Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[yuris125]

Warmonger penalty is a stupid concept, but its current implementation is just terrible. Do you know that if you declare an ancient war on someone (e.g. to steal a Settler), you will not get a negative modifier with anyone, even with your wardec target? Nonsensical doesn't even start to describe it

I don't understand why they had to scrap the perfectly reasonable modifier system of Civ4. That being said, they seem to have made multiple changes for the sake of changes (movement rules being the most egregious example)

[Dreylin]

But if everything is researchable with just Blue-Science, then what will Purple-Science be for?  You gotta do SOMETHING with it, right?  What's the point of an income if it can't fill a bucket?  You have to make a bucket for it to fill, even if it doesn't work with the rest of the game.

What if Culture were the currency you had to spend to switch Governments and Policies?

Actually, "Purple-Science" as you call it has multiple functions, whereas "Blue-Science" only has one. Culture on a city level pops borders, and on a Civ level is part of the Culture/Tourism victory condition. Better question is why Blue-Science only has one use when all of the other pot-fills have multiple?

[fluffyflyingpig]

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

Internal trade routes can be established between your own cities.
When you start an internal trade route it gives food and production depending on the districts at the place it's going to.



District
Food
Production

City Center
1
1
Holy Site
2
0
Campus
1
0
Encampment
0
1
Harbor
0
2
Trade District
0
1
Entertainment Complex
2
0
Theater Square
2
0
Industrial Zone
0
2
Aqueduct
0
0


Tons of free food from the ether!  Build your core cities nice and tall around a cluster of industrial zones and have an orbiting halo of tiny cities with trade routes to the core creating food and shields from trade.  Keep the orbiters at size 2 to avoid the global happiness cap penalties!  Add wonders and civic card bonuses.

[Whosit]

I only read through about the first half of the thread, but the one question I have that I didn't see an answer to yet is: How badly does 6 punish wide/large empires?

[HansLemurson]

I only read through about the first half of the thread, but the one question I have that I didn't see an answer to yet is: How badly does 6 punish wide/large empires?

• Settlers increase in cost for each one you build. (80, 100, 120, 140...)
  
• Each luxury type provides happiness to only 4 cities. (Silk + Truffles and 6 cities = +(2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1) happiness)
  

That's it.  Build as wide as you want.  As wide as you dare.

[Singaboy]

I just finished an Island map AW game on Emperor against 9 Foes on a big map epic speed. There are several observations one can possibly only make when fighting the AI throughout the game. Some observations of the AI that people make are due to the fact that they don't fight it during the game.

1. AI never upgrades units.
This seems to be a coding error. Why do I say that? The AI will field its newest units once the obsolete ones have been wiped out. I was fighting against progressively modern units facing infantry, cavalry and battleships. It doesn't seem a problem for the AI to get new units, but upgrading seems problematic.

2. AI is unable to conduct warfare.
1upt is not easy to play. Combined with the ridiculous movement restrictions of Civ6 (no hill climbing without two movement left), 1upt is a killer for any AI. I think this concept is a game breaker and will never really work for them. SOD were more fun to play as a warmonger. Due to 1upt, every unit is so precious, that you don't want to ever lose one. However, when attacking cities with 1upt, sometimes you have to throw in a sacrificial unit in order to succeed to bring down the walls. The AI won't do that.

Once you get into naval warfare where 1upt is less of an issue (no terrain to hinder movements), the AI puts up a credible fight. Several Egyptian privateers were able to wipe up two of my battleships due to smart combined attacks.

3. War weariness is terrible
True enough, I had mid game revolts in some fringe cities. It seems that war weariness is terrible as long as you are occupying cities of a Nation not yet wiped out. Once I got rid of some foes, war weariness was no longer an issue. In fact in the end, my capital was ecstatic due to the many happy improvements I made.

4. Enemy troops move stealthily
This issue is downright terrible. How are you supposed to fight enemy troops in your own territory of you don't get to see such movements in the IT. There are no alerts whatsoever. Big problem when you fight on various fronts.

5. Internal trade routes are completely OP
In an AW game, you need to build harbors and economic districts from the start and never stop doing it. Why? The traders that come with it (of course, only the capacity, traders still need to be built) are super powerful. The get stronger and stronger as your target cities get better. Internal trade was so powerful for me with ultimately 60 trade routes (I made 1000gpt in the end). And the production boost is not to be underestimated too. You can start your trade routes in cities, you want to develop. It's a MM wet dream, but usually this sort of MM turns people off. The menus are not very userfriendly as most of it in the game.

6. City states
Simple, please give us an option to disable them. We don't need them in AW games at all. Or for that matter, even in other games.


If you want to read about that game, here is the link (I'll finish the write-up soon):http://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/th...ar.601418/

[Sirian]

My other point, which maybe I'm alone in, is that I think the maps themselves are pretty mediocre.  It shipped with almost no map-types and there isn't a lot of variety from game to game.  The adventure is actually one of the more interesting maps I've seen actually, as the utter lack of rivers in the start locations meant that you had to be a lot more creative settling than in most games, where it usually is a matter of squeezing as many sites as possible along rivers, settling for next to lakes if that's not an option and plunking on the coast only when either a needed resource is handy or you have nowhere else to expand.  The distribution of strategic resources is awful, leading to the problem Sullla discussed in his report - specifically that the AI basically never get to upgrade their melee and cavalry units.  (This is also partly an issue of not enough units in each line in the game - there really should be at least one in each class per era and the warrior > sword > musket > infantry > mech inf path is particularly bad because of the strategic resource scenario.)  There are other issues as well, but the maps don't feel as well constructed as 4 or 5.

I did the maps for Civ4 and Civ5.

I haven't tried Civ6, nor looked at any of its files.

Comparing the files to those from Civ5 could tell you whether they redesigned the maps from the ground up or just fiddled with things a bit and mostly re-used my old work.


- Sirian

[Commodore]

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.)

LoL. (And DotA)
Seriously, I also loathe the single experience thing, but it's been consistently and empirically proven to be the more popular model. A dozen years ago I was really into Warcraft III multiplayer...the custom map scene got just gutted in the casual dreck that was Defense of the Ancients. But that model went on to make ridiculous bank, playing one map over and over and over and over...

[Hail]

What if Culture were the currency you had to spend to switch Governments and Policies?

Bingo!

[Magil]

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:

This is how I feel right now too. The city-building has always been my favorite part of Civ and VI has made that into a real puzzle.

I'm of two minds on trade routes, yes, they are powerful, but an individual trade route really doesn't outperform a good tile in terms of food/production except if a city has really been built up to do so, and even then 2 good tiles will still do better. Yeah you can make a megacity by sending all trade routes out of it, but that's an opportunity cost at the expense of your other cities. I do think they're probably a little too good how they are now, but I'm not sure how to approach toning them down. They're not really like Civ IV's corporations, because those could benefit all of your cities and continued to scale in benefit, the cost would simply also scale (though you could do Corporate HQ + Wall Street to mitigate a large portion of the cost). They're a much more controlled resource.

Here's a screenshot from an Immortal Game with no AI-related mods but scaling up the tech/civic tree via the "8 Ages of Pace" mod:

Pretty buff there. I don't know if the AI was competent enough to actually use that to kill me, but the AI was waging war on each other, expanding and being aggressive, nearly the whole map was covered in cities, Spain was eliminated completely and both Egypt and America lost their capitals and a handful of other core cities to aggressors. I do think the AI is way too passive in the late game though, Germany never put that huge army to use, probably due to warmonger penalties influencing AI behavior too much. I wonder if toning those down would make the AI more willing to war?