Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[Singaboy]

The whole AI diplomacy seems broken. Maybe an over complication on their side? I never liked diplomacy in civilization due to the easy exploits and crazy bugs (who doesn't remember the broken rep in C3C due to some trade route being disrupted or a trade partner being eliminated). The best AI for diplomacy was part of Civ4. Civ 6 seems outright mindless. Maybe patching will ease that.

They got a lot of work to do, I'd prefer they start with the UI, so many things that are annoying. And the autocycle which can royally screw you in a war.

[Lord Parkin]

One other thing, I don't understand why you can change out any & all legacy cards when you gainew legacy. It is great for the player, sure, but the cards roll in all the time so I am basically a spiritual civ. Gain a orange card, and you can not only swap to _that_ particular card, or any orange card, but basically redesign your whole deck. And one really should do it, get the +builder one(s) and build those for 10 turns...then next policy and switch to units...then some wonders...then a herd of settlers...all the while changing cards accordingly. So yeah. Micromanagers ahoy.

It does feel a bit like being spiritual yeah. I like it though, nothing wrong with a bit of micromanagement and there are a lot of interesting possibilities so it's nice to be able to try them out. The rapid pace of civic tree progress does however mean that the option to pay to change civics more than once every 5 turns is pretty redundant. Probably this will be somewhat helped by rebalancing the tech/civic costs to make the free changes less frequent... though I still can't imagine ever spending gold to change civics outside the optimal time, vs buying more useful stuff like builders.

[Lord Parkin]

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've gotten a couple of weird startup glitches similar to this. A computer restart has fixed it each time, but I have no idea what the cause is. My machine is on the low-ish end of the requirement spectrum FWIW.

Haven't had any issues here with startup, so I assume it's related to computer specs. I have a fairly high end laptop, and I haven't had a single game crash - despite sessions up to 10 hours complete with multiple alt-tabs. Definitely couldn't have managed that with civ5 or even civ4 on release.

[fluffyflyingpig]

Theres some terrible terrible bugs with trade renegotiation resulting in bizarre and one-sided trade offers

[pindicator]

Well, someone has a theory why districts get to be so damned expensive:

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/58...h=4de1863d

Short version: He thinks it's a bug

[Gaspar]

My two cents:

• It's definitely better than Civ5.
  
• It's still not that good.  It has enough pull, particularly in the first 100 turns to be worth playing, and probably will have some mileage as an SP game once after a few patches and possibly mods.
  
• The main reason its not that good is the main reason Civ5 wasn't that good.  The best thing about the first 4 civs is that feeling that you're progressing towards something, that you want to get X tech so you can get Y benefit.  There are so many empty techs in this game.  They split into two empty tech trees from one, but there's very few spots in either tree where you can't wait to get there so you can do a thing.  Mostly you're just burning through until you get to the thing that enables your victory condition.
  
• I'm not that good, and that's definitely an impacting factor on my feelings about the game.  If I were optimizing harder, I imagine I could get a bit of the juice that say T-hawk gets when he's trying to get a fastest finish or whatever.  But the game I spent most of the day playing on and off I had won around turn 150 but had to sit through 225 mostly boring additional turns just to get the win.  The civ series has always had problems in endgame but this is definitely a carryover from Civ5.
  
• The UI is clearly not designed for a player to give the slightest fuck what's going on.  Seven pointed out a bunch of stuff in his thread but information is so hidden.
  
• I really hate the Fog of War.  It looks cool but its so much harder to discern what's actually going on.
  

That's just a few thoughts off the top of my head.  I don't mean to be overly negative but I've put in 20 hours or so of on and off play this weekend and I just want it to be better than it is.  Also, most of the response has been neutral-positive so I thought it fair if I expressed my frustrations to give another viewpoint for those who are on the fence about picking it up.  We're all itching for a civ game that is fun to play and I think that has a lot to do with why so many of us who were dissatisfied with V bought in to VI despite our misgivings with the last edition.  Unfortunately, I think ultimately what 1UPT means for production costs is a thing that can never really be fixed.  That said, I'll keep banging at it and see if I can't find a game I find fun in there.

[sunrise089]

Thanks Gaspar! I'm not too optimistic stuff like UI interface issues will get fixed via pstch, but perhaps they can be fixed via mod. Criticisms about difficulty and AI expansion don't worry me since even if VI Prince is stupid compared to IV Prince that won't affect most of us when playing SP provided higher levels expand sanely.

[fluffyflyingpig]

Yeah the ai being dumb is nothing new. The bigger problem is the underlying game and the ability to make strategic choices. Or lack thereof.

Echo the comments about the empty tech tree and pushing end turn for hours to get the victory screen.

[Magil]

Going up a little in difficulty seems to make a dramatic difference in AI behavior... in the Prince game I played for the adventure I had 1 wardec by the AI and instigated one war myself the whole 230ish turns, and now I started a King game and have been declared war on five times and we're not even out of the Classical era

Maybe it's at least partially coincidence but it's pretty crazy.

[Bliss]

After playing a prince conquest game and being half way through the potluck game, here are my initial thoughts:

Overall I like the game, I believe it has potential with a few patches to be as good as civ4 (although the 1UPT is a problem). It is already better than civ5

The good:

1. Districts are a nice addition and add to the strategic choices

2. Governments and civics have great potential. As a system I find it good.
However there need to be alot of changes to the specific government & civic bonuses to make it more meaningful. As it is I found myself using a very small amount of the civic cards and government bonuses are not that impactful.

3. I like the Great people system - There are however great people that are much more useful than others, so it will need some balancing

4. I like the swap of workers with builders - It makes you think and prioritise what you will improve and they make for meaningful choices

5. I like the way production is limited and the way it scales - Things are hard to build and that is good, you cannot just spam cities and build things quickly, new cities take ages to become productive which makes sense.

6. Barbs being a nuisance throughout the game is great - It makes you fog bust and think how you position units

7. City state system is good -Meaningful bonuses and you have to make choices

8. The changes in wonders is great - both the cost of building them but also the tiles needs. No more wonder spam is refreshing

9. Roads - It is good that you cannot just road everywhere, which makes sense as far as realism goes at least.

10. UI - It is not bad, I got used to it quickly.

11. happiness system - city growth - I like it. Makes city placement resources and buildings important and you cannot just slave and make a crap city useful...

The bad

1. Ai is horrible. they cannot expand, they cannot fight, diplomacy is a joke - I guess this is no1 priority fix

2. 1UPT is still bad, mainly because the ai cannot use it properly and also because moving around your units one by one becomes tedious after mid game (not talking about auto cycling which needs to be fixed)

3. Tech tree is flat. Many techs provide virtually nothing and beelines are not meaningful enough. It becomes a case of teching everything instead of focusing on beelines to get some sort of advantage and inspirations dictate pretty much what you tech.

4. Religion - Seems irrelevant to me, I think they messed it up completely, The prophets founding religion system is bad, it is too much work to even know what is happening to your cities with religion, even if you found one. You can even found a religion and next turn not have it because someone send a missionary... It is crap and basically can be ignored completely and wont make and difference to your game.