Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[Dreylin]

Another item for the "how could this not be spotted and fixed in testing?" list: map pins. I like to stick them on the map to remind myself of things -- a nice city site, one of those hard to see tribal villages, etc. Once I take care of that item, I delete it. But I keep finding pins have lost their labels (the list now shows them as "unnamed" or "unlabel pin #N"), or far worse  switched labels with other pins. My barb encampment pin now has the text from my marble city pin, which has a tribal village text reminder, which has an iron city note, etc. Come on, Firaxis! How hard is it to stick a static piece of text on a map pin? It sure looks like an elementary coding error, mis-indexing into the list of pins -- how do you not spot and fix something like that?

Perhaps because that's not a easily reproduced Bug? I have used pins in my 3 games and so far not seen this happening. Could be that you made more pins then the Devs planned for?

OTOH I have seen some strange behaviour of the UI/notifications if I play a long session. Once I save, close, restart and load everything is normal again.

I've seen the map pin issue multiple times - usually when placing a new one, It seems like if you try and edit it before accepting, it will shuffle some of the other pins' information around; but I'm not sure that's just it. That's with just 3-4 pins, not with dozens. First turn after a load game seems to emphasise some problems (e.g. Missionaries listed as "Custom Religion") so I try to avoid that as well.

[Staltran]

I've also had issues with pins having the text of another pin. What Dreylin said about editing/backing out sounds familiar, but I can't confirm that's what caused it for me.

[Rowain]

Is there a number of turns involved? I have placed so far 12 pins in my new game and all have still their correct name and place.

[Rowain]

Further testing showed that after a certain number of pins done (and some deleted)  all further pin -names were first getting redirected to the last one. But the pin itself got placed on the correct spot with the name "unnamed pin x"

Once I deleted the name-magnet another pin (the one set before) become the new name-magnet. Once all pins were deleted the system returned to normal behaviour.

Will test further to nail the number of pins allowed but not today.

[Singaboy]

I have done some mini-analysis of the comments on steam, to give me some indication of a hunch I have. I have the impression that first impressions of Civ6 are very positive, but with continued play, reviewers seem to get more annoyed or frustrated with the many broken aspects of the game.
So, what i did was to count the ratio of positive versus negative reviews. Granted, there are a lot more positive reviews, around 7-8k. However, the ratio of positive vs negative has decreased from 3.54 (on Monday) to a current 3.32 (Friday). In fact, the increase in numbers from Monday to Friday is 2:1 (pos vs neg).

The overall ratio is in fact worse than for example Stellaris.

[Magil]

I'm annoyed by the various little negative things about the game. I'm also still having a lot of fun--playing with some tech tree mods and the AI is being reasonably competitive in the late game in my Immortal game, such that it was nice to actually be able to trade Great works of Art with Brazil for theming bonuses. And then using spies to steal the Great Works I just traded right back.

[Sullla]

If anyone wants my first impressions, they are largely contained within my report for the Adventure One game, which I just posted to my website. For overall impressions, I wrote this:

"Civ6 on release is a flawed game. The balancing is poor, there are a lot of exploits, diplomacy is a total trainwreck, the AI makes the Templars from the Apolyton Demogame look like genuises, and One Unit Per Tile remains a terrible fit for the series that continues to cause all sorts of problems. Tom Chick, the reviewer who infamously wrote the only critical review of Civ5, has finished his review of the release version of Civ6, and it's quite harsh. I don't think he's wrong either; almost everything in that article is a legitimate complaint about the game in its current state. If you're on the fence about purchasing Civ6, I think you have very good reason to remain skeptical right now.

With that said... I still like this game. The city building mechanics are excellent, worker builder management and tile yields are back in a big way, Civ6 has returned to being a game of expansion once again, the government/civics system is lots of fun to use, and the various leader/civ bonuses are mostly unique and interesting to play. I'm hopeful that the poor aspects of the gameplay will be improved via patches; one thing that gives me hope is the fact that Civ6 is extremely stable to play, with virtually no reported crashes or stability issues. The charitable interpretation is that Firaxis was working on these issues before launching to make sure they had a stable platform, and now will go back and begin fine-turning the gameplay balance with feedback from the community. This could be completely false, but I hope that's what has been taking place.

But ultimately, even if that doesn't happen, Civ6 provides a solid base to work off of. There's enough good things in the design for me to give Firaxis several patches to iron out some of the problems in the AI, in the diplomacy, and so on. They've earned that much from me. The game also becomes a lot more fun on higher difficulties; a lot of my frustration in this game came from the weakness of the AIs on Prince difficulty level. If that improvement doesn't happen though, Civ6 is a good enough game that we can mod it into something even better, removing the poorly thought out mechanics and doing the balancing ourselves that should have been carried out professionally. One way or another, this is going to become an excellent game in time.

Finally, one last point of comparison. Most of Civ6's problems right now involve the AI in some way, between its seeming total inability to construct its own cities, conduct warfare, or haggle in diplomacy. But most of the mechanics in Civ6 are good systems, even if the numbers might be off right now. This is in contrast to Civ5, where the gameplay mechanics were inherently flawed from the start, and no amount of number tweaking could salvage them. In a nutshell, this is the difference between the two games for me. You can work around poor AI and poor balancing (both can be fixed in time), but it's essentially impossible to work around poor mechanics in the core gameplay. That's why, for me, Civ6 is fun to play while Civ5 was not. Your feelings may or may not coincide with mine here."

I also have a second game looking at the religious mechanics in a little bit more detail, in case the Adventure One report wasn't long enough to read.

[Sirian]

If anyone wants my first impressions, they are largely contained within my report for the Adventure One game, which I just posted to my website.

I read your summary first, and it had me nodding along. Everything sounds fair, reasonable, and probably in line with what I would feel. (I watched about 1:40 of your streams, too, but 10+ hours I just don't have these days. New baby and all.) You and I have always had similar tastes and sensibilities.

Then I opened up your report to read a bit of it and almost from the start, spidey senses are tingling hard, then alarm bells are going off.

Trade routes, per route, can add production to the city? (Food too?) That could be a deal breaker for me as a player.

Soren started the trend (in Civ4) of offering up non-commerce currencies from non-map sources. It started with the specialists and great people. (I know the specialists have been in from the beginning, but they were commerce-only options and nearly always a more poor option as a scientist or financier than working a tile. Using some as Elvis was a flexibility that allowed any given city to not have to conform 100% to what the best luxury tax rate might be for the empire on the whole. The original specialists were a grand mechanic!)

Jon expanded it in Civ5, with maritime city states, with granaries, and more.

Moving on to incorporating it in to trade routes, which become a focus of upward expansion, does not sound to me like what I am looking for from an empire game.


The districts might be a feature I would enjoy. But so far, what I'm hearing is "factory district" "trade district" and the rest are for niche victory pursuits. If there's a gem in there, it is far, far from polished.

Can managing the districts create enough interaction with the map to make every map experience its own unique flavor? If the trade routes are just a multiplier on the yields coming from the land, then perhaps. But specialists are still in. Great people are still in. AND we have these other sources of yields that are not coming from the tiles.

I will eventually experience Civ6 for myself -- but I was over three years late on Civ2.

I miss having 4X games that let you play the map, rather than having all these contrivances cooked up by designers to create shiny objects that play the same from one game to the next. (Eurekas? WOW. Talk about a replay killer. That one feels like it was catered to the Earth Map crowd, who want to perfect a single experience rather than explore and adapt to the unknown.)


- Sirian

[T-hawk]

(Using some as Elvis was a flexibility that allowed any given city to not have to conform 100% to what the best luxury tax rate might be for the empire on the whole. The original specialists were a grand mechanic!)

The Elvis was the original brake on growth in Civ. If you wanted to grow a useful citizen, you had to grow two instead and make one an Elvis to entertain the other. I think dropping them was one of the few bad decisions Civ 4 made, there was useful depth in managing them.

I miss having 4X games that let you play the map, rather than having all these contrivances cooked up by designers to create shiny objects that play the same from one game to the next. (Eurekas? WOW. Talk about a replay killer. That one feels like it was catered to the Earth Map crowd, who want to perfect a single experience rather than explore and adapt to the unknown.)

Eurekas in priciple are fine. They could be just like Civ 4's wonder doubler resources. Get something for half price in a particular game and you might go off in new directions.

But it sounds like the Eureka conditions are too easy and generic that almost all will occur on almost all maps. That's what casual players would expect after all, to have all their goodie boxes ticked in their one or two playthroughs.

[yuris125]

But it sounds like the Eureka conditions are too easy and generic that almost all will occur on almost all maps.  That's what casual players would expect after all, to have all their goodie boxes ticked in their one or two playthroughs.

Early game ones are too easy and too random I think ("meet three city states", "find a natural wonder", etc. - you may not have a natural wonder nearby, and if you do, you will stumble on one by accident). But considering you can also get them from huts, maybe it's not too bad

Midgame eurekas are hard to get by accident - even relatively easy ones like "build 3 Archers" or "have 8 units in your army" - you're not always going to military route, in which case it's a decision whether you want to spend hammers on those extra units or spend research to get these techs without a boost

I actually think eurekas are just fine, and one of the big points on which I disagree with Chick's review. Eurekas being always the same and known from the start is what makes them a valid inclusion in a strategy game (Civ5 city state quests have been poked many times by now, but they're a prime piece of evidence for how bad random eurekas would be)