Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[T-hawk]

My best guess is that the casual gamer really enjoys the replay value (different civs, different victory attempts, etc), and in not getting too into the weeds, doesn't stumble upon the ways to abuse the system.

This is exactly it.  Look at one of BNW's major selling points, the ideologies.  Now casual players have 3x the replay value in the later game, even 9x if you consider the matrix between ideologies and win conditions.

Never mind that half of what the ideologies claim to do for victory conditions is useless.  Gunboat Diplomacy for city-state influence for a diplomatic victory -- this is pointless because it's trivial to just buy all the city-states by then.  Anything relating to tourism is moot because Sacred Sites obviates it a hundred turns sooner.  Doesn't matter, people will still talk about what these effects look like they should do, without actually ever using them.

In this regard, I might argue the biggest reason Civ5 was more successful with general audiences than 4 (besides marketing) had to do with giving each Civ a UA.

Yes.  Exactly.  Humans love factionalization and taking sides.  JK Rowling made a billion dollars off the four houses of Hogwarts.  Pokemon Go has ten million players trying to defeat Valor for Honor.

Never mind how useful or useless the factions are, that has no bearing on reality.  All the guides and reviewers of Civ 5 love trumpeting the Aztecs as a great way to catapult through policy trees, never mind the reality that it takes impossibly many hundreds of kills to gain even one policy by the midgame.  They tout Korea's extra yield from great tile improvements, never mind the reality that you settle like two throughout a real game.  They love Babylon's great person ability that adds up to all of one scientist.

I'm starting to realize this fundamental truth: games are played in the player's head more so than in reality.  This manifested all the time with FTL, where all the "strategy guides" would keep talking about junk like ion weapons and fire beams and artillery and Lanius asphyxiation that all just doesn't win fights and games when put to the test.  What matters isn't the reality of a game, it's what the player can perceive in their head as being entertaining and fun and giving them ownership of a situation, whether or not it ever really actually happens or involves any actual strategic decisions.  Civs 5 and 6 deliver in that area just fine, better so than 4.  (And the alltime king of this effect is Magic the Gathering.  Deckbuilding is all about playing in your head rather than confronting reality.)

[Singaboy]

The biggest difference between Civ5/6 and Civ4 is what also causes Civ6 to get such stellar reviews.

Civ6 gives people the initial 'wow' effect. Wow, so many new things to do; wow, look at them districts; wow, two not one research tree; wow, so many social policies and their cards; wow, so many agendas for the AI leaders.

This target audience doesn't even bother about things such as trade route details, tile assignments in cities. They won't realize that the seemingly many choices in Civ6 are all rather meaningless. What difference do they really make? Districts take such a bloody long time to make (+all their follow up improvements) and the effects are sometimes really trivial. Diplomacy is a joke and trade routes can become a MM nightmare, if you got 20+ of them going. The more you play Civ5/6, the more you realize that you don't have that many choices after all.

In Civ4, the wow effects are much less obvious. However, the longer you play, the more you uncover the possibility in different playstyle. Do you want to grow food and use specialists? Do you rather grow cottages for more income? Do you go for some research slingshots? Do you try and play the culture flipper, warmonger, stay-under-the-radar game? There are so many possibilities, that casuals would never know about and actually be scared of. Too much to think ahead of while playing, too much to plan.

In Civ6, it's all rather inconsequential and part of that experience (you will most likely win not matter how terrible you play) is that fact that the AI is downright atrocious. It pleases the crowd. Those that would go and hunt for pokemons.

[Pliskin]

Heh, I bought the game and so far I have played one single turn. I dunno somehow the looks of the game + the amount of learning ahead of me + low expectations just keeps putting me off. Well, maybe during the weekend I finally give it a shot.

If not this might compete for my single dumbest investment ever..

If you bought it on steam you can still refund it

[Epoxy]

In this regard, I might argue the biggest reason Civ5 was more successful with general audiences than 4 (besides marketing) had to do with giving each Civ a UA.

Yes.  Exactly.  Humans love factionalization and taking sides.  JK Rowling made a billion dollars off the four houses of Hogwarts.  Pokemon Go has ten million players trying to defeat Valor for Honor.

Never mind how useful or useless the factions are, that has no bearing on reality.  All the guides and reviewers of Civ 5 love trumpeting the Aztecs as a great way to catapult through policy trees, never mind the reality that it takes impossibly many hundreds of kills to gain even one policy by the midgame.  They tout Korea's extra yield from great tile improvements, never mind the reality that you settle like two throughout a real game.  They love Babylon's great person ability that adds up to all of one scientist.

One thing to add here, to reinforce your point: the huge range of bonuses Civ V and Civ VI offers makes it very easy to manufacture new leaders and abilities. The best example being Carthage which has the ability to travel through mountains—a cool asset which is uselessly specific. What decides the ultimate viable pool of competitive leaders is how their abilities compare against each other, their timing and availability included in the equation (something which doesn't appear to be recognised by the reviewers you cite). It was easier to predict these sort of effects with Civ IV on account of each leader being primarily a template of two traits, with a unique asset and two starting technologies on top for each nation. It's ironic that by having a clearly limited list of traits, Civ IV still achieves a fair range of diverse approaches being viable and situational (i.e. starting technologies being an important consideration for ancient games, organised coming into the fore in later starts, philosophical + spiritual allowing fast great person production on a whim). That judgement is harder to make (if even worth bothering) for Civ VI.

[Tacitus]

This target audience doesn't even bother about things such as trade route details, tile assignments in cities. They won't realize that the seemingly many choices in Civ6 are all rather meaningless. What difference do they really make? Districts take such a bloody long time to make (+all their follow up improvements) and the effects are sometimes really trivial. Diplomacy is a joke and trade routes can become a MM nightmare, if you got 20+ of them going. The more you play Civ5/6, the more you realize that you don't have that many choices after all. 

This. As I see it, there are two groups of people who play the civilization series. There are the people who play it because they enjoy planning and strategy, and there are the people who play it because they want to experience being a god-emperor at the head of their favorite empire. In real life, out of the 20 or so friends I have who play Civ 5, the only person I know who plays the game primarily for the former reason is myself. My friends who play the game do not bother to try to play the game optimally, and instead play towards some preset goal, like becoming the worlds dominant religion as the celts, or building a well khasbahed city as morrocco. Some of them have never played higher than settler. Yet they still enjoy the game, because they are not really even playing to win. They are playing because they like to role-play a civilization. Most of them will buy civ 6 and play it exactly the same way. The quality of the AI does not matter to them in the slightest, because they will never play on a difficulty where it would be challenging anyway. Likewise for the quality of strategic decisions, it doesn't matter because that is not why they play the game.

I honestly think you're wrong on this. For me the biggest reason why Civ 5 sold more than Civ 4 was due to the fact of Civ 4. That game is still the pinnacle of 4X type games (especially turn based ones). The massive good will generated by the success and quality of the game translated into a large fanbase for any sequel, and also translated into a lot of word of mouth good will amongst people who didn't play Civ previously but had friends who were fans of the game.

For the record, my introduction to the civ series was civ 5. This is true for my casual friends as well. We were all in elementary school when civ 4 came out and none of us had any experience of it. I didn't buy civ 4 until early 2015 after I had sunk three years and 800 hours into 5. 
For all of its flaws, I enjoyed the game, and I think, based on what I have seen, that I will enjoy civ 6. For all the flaws that civ 5 had and that we are seeing in civ 6, I disagree with the idea that these games were aimed primarily at casual players who don't care about strategy. I think Civ 5 tried to be a game that combined good tactical wargame style play with the strategic scope of the civilization series. Unfortunately, it would up with meaningless tactical play that badly hamstrung the rest of the game. Although some aspects of the expansions were clearly aimed at the casual audience, (Archeology subsystem, entire new eras, the world congress) the core of the game was a legitimate, if flawed, attempt to be a great strategy game in the way that civ 4 was. Civ 6 is the same. It attempts to make a meaningful game, i.e. unstacking cities, removing the brutal expansion constraints, but it falls just short.

[fluffyflyingpig]

Adventure 1 is a standard size map on a pangaea on standard speed. AI difficulty is set to prince, the default 'fair' setting. This is as close to a default game setting as you can imagine, and why it was selected for the adventure.

If you do nothing for 500 turns but hunker down in your one city and push the next turn button till the game ends, no ai will be close to winning for the vast majority of cases. I think that says a lot about the AI design philosophy and attempts to make a meaningful game vs creating an experience with AIs as artificial obstetrical.

[Gaspar]

Adventure 1 is a standard size map on a pangaea on standard speed.  AI difficulty is set to prince, the default 'fair' setting.  This is as close to a default game setting as you can imagine, and why it was selected for the adventure.

If you do nothing for 500 turns but hunker down in your one city and push the next turn button till the game ends, no ai will be close to winning for the vast majority of cases.  I think that says a lot about the AI design philosophy and attempts to make a meaningful game vs creating an experience with AIs as artificial obstetrical.

This isn't that far from true in Civ4, either.

The AI in all Civ games suck, and particularly so in 5 & 6 because it has taken away what it does best (build lots of units) and given it a constraint it will never be able to properly handle (1UPT), but the point of AI in the Civ games isn't to make a meaningful attempt at victory.  It is to provide flavor and context for the player whilst providing a meaningful obstacle to the player's victory.  That is a very important distinction.  In the early days of Civ5 the AI was programmed to emulate an attempt to try to win and it made for a horrendous gaming experience, a billion backstabs and wardecs making diplomacy, already needlessly obfuscated, utterly meaningless.  Civ4 probably did the AI-player interaction as close to correctly as possible, giving the player meaningful opportunity to play to the AIs strength and make friends, influence geopolitic and so on.  Of course the necessity of abusing the horrendous tech trading mechanics to compete on higher levels, present in all of the first 4 games is the primary blemish on that iteration's AI.  That caveat aside, I'd rather have the psychotic and bloodthirsty Civ3 AI than the useless idiots that the dev team has spun out for this iteration.  As long as the AI cannot competently wage war against a human player, it will never be meaningful.  In Civ3 or Civ4 you might have been able to easily outmanouever the AI but there's no doubt if you were unprepared and he dropped an enormous stack of doom on your doorstep, you were going to at a minimum lose cities, you might even die.  Between rushbuying being available at the start and the completely inability of the 5/6 AI to handle the tactical constraints of the game rules, you basically have to be utterly incompetent to ever lose a city to the AI, save maybe the scenario where you're playing on a very high difficulty and are behind a couple of eras in military tech, and even then the AIs ability to defeat you in any meaningful way is at worst debatable.

Anyway, bottom line is that well-designed AI should be there to be another game system for the player to interact with as well as a meaningful obstacle for the player to overcome.  The series has really only come close to hitting that note in Civ3 and Civ4, neither anything close to perfectly, but I honestly don't see how that could ever work now that it is fairly certain that 1UPT is part of the series forever.

[Serdoa]

One point in favor of the AI though: It does sometimes try to hit you on several fronts when it has enough units instead of stacking them all one behind the other. It does have issues when there are mountains, ocean, etc. in the way or when it finally stacked enough units against your front city. It also does retreat much too early from fights that it has no business retreating from imo. But if the core idea of hitting you on several fronts works that is enough, because the other stuff can probably be tweaked. So I just hope for a better AI-mod.

Btw: There is a mod available that tries to improve the AI already, though because there are no modding-tools available yet, it is for now only correcting some wrong unit-types in the files as well as trying to make the AI expand more instead of building units.

[yuris125]

<...>Between rushbuying being available at the start and the completely inability of the 5/6 AI to handle the tactical constraints of the game rules, you basically have to be utterly incompetent to ever lose a city to the AI, save maybe the scenario where you're playing on a very high difficulty and are behind a couple of eras in military tech, and even then the AIs ability to defeat you in any meaningful way is at worst debatable.

I lost two cities in the adventure :P One of the changes I really like in 6 compared to 5 is that cities don't have their own attack from the start. You won't lose a city to a wandering Warrior, but you still have to take measures (build Walls and/or units) to make sire they're safe. Also, tactical AI is much improved compared to 5, and you pretty much always have things to spend money on, so can't sit on it until you need to rushbuy units. All this means that AI is quite capable of capturing cities, if it has sufficient forces (and one of my cities in the adventure was taken by 2 Spearmen)

[Rowain]

Adventure 1 is a standard size map on a pangaea on standard speed.  AI difficulty is set to prince, the default 'fair' setting.  This is as close to a default game setting as you can imagine, and why it was selected for the adventure.

If you do nothing for 500 turns but hunker down in your one city and push the next turn button till the game ends, no ai will be close to winning for the vast majority of cases.  I think that says a lot about the AI design philosophy and attempts to make a meaningful game vs creating an experience with AIs as artificial obstetrical.

This isn't that far from true in Civ4, either.

That is so true. Kylearan could win a game on Monarch without ever building a military Unit (read here ). BTW he could also win a game without researching anything self after the workertechs just by buying and extorting techs from AI.

The Civ4 -AI at release wasn't that great either. It needed a player making a MOd which later got incorporated by Firaxis to even get to todays point. And still everytime a player drops from a Pitboss there is the saying that any lurker would be better than the AI .


What is a big difference between Civ4 AI and Civ5-AI is the Civ4-AI is reliable. In the sense that certain AIs would do well and usually build strong empires while other would fail to become strong for exactly the same reasons game after game.  In Civ5 the AI is far more victim of the RNG deciding its objectives/character at gamestart and consequently its actions.
 

If the AI really tried to win no player could overcome the huge Boni the AI gets at the higher difficulties.  Firaxis reduced the Boni the AI got when they included Blakes Modifications to the AI and still people were very unhappy because they had suddenly to play on a lower difficulty then before and that felt like a demotion .