Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[Commodore]

Seven, I think you just reinvented SMAC improvements.

Which, don't get me wrong, is a great game and I miss my formers badly. Yes forests were most optimal, but the former minigame was very fun...

[BRickAstley]

City improvements on the map is something I've been favoring for a long time. That's probably the part I'm most curious about how they do.

By the way, Seven, how would you see this working if it was something you could dictate yourself?

Well it's a big question, but I have part of an answer at least.

The main benefit of having improvements on a map is that they can care about the spacial relationships between them. So what I envision is some more basic improvements that are comparable to farms/mines in civ iv, with more advanced improvements (that are typically themed as buildings) also having special abilities. For example, Granary could be an improvement that boosts adjacent farms by 1 food. Market could be an improvement that's worth 1 commerce per different neighboring improvement. Quarries could make building improvements on adjacent tiles cheaper in addition to producing resources. Farming village could be an improvement that just creates farms on empty adjacent tiles over time. You can also add in stuff like a plaza that makes all adjacent tiles count as adjacent to each other. And obviously not all special abilities need to relate to adjacent tiles - you already know what that looks like from existing civ games.

Oh, and I think an important component of some of these ideas is you want to terrain-restrict at least some of the improvements. So like if there's something you can only build on a hill that makes adjacent Xs good, then you want to plan out your layout so that you can put Xs around a hill. And then that influences what shape you have left to put other improvements.

Suburbia: The 4X Version.




The certainly would be a fun and interesting take.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Those saying 5 was a success - is that in volume or money made? I bought it when it was on steam sale and got all the DLC I think for a tenner. I have maybe put 3-4 hours into it at most. There is a good function on steam where you can see how many people have spent no hours on a game, total hours in game and hours/copy.

TBF I have a huge hours played on civ 4 on steam, but I regularly leave it run overnight with everything else on the laptop going :P

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

City improvements on the map is something I've been favoring for a long time. That's probably the part I'm most curious about how they do.

By the way, Seven, how would you see this working if it was something you could dictate yourself?

Well it's a big question, but I have part of an answer at least.

The main benefit of having improvements on a map is that they can care about the spacial relationships between them. So what I envision is some more basic improvements that are comparable to farms/mines in civ iv, with more advanced improvements (that are typically themed as buildings) also having special abilities. For example, Granary could be an improvement that boosts adjacent farms by 1 food. Market could be an improvement that's worth 1 commerce per different neighboring improvement. Quarries could make building improvements on adjacent tiles cheaper in addition to producing resources. Farming village could be an improvement that just creates farms on empty adjacent tiles over time. You can also add in stuff like a plaza that makes all adjacent tiles count as adjacent to each other. And obviously not all special abilities need to relate to adjacent tiles - you already know what that looks like from existing civ games.

Oh, and I think an important component of some of these ideas is you want to terrain-restrict at least some of the improvements. So like if there's something you can only build on a hill that makes adjacent Xs good, then you want to plan out your layout so that you can put Xs around a hill. And then that influences what shape you have left to put other improvements.

Suburbia: The 4X Version.




The certainly would be a fun and interesting take.

That interests me, but I feel it would be a lead balloon with 5s fanbase. Also it needs a huge amount of thought and testing otherwise it will be broken in power in some way and a right setup becomes inevitable. STill dislike 1UPT - would make games that we play incredibly slow IMO.

[Commodore]

I'm curious what their map-tile counts will look like. A lot of the stuff on their feature list describe using tiles for cities, tech, warfare, etc, but we all remember the traffic jams... if they took what was a hex in CIV V and made it 7 hexes in CIV VI, that might give them more space to work with...

Very much this, by the way. The scale of Civ5 always bugged the stew out of me.

[GermanJoey]

City improvements on the map is something I've been favoring for a long time. That's probably the part I'm most curious about how they do.

By the way, Seven, how would you see this working if it was something you could dictate yourself?

Well it's a big question, but I have part of an answer at least.

The main benefit of having improvements on a map is that they can care about the spacial relationships between them. So what I envision is some more basic improvements that are comparable to farms/mines in civ iv, with more advanced improvements (that are typically themed as buildings) also having special abilities. For example, Granary could be an improvement that boosts adjacent farms by 1 food. Market could be an improvement that's worth 1 commerce per different neighboring improvement. Quarries could make building improvements on adjacent tiles cheaper in addition to producing resources. Farming village could be an improvement that just creates farms on empty adjacent tiles over time. You can also add in stuff like a plaza that makes all adjacent tiles count as adjacent to each other. And obviously not all special abilities need to relate to adjacent tiles - you already know what that looks like from existing civ games.

Oh, and I think an important component of some of these ideas is you want to terrain-restrict at least some of the improvements. So like if there's something you can only build on a hill that makes adjacent Xs good, then you want to plan out your layout so that you can put Xs around a hill. And then that influences what shape you have left to put other improvements.

That sound's great to me too. I love the worker aspect of civ4, in terms of how efficiently managing them relates to your growth, but one thing that's always felt missing is that, at least from the perspective of your city, your tiles might as well just be in an unordered pile. Like, first your resources are improved, that's one's thing, ok. But what about your other 16-18 tiles? Maybe you say, "I want a couple farms for this city, and then a bunch of cottages", or "this will be a small city, so just a few mines is fine", or "I just want to spam workshops to cover whatever excess food I have." And it doesn't matter really where those farms/cottages/mines/workshops/whatever are (beyond perhaps sharing them with other cities) - a grassland to the south is the same as a grassland to the north, and a hill is a hill is a hill - so you just build them on whatever tiles are most convenient for your workers. Even whether an improvement is riverside or not (except for Fin or watermills) doesn't really make a difference. Thus, you sorta get the effect, when you zoom out a bit, of your empire just having various random improvements scattered around haphazardly.

Adding an extra layer on top of the worker aspect, where you have what you had before but now have an additional spatial planning aspect to consider, in a trade off with worker efficiency and perhaps even sharing tiles, sounds perfect.

[GermanJoey]

Getting back on track. Civ6's actual motivation for "unstacking the cities" revealed:

"When we unstacked the armies in Civ 5, all the tactical nuances of having cavalry and archers and melee units separated on separate tiles created little rock-paper-scissors combinations that were very clear for players to understand," says Beach. "That was a beautiful win."

[El Grillo]

Yeah, while I love Suburbia and could see Civ implementing its tiles that care about local/regional/total other tiles, that would quickly degenerate into tedium if combined with the number of tiles needed to make 1UPT combat work on a tactical level. Short of scrapping 1UPT entirely, there could be potential in abstracting army composition even further: think of an army as a mobile city. It works/occupies tiles to increase in power over time, costs increasingly more maintenance the larger it gets, risks becoming unhealthy/unhappy, contains a blend of cultures and religions, and hires specialists as technology becomes more advanced.

[MJW (ya that one)]

This is all fluff at this point. I'll just point out because buildings are on the map they cannot steal them from you when you take out the city which might make conquest overpowered.

No corruption system mentioned yet--probably the most important part in how the game plays.

I like the new art style.

[greenline]

i guess we can add civilization to the list of franchises that have officially jumped the shark