Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[Rowain]

If you got double the empire score of the next AI, this is only an issue of pressing end turn 150-200 times.

If you first go all out conquereing than SV is useless I agree.

But for people that prefer to not war SV might be interesting.

[TheArchduke]

If you got double the empire score of the next AI, this is only an issue of pressing end turn 150-200 times.

If you first go all out conquereing than SV is useless I agree.

But for people that prefer to not war SV might be interesting.

I detect a bit of animosity.

[Rowain]

If you got double the empire score of the next AI, this is only an issue of pressing end turn 150-200 times.

If you first go all out conquereing than SV is useless I agree.

But for people that prefer to not war SV might be interesting.

I detect a bit of animosity.

I don't think I get what you are trying to say here (especialy with the )

[Krill]

Science victory is irrelevant in MP in Civ 6 because you will die before you get there, and the is because anyone who doesn't understand that is basically playing to lose

[Bacchus]

This is what gets me really angry actually. There is a legitimate game design challenge here: how do you avoid making any victory reducing to a conquest victory, and how does the leading 4x studio tackle that challenge? By roundly ignoring it. Why even bother, there are some who just dont like conquest, so lets give them some buttons to twiddle, and twiddle them they will. Sandbox!

[Rowain]

Science victory is irrelevant in MP in Civ 6 because you will die before you get there, and the is because anyone who doesn't understand that is basically playing to lose

I was under the impression that we were taking about SP.

[Huinesoron]

Science victory is irrelevant in MP in Civ 6 because you will die before you get there, and the is because anyone who doesn't understand that is basically playing to lose

I think this points at the reason for the push to make production slow in Civ VI. They can extend the tech and civic trees to push Science and Culture further into the future, but that just gives Conquest more time to take them out. The 'extend the game time' move only makes sense if it takes a long time to build units, and is therefore not easy to go a'conquering.

Obviously that doesn't address the 'boring' comments, but... what speed setting are MP games usually played on? If it's Standard, or even Quick, how would a game played at Online speed (which seems to double everything except unit speed) but without the 'buggy' production multipliers feel? It seems at least possible that you'd get a scenario where production is an actual limiting factor (so building for war means the enemy is getting ahead of you in research, potentially towards military supremacy), but without the whole game slowing to a snail's pace.

hS

[TheArchduke]

This is what gets me really angry actually. There is a legitimate game design challenge here: how do you avoid making any victory reducing to a conquest victory, and how does the leading 4x studio tackle that challenge? By roundly ignoring it. Why even bother, there are some who just dont like conquest, so lets give them some buttons to twiddle, and twiddle them they will. Sandbox!

I disagree heavily. The civilization that expands better, may it by expansion or war, should be more competitive. The whole game is built around that.

There is a game which does things different like Imperialism or even Europa Universalis (a bit). This is a whole other game though.

More cities is more power, thus conquest always pays.

I get more angry at the stupid way they went to make conquest a bit more unviable, the occupation penalty, which is insanely bad designed.

[Rowain]

This is what gets me really angry actually. There is a legitimate game design challenge here: how do you avoid making any victory reducing to a conquest victory, and how does the leading 4x studio tackle that challenge? By roundly ignoring it. Why even bother, there are some who just dont like conquest, so lets give them some buttons to twiddle, and twiddle them they will. Sandbox!

And what is the difference to Civ1 - 4 here? They were all in the line of "If you conquer them you can choose which way you win".
Adventures/Epics had to be specifically crafted to make conquest not the answer.

Still people choose to twiddle the buttons. Astonishingly according to steam-stats more poeple got the achievment for a culture-win(22.3%) than for a conquest-win(21.0%)

IMO the challenge was always to win without conquering the AI/kill CS etc.

[Krill]

This is what gets me really angry actually. There is a legitimate game design challenge here: how do you avoid making any victory reducing to a conquest victory, and how does the leading 4x studio tackle that challenge? By roundly ignoring it. Why even bother, there are some who just dont like conquest, so lets give them some buttons to twiddle, and twiddle them they will. Sandbox!

A good conquest victory has a series of steps, specifically building an economic advantage to take something from another player, and then using what they have taken to build another economic advantage to take some more, and so on until a player reaches a conquest VC. In a balanced game, where all players have the ability to wage war effectively, at some point there should be a dearth of economically viable targets because more than one player has been able to play for a conquest VC. Then when each player is bloated, we then turn to reaching one of the other VCs: PB18 is the perfect example of this. BGN could have won a conquest VC (disregarding real life consequences of playing 18 hour turns), TBS reached culture and OH launched the spaceship.

This requires an awful lot: each player has to be competent (ie, capable of understanding and using all of the systems within a game), neighbour luck skews games (but in reality, competent players following alternative strategies will leave windows of opportunity to be attacked), and I'm sure I'm missing other factors.

All civ games have failed to do this because the AI has never been competent, and because the AI is incapable of waging war effectively, it cannot contest a conquest VC, leaving open too many easy targets of opportunity for the human player. MP does not have this problem, but has required games to be rebalanced: just look at the size of RtR to bring this into a functional position, and for Civ 3 go and look at the Apolyton University mod that Alexman built.

The way I think this probably needs solving for SP is to build two or more AI's in a game: one Killer AI, as defined as teh Ai that is capable of eating every other AI, and then other AI's that follow alternative strategies (essentially, crippled AI's, so build the KAI first, then knoble it to make the secondary AI). The rest comes down to balancing.

Also, Civ 6 is fucked: Because of how conquest VC will always work, all of the economic outputs in the game need to be transferable from one strategy to another ie, production can be used to build units or districts, but outputs that do not enable you to wage war have to contribute in some way to building a military (this can be completely reasonable, for example locking into one type of output may give greater returns in one part of the economy, in Civ 4 this is cottages: you invest in them, and you can use fewer hammers to build wealth so you have more output in total. The balancing act is where skill comes in). Outputs that pay into one VC but nothing else are worthless until you win, and this is why you only turn the culture slider on AFTER you are ready to rush for a CV). Civ 6 just doesn't seem to do this well enough, once you veer off the ideal conquest path you get crushed eventually.