Report written and uploaded to the website. As usual for me, this one is probably too long and a bit meandering. I will post a snippet from the conclusion here:
"Civ6 on release is a flawed game. The balancing is poor, there are a lot of exploits, diplomacy is a total trainwreck, the AI makes the Templars from the Apolyton Demogame look like genuises, and One Unit Per Tile remains a terrible fit for the series that continues to cause all sorts of problems. Tom Chick, the reviewer who infamously wrote the only critical review of Civ5, has finished his review of the release version of Civ6, and it's quite harsh. I don't think he's wrong either; almost everything in that article is a legitimate complaint about the game in its current state. If you're on the fence about purchasing Civ6, I think you have very good reason to remain skeptical right now.
With that said... I still like this game. The city building mechanics are excellent, worker builder management and tile yields are back in a big way, Civ6 has returned to being a game of expansion once again, the government/civics system is lots of fun to use, and the various leader/civ bonuses are mostly unique and interesting to play. I'm hopeful that the poor aspects of the gameplay will be improved via patches; one thing that gives me hope is the fact that Civ6 is extremely stable to play, with virtually no reported crashes or stability issues. The charitable interpretation is that Firaxis was working on these issues before launching to make sure they had a stable platform, and now will go back and begin fine-turning the gameplay balance with feedback from the community. This could be completely false, but I hope that's what has been taking place.
But ultimately, even if that doesn't happen, Civ6 provides a solid base to work off of. There's enough good things in the design for me to give Firaxis several patches to iron out some of the problems in the AI, in the diplomacy, and so on. They've earned that much from me. The game also becomes a lot more fun on higher difficulties; a lot of my frustration in this game came from the weakness of the AIs on Prince difficulty level. If that improvement doesn't happen though, Civ6 is a good enough game that we can mod it into something even better, removing the poorly thought out mechanics and doing the balancing ourselves that should have been carried out professionally. One way or another, this is going to become an excellent game in time.
Finally, one last point of comparison. Most of Civ6's problems right now involve the AI in some way, between its seeming total inability to construct its own cities, conduct warfare, or haggle in diplomacy. But most of the mechanics in Civ6 are good systems, even if the numbers might be off right now. This is in contrast to Civ5, where the gameplay mechanics were inherently flawed from the start, and no amount of number tweaking could salvage them. In a nutshell, this is the difference between the two games for me. You can work around poor AI and poor balancing (both can be fixed in time), but it's essentially impossible to work around poor mechanics in the core gameplay. That's why, for me, Civ6 is fun to play while Civ5 was not. Your feelings may or may not coincide with mine here."
"Civ6 on release is a flawed game. The balancing is poor, there are a lot of exploits, diplomacy is a total trainwreck, the AI makes the Templars from the Apolyton Demogame look like genuises, and One Unit Per Tile remains a terrible fit for the series that continues to cause all sorts of problems. Tom Chick, the reviewer who infamously wrote the only critical review of Civ5, has finished his review of the release version of Civ6, and it's quite harsh. I don't think he's wrong either; almost everything in that article is a legitimate complaint about the game in its current state. If you're on the fence about purchasing Civ6, I think you have very good reason to remain skeptical right now.
With that said... I still like this game. The city building mechanics are excellent, worker builder management and tile yields are back in a big way, Civ6 has returned to being a game of expansion once again, the government/civics system is lots of fun to use, and the various leader/civ bonuses are mostly unique and interesting to play. I'm hopeful that the poor aspects of the gameplay will be improved via patches; one thing that gives me hope is the fact that Civ6 is extremely stable to play, with virtually no reported crashes or stability issues. The charitable interpretation is that Firaxis was working on these issues before launching to make sure they had a stable platform, and now will go back and begin fine-turning the gameplay balance with feedback from the community. This could be completely false, but I hope that's what has been taking place.
But ultimately, even if that doesn't happen, Civ6 provides a solid base to work off of. There's enough good things in the design for me to give Firaxis several patches to iron out some of the problems in the AI, in the diplomacy, and so on. They've earned that much from me. The game also becomes a lot more fun on higher difficulties; a lot of my frustration in this game came from the weakness of the AIs on Prince difficulty level. If that improvement doesn't happen though, Civ6 is a good enough game that we can mod it into something even better, removing the poorly thought out mechanics and doing the balancing ourselves that should have been carried out professionally. One way or another, this is going to become an excellent game in time.
Finally, one last point of comparison. Most of Civ6's problems right now involve the AI in some way, between its seeming total inability to construct its own cities, conduct warfare, or haggle in diplomacy. But most of the mechanics in Civ6 are good systems, even if the numbers might be off right now. This is in contrast to Civ5, where the gameplay mechanics were inherently flawed from the start, and no amount of number tweaking could salvage them. In a nutshell, this is the difference between the two games for me. You can work around poor AI and poor balancing (both can be fixed in time), but it's essentially impossible to work around poor mechanics in the core gameplay. That's why, for me, Civ6 is fun to play while Civ5 was not. Your feelings may or may not coincide with mine here."
I did not know that I could build more farms to get additional housing; I didn't even know that lighthouses and seaports provide housing. I think something like 150 turns passed before I built England's cheap unique harbor district, since I had no idea what it would do or if it would be useful. Something as complicated as a double wonder build into mass seaside resorts was way more complicated than I was thinking in this particular game.