Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[RefSteel]

I see someone has put together a size 200 city. Oh, the hours of pressing end turn.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/civ-...mous-city/

Pretty sure this is possible in Civ 4 BtS with a huge, lush map and e.g. Cereal Mills. (Probably wouldn't even take thousands of turns, though it would take enough to make me abandon the attempt long before I arrived.)

More impressions of Civ6 to discuss; I wrote up a report for an Emperor game that I played on Livestream earlier this month. Lots of thoughts on the current state of the game in there, which overall I'm enjoying at the moment. :)

Yay, another Sullla report! Thanks for taking the time to write these up!

[fluffyflyingpig]

Maybe it's just me, but fishing villages that are only viable due to districts and trade routes and not worked tiles does not feel at all natural.

The amount of production and food that is magically appearing out of thin air via trade seems incredibly weird. Almost like the map is irrelevant!

[Gaspar]

Entertaining write-up, Sullla.

The issue you raise at the end of the game regarding AI I think misses the point a little bit. I don't really think anyone is looking for the AI to be at the level of a competent human opponent. That is an unrealistic expectation. I think the issue is one of degrees. The Civ3 AI was incredibly stupid but if you avoided exploiting it, could be a threat at higher difficultly levels. The Civ4 AI was clearly smarter than the Civ3 AI if still stupid. Blake's AI was smarter than that. Then they changed the game rules and the Civ5 AI was completely useless and Civ6s AI seems roughly equivalent. These things should be getting better over time, not staying the same or getting worse!

I think Civ6 is a quite playable, entertaining game but I also think the way the game has been constructed to minimize war over the last two games, first by making it incredibly easy to fight off any AI invasion because of their inability to perform at 1UPT and secondly by minimizing the number of wars altogether through the ridiculous warmongering penalties in both games is a disservice to the franchise. I think the two big things the game has to improve to be a quality long-term title are the interface and the place and function of the AI opponents - the UI issues we've all mentioned ad nauseum and can and should continue to do so. The warmongering penalties should continue to be reduced, particularly in terms of formal wars with casus belli. The AI should be trained to pose a credible threat that requires more from the human than quick cash upgrading units and keeping their ranged units behind their melee units/cities. If that was possible, we could live with the usual that every Civ AI has produced. I'm not sure that Firaxis can actually make that happen so I think we're probably looking at a fun, good but not great game.

Well a third - I think the map generation is generally pretty terrible. Particularly with regard to strategic resources, but also as a general rule there aren't enough maps and then they don't do a particularly quality job of spitting out interesting and fair starts.

[T-hawk]

Pretty sure this is possible in Civ 4 BtS with a huge, lush map and e.g. Cereal Mills.

Corps don't do it, unless it's a custom edited map where every tile is a corporate food resource or some such.  The corps might get to 100 food or so on a real map but you need 400 for a size 200 city.  Nothing stacks onto a Civ 4 city like Civ 6's districts.

It's possible (in theory) with settled Great Merchants, which produce 1 food each and are unbounded in number with enough time.  Although you'd be talking thousands or even millions of turns to spawn 400 of them.

[RefSteel]

Corps don't do it, unless it's a custom edited map where every tile is a corporate food resource or some such.  The corps might get to 100 food or so on a real map but you need 400 for a size 200 city.  Nothing stacks onto a Civ 4 city like Civ 6's districts.

It's possible (in theory) with settled Great Merchants, which produce 1 food each and are unbounded in number with enough time.  Although you'd be talking thousands or even millions of turns to spawn 400 of them.

Good point; I didn't even think about the actual math, which was silly of me. And even if I did cook a map (or grow Merchants) and get to 400 food in the city, even just crawling up from size 190 to size 200 would take hundreds of turns on its own.

[T-hawk]

On AI: Firaxis has never made a solid Civ AI up to the standards of what we want.  Only Blake ever did.  Firaxis was community-savvy to make Civ 4 moddable enough to facilitate that, and recognize and assimilate the results into the official product.  Once.  Ten years ago.  That was one isolated occurrence, not a new norm for the strategy industry or for the Civ franchise.  And we're fooling ourselves if we ever think or demand otherwise.

Firaxis has never had a priority for AI to be anything more than a moderate speed bump.  And that's perfectly fine.  The Civ audience outside of us few screaming hardcore degenerates doesn't care.  Players expect a win rate very close to 100%.  Sure, they'd like to have a stronger AI, nobody's arguing that we should have a weak one.  But game development has a million competing priorities and you can only do so much.  The perfect is the enemy of the good.  Blake himself had the luxury of working on a time scale that was as long as Civ 4's development itself, the luxury of a frozen set of subsystems and rules post-release, and the luxury of a self-directed project unencumbered by commercial concerns or scope creep.  None of that can happen during the development cycle of Civ or any strategy game before its release.

As for Civ changing to deemphasize war: why shouldn't it?  It doesn't have to descend from tabletop games like Risk or Diplomacy where the natural end condition is to conquer the entire map.  Plenty of modern board and war games are meant to lead to a victory state where you control just a bit more territory or resources or technology than the next guy.  And the maximum extent of conquest of any real-life historical civilization has been half a continent or so. Civ 6 turning the game into PvM against the barbs rather than PvP seems perfectly logical to me.

[The Black Sword]

 The corps might get to 100 food or so on a real map but you need 400 for a size 200 city.  Nothing stacks onto a Civ 4 city like Civ 6's districts.

I'd guess that it's actually trade routes generating all the extra food from outside the map. The districts for a city that size probably generate housing, otherwise you deal with a -100% food modifier.

You're probably correct that the AI wasn't a priority for Firaxis. It's important not to start frothing at the mouth and fling insults of incompetence around the place, as happens far too often. At the same time, there's nothing wrong with stating that the AI in it's current form is a major turnoff for me personally and that I'm more likely to continue playing/buy future expansions and games if it's improved.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Corps don't do it, unless it's a custom edited map where every tile is a corporate food resource or some such.  The corps might get to 100 food or so on a real map but you need 400 for a size 200 city.  Nothing stacks onto a Civ 4 city like Civ 6's districts.

It's possible (in theory) with settled Great Merchants, which produce 1 food each and are unbounded in number with enough time.  Although you'd be talking thousands or even millions of turns to spawn 400 of them.

Good point; I didn't even think about the actual math, which was silly of me. And even if I did cook a map (or grow Merchants) and get to 400 food in the city, even just crawling up from size 190 to size 200 would take hundreds of turns on its own.

There is a really simple way of changing this with the worldbuilder - putting a gran and terrace in the same city gives you 100% food stored between growth. Removes the clicking through issue at least, you just need to be able to get the food then.


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[fluffyflyingpig]

Or just use world builder to spawn a ton of great merchants

[darrelljs]

Blake himself said he didn't think he was a better AI programmer or designer than Soren, he simply had the benefit of 100s of hours of playing Civ at a high level.  The changes he made to Worker management were based on community CW, and made by far the biggest difference.

Then he became a buddhist monk .

Darrell