Batman | Begins
Two years earlier, Bruce Wayne had stood in a Bhutanese prison cell, stripped of his passport and his name. He’d wanted to feel fear again—the kind that had frozen him in that alley when pearls scattered like dropped teeth. Instead, he felt only a hollow rage. Then the man in the hemp robe came. Henri Ducard, he called himself, though his eyes held the cold arithmetic of a glacier.
Later, in the cave beneath Wayne Manor, Alfred patched a knife wound across Bruce’s ribs. “You’re bleeding on the Persian rug again, Master Bruce.” Batman Begins
In the warehouse office, Carmine Falcone was explaining to his lieutenant why fear was a commodity. “You think the mob’s about money? It’s about certainty . People need to know the rules.” He tapped a cigar. “I am the rule.” Two years earlier, Bruce Wayne had stood in
Bruce followed him into the mountains. The League of Shadows’ temple breathed ice. Here, a boy who had once fallen down a well learned to fall on purpose: from cliffs, from burning ropes, from the pedestal of certainty. Ra’s al Ghul, whose voice was the rustle of old parchment and older bones, taught him that justice was a scalpel, not a shield. “To fight injustice,” the ancient man whispered, “you must become something terrible .” Then the man in the hemp robe came
Bruce stared at the cowl on its stand. The ears were crooked. He’d fix that tomorrow. “Did he ask for a name?”
But tonight, a bat had flown. And the city, for one breathless moment, remembered how to be afraid of the dark.
“The problem is that the game’s designers have made promises on which the AI programmers cannot deliver; the former have envisioned game systems that are simply beyond the capabilities of modern game AI.”
This is all about Civ 5 and its naval combat AI, right? I think they just didn’t assign enough programmers to the AI, not that this was a necessary consequence of any design choice. I mean, Civ 4 was more complicated and yet had more challenging AI.
Where does the quote from Tom Chick end and your writing begin? I can’t tell in my browser.
I heard so many people warn me about this parabola in Civ 5 that I actually never made it over the parabola myself. I had amazing amounts of fun every game, losing, struggling, etc, and then I read the forums and just stopped playing right then. I didn’t decide that I wasn’t going to like or play the game any more, but I just wasn’t excited any more. Even though every game I played was super fun.
“At first I don’t like it, so I’m at the bottom of the curve.”
For me it doesn’t look like a parabola. More like a period. At first I don’t like it, so I don’t waste my time on it and go and play something else. Period. =)
The AI can’t use nukes? NOW you tell me!
The example of land units temporarily morphing into naval units to save the hassle of building transports is undoubtedly a great ideas; however, there’s still plenty of room for problems. A great example would be Civ5. In the newest installment, once you research the correct technology, you can move land units into water tiles and viola! You got a land unit in a boat. Where they really messed up though was their feature of only allowing one unit per tile and the mechanic of a land unit losing all movement for the rest of its turn once it goes aquatic. So, imagine you are planning a large, amphibious invasion consisting of ten units (in Civ5, that’s a very large force). The logistics of such a large force work in two extreme ways (with shades of gray). You can place all ten units on a very large coast line, and all can enter ten different ocean tiles on the same turn — basically moving the line of land units into a line of naval units. Or, you can enter a single unit onto a single ocean tile for ten turns. Doing all ten at once makes your land units extremely vulnerable to enemy naval units. Doing them one at a time creates a self-imposed choke point.
Most players would probably do something like move three units at a time, but this is besides the point. My point is that Civ5 implemented a mechanic for the sake of convenience but a different mechanic made it almost as non-fun as building a fleet of transports.
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