28-07-2008 05:07 | www	edit | quote	#4 | report |
Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

A combination of:

1. It's a game feature now apparently, according to one preview (don't remember which): large colonies will expand to take up multiple tiles.

2. It's done for PR reasons: the marketing folks get paid to spend waaaaay too much time thinking about how to get the most value out of their promotional material, which leads to them manufacturing artificial screens that have as much 'cool stuff' crammed into them as possible. Empty maps aren't very sexy, so they throw a ton of stuff in there that often makes little or no sense, which is also why you see rather unnatural numbers of ships in some of the coastal screens. Most/all of these screens were clearly made in the World Builder.

Take my word for it, every single piece of promotional material for any game produced by publishers/developers is very carefully manufactured and/or screened, it's almost never just the result of 'natural' gameplay. You always have to take this kind of stuff with a bit of a grain of salt.

One of the most extreme examples I've ever seen of this was actually for Civ4: there was a pre-release screenshot that showed off a city sprawling out over 20+ tiles with massively oversized wonders, which looked really awesome but is obviously not possible in the game -- it requires significant messing around with both the World Builder and the XML files. This was especially nasty as it created the false impression that you could actually have something like that in the game, and people ended up disappointed upon learning you couldn't. (Edit: screenshot in question)

It's not coming from a bad place really, but some of these marketing folks tend to get a little over-enthusiastic from time to time

Last edited by Locutus on 28-07-2008 at 05:14