Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[yuris125]

I may be around for MP on Sunday as well

There's the online speed the devs showed on stream, where everything costs 50% of standard speed. We could use that. There also are alternative game rules which speed up the game even more (e.g. game time is 50 turns, 4 victory criteria (most tiles uncovered, most tiles pillaged, most wonder built, and something else), whoever is ahead in most of these criteria at the end of 50 turns wins. I'm much less keen on these, would strongly prefer regular rules

[Gaspar]

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.

Well, I don't think I'd go that far.  Let's keep in mind you're looking back on the early days of Civ5 similarly - through a lense of the finished game.  I think Civ6's selling horsemen over and over is actually probably the worst early game exploit in any recent Civ game and the diplo negotiation exploit I would also classify as more game breakingly worse than lux abuse in 5.  Really anything involving gold is as or more broken than the gold exploits in 5, selling 1-charge builders is a pretty obvious and egregious oversight for example, and the guys who are hardcore exploiting all of these gold-exploits are basically buying all the AIs cities off of it for huge sums of gold than can be constantly recreated, etc.  Not to mention the no depreciation on forest/resource/whatever chops no matter how far you are from a city.  And this is just a smattering - I'm only a casual reader of reddit and CFC, if one were out looking for every hardcore exploit that shipped with game, we'd be here all day.

All these games ship buggy.  Civ6 gets credit for not shipping crashy, but I'd take the Pepsi challenge on severity of Civ6 exploits available at launch against nearly any other Civ game really. (I didn't play 1,2 or 3 at launch, I picked them all up later - and also don't think 1 or 2 can really be looked at seriously given what has change in game development in the last 20-odd years.)

As I said, they don't bother me that much personally because its easy to just not use them, but it was equally easy to not exploit lux selling in 5.  Maritime city-states is a slightly different animal, as that was a core feature that was fairly hard to avoid, but I also don't think it was on the same level as the gold exploits.

[Serdoa]

As I've played a religious victory to conclusion, I think there is also more strategy behind it than it seems at first. Not that you can't achieve it without knowing what you are doing, I very well could. But looking back, there are so many things I did wrong, partially because nowhere you are told how it works. For example, it seems there is a limited amount of promotions for your apostles. At some point mine didn't get any, despite the game telling me that there is a promotion on the unit available, I could not use it. I could for other units, so it was not a breakdown of the whole promotion-system. I concluded that it probably is similar to the Great People with a limited amount. With that knowledge though, using the charges of the promotion that lets you erase all other religions from a city becomes much less op, because you do not have an unlimited amount of those but instead have to plan when and how to use them. 

The only complaint I have so far regarding religion is that it feels like a game within the game. When I go for religious stuff, I stop being interested in basically everything else because at a very early point in the game there are no more techs or civics coming that make a difference for the religious part. No buildings that give you more faith, no tile improvements, no nothing. So neither culture, nor science, nor gold, nor production are necessary any more. That's were I'd love me a good old slider like in Civ4 so I could funnel all my commerce into faith instead of the "commerce"-yields being produced right from the start as 4 different categories.

[Ichabod]

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. 

From reddit: 

the Factory building which you can build in the Industrial district grants 3 production to any city within 6 tiles. Power Plant as well, but that one grants 4 production.

[Ichabod]

As I've played a religious victory to conclusion, I think there is also more strategy behind it than it seems at first. Not that you can't achieve it without knowing what you are doing, I very well could. But looking back, there are so many things I did wrong, partially because nowhere you are told how it works. For example, it seems there is a limited amount of promotions for your apostles. At some point mine didn't get any, despite the game telling me that there is a promotion on the unit available, I could not use it. I could for other units, so it was not a breakdown of the whole promotion-system. I concluded that it probably is similar to the Great People with a limited amount. With that knowledge though, using the charges of the promotion that lets you erase all other religions from a city becomes much less op, because you do not have an unlimited amount of those but instead have to plan when and how to use them. 

That's very interesting. I noticed the good Apostle promotions were not appearing anymore for me, after some time. Maybe it has something to do with it. 

How does the Yerevan bonus works, in that case? It says: "Your Apostle units can choose from any possible promotions instead of receiving a random promotion." I wonder if the good promotions stop appearing, after you took them too many times...

[Gazglum]

Yeah, I disagree that production is way too weak in this game, you just need to plan the factories carefully. It does feel a bit weird though, that I feel like I need to build my cities around key Industrial District sites, whereas commercial, faith or campus I am happy to drop down anywhere half-decent.

[BRickAstley]

I think that still means that production is too weak on it's own. If it weren't, it would be the same thing as science/culture/faith, where you have some room for variability.

[Serdoa]

Well production is applied on a per-city basis while science, faith, gold and culture are all going into an empire-wide "pool". That already makes a difference I think. The other one is that the adjacency bonuses for all the districts are not really all that strong, maybe 10% of your total output, probably even less - but for production gaining those additional 7 production via factory and power plant, several times per city? That can double your output or at least give you +50%. 

What I do think though is that they still go overboard on the production-costs, which in turn has them implement buildings that give you more production, providing a loop for players to do something with their production, because there are no other production-sinks as you simply don't need that many units with 1UPT. You'd need a better production sink in order to lower them. I think having units go obsolete (instead of upgrading them cheaply with gold), not providing gold on unit disbanding and having units not only cost gold but production for maintenance would go a long way. Just let them get worse fighting-wise if you don't maintain them. And then you have an additional production-sink for a maintenance-unit. And you could actually play out prolonged wars with enemies trying to go to the backlines and prevent maintenance units to get to the front, slowly wearing the fighters down. 

I'm sure there are a plethora of problems with that approach that I don't see yet, but I'll probably explore which possibilities are there with modding for something like that when the modding tools are released.

[scooter]

I think the reason people are saying production feels weak is that at a certain point in the game, very few buildings are worth it. I still don't know what a Theater District does, but I'm sure not slogging 18T into it in when I could just build more settlers and builders instead. I feel like I'm playing a Civ4 leader that gets basically no building bonuses so you just go as wide as possible and hope to make up the difference that way.

[Sareln]

Why build a theater district when you could build industrial, commercial, harbor, or campus? All of those will do something tangible for you, while your civics come in at a 1 per 5 turns anyways w/ Inspirations etc. I think I've built 2 theater districts total across 2 playthroughs which went to 8+ cities each...