Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[sunrise089]

@GermanJoey - great point about arbitrary past-title bashing.

@BlackSword - i respectfully disagree about the need for huge changes to justify a purchase. Sports games, shooters, long-running RPG series, etc. sell tons of copies with few changes to their mechanics. Civ is even set up to succeed this way since civilizations, leaders, and techs are only a subset of possible choices each game. I absolutely believe that a pretty reskin of IV with new voiced and animated leaders and techs and wonder movies and 2-3 new mechanics a-la Madden annual updates could work fine for the Civ series if games came out roughly every three years.

@Gavagai - strongly disagree with you about the Death Star

[Qgqqqqq]

mjw on 'Is Civ5 successful drama?':

90% of gamers cannot beat EMP on Civ5 (I've considered people who never finish games) so Civ5 is good enough for them. It has flaws but they don't matter for them. So the real question is if those 90% should count or not which actually has nothing to do with Civ5 itself. There's problems for not caring about the 10% (like your game being trashed as not "real") but they don't matter because Civ is the only AAA TBS left standing.

(I would not count the 90% because if you cannot beat EMP then LOL.)

I strongly suspect that 90% of Civ4 players never beat Prince. Ultimately, most players play games casually, no matter the strategic depth beneath it.

[The Black Sword]

I define "unit" here as something which can't be broken into smaller components.

I agree that a key component of warfare is deciding how to deploy your resources but I don't think they need to be able to break down into arbitrarily small components for that. MUPT has a limit on that too, you can't split your axe up into 2 warriors either. If the amount of force you can concentrate in a location via armies is similar to the amount you can build at that time then you could get very similar limits as MUPT. Not that I feel it has to be that free to make a good game.

@BlackSword - i respectfully disagree about the need for huge changes to justify a purchase. Sports games, shooters, long-running RPG series, etc. sell tons of copies with few changes to their mechanics. Civ is even set up to succeed this way since civilizations, leaders, and techs are only a subset of possible choices each game. I absolutely believe that a pretty reskin of IV with new voiced and animated leaders and techs and wonder movies and 2-3 new mechanics a-la Madden annual updates could work fine for the Civ series if games came out roughly every three years.

Sure, I'd almost certainly buy another iteration of civ4, and it's clearly not perfect, there are things to improve. But if they make huge changes and they're successful doing that we get 2 different great games to play instead of 1 and a bit.

[greenline]

But the argument seems to be that Civ 5 is a failed game, that the 1UpT ruined the game, that it was filled with almost nothing but flaws and bad mechanics. That is only really true if you expected Civ 5 to be just like Civ 4.

It could also be true if you expected Civ 5 to be a compelling strategy game with interesting decisions to make after putting several dozen hours into it. A strategy game doesn't have to have a carbon copy of Civ 4's mechanics to accomplish this.

[Jkaen]

http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/11/sid-me...on-cities/

It doesn’t necessarily mean that the maps will be huge, with armies and cities spread out. You may wind up with a few cities or lots of cities. The happiness level will be focused on a city level, rather than on a global basis across your civilization.

“One city can only go out three tiles in all directions,” Shirk said. “One city with maximum land can’t build every Wonder. If you build every district in one city, you will not have enough farmland to support your population. You have to make these decisions city by city. We are unstacking the cities and taking that to the nth degree.”

That means you have to spread the different districts across multiple cities. That means you have to be able to defend multiple cities. The idea is to take full advantage of the terrain. Each hex that is near another can modify how your tile grows. You may get a bonus based on what is adjacent to the tile. Before, you could put down a building in a city and be done with it. Your districts can be containers for additional buildings. You can create a holy site that will eventually house religious buildings such as churches or temples. If you have a mountain pass, you may want to put a military encampment there to create an easily defended zone.

Happiness per city takes us back a bit (was that 3 or 2?), I wonder what they are bringing in to balance city spam?

[v8mark]

I read city-level happiness to mean something similar to the Civ4 model. Global happiness was another of Civ5's failed experiments that they've realised was a mistake.

[Jkaen]

My point was meant to be that unless they add in some sort of corruption mechanic then having city spam becomes the one right way ™, there needs to be some sort of global balance mechanism in place I think

[Thoth]

Civ 4's cash maintenance per city worked well. I see no reason not to bring it back for Civ 6.

[Borsche]

Civ 4's cash maintenance per city worked well. I see no reason not to bring it back for Civ 6.

Seriously. It will need to be balanced to the system of commerce/gold yields that the game provides, but the way it scales is perfect.

[BRickAstley]

So who is going to draft the email to Ed offering our RB crowd as Civ 6 MP beta testers?