Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[Lord Parkin]

I did experience a bizarre occurrence a few hours ago.

Roosevelt declared war on me, and on the same turn Saladin had declared war on me. Trouble is - I'm Saladin. And there are no other Saladins in this game.

Later I met Victoria to find we were somehow already at war. She made peace immediately. Not sure what happened there, I'm assuming bug.

I've seen reports from others that the AI can blame the player for the actions of other AI's with the same nation, so apparently there's some confusion going on in the diplomacy code somewhere.

[scooter]

Agreed on the tribal villages. I spent a couple minutes looking for one yesterday.

I haven't bought the game yet.  The tenor of the complaints is making me seriously consider it, though.  I'm seeing a lot of comments about balance issues, desire for the game to be harder, interface issues, and multiplayer.  I'm not hearing much of anything about 'the game is about not doing things' or 'I'm bored'.  So far it sounds like the sorts of problems that are eminently patchable.

Is that what it actually feels like to people playing?

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly how I feel. I'm having a lot of fun, and the frustrating things (there are admittedly a lot of them) all seem very fixable. I worry a little bit about production scarcity or late-game tech speeds, but it doesn't feel fundamentally broken to me.


----

So I played one random test game (around 100T) before diving into the adventure just to clear up a few mechanics that didn't make sense to me. Here's my two "this is broken" screenshots.



"Reasons for Current Relationship" - this is a complete joke. I'm currently at -63 for unknown reasons. Here's the extent of my relationship with Saladin here:

There was a city state on a prime location near me, and its envoy bonuses felt weak, so I attacked and conquered it with Legions. Unfortunately, right before I invaded it I hit a tech that launched me into the Medieval Era, so the warmonger bonuses went up significantly. There's no casus belli for city states, so it seems it's always treated as a surprise war or something. I don't really understand. So despite the fact that it was Legions vs Warriors (and every other civ was still in ancient era), I get third era warmonger penalty.

Anyway, the two civs on my continent promptly denounced me and refused to deal with me anymore. So I simply marched up and conquered Saladin's capital because again, still warriors. After conquering it, I then learned that conquered cities do not grow unless you either get the city ceded in peace OR conquest the civ in question. Saladin refused to cede me the city, so I realized I needed to find his other city. Enter this:



(Aleppo is the city in question.)

WTF? Cairo was his capital, and his ONLY settler of the game 111 turns in goes UP THERE?? Something is very, very broken about both the way the AI picks its cities, and the rate it expands. I did notice all of these cities had built several districts (I'd only built a couple), so there's a good chance the AI simply is using it's very limited production on districts instead of expansion. That seems like the wrong choice.

By this point I had 5 cities of my own and conquered another two. Roosevelt declared on me for another huge pile of unknown reasons, so I conquered him on my way to Aleppo. By this point my score was 3x higher than my nearest rival, so I temporarily abandoned the game and figured I should take the Adventure for a spin. I wanted some surprises to still be left for that game.

EDIT: this was on Prince FWIW

[Staltran]

Numbers in the reddit post are wrong. If you actually check the screenshots, Paris is getting 4 amenities and La Rochelle and Bordeaux are getting 3 each, bringing the total to what you would expect when the second copy counts

Amenities system is still opaque, but considering how much info the game hides at the moment, that's not surprising. Hope they will eventually make it display which amenities are being used by which cities, or better still, let the player control it

Paris is getting 4 amenities total, but only 2 from luxuries. The other two are from civics and entertainment, probably the civic that gives 1 amenity from garrison and an entertainment complex. La Rochelle and Bordeaux are also only getting 2 from luxuries. Furthermore, this behavior is as described in the manual:

LUXURY RESOURCES
Luxury resources provide a small bonus to the hex’s output and increase your civilization’s happiness by providing them amenities when improved. Only one source of a specific luxury provides amenities, shared with the four neediest cities in your empire. For example, if you have 2 Citrus resources improved around your capital, only the first will be providing amenities to your empire. You can choose to trade the second Citrus with another civilization for something else you need, like Gold, or another resource.

(bold mine)
An odd design decision, if you ask me. Having additional sources distributed to more cities would be far more intuitive. I suppose they wanted to punish people for going wide a bit.

I haven't bought the game yet.  The tenor of the complaints is making me seriously consider it, though.  I'm seeing a lot of comments about balance issues, desire for the game to be harder, interface issues, and multiplayer.  I'm not hearing much of anything about 'the game is about not doing things' or 'I'm bored'.  So far it sounds like the sorts of problems that are eminently patchable.

Is that what it actually feels like to people playing?

Most issues certainly seem patchable to me. However, buildings, wonders and districts all seem expensive. That does give a feeling of not being able to do much. District cost calculation is very opaque however and might be bugged. The costs might get overhauled in general, but I rather doubt it. I might also be undervaluing the GPP from buildings, making them seem disproportionately expensive.

The tech and civics trees seem pretty barren to me, though. I find that a lot of the time, I don't actually care about any of the techs/civics I can research, and have to search for something later in the tree to shoot for. This wouldn't necessarily be so bad but it happens often, and frequently I leave several techs/civics half done waiting for an eureka to finish them. And it's not like beelining for Liberalism or State Property or an important wonder in Civ4, but just "beelining" for something I care about at all. It definitely feels like the tech/civic tree separation has left them both sparse on content, like the tech tree in V with a lot of the cool stuff moved to policies. Except this time, there are two trees so both end up with a low concentration of impactful stuff. This is probably made worse by the fact that you can only use a few of the policies at once, so a lot of the civics will end up useless to you no matter what.

A lot of the Great People also feel like duds, but some are very powerful.

I found the religious subgame  pretty boring. The theological combat doesn't really spice it up that much. Probably a matter of taste though. The tourism and associated Great Work/archeology subsystems (and the new appeal subsystem) still feel like bloat.

It probably bears repeating that production feels really slow, though that's the sort of thing that might get adjusted. With 1UPT, though, it might very well not be. Districts in particular get really expensive if you have a lot of cities. On a somewhat related note, needing 2 movement to move into hills/forest/across a river also slows down movement a lot, which can get really annoying when moving eg. settlers, especially if there are city state units milling around.

Overall, it definitely feels more like V than IV wrt doing stuff. Nothing really feels very impactful. This is only based on one and a half games (or probably closer to 4/3 games) though, and patches could improve things. The game does feel like it has a lot more potential than V did. The district system is certainly interesting and forces you to specialize cities, even if they're currently very expensive and you're almost forced to build an industrial zone as soon as possible to get anything done. Hopefully district cost will be adjusted soon.

e: Having yourself show up to declare war on you is what happens when civ A gets civ B, who you have not met yet, to declare a joint war on you. That probably shouldn't be possible. The diplomacy code is definitely bugged though, often you offer a deal to an AI who doesn't accept it, ask for a counteroffer and they give one that's strictly worse for them than what you initially offered. Similarly, every time I've been at war with someone they've told me there's no way they can accept a peace treaty, then on their turn they ring me up to offer to cede two cities, a significant amount of gold and gpt and a luxury or two. Often they've also made a similar offer the previous turn. And one time when I made peace, they immediately called me back to complain about my forces being on their border (when they had just previous been inside their borders).

[Magil]

"Declaring war on yourself" is a known bug when someone declares a Joint War on you with someone you haven't met yet. It can cause very weird things to happen.

Edit: Things are expensive, but most things are affordable if you utilize overlapping factory/power plant zones. It does require you to put industrial zones in almost every city. Also build commercial hubs in every city so you can spam internal trade routes for even more production.

[lossofmercy]

The tech and civics trees seem pretty barren to me, though. I find that a lot of the time, I don't actually care about any of the techs/civics I can research, and have to search for something later in the tree to shoot for. This wouldn't necessarily be so bad but it happens often, and frequently I leave several techs/civics half done waiting for an eureka to finish them. And it's not like beelining for Liberalism or State Property or an important wonder in Civ4, but just "beelining" for something I care about at all.

You summarized the game really well Staltran. I honestly don't care about most of the techs, and the whole game has a feeling of "a lot of shit to ignore."

What I thought they were going to do was add MORE infrastructure to build and a bigger map to make the cities feel like cities. Instead they hide all the old buildings behind districts AND made districts prohibitively expensive. You can't even build anything besides graneries and walls in your main base! And from what I hear, they actually made the map even smaller.  And all this for what? Does anyone actually feel like they are making a giant city with these new districts? No? That's a problem. It's actually less expensive to create a completely new settlement! Compare this to Endless Legend, or even Nobunaga's Ambition. Simple, but it actually makes you feel like you are creating a metropolis. 

Honestly, what this has shown me is Firaxis just is not one of the developers we can rely on to make great grand strategy games. I should have trusted my instincts and waited for the experts to come back with comments. Now I just spent another 80 dollars on a half baked product.

[AdrienIer]

I did experience a bizarre occurrence a few hours ago.

Roosevelt declared war on me, and on the same turn Saladin had declared war on me. Trouble is - I'm Saladin. And there are no other Saladins in this game.

Later I met Victoria to find we were somehow already at war. She made peace immediately. Not sure what happened there, I'm assuming bug.

I've seen reports from others that the AI can blame the player for the actions of other AI's with the same nation, so apparently there's some confusion going on in the diplomacy code somewhere.

Same thing happened to me. Congo declared war on me, and so did Rome (myself). Then when I met Victoria she proposed peace.

[picklepikkl]

Found a thread on Reddit outlining a bunch of imbalances/exploits currently extant: https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/58...tfix_asap/

Haven't started Adventure One yet; going to have to be mindful of the lack of hammer decay from chops outside borders.

[pindicator]

Tribal villages need to be easier to spot.  I keep getting messages I've found them, and it is a royal pain to figure out exactly where.  Goodie huts from early versions where far easier to find.

Definitely agree that they're hard to spot.  One thing that helps: if you click on the notification it will center the screen on the tribal village.

I upped the difficulty to Emperor for a game and have (at least for this game) seen some decent AI behavior.  Nothing as mind-numbingly bad as I saw in Prince.  AI will settle, declare -- if anything it seems that it is almost impossible to get on good terms with the AI in the early game.

[Old Harry]

So I played about an hour yesterday, then today when I try to launch CivVI it plays me the intro music but gives me a blank screen and eventually Windows says it's stopped working and do I want to end it. Anyone know what the problem is likely to be?

[LKendter]

So I played about an hour yesterday, then today when I try to launch CivVI it plays me the intro music but gives me a blank screen and eventually Windows says it's stopped working and do I want to end it. Anyone know what the problem is likely to be?

I wonder if you are having the same issues with me, and lack of memory.  This machine has never given me a low memory message until trying to play the game.  I now have to make sure to close stuff, especially browser tabs with flash games going.  It locked so bad in my test game yesterday that I had to reboot my PC.