Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[Hail]

I have zero problems with consumable workers, even if it does mean that cities "might as well build improvements directly". They are an elegant way of implementing Public Works where it feels alive and interactive.

The paradigm in Civ is that Units are what do things on the map. If the tiles just developed on their own after being fed production by the city, it wouldn't seem like you were doing things, they would just happen.

the paradigm of civ is tbs + tile-based. all must happen on tiles. not between tiles, not in some global off-map stockpile, etc.

None of that is happening here, you stubborn troll asshole. Everyone here understands what ICS is just fine. The root of the strategy is still the same, only the minimum distance between sites has changed. Oh, and, by the way, ICS originated in Civ1, not in Civ2. OH, BUT I GUESS SOME OF US DON'T HAVE A CIV PEDIGREE THAT GOES BACK THAT FAR, AND ONLY GOT STARTED LATE IN THE SERIES, LOL!!

get your shit together and stop the insults.

But I guess the reason for it is so that established cities can provide the production for the basic level of improvements in a new city.

If that was the goal, it could also be done by making a national pool of "public works" production which is then distributed between building improvements throughout the empire.

Hmmm, but the other aspect of workers is that they need to be spatially coordinated on the map. If you just had a big pool of production that you could shift around with a slider or something, then the game wouldn't be so interesting, I think.

I find spatial coordination of workers a mundane chore. much clicking for little gain. the PW system from the CoP series is brilliant gamedesign.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Chill out joey

Also, I for one really enjoy the worker minigame, some games, it feels like I'm falling behind, other games, everything just *clicks*, and everything moves so smoothly, and I rocket ahead. My workers are almost never idle in Civ4. They do often run out of things to do in Civ5, but that is more a fault of Civ5's boring-ass tile improvements.

Also, thank god you can build roads of your own using military engineers in the midgame.

[v8mark]

Pardon if I'm misunderstanding your intent here, but this:

The unrestricted method is a high conflict design: clashes will and do occur at borders, over who gets to control what territory. The restricted method is more of a "gentleman's agreement": you take x cities and I'll take x cities and everyone else will take x cities, and we'll all sit here and play patty-cake with one another for a while. Or maybe we'll fight, but without anything to gain from it, just fight for the sake of fighting just to be fighting: fight to wound the competition, rather than to gain for your own (imaginary) people. ... There's a certain smoothness to the gentlemen's agreement method, but it also comes with a certain kind of emptiness. You're battling the designer's leash around your neck rather than the opponents on the map.

Is an absurdly inaccurate view of Civ IV and, frankly Civ III. In "unrestricted" Civ III, conflict occurs because land fills up quickly (due to low expansion costs), units are cheap, and production-intensive city improvements are highly limited in number. Gains from conquest are often economically marginal due to corruption (pre-Communism), and all AI are liable to declare on the human without warning due to the game often compelling them to on the basis of an RNG roll. Therefore, fighting neighbors is often less about executing a coherent national strategy and more about "well, I have nothing much better to do with my production, and I'm going to have to kill these guys anyway, so I might as well fight now on my own terms", which is akin to 'fighting just to be fighting'.

In Civ IV conversely new conquests are immediately productive as soon as they come out of revolt into player control. Each captured city potentially adds significantly to an empire's productive capacity. There are far more resources to contest as well, which are much more rationally dispersed than in Civ III. In III it's quite possible to secure a copy of all the strategic and luxury resources available on one's landmass without fighting (or trading with) anyone, provided a player expands quickly enough. In IV, the map generator typically makes doing so impossible. This is to say nothing of fighting over holy cities, corporate headquarters, or IV's overall superior wonders.

I agree with Bob. I’m so confused by Sirian’s post.

On the one hand we have Civ3, where cities are homogenous, land is all that counts (amount, not quality – tile yields are too similar and luxuries too plentiful) and conquest gains are marginal. On the other we have Civ4, where cities are specialised, quality of tiles matters, and conquest gains are huge. In one of these gains, conquest is incentivised for its own sake, and that game isn’t Civ3.

So why is warfare so prevalent in Civ3? It’s like Civ5’s buildings, which are so marginal that it’s often better not to build them – or to build something else, like another unit – than to actually build them. But you do anyway, because there’s basically nothing else for you to do. Civ3 and conquest is like that for me. “Hey, I’ve run out of useful buildings to build, and I can’t grow any more because there’s a hard cap on that... better build some units! Guess we’ll be fighting, even if I don’t really want to!” That’s so, so, so, so unsatisfying. I totally don’t get this argument about perceived freedom. Civ3 does not feel free to me – it feels like I’m being forced into certain decisions because it’s just so obviously the best (or only!) way to play.

In Civ4 you have an actual meaningful trade-off strategically, because the cost of building a new city in the short-term can reach a point where it’s comparable to the enormous long-term benefit of building it. And the terrain a city site is on matters a lot more. You have to factor in that there’s a very very juicy triple-gems double-rice 12-cottage city in the middle of the jungle that you REALLY REALLY want to get, but you’re already at 10% research because you’ve expanded to seven cities and ohhhh do I risk completely crashing my economy to get it before Suryavarman does?

And that’s without mentioning the slightly weird ICS detour… like, ICS was completely destroyed in Civ4. Completely. Some guy at Apolyton ate the box the game came in because of a bet he made that ICS would still be the dominant strategy, when it so obviously wasn’t. The way to counter ICS is to make the short-term cost of building a city painful enough that it’s sometimes not the best thing to do. Civ4 does this, and it works.

[Gavagai]

But I guess the reason for it is so that established cities can provide the production for the basic level of improvements in a new city.

If that was the goal, it could also be done by making a national pool of "public works" production which is then distributed between building improvements throughout the empire.

Hmmm, but the other aspect of workers is that they need to be spatially coordinated on the map. If you just had a big pool of production that you could shift around with a slider or something, then the game wouldn't be so interesting, I think.

Well, we differ here, I never thought that moving workers around is by itself fun or adds much to the game. It's a dull optimization task. Though even this task is trivialized by making all improvements equal cost.
From my perspective having a worker unit is only justified by its interaction with other units and it appears that civ6 is going to minimize this aspect.

[T-hawk]

This is the best sales pitch for Civ5 (to me, at least) that I've heard in years. Not sure it's enough to drop everything else and investigate, but in times when I had more time, I might have.

I'm not sure it'd be to your liking. The GPP is a required component and rather small and gamey and micromanagey in nature. Cities #5-8 come to positive value only by producing a Great Scientist to accelerate the tech tree by more than the city's cost.

Pardon if I'm misunderstanding your intent here, but this:

The unrestricted method is a high conflict design: clashes will and do occur at borders, over who gets to control what territory. The restricted method is more of a "gentleman's agreement": you take x cities and I'll take x cities and everyone else will take x cities, and we'll all sit here and play patty-cake with one another for a while. Or maybe we'll fight, but without anything to gain from it, just fight for the sake of fighting just to be fighting: fight to wound the competition, rather than to gain for your own (imaginary) people. ... There's a certain smoothness to the gentlemen's agreement method, but it also comes with a certain kind of emptiness. You're battling the designer's leash around your neck rather than the opponents on the map.

Is an absurdly inaccurate view of Civ IV and, frankly Civ III.

This is a view of Civ 5 and it is damningly accurate. There is no relevant fighting in Civ 5. I completely gave up on militaristic games after about two attempts. The city cap in Civ 5 is so tight that you can always land-grab your way to it and never need to conquer. Conquering blasts you so hard with happy and diplomatic penalties that it's never worth it. Conquered cities aren't just unproductive in themselves, they bear negative value in hurting your entire empire with the happiness penalties. The one occasional exception is a rival capital with enough luxuries to pay for its own happiness cost, but it isn't worth building units to conquer just one city or to conquer your way through another to get to the capital. I only found fun in Civ 5 once I realized that this game subsystem practically speaking doesn't exist.

It is also unclear to me why you insist on peddling this fiction that Civ IV has some sort of hard limit on expansion, as the community has demonstrated repeatedly to you that continual expansion through all eras is both possible and frequently optimal.

I believe Sirian's concern isn't so much that expansion is impossible, as that it always requires counterbalancing investment in other areas. You can't expand as fast as you can reach; you do need to be building cottages and courthouses and shrines and Bureaucracy and such. Civ 4 does always let you expand, but you have to request and earn permission. I believe it's that which chafes at Sirian. Civ 4 is like a reasonably permissive mom, but it's still a mom, you feel the leash even if it doesn't actually tug to restrain you. Civ 3 is like your cool uncle that lets you free-range wherever you want and chuckles when you overgorge yourself. Civ 5 may as well be a Catholic nun snapping her ruler.

[BRickAstley]

Also, I for one really enjoy the worker minigame, some games, it feels like I'm falling behind, other games, everything just *clicks*, and everything moves so smoothly, and I rocket ahead. My workers are almost never idle in Civ4. They do often run out of things to do in Civ5, but that is more a fault of Civ5's boring-ass tile improvements.

Hey guys i just had the best Idea, we should create a game like civ, but focus it *all* on the workers! Make the whole of gameplay rely on moving your workers around to do stuff quicker and more efficiently than everyone else. It'd be a whole new type of game, like a 'worker placement' game or something.

[Brian Shanahan]

An interesting variation, but I'm not sure I'm a huge fan as it's described.
From similar mechanics in board games, I find it tends to lead to no-one wanting to select a mediocre thing if that might open up a much stronger option for the next player, at the same cost.
And will an AI ever be able to make that choice intelligently, against uncertain future options?

I'll give 5,000/1 on that this'll be patched that you have to invest your point immediately about five patches in, just like what was done with policies in 5.

[SevenSpirits]

An interesting variation, but I'm not sure I'm a huge fan as it's described.
From similar mechanics in board games, I find it tends to lead to no-one wanting to select a mediocre thing if that might open up a much stronger option for the next player, at the same cost.
And will an AI ever be able to make that choice intelligently, against uncertain future options?

I'll give 5,000/1 on that this'll be patched that you have to invest your point immediately about five patches in, just like what was done with policies in 5.

Will you really? I'd take that.

[Brian Shanahan]

An interesting variation, but I'm not sure I'm a huge fan as it's described.
From similar mechanics in board games, I find it tends to lead to no-one wanting to select a mediocre thing if that might open up a much stronger option for the next player, at the same cost.
And will an AI ever be able to make that choice intelligently, against uncertain future options?

I'll give 5,000/1 on that this'll be patched that you have to invest your point immediately about five patches in, just like what was done with policies in 5.

Will you really? I'd take that.

No not really, I'd be breaking the law, not being a licensed bookmaker.

[Sirian]

I believe Sirian's concern isn't so much that expansion is impossible, as that it always requires counterbalancing investment in other areas.

It requires waiting. That's the problem. You have to wait until the middle game. If you are extremely adept at exploiting every available cash-incresing lever, you can accelerate the arrival of the middle game, but it's still the middle game. The mechanism that is stopping you from determining when and where to settle is the heavy hand of the designer, not the emergent conditions of your individual game situation. You HAVE to follow the pattern laid out for you of unlocking this that and the other before you are allowed to settle as you please -- to settle what you are capable of defending.

Civ4 only applies the heavy hand in the early game, lightens it over time, and turns it loose later. It's an INEVITABLE process, with experience and skill determining how quickly one can get to the loosening part. That's a skill set, surely, but some folks here seem determined to believe I'm incapable of managing the issue rather than deciding it just wasn't my cup of tea and walking away.

Much of what's in CIv4 is there because of me -- especially matters related to game pacing and balance -- but that doesn't mean it's the Civ game of my dreams. My job was to help Soren make the Civ game of his dreams.


All of this because I expressed a desire to see Civ6 support expanding to fill the map you're playing instead of the leash length you've been allowed by the designer. "Leash" is a tough word, I realize, but it's a flavor/preference word not a skill oriented word. Each system has its own set of challenges to play out. I do think it's a bit ironic that some of the same folks who pan Civ5 for having too tight a leash for them are irritated if someone else comes along and labels their preference as too tight of a leash in turn. But the free-wheeling design where the map size and the opponents provide all the boundaries on expansion gets its share of tough language, too: "settler spam", "ICS", "mindless expansion", plenty more take your pick.


One of Civ5's secrets to success (with its new audience) may be that conquest is entirely superfluous.

Yet if the tight leash intended to "make tall (aka small) empires viable" goes away, the military dimension may be revived. So from an observation perspective alone, Civ6 is bound to provide plenty of opportunity for theorycrafting.


- Sirian