[weerd]

Great article. My favorite part was learning a new word: grognard!

Makes me sad that I only got into the series at Civ5, which I enjoyed every bit of except for the ultra creepy 3D models of the leaders.... totally unnecessary in this kind of game. Also it's ridiculous to see Gandhi pop up and declare war on you. It was a good example of a typically superfluous feature tacked on to an otherwise decent piece of software.

[DonaldPShimoda]

> Also it's ridiculous to see Gandhi pop up and declare war on you.

Yeah, but it's a staple of the series now. If anything, I think an installment without a warmongering Gandhi would be disappointing!

https://kotaku.com/why-gandhi-is-such-an-asshole-in-civiliza...

[kimar]

Thanks for sharing this! Quote from the article:

In the original Civilization, it was because of a bug. Each leader in the game had an “aggression” rating, and Gandhi - to best reflect his real-world persona - was given the lowest score possible, a 1, so low that he’d rarely if ever go out of his way to declare war on someone.

Only, there was a problem. When a player adopted democracy in Civilization, their aggression would be automatically reduced by 2. Code being code, if Gandhi went democratic his aggression wouldn’t go to -1, it looped back around to the ludicrously high figure of 255, making him as aggressive as a civilization could possibly be.

[ericmcer]

It kinda sucks that nowadays that would be fixed in the next patch and forgotten about as a minor bug in the games history. There was definitely something more artistic about the old software distribution style. Once your creation was given to the world it was able to take on its own life.

[DonaldPShimoda]

I mean, from a gameplay perspective it's absolutely more reasonable for this bug to have been fixed.

That said, the best user experience does not always derive from the perfect game. What the developers have to do is compare the experience for a new user (who knows nothing of Gandhi's warmongering history in the Civilization games) to the experience of someone who is familiar with the series and might even expect such behavior.

They clearly couldn't keep the old rule in place — that Gandhi suddenly gains the highest aggression value possible is unexpected for new players. Instead, they simply made Gandhi have a slightly elevated aggression — something that new players can handle ("Oh, haha, it's funny because it's Gandhi I guess") and something that old players will recognize. It's a good middle ground. (Note that they have kept around Gandhi's elevated aggression in more recent incarnations, though they have reduced its effect somewhat.)

But, again, from a pure gameplay perspective, the bug should have been fixed.

[eropple]

> Note that they have kept around Gandhi's elevated aggression in more recent incarnations, though they have reduced its effect somewhat

Kind-of. Civ 6 makes him sneaky and shitty aggressive rather than just straight-out homicidal. This matches my experiences pretty well: https://kotaku.com/gandhi-is-still-an-asshole-in-civilizatio...

[kibwen]

In Civ 6 the Gandhi AI will actually never declare war on you, AFAIK. For the instance where a human player is controlling Gandhi and declares war, he has a unique cutscene where he lampshades the absurdity of the situation. The Gandhi AI does have an uncharacteristically large chance of "randomly" spawning with the agenda that makes him revere nuclear weapons, as a throwback to Civ 1.

[bovermyer]

When I played the original Civilization, there was a bug with the Trade technology where as soon as I unlocked it, the game froze and was unplayable.

So, I learned to play the game without learning Trade, and instead just destroying my enemies as fast as possible without it.

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

You could even pretend it was planned functionality instead of a bug!