through options? I'm really not very much into tactical combat (that's why I like games such as Civ). I'm really happy about the hex map, this has been my dream for years.
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Game Speed (Score:2)
Civ 4 makes me wait a couple seconds for my next move after I hit enter. I'd like to see multiprocessor support and 64 bit support. I hate to wait!
When I played The Operational Art of War (maybe the greatest game ever), I got a new computer and it turbo-ripped through scenarios that the old one was slow on. Civ 4 seems to proceed at its leisurely pace no matter what the computer.
Any ideas on this?
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No offense, but delaying the ability to play just for no reason is a silly idea.
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I belive Larry Niven wrote that into one of his Dream Park novles, that the serach program on the computer had been programed with a dealy, as if a human got a responce too quickly they assumed it hadnet worked propperly and hit serch agine..
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I have to think the point is the scenarios and mods... there's a LOT of that out there for Civ 4. They obviously hope that people will create that much stuff new for Civ 5, but it's not a bad selling point if they can say: "There's already more player-created content for this game than you'll live long enough to experience."
That being said, I can't think of a lot of good ones that wouldn't be very heavily broken by other announced Civ 5 changes. For example, removing religion.
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Or maybe they know people will want to play maps they are familiar with in Civ4 and are trying to make it easier for people to do so. No, that couldn't possibly be it.
Re:DRM (Score:4, Informative)
The only "DRM" is that it's a Steam-only game, and you can always play steam games in offline mode.
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Sorry, but Slashdotters absolutely hate any form of DRM, even when it's completely non-intrusive, unnoticeable, and doesn't interfere whatsoever with your ability to make personal backups of the game. Basically, Steam addresses every single complaint they've ever made about DRM, but they still don't like it because a lot of them want to pirate the game.
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Your description of how steam works doesnt jive with how steam works.
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In fact I have personally spent several evenings unable to play Steam games for exactly the reasons I stated. It is a fact that Steam's DRM works this way. If you haven't encountered it, then either they don't apply it consistently or you are merely lucky.
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You must be dumb or something. I literally didnt have to do anything special: they just launched.
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Uh huh, and because you had that experience, it always works that way under all conditions for everyone, despite all the documented claims to the contrary?
You are a sharp one!
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Uh huh, and because you had that experience
Me and most other people.
So basically, citation needed for your claims.
I'll bet almost anything that you are at fault. Did you mess with the configuration, for example, to not save logon information... because of your DRM paranoia? Yeah, that would break offline mode. DUH.
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"Most" is not "all." Steam's DRM stops people from playing games they own. It's as simple as that.
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Wrong. When you go homes, unplug your ethernet and then boot up your computer and play steam games.
It's a simple tests, and it shows you are wrong.
Then maybe you will STFU.
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Time for a little copy editing...
You cannot always download steam games offline. When steam servers are down, or when you have no internet connection, Steam will start in offline mode. Your games remain playable, provided that you have already downloaded and run them in that case. Steam's DRM is another case where loud-mouthed forum trolls understand even less than paying customers.
There you go. While there are some circumstances in which being 'offline' will cause troubles, most games play just fine i
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When I start up my computer and discover that my wireless is down, Steam prompts me for a username and password. I can't manually run most (not all) of my games, either, because Steam is not really running from the login prompt. If I try to log in, it says it can't reach the s
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I like how your post which has flat out lies in it is moderated as informative.
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In any case, parent is spot-on and absolutely correct for his and my own experience. I'm very happy that the rest of you have a different experience, but you might wa
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Why was this comment modded "Flamebait"? The post is NOT flamebait, in addition to being right on the money: it is true, you can NOT *always* play Steam games without internet connection. And yes, like every other DRM, in this case, too, pirates will have the better experience.
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More lies about Steam. What's worse is that morons will see your post and assume it's true, spreading the lies to other forums.
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I understand and believe that many people have never had problems getting Steam games to run offline. Most of my friends who game on Steam are in this boat.
It's also true that, for whatever reason of vagaries of system specs or environment, this is not true for everyone. I am in this boat. (Sometimes, Steam also seemingly-randomly refuses to authorize some of my games even with an internet connection. This isn't every time or even most of the time, but it's enough to piss you off.)
Steam won't keep me fr