Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I know, but I think large empires get too many penalties currently to be honest. Large empires generally get what they want over smaller empires so I think there should be a bit of a wide bias.

Whilst not great in SP where you can game the AI into not attacking it is less easy to abuse in MP.

[Cheater Hater]

Disagree. This had a lot of problems.

...

None of this is fundamentally unsalvageable. Limiting expansion with an economic brake still can fundamentally work, but there's a lot of work to do besides just porting Civ 4's mechanism.

I think these are really fair criticisms of Civ4's maintenance model. (even though I still think that, at least conceptually, Civ4's model is 100% the way to go) I think one of the biggest problem's with Civ4's model as-implemented is that they tried to create one system that worked across too many different game ranges. To start with, a barren world and one where you trip over grass gems will have very different economies. On top of that, one economic system is supposed to adapt to any combinations of:

1.) 3 different game speeds
2.) 8 different world sizes
3.) 9 different difficulty levels

That's 3*8*9 = 216 combinations per map! That's way too much for any designer to test out and make sure it "feels" right. And that's not including the fact that map dimensions will affect city maintenance, even for otherwise identical settings. The worst part is that there's no easy way to adjust the maintenance other than difficulty level, but then that affects barbs, so it's not too common to mess with that at least in MP games.

A lot of those are at the extremes (and I noticed you discounted Marathon already). Anything below Noble (and probably including it) doesn't need to be balanced as perfectly since the player is already playing a different game (and will move to a higher difficulty before carefully examining the system). Deity is pushing everything to the max, and requires one of three things to win (complete mastery of all mechanics, AI exploits, and/or luck/starting bias), so that isn't balanced in that sense. The smallest map sizes don't have a late game, while huge games require luck to get to the late game. Starting eras are another aspect, but Ancient is the default and not really changeable (I wonder what percent of people ever started a custom game?).

[The Black Sword]

- It's obscure for new players. Look at any beginner Civ 4 forum and one of the first things they post is "How do I get more gold?" The really hidden part is how each city escalates the number-of-cities cost for all your previous cities - city #7 can cost like 20 gpt by this mechanic - and this is clearly communicated nowhere in-game and takes a lot of mathematical understanding.

I've always thought the rule they were going for was pretty simple; 'each city costs a little bit more than the previous one, up to some cap'. The complicated formulas are a way of distributing this cost in an even and semi-realistic way around your empire that gives you multiple options of combating it(courthouses, Forbidden Palace, civics, raw commerce generation). Do you think this just needs to be communicated better or does it need to be simplified?

- It didn't balance and scale right with escalating player skill. It felt balanced in the early days, when everyone was wasting effort on religion and chariot rushes, before everyone figured out how to build for two food resources, cottage everything else, get by on paper-thin military and build via the whip. Advanced players figured out how to overpower the cost drain with Bureaucracy and Currency slingshots. We think this is good strategy because we figured out how to beat the system, but this is closer to one-right-path than we like to admit.

Should maintenance be higher then(even on deity)? I must admit I enjoy the increased maintenance of toroidal maps, but I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority there. I disagree with a characterisation of Bureau and Currency as 'one-right-choices'. Currency has a whole bunch of competing techs; Calendar, Monarchy, CoL and MC to name the most common. The big competitor for Bureau is the path to Knights, but there are other options like Music, particularly if you don't have a good capital site.

Btw, do people think that all land should be settleable eventually? This is the case with the civ4 system, once you get to a certain tech level, my understanding is it's not the case with civ5. I can see arguments for and against.

[Jkaen]

I prefer the idea of all land not being settleable. Again this plays into the idea of the map being important, if you have it so all land can be used, then at some point your cities in each game will start looking very similar

[T-hawk]

I've always thought the rule they were going for was pretty simple; 'each city costs a little bit more than the previous one, up to some cap'. The complicated formulas are a way of distributing this cost in an even and semi-realistic way around your empire that gives you multiple options of combating it(courthouses, Forbidden Palace, civics, raw commerce generation). Do you think this just needs to be communicated better or does it need to be simplified?

Yes, you're right, the principle is simple but the formulas are complicated. Thing is, "a little bit more" isn't something you can base strategy on. The game never tells you if that little bit more is going to be 3 gpt or 12 gpt, which makes a big difference in whether or when that next city is a good idea. You need to understand the formulas for that. You could get there by either clearer communication or simpler formulas or most probably both approaches.

And oh yeah, I forgot about civic upkeep too. The costs of a new city are scattered and hidden behind three different formulas, four if you count the upkeep for the military to protect it, five if you count inflation as well.

Now I remember that that was deliberate. Hiding the costs was a reaction to Civ 3 players forever screaming about corruption. People liked Civ 4 so much more because they didn't feel scammed out of what they felt entitled to earn. Even though they were but never knew it until understanding their way through the formulas (which the majority of players never do.) And even though both Civs 4 and 5 could actually punish you with a new city being negative value, which Civ 3 never did.

I've always felt Civ 5's happy cap works better there for your average strategy player. It avoids the entitlement feeling by preventing the overexpansion in the first place rather than allowing it then penalizing afterwards. And it doesn't hide the brake but brings it right up front and center as a strategic point for you to manage.

Btw, do people think that all land should be settleable eventually? This is the case with the civ4 system, once you get to a certain tech level, my understanding is it's not the case with civ5. I can see arguments for and against.

I'm happy with not. The real world has plenty of land that isn't settled. Civ 4 can get rather degenerate in allowing everything to be profitable with enough per-city trade routes and corporations and specialists.

[Windsor]

Btw, do people think that all land should be settleable eventually? This is the case with the civ4 system, once you get to a certain tech level, my understanding is it's not the case with civ5. I can see arguments for and against.

It really doesn't matter. T-hawk posts a screenshot that doesn't look good, but that game have been decided a long time ago so the player is really just roleplaying and having some fun. And why not? If roleplayers want to be able to settle the ice and tundra, why not let them do that? The game is a sandbox and not a strategy game at that point anyway.

As long as some land remains unprofitable for the relevant part of the game, that's good enough.

[Commodore]

Happy penalties for expansion don't have to be linked to empire-wide happiness, of course.

*Founds city* "Drone riots" *curses*

[LKendter]

One of the few things I will say that Civ5 did better was having happy limited empire size. It was very EASY to understand. The little bit I played I didn't want another early city unless it claimed another happy source. As I got enough happy buildings in place, then another city looks better. Tying the GA to happy further makes you want a really small empire.

[Psillycyber]

I'm happy with not. The real world has plenty of land that isn't settled. Civ 4 can get rather degenerate in allowing everything to be profitable with enough per-city trade routes and corporations and specialists.

Good god. Do people actually play on map sizes that big? Talk about a late-game slog! Standard is the largest I ever go nowadays...also because my computer would probably crash with anything larger.

I agree, though, about Civ4 getting a little silly in the late game with size-20 tundra cities being fed by corps and farms. In my own personal mod, I've changed tundra to yield no base food, and to require fresh water to build anything other than forts or windmills. It still allows you to build in the tundra near rivers and lakes in the lategame, but there is less incentive to plop down random cities in the middle of nowhere.

[Gaspar]

I don't think all land needs to be settled, stuff like tundra iceballs and the like. But the overwhelming majority of it should be settleable. I think if you take away the silly stuff Sid's lets you do, Civ4 mostly gets that right. I never liked the global happiness setup in Civ5 because it felt less natural - the empire getting progressively more expensive to maintain as it expands makes more sense than the empire getting progressively unhappy, even if there is some truth to both in real life.

I think the thing I dislike the most about Civ5 is how it handles conquest - the puppeting mechanic just isn't fun and tbe hoops you have to go through to integrate a conquest of even a 5 city empire generally aren't worth it. I always feel like the ideal goal in a 4x game should be to spread far and wide and eventually take over the world. I'm fine with other win conditions and variant play, but getting really big should basically be the one best choice. A three city challenge should feel challenging because it is strictly worse than expanding normally, it shouldn't feel like a perfectly normal way to play the game.

All that said, I think you can still have plenty of fun in a game that treats things differently - its just not my ideal version of Civ. I've been playing since the original and Civ3 actually remains my least favorite iteration of the franchise, the one of the 5 I could never get into for even a little while, so I can accept different ways of doing things. I hope whatever system 6 chooses its different from 5 and I'll probably be happy.