Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[scooter]

I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to believe that a certain franchise eventually perfected the model. I don't think Civ4 is 100% perfect, but I also have never had a game in any genre that I was still playing well over a decade after it came out. And if I'm being honest, all I want in a Civ game is just Civ4.5, and that's the same reason I enjoyed playing some of the balance mods that were worked on here at RB because they were basically Civ4.5. There are very few things in Civ4 where I'm left thinking "ugh I hope a future game reworks this" because after all these years, I'm still pretty happy with how the game is designed/balanced. It just feels like a game that took all the lessons of the first 3 installments and made the best thing possible with those lessons. So that may be driving a lot of the Civ5/6 rejection from places like this forum - a belief that 4 (or 3 if that's you) basically got it right. That's pretty much how I feel.

To use a different example, this type of thing happens all the time to fans of a particular musical artist. The first couple albums make them fans, but the third album (or whatever) is the one that blows them away, and they find it hard to enjoy all future albums by this artist because the third one was so incredible to them. It's hard to accept that maybe the stars just aligned for that one. It's also hard to see future albums be widely acclaimed when to you it will always feel like a step down. And maybe it is a step down, but expecting the stars to align again like that isn't reasonable.

[darrelljs]

There have always been, and always will be, another ton of games that are fun but get boring after you've played for a while. These are successes. A game maker should be proud of his work when he makes something that falls in this bucket. And, honestly, we should be happy to get a game like this.

Yeah, but I don't think Civ5 was in that bucket (and not implying you were implying it was).

Happiness = Reality / Expectations, and when you make a civ game the reality better meet my outsized expectations .

Darrell

[The Black Sword]

And if I'm being honest, all I want in a Civ game is just Civ4.5,

To be fair they have to make some radical changes between versions, they're coming out with a new game, not an expansion. I think that's a good thing, if it works out then we get a genuinely different experience, if not there are always other games to play. If they just made a civ4.5(or 5.5) it would be a waste of an opportunity IMO.

[T-hawk]

Although I'll chip in 50c...we need to crowdfund buying T-Hawk a copy so he can break it like a wild mustang and more it his hackhorse.

Ha. I've got the money. What I do is use money as a proxy for mindspace. I resist buying things because that means I'm going into it all the way. I don't have a ridiculous amount of bought unplayed Steam games like everyone else. I don't half-ass.

I've just been busy with other stuff besides video games lately. Mostly a board games group that meets regularly for entire weekends. Coincidentally enough, we were just looking over Suburbia in the games shop last weekend. (Didn't play it as we had a group of 6 and it goes to only 4.)

"Unstacking the cities" and spreading them out over the map is the right evolutionary step for the franchise -- in my opinion. So much so, it seems obvious to me.

I had the same reaction even before seeing your comment. So much of the one-right-path in Civ 5 and even 4 comes from stacking up everything you can cram into one city. "Unstacking the cities" is exactly what the franchise needs to do. This is even how to recapture the feeling of squeezing everything you can out of marginal terrain as you liked so much in Civ 3.

Oh dear. Looks like we've a game designer who doesn't understand the game he's making. If he can say rubbish like that about Civ 5's 1upt, I shudder to think what his design decisions for 6 were.

How is this rubbish? The rock-paper-scissors tactical maneuvering of Civ 5, trying to get your mounted units through to kill a soft archery guy without getting them shot or counterattacked, is indeed the high point of that game. And with meaningful decisions, not one-right-pathing. The downsides were the traffic jams (which they're alleviating) and that the parallelism exploded the decision space too much for the AI to handle (which did improve in Civ 5's patches, enough that Civ 6 certainly could do it right.)

[Kurumi]

My spider sense tells me that some of those will happen:

- hardcap on cities
- no workers
- city states more "important" which probably will rule out playing without them
- borders will become even more absurd in some way
- barbarians removed or reworked beyond recognition
- war becomes even less bloody and ethically inspiring for the player, enjoy genocide and never batting an eye
- slavery so natural you'll forget that it existed (civilization v is amazing at removing every connection to real-world consequences of policies, everything is good)

Basically, I think that the game is going to be an even easier Civ5 with more simplification. The moment they show me a screenshot from 1840 AD without entire Pangea covered in culture - I know that it'll take me veeeery long before I buy Civ 6, if ever. (I bought V in December 2015...)

And the last two points are something that I hate about Civilization V. There's nothing wrong with religion. Nothing wrong with capturing workers of city-states. Nothing wrong with Autocracy. Cultural tensions don't exist. Cultural domination is not because of aggression or history of it, it's just having AMAZING MUSEUMS! (which use robbed artifacts)
What draws me to 4X is that I need to feel my civilization. I need to understand the problems I undertake. I need to know what kind of problems they are and why they are problems at all. Games are not only entertainment, they are a way of reflection upon our human condition. Especially games like Civilization should take a sharp, critical scope. Slavery in Civ 4 was ingenious - it's a great policy to have in your empire, but every time you use it, you need to click a button, see what's getting produced, see the population drop and the unhappy malus. You know that you have done something. That it has consequences. You are motivated to wonder what is exactly happening, how it happened in the history of our civilizations.
Civilization should have more of these problems, more in-depth problems. I know that there are some things I just can't do in video games because I feel bad about it. My first playthroughs of anything is going for a saint personality type. I've put quite some time in Fallout: NV and while I can roleplay a cannibalizing black-widow type woman, basically a wretched person, I can't help the Legion. I can't create a character which I'd feel would actually side with Legion. (same why I couldn't really play Miriam's Believers or Yang's Hive or Spartans, or Morgan...) I just don't understand how to create one, who he would be and so on. That's only because the game put me through the problems concerning Legion. In Civ 5 you can recreate the Legion and you will never encounter any of the problems seen in F:NV. It's good, requires no player agency, no maluses present, no citizen protests what you are doing.
The lack of ethics in Civilization V is appalling.

[Brian Shanahan]

How is this rubbish? The rock-paper-scissors tactical maneuvering of Civ 5, trying to get your mounted units through to kill a soft archery guy without getting them shot or counterattacked, is indeed the high point of that game. And with meaningful decisions, not one-right-pathing. The downsides were the traffic jams (which they're alleviating) and that the parallelism exploded the decision space too much for the AI to handle (which did improve in Civ 5's patches, enough that Civ 6 certainly could do it right.)

Because, in order to try and accomodate 1upt they pretty much had to break every development model in the game. And they still didn't manage to implement it properly, because a) the maps were too granularly coarse to handle 1upt, and b) they didn't implement a half way decent AI for it.

Saying 1upt is a fine win for civ 5 is like a team celebrating a five nil loss.

[T-hawk]

Brian, that's not what Ed said, you're reading what's not there. He didn't say 1upt was a win, you're making that up, he didn't say anything about the development model. He said the RPS interactions enabled by 1upt are a win. That's a perceptive distinction, and says he does understand his game, the good and bad aspects of 1upt, to isolate and keep the good while rebuilding to work around the bad.

[Sareln]

T-Hawk, I own both Suburbia and Castles of Mad King Ludwig (same designer) and I like both as interesting games with a lot of thinking and planning involved. For 6, I played Quartermaster General w/ my group and would recommend it (seats exactly 6, it's a 3v3 WW2 game).

Although I'll chip in 50c...we need to crowdfund buying T-Hawk a copy so he can break it like a wild mustang and more it his hackhorse.

Ha. I've got the money. What I do is use money as a proxy for mindspace. I resist buying things because that means I'm going into it all the way. I don't have a ridiculous amount of bought unplayed Steam games like everyone else. I don't half-ass.

I've just been busy with other stuff besides video games lately. Mostly a board games group that meets regularly for entire weekends. Coincidentally enough, we were just looking over Suburbia in the games shop last weekend. (Didn't play it as we had a group of 6 and it goes to only 4.)

"Unstacking the cities" and spreading them out over the map is the right evolutionary step for the franchise -- in my opinion. So much so, it seems obvious to me.

I had the same reaction even before seeing your comment. So much of the one-right-path in Civ 5 and even 4 comes from stacking up everything you can cram into one city. "Unstacking the cities" is exactly what the franchise needs to do. This is even how to recapture the feeling of squeezing everything you can out of marginal terrain as you liked so much in Civ 3.

Oh dear. Looks like we've a game designer who doesn't understand the game he's making. If he can say rubbish like that about Civ 5's 1upt, I shudder to think what his design decisions for 6 were.

How is this rubbish? The rock-paper-scissors tactical maneuvering of Civ 5, trying to get your mounted units through to kill a soft archery guy without getting them shot or counterattacked, is indeed the high point of that game. And with meaningful decisions, not one-right-pathing. The downsides were the traffic jams (which they're alleviating) and that the parallelism exploded the decision space too much for the AI to handle (which did improve in Civ 5's patches, enough that Civ 6 certainly could do it right.)

[GermanJoey]

And if I'm being honest, all I want in a Civ game is just Civ4.5,

To be fair they have to make some radical changes between versions, they're coming out with a new game, not an expansion. I think that's a good thing, if it works out then we get a genuinely different experience, if not there are always other games to play. If they just made a civ4.5(or 5.5) it would be a waste of an opportunity IMO.

That's fair, but at I don't begrudge them for trying something different. I think what actually gets under people's skin - or at least mine - isn't that Firaxis has the gall to make a brand new game, it's that they trash on their old games to sell the new one, usually ignorantly, using the fact they officially represent "Sid Meier's Civilization" as a franchise to give them authority.

Like, take 1UPT for an example. What was the reason Firaxis said they wanted 1UPT? Because it was something new? Because Jon Shafer was also a huge fan of Panzer General, and wanted to try integrating its tactical combat in with civ-style empire building? No, it was to "fix civ4's combat model" which centered around "stacks of doom." Over and over, we'd hear, from both the official sources and fanboys, how Civ4's stacks of doom were ahistorical, simplistic, broken, unfun, and boring because it was all about just cramming tons of units into a single tile and then mindlessly walking towards the enemy. And, for the single player experience, this often was indeed the case. However, in MP, it doesn't happen so much because it is inefficient, slow, inflexible, and leads to overcommitting. That begs the question: if human players try to avoid an SoD strategy against each other despite knowing about it, does Civ4, mechanically speaking, actually have an intractable SoD problem?

The answer, of course, is no. The Civ4 "SoD problem" was actually an AI problem. First, consider defense. The AI doesn't understand when and where another player will attack, so it will spam defensive units nonstop and put them in *every* city so that the player can't snipe them for free. (and then laugh about it on internet forums) A side effect of this defensive unit spam means that the AI will very rarely try to attack out of its cities at attackers, because it allocates its defensive units as defensive units. On top of that, the AI gets production bonuses at higher difficulty levels (due to the AI having a very low skill cap), so them having more units than the player will always just be a fact of life. Combining these two things with the fact that the defender naturally has an advantage leads one to the necessity to be extremely hammer-efficient when conquering an AI. You will need to kill 2 or 3 hammers of theirs for every one you lose in order to win. That leads to strategies that combine siege with a superior tech unit in order to minimize losses. (At higher skill levels, horse-based attacks can work too, but the SoD invasion was an obvious fact of life for most players) Now look at AI offensive. It is an unfortunate fact that the AI is not very good at coordinating a war. So, what's the easiest way to ensure that it at least doesn't embarrass itself too badly when it invades someone? Well, group up all its units in a single stack and move that in, of course! It's easier to coordinate and ensures that, at the very least, the player won't pick them apart piecemeal and actually has to do real work to defend themselves. Thus, you had both the player and the AI both favoring SoD tactics simply because AIs were in the game. However, in the press (and at the keyboard), the designers of Civ5 didn't seem to understand that. Instead, they threw out the baby with the bathwater in an attempt to "fix" the problem and ended up creating an AI that was even worse at coordinating war than the old one!! Instead of a stack of doom sitting in a pile in the middle of the floor, we had a carpet of doom covering the whole damn house! And here we have Ed Beach calling that a "beautiful win." Perhaps, as T-Hawk says, that there's some real depth there that reveal itself in human vs human situations, similar to what happened in Civ4, but that's besides the point. The point is that they changed mechanics without understanding it was an AI problem and ended up creating an even more glaring AI problem, but still talk as if the idea of going back to unit stacks was backwards, brain-damaged thinking.

And you could go on and on with this same sorta thing. Civ5 players tend to beeline one particular tech? Clearly, the idea of choosing your own techs is a broken and boring idea, so let's try to increase their strategic decisions... but instead of rebalancing the tech tree, let's add random bonuses so that instead the player has no real choice at all! Players like to build certain wonders every game? Let's make it so whether they can even build the wonder or not randomly depends on their starting land, and say that Civilization VI will be "the first Civilization where the geography of your nation influences every aspect of the game!" Whether they actually believe this or are just saying whatever nonsense for marketing reasons (although note that they really did believe themselves about SoD/1UPT), it's still infuriating to see these guys putting on such high airs while saying such stupid shit.

And, by the way, it's not just us getting worked up about this - I've been reading Civ5 fan reactions to Civ6 on other forums and they seem just as annoyed about stuff like the "geography of your nation" quote and the "beautiful win" quote, etc, as we are.

[Bobchillingworth]

My spider sense tells me that some of those will happen:

- hardcap on cities
- no workers
- city states more "important" which probably will rule out playing without them
- borders will become even more absurd in some way
- barbarians removed or reworked beyond recognition
- war becomes even less bloody and ethically inspiring for the player, enjoy genocide and never batting an eye
- slavery so natural you'll forget that it existed (civilization v is amazing at removing every connection to real-world consequences of policies, everything is good)

Basically, I think that the game is going to be an even easier Civ5 with more simplification. The moment they show me a screenshot from 1840 AD without entire Pangea covered in culture - I know that it'll take me veeeery long before I buy Civ 6, if ever. (I bought V in December 2015...)

And the last two points are something that I hate about Civilization V. There's nothing wrong with religion. Nothing wrong with capturing workers of city-states. Nothing wrong with Autocracy. Cultural tensions don't exist. Cultural domination is not because of aggression or history of it, it's just having AMAZING MUSEUMS! (which use robbed artifacts)
What draws me to 4X is that I need to feel my civilization. I need to understand the problems I undertake. I need to know what kind of problems they are and why they are problems at all. Games are not only entertainment, they are a way of reflection upon our human condition. Especially games like Civilization should take a sharp, critical scope. Slavery in Civ 4 was ingenious - it's a great policy to have in your empire, but every time you use it, you need to click a button, see what's getting produced, see the population drop and the unhappy malus. You know that you have done something. That it has consequences. You are motivated to wonder what is exactly happening, how it happened in the history of our civilizations.
Civilization should have more of these problems, more in-depth problems. I know that there are some things I just can't do in video games because I feel bad about it. My first playthroughs of anything is going for a saint personality type. I've put quite some time in Fallout: NV and while I can roleplay a cannibalizing black-widow type woman, basically a wretched person, I can't help the Legion. I can't create a character which I'd feel would actually side with Legion. (same why I couldn't really play Miriam's Believers or Yang's Hive or Spartans, or Morgan...) I just don't understand how to create one, who he would be and so on. That's only because the game put me through the problems concerning Legion. In Civ 5 you can recreate the Legion and you will never encounter any of the problems seen in F:NV. It's good, requires no player agency, no maluses present, no citizen protests what you are doing.
The lack of ethics in Civilization V is appalling.

To be fair, Civ III was way worse from an ethical standpoint. That game outright encouraged genocide. Each population point was assigned a race / nationality, and if you captured a city its population would be massively unhappy, prone to rioting, and potentially culture-flip back to their parent civ, which would cause all manner of headaches. You could ply them with specialists and luxuries, while waiting for them to veeeery slowly absorb into your empire, but by far the best approach was to starve the city while building workers (who consumed pop points and would appear as special slave units), and then replacing the native population by merging in workers from your own culture.


Oh, and adopting Fascism killed 2-4 pop from all of your cities over a certain size, as your civ replicated the Holocaust.