Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[Serdoa]

I've explored the AI-mod I mentioned before and the creator added some types for victory-conditions as it seems they were missing for all except the religious victory. Which coincides with the observation that the AI seems only competent in achieving religious victory.

[Brian Shanahan]

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.

Before I say anything about the post, please indicate who you are quoting in future. Makes reading posts, especially when you quote multiple others a bit easier.

I honestly don't think Civ 5 could be considered an attempt at a serious strategy game. If that were the case they'd have tested 1UPT to see whether it worked with the empire building mechanics that are at the core of the Civ series, and frankly the testing for 5 seems to have been let to fanboys who were more interested in shouting down serious discussion (from outside the process) than finding problems with the game to be fixed. The game was given to John Shaffer, a modder who had (and continues to have, see his current game At the Gates for evidence) a serious problem with finishing his product (his space mod with BtS wasn't even remotely playable until other modders totally reworked it, for example he had AIs left with their initial citizen not working any tile until first growth) or with seeing if the mechanics were compatible with the base game or balanced (he was largely responsible for BtS's espionage mechanics and corporations). Frankly, Firaxis were chasing the shiny over the good with five, and I think they've done the same with six.

[Rowain]

... frankly the testing for 5 seems to have been let to fanboys who were more interested in shouting down serious discussion (from outside the process) than finding problems with the game to be fixed.

Don't know about the beta-testers but it also depends if the Devs were willing/have time  to adjust/correct told problems. If a deadline looms and the game has to go out at a certain date several problems are put into the 'we deal with that later'-bin.

[Ichabod]

Just finished my first game, a Cultural win as Brazil on Prince. I quite enjoyed the experience and I'm very willing to play more. The Adventure is next!

Some random thoughts:

*I really dislike the "unit requires full move cost to walk into a new tile". I played a game some years ago that had this (Warlock, masters of the Arcane) and it really pissed me off, everything was so clunky. And now Civ does the same thing. 

*On the other had, they changed the annoying thing where your unit couldn't go pass an opponent unit (during peace), even you had enough moves. I saw it with military and civilians. I may be wrong in thinking it didn't work that way in Civ 5, but AFAIK, it was.

*Religious Combat is pretty strange. If your apostle has that +strenght promo, he's a killer, otherwise he's toast. The city state that gives the suzerain bonus where you can choose the Apostle promo is pretty crazy for a religious game. Like stated, some promos are crazy (+strenght for combat, the one that removes religions when you spread yours)

*The +food from farms tech (you can get some crazy adjacency bonuses) and the Neighbourhood district seems pretty powerful. I still miss an improment that turns flatland into a production focused tile, though. 

*Amenities... I can't really understand. It seems my cities become unhappy between turns, even when nothing happened.

[scooter]

Another standard Terrible Diplomacy Story...

Playing Adventure 1 last night, I met Kongo. He said hello and offered the capital exchange. I said sure. We're miles away. I end turn, and on the inter-turn he declares war on me. Unknown reason. A dozen turns later and he refuses to make peace. That's broken. I then immediately get Trajan declaring on me, and of course I'm Trajan, so that's fun for a laugh. I'd heard about that glitch, but wow it was bizarre getting it in person.

It gets better, though. I meet Teddy two turns later. Same deal: he says hi, we swap capital locations. I end turn, and on the inter-turn he declares war on me! Unknown reason, relationship a mere -1.

I'm legitimately having fun with this game, but that is going to fizzle so very fast if diplomacy and a couple other things aren't fixed pretty quickly.

------------

I've seen a few comments saying this game is "dumbed down," and I have to disagree with that pretty strongly. I think that's a lazy criticism that gets thrown too easily. There are a lot of systems in this game that are very complex and difficult for a "casual" player to solve.

* The policy swapping system seems very exploitable, especially early. There's obviously power here, but it's not clear at all what the best strategy is. That's a very good thing.

* The district adjacency system and bonuses is pretty mind-bending. I spent a ton of time last night trying to figure out how to re-arrange my improvements to get the right location for an industrial zone for a city with some weird cases. That was fun! I felt like I solved a challenging puzzle.

* The district idea itself is great, and it forces you to think a lot more about where to place a city. Figuring out city placements has been pretty challenging so far to me, and I still have a feeling I got a lot of wrong answers in Adventure 1. In Civ4 settling a city isn't that hard. Get food, preferably first ring, and some chops to speed it is nice. I find myself having to think about fresh water, production capacity, chop ability, and district placement here in addition to the standard "is the land good" stuff.

* Incorporating a casus belli system is a solid and challenging idea in theory, but that's easy to overlook given how broken diplomacy is currently.

* I haven't figured out if they're fun/interesting yet, but both the great people system and religion system are very complex. It doesn't seem obvious to me what the right thing to do is, and if it was a dumbed-down concept it would be very obvious. Whether they're duds anyway or not, I haven't figured out yet.

* The Eureka system also is the opposite of dumbed-down. I have a lot of complaints about the two tech trees, but the Eureka system is actually pretty challenging. It's easy to get the Eurekas in the first era and a half, but after that I actually found it pretty difficult to hit them, and it would have forced me to go off track a bit. That's a good thing, because it's giving me a difficult strategic decision. Do I beeline forward to improve my mines knowing I won't get those Eurekas along the way, or do I continue to follow whatever Eureka I can unlock the easiest?



Yes, 1UPT is dumbed-down. I agree with that, but I think slapping that criticism on the whole game is lazy. This is not a defense of all the things that are clearly not great right now, but I think the faults in the game are that things simply don't work properly or well. That's frustrating, but it's a different criticism.

As an aside, I also think we're seeing the Civ4 launch through rose-colored glasses. I remember 1.0 being pretty bad. Tons of people had constant crash-to-desktop problems - in fact the first patch or two were almost entirely dedicated to ensuring the thing ran without crashing because it crashed all the time, so balance issues had to wait. Ironworks literally did nothing in the release version of the game. The game as a whole was probably still in better shape than Civ6 due to its unusually long testing period, but you don't have to look too hard to find an avalanche of complaints when it first came out. Some issues like the 2-pop whip bug weren't fixed for literally years!

[Ichabod]

I agree, Scooter. I played my first game very, very casually. Just passing turns, trying builds and "what does this do?" testing. But even then, I already started considering where to place things, how to get the best adjacency bonuses and so on. I think there's a lot to discover in the game. 

Anyone up for a realtime MP game this weekend? There's supposed to be a speed made only for MP, very fast and all. I'm still pretty raw in the game, but I'm willing to go for it. We can also live chat through Discord and everybody can laugh at my terrible english.

[Gaspar]

I've seen a few comments saying this game is "dumbed down," and I have to disagree with that pretty strongly. I think that's a lazy criticism that gets thrown too easily. There are a lot of systems in this game that are very complex and difficult for a "casual" player to solve.

<snip more stuff I largely agree with>

For the record, I think most of what scooter says here is spot on.  The game is much more complex than maybe even I've given it credit for, its just tough to see the forest for the trees in the face of lots of obvious game-breaking bugs/exploits and the general state of diplomacy.  For the record, I really don't like the way warmonger penalties work - its similar to what I didn't like about corruption in the first three civs - the game system at a minimum looks like its punishing you for what is correct play.  I don't mind extreme warmonger penalties, since if you're basically attacking everyone left right and center you're going to be an international pariah and that's reasonable.  But I think basically everything before someone has teched to the causus belli system should carry pretty much no penalty and that there should be a greater decay of the warmonger malus over time.  

Aside over, I think Civ6 does deserve a lot of credit for being stable at launch.  Both 4 and 5 had a lot of crashing issues at launch and I haven't seen or heard of many issues on that front in 6.  I also think there's more strategy in the game than we're currently aware of, which is also frustrating of course, because the UI doesn't tell us so many of the things that we need to know.  The various trees not clearly telling you everything a tech gives/does, the abhorrent city screen, the level of mystery as to how amenity distribution works, etc.  I think once we have all that info (either when the devs patch in better information or when an enterprising modder pulls all the info out of the game and displays it to us) there's a lot more strategy in there.  For example, I still don't entirely understand how the district impacts work but from poking around a bit I got the idea that you really want to position at least your industrial districts so that their influence overlaps as many cities as possible.  So I played a game where I made sure to sort of point my industrial districts towards at least one other city, ideally two.  And it was a huge hit, I had significantly better production than in games where I hadn't done that.  That's cool - but shouldn't there be something in the UI, a lense perhaps, where it shows just which tiles the industrial district (or any other district where this matters) is influencing so you can better plan your districts?  Don't get me wrong, Civ4 had problems of this variety as well, which is why so many people used BUG, but we're 10 years on now, shouldn't we be getting better at this, not worse or staying the same?

Anyway, in a lot of ways, the game seems better to me when I play it more and hence am trying to do more than just figure out the basics.  But I just hope that in addition to the obvious exploit fixes (I don't actually care about this as much, since its easy enough to just not use the exploits) that the really obvious flaws in UI, diplomacy and the AI get addressed as well.  My gut feeling is only diplo will really get a pass and the others will require mods to work the way they should.  But time will tell.

[fluffyflyingpig]

I've explored the AI-mod I mentioned before and the creator added some types for victory-conditions as it seems they were missing for all except the religious victory. Which coincides with the observation that the AI seems only competent in achieving religious victory.

That makes sense. The ai does not appear to build space victory projects at all

[Magil]

Yes, 1UPT is dumbed-down. I agree with that, but I think slapping that criticism on the whole game is lazy. This is not a defense of all the things that are clearly not great right now, but I think the faults in the game are that things simply don't work properly or well. That's frustrating, but it's a different criticism.

As an aside, I also think we're seeing the Civ4 launch through rose-colored glasses. I remember 1.0 being pretty bad. Tons of people had constant crash-to-desktop problems - in fact the first patch or two were almost entirely dedicated to ensuring the thing ran without crashing because it crashed all the time, so balance issues had to wait. Ironworks literally did nothing in the release version of the game. The game as a whole was probably still in better shape than Civ6 due to its unusually long testing period, but you don't have to look too hard to find an avalanche of complaints when it first came out. Some issues like the 2-pop whip bug weren't fixed for literally years!

That's a very fair summary and quite accurate, I do believe. Especially the part about the faults in Civ VI--which is how I feel right now, it's more things that aren't working because of bugs or just things that slipped past the developers. I do believe that the core systems of Civ VI are overall pretty solid, and the decisions that the player makes do matter. This isn't Civ V's maritime city-states or selling luxuries for gold over and over. I think Civ VI is off to a good (but not great) start, and absolutely can be turned into something grand.

[AdrienIer]

Anyone up for a realtime MP game this weekend? There's supposed to be a speed made only for MP, very fast and all. I'm still pretty raw in the game, but I'm willing to go for it. We can also live chat through Discord and everybody can laugh at my terrible english.

Dp101 and I wanted to do a MP session last sunday but I had to cancel. We agreed to reschedule to next sunday. You're welcome to join us.

We'll probably be playing from 8:30PM to 11PM UTC+2