The Google Docs spreadsheet for the Civ6 Epics/Adventures has been updated to include Epic Three. We only had two reports submitted for this game, and it doesn't appear to have attracted much interest.
Let me say a few words about the intended setup for this game. I picked the Inland Sea map script because it creates huge tundra regions in the north and south. Then I decreased the number of AI civs and the number of city states as well as turning on "Scarce" resources, with the result of creating a map full of vast empty spaces. My intention was to create a massive area in which barbarians could spawn, which would repeatedly hammer the player's civilization. In Civ3 and Civ4, the more empty parts of the map there are, the more barbarians will spawn, and more barbarians also appear on the higher difficulty levels. I thought that this would replicate the Rome Versus The Barbarians scenarios that we had for Civ3 and Civ4 in previous incarnations of this game.
Unfortunately, it appears as though Civ6's map generation works in a completely different way. I played out the first 75 turns on this map, and I had the same experience as ebbitten and MJW. The barbarian presence was light to almost nonexistent, turning this into a calm and peaceful builder's game. What happened? My best guess from what I've seen thus far in Civ6 is that the same number of barbarians are generated regardless of the size of the map itself. This means that the worst maps for barbarians are actually small, cramped ones. A big map just means that barbs are more likely to spawn a huge distance away. Now that's just a guess based on my observations thus far, but I think it makes sense. Barbarians also don't spawn any more heavily on high difficulty in this game, and the danger posed by barbarians seems to be heavily based on whether they happen to appear next to horse resources and start spitting out horsemen and horse archers. It's a frustratingly random approach to a game mechanic. Sometimes horsemen spawn on Turn 5 and immediately start attacking your capital. Sometimes you barely see any barbarians at all. I tried to engineer a scenario where there were lots of barbarians attacking the player and it fizzled out in this game.
This game also drove home again the haplessness of the AI in Civ6. Even with their incredible advantages on the highest difficult level, they seem to be completely incapable of developing an economy and pursuing any of the victory conditions. This is so incredibly disappointing because we're seeing in the PBEM games how the mechanics themselves create a robust, deep game of tactical combat. But the AI is completely helpless at understanding any of this, and the only danger seems to come from the AI conducting rushes in the first 100 turns with their free starting units. Remove the initial rush, and they collapse. It's most saddening.
In that light, it looks like we can't really do "challenge" games for Civ6 right now. I'll be trying to concentrate mostly on quirky scenarios with scoring objectives, with the focus being on competing against the other human players for scoring, not against the AI. Next up is an Adventure with Spain using some scoring objectives based around religion. I'm hoping to have it posted by the end of today. Thanks to ebbitten and MJW for taking part in this one.
Let me say a few words about the intended setup for this game. I picked the Inland Sea map script because it creates huge tundra regions in the north and south. Then I decreased the number of AI civs and the number of city states as well as turning on "Scarce" resources, with the result of creating a map full of vast empty spaces. My intention was to create a massive area in which barbarians could spawn, which would repeatedly hammer the player's civilization. In Civ3 and Civ4, the more empty parts of the map there are, the more barbarians will spawn, and more barbarians also appear on the higher difficulty levels. I thought that this would replicate the Rome Versus The Barbarians scenarios that we had for Civ3 and Civ4 in previous incarnations of this game.
Unfortunately, it appears as though Civ6's map generation works in a completely different way. I played out the first 75 turns on this map, and I had the same experience as ebbitten and MJW. The barbarian presence was light to almost nonexistent, turning this into a calm and peaceful builder's game. What happened? My best guess from what I've seen thus far in Civ6 is that the same number of barbarians are generated regardless of the size of the map itself. This means that the worst maps for barbarians are actually small, cramped ones. A big map just means that barbs are more likely to spawn a huge distance away. Now that's just a guess based on my observations thus far, but I think it makes sense. Barbarians also don't spawn any more heavily on high difficulty in this game, and the danger posed by barbarians seems to be heavily based on whether they happen to appear next to horse resources and start spitting out horsemen and horse archers. It's a frustratingly random approach to a game mechanic. Sometimes horsemen spawn on Turn 5 and immediately start attacking your capital. Sometimes you barely see any barbarians at all. I tried to engineer a scenario where there were lots of barbarians attacking the player and it fizzled out in this game.
This game also drove home again the haplessness of the AI in Civ6. Even with their incredible advantages on the highest difficult level, they seem to be completely incapable of developing an economy and pursuing any of the victory conditions. This is so incredibly disappointing because we're seeing in the PBEM games how the mechanics themselves create a robust, deep game of tactical combat. But the AI is completely helpless at understanding any of this, and the only danger seems to come from the AI conducting rushes in the first 100 turns with their free starting units. Remove the initial rush, and they collapse. It's most saddening.
In that light, it looks like we can't really do "challenge" games for Civ6 right now. I'll be trying to concentrate mostly on quirky scenarios with scoring objectives, with the focus being on competing against the other human players for scoring, not against the AI. Next up is an Adventure with Spain using some scoring objectives based around religion. I'm hoping to have it posted by the end of today. Thanks to ebbitten and MJW for taking part in this one.
