Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[Sirian]

Civ5 numbers from about a year ago, for total hours played all time vs number of copies, had the median at about 115h/copy, with only about 10% of copies with zero hours on them.

There are undoubtedly a number of folks who simply leave the game running while they eat dinner, watch TV, even sleep -- I have one friend like that, her comp is always running whatever she was last playing -- but to project that out to anything more than a minor slice of the total hours would be self-delusion. And even if one-sixth of all hours logged are AFK hours, that still leaves almost 100 played hours per copy.

There are people out there without jobs: unemployed, retired, disabled in some way, addicted, supported by somebody else, who really can put in a steady 80 hours a week in to a vid game. They drive up the averages quite a bit, but those same people drive up the averages for all of the games, not just for Civ5.


1m hours per day (for the sake of argument) would be over 1.5b hours in the last five years. If there are 15m copies out there, that would average out to about 100h per copy. This is in the right ballpark, so perhaps that number does represent hours played in the last month. Either way, it clearly does NOT represent total hours played, and the absurdly low conclusion of 3h per copy. No way is that the case.

Civ6 is bound to be a financial success, too. But this bears little on whether RB folk will enjoy playing it. For that, we'll just have to wait and see.

For me personally, I haven't been able to play Civ as a recreational pursuit for over a decade. As a player, it's ancient history for me, so I may have less stake in this than almost anyone else in the thread. But there is a corner of my mind that remembers playing Civ for fun, and I am open to the possibility that this could happen again. For that, too, I will just have to wait and see.


- Sirian

[MJW (ya that one)]

Civ5 is still #4 on Steam...It's pretty obvious you don't want to admit that a crappy game could be successful.

Crappy? Let's not get carried away, Civ5 in its current state is objectively a pretty decent game. If you're solely comparing it to Civ4, then sure there are a number of things lacking... but that's an incredibly high bar you're up against. If you view any game without as much depth and nuance as Civ4 is "crappy", then you're not going to enjoy pretty much any other game out there.

It's crappy if you can beat emp without breaking a sweat, because IMM and Deity are just silly (remember due to the "level 2 difficulty bug" Deity AIs only get 36% (!!!) unhappiness and build costs) and MP is weak.

Most people cannot do that in the first place so civ5 is good for them. Now part of the problem is that they don't play a lot but the real cause is most people are bad at strategy games. A good example of this would be watching FtL streams.

[Jowy]

Norway made it in :O

[E_T]

Live stream on twitch today

[BRickAstley]

Norway will make for fun map balancing and design.

[picklepikkl]

For those who are, like me, too lazy to go watch a video, but unlike me not too lazy to look it up on reddit (a very specific level of lazy):

Leader - Harald Hardrada - Norway
National Ability - No cost to embarking or disembarking. Can enter deep waters upon researching shipbuilding, earlier than anyone else.
Leader Ability - Thunderbolt of the North - All melee naval ships can do coastal raids. Also gets the Longship unit, which heals in neutral territory.
Unique Unit - Berserker - Pillaging requires one less move, and bonuses to attack, but not as good defence.
Unique Infrastructure - Stave Church - All temple benefits, but an additional adjacency bonus to woods.

[Bacchus]

I think Norway and Scythia will just be bans in MP games. Fun SP variants to be sure.

[Molach]

Norway..maybe I must buy this afterall.

But. I just don't understand...

"Civilization VI will largely be keeping the one unit per tile rule to avoid stacks of doom, but a new feature is being introduced that will allow would-be generals to customise their units with additional gear, as well as combining units together to create armies and corps. "

Fine, combine units of same type into better types. Add support "items". Good.

But at what time in the last 6000 years were armies _not_ usually organized into stacks of doom in time of war? Or rather, when did a nation's army get so large that the units were impossible to fit into a 300 x 300 km area? (largest map size in civ V compared to the earth) One unit per tile makes little sense in a historical context. "Sorry General Howe, we can't fit grenadiers, light infantry, cavalry as well as that artillery unit on Staten Island. Hell, you wouldn't be able to fit them all in the whole state of New York." They should have fixed stacks. Or maybe realized that if you are invaded by a real actual unbeatable stack of doom, you lost the game. And that can be an okay thing every now and then. Even if stopping an unstoppable AI because they didn't hire enough traffic cops/logistics experts might be fun.

Sceptical.

[T-hawk]

Well, at what time in the last 6000 years did armies _not_ have to do strategic and tactical maneuvering? That's what gets lost when stack-of-doom mechanics are too strong, that you just muster and march and whoever brought the most wins and there's no depth or fun to executing the combat itself. Civs 5 and 6 eschewed the stack-of-doom to bring interesting tactics into the game, not for realism. Civ is a game, not a history simulator.

[Brian Shanahan]

Problem with the "stack of doom" is not stacking but computer code which isn't complex enough to deal with any but the most basic of tactical manoevres. The computer essentially can only handle "x defenders per city plus put overflow into a more mobile force for defence/when going on attack". And the attack is simply put evreything together, go to nearest city, siege, attack, rinse and repeat. When you look at MP games you see that it's the limits of the game's programme is the problem not stacking itself.

And it's also the reason why 5 was such a bad game in terms of combat (at least base). The code didn't know how to handle terrains, unit types, placement and all the other logistical decisions (in fact base combat ai was essentially the old stack ai from 4, despite most combat routines now being obsolete) that proliferated with 1upt. I haven't really followed games in the final state, but weren't units still being ferried half way round hostile territory, despite an open land route pst release of the first expansion?

So unless there's been a major overhaul and testing of the combat algorithms, expect 6's combat ai to be as lacking as 5's.