Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[Krill]

I think that part of the large UI issue is that it is so pervasive. It affects all the other issues and makes them that much worse.

For example, given the decision to go with a "Base cost", which is shown in the UI, it's so much harder to work out the real cost of pretty much anything. Do unit costs scale? Why do they scale? How do I work out what the new cost is when all I have is the knowledge of the number of turns to build a unit, and I know the hammer output. Do I have to go through a bunch of micro just to figure out information that should be given to me?

One thing that I liked about civ 4, is that the is one part of the game, just one, that doesn't explain what it does to affect the costs on the economy, and that's inflation. And even then, it's not actually that hard to figure out what it actually is given the F2 screen.

Civ 6 has so many abstractions it's just too time consuming to do it right, and that's a large problem. I think that even if they fix the UI issues, then they are going to just highlight those problems that are obsfuscated by it. The trade routes, districts, AI behaviour...

[Thespian]

I finished my second game on Emperor as Gorgo of Greece. (Can that be classified as a first impression anymore? ) A few miscellaneous, slightly incoherent thoughts I put together once I finished.


City states are frustrating. I spawned next to four of them in literally any way I could expand but directly west or east for one city. I tried playing more peacefully and not killing them from the get go but that was such a huge mistake. Killing them would have given me more land and far better cities. Their quests are absolutely random and I don't feel actually beneficial to the city state. Running a trade route? Yes. Killing a barbarian camp? Yes. Unlocking a eureka towards Social Media? Not... exactly. I feel like a system where they'd give you some sort of quest like the following would work better:



Donating a (highest class of unit you could build) unit.

Shipping them a great deal of cash.
Sending them some production.



So on and so forth, being aptly balanced so you couldn't just toss a bunch of cash at them constantly. IE: Pay x (scaled) cash for a quest, and the quests pop up at whatever interval they do. Make it feel like you're sacrificing something to get their bonuses. Also, could they... not like, take up land? There should be some logical system you could use that means they aren't actually on the map.

The AI properly expands! 10 to 11 cities is definitely scary when you have four and a fourth of a city because of the bloody city states. They still don't build enough districts - my four cities were comparable to the top dogs with 11 to 12 cities district wise. I'm not sure if this expansion was because it was a small map or if it was a higher difficulty.

It's really obvious that the AI cheats - 4,000k power in regards to military? It wasn't like my economy was floundering either (and I had the policy which reduces maintenance), but I could barely manage an eighth of that. In the early game, Norway had 1k in regards to military. Norway also was by far the weakest civilization in the end of the game so maybe they couldn't manage the maintenance either? Their military doesn't matter because the AI will literally sit tank armies off the coast of your cities without doing anything. In another war, I did take down a siege unit to low health which seemed to paralyze the AI and make them refuse to attack my cities. It could just correlation not causation, however. Digging for artifacts in their borders appears to make the AI declare war on you - I did it twice and they declared on me twice. A useful note for those having fun with that minigame.

It's definitely hard to win some AI over with their agendas on higher difficulties. Russia, for example, requiring strong culture and science? Tricky. I'm not sure whether I like that or not, but I think ultimately it doesn't matter since diplomacy is broken and also a bit useless. No AI will have anything you want other then luxuries, and they'll bid all day for that.

Speaking of agendas, Civilized is either bugged or in need of proper fixing. Peter would come around and insult me every so often for not taking care of the barbarian threat. I saw no barbarians nor any camps reasonably near by. I also had launched my Satellite at this point so I saw literally all the map. It's possible one barbarian was lurking in the northern wasteland, but I couldn't see it and I wasn't going to send limited units to check.

Water matters more on a higher difficulty. If you're severely lacking in that department? That's a bad position to be in. But... the AI struggles even when you have that problem and limited land. I was never in any real danger of losing and did eventually (finally) get a science victory on the same year of the actual moon landing. Not exactly a stamp of approval when you're on the third hardest difficulty. I also wasn't playing anywhere close to my 'peak' ability. I barely concentrated through the game and ended up having a ton of silly mistakes.

I did experiment with farming for a bit and I don't really feel that strongly about it one way or the other - I think it's better to avoid farms unless you're going hard for specialists. And I was hit pretty hard by the housing cap, too. +.5 doesn't seem like a big enough of a boost to properly matter. I built six farms to get +3 Housing and I don't think it mattered much.

[Magil]

FWIW, someone on Civfanatics did identify the bug that makes classical/ancient era units always build faster (which I believe contributes to them being spammed en masse). It seems the God of the Forge pantheon is incorrectly applying to all Civs rather than just the cities with the pantheon present. There's already a fix for it here.

[Sareln]

FWIW, someone on Civfanatics did identify the bug that makes classical/ancient era units always build faster (which I believe contributes to them being spammed en masse). It seems the God of the Forge pantheon is incorrectly applying to all Civs rather than just the cities with the pantheon present. There's already a fix for it here.

Has the software quality on CIV titles been so dodgy before? Did something change between CIV4, CIV5 and CIV6 in Firaxis' structure?  Or did I just learn more about SWE in the intervening years?

[Brian Shanahan]

FWIW, someone on Civfanatics did identify the bug that makes classical/ancient era units always build faster (which I believe contributes to them being spammed en masse). It seems the God of the Forge pantheon is incorrectly applying to all Civs rather than just the cities with the pantheon present. There's already a fix for it here.

Has the software quality on CIV titles been so dodgy before? Did something change between CIV4, CIV5 and CIV6 in Firaxis' structure?  Or did I just learn more about SWE in the intervening years?

Testing is my guess. We know the testing for five was miles worse than the testing for four, coming from the fact that they hired fanboys rather than those willing to break the game and find the problems. Plus we've got a secondary point in that both five and six look to have geared very much towards the "ooh, shiny" segment of the market, though that trend was evident in BtS.

[Sirian]

We know the testing for five was miles worse than the testing for four, coming from the fact that they hired fanboys rather than those willing to break the game and find the problems.

You use the words "know" and "fact" incorrectly. Try these instead: "suppose" and "conjecture".

The pre-release testers on five all contributed to four. They were a smaller subset, minus the MP ladder folks and some of the single player testers.

You could, I suppose, go with the conjecture that half the Civ4 contributors were fanboys, and that Jon found a way to exclude the "good" testers from Civ4 and bring along only the bad ones to Civ5, but then how did Civ4 turn out so well with a half-bad testing group?


If you do want to label the Civ5 testers as fanboys, I suppose you'd have to put me at the top of that list. Soren doesn't view me that way, based on the fact that he's hired me to work with him again twice since he left Firaxis. First at Zynga, on a project that vanished when Zynga got in to financial trouble and closed a ton of the studios they had bought up. More recently at his own company, where I just finished designing a campaign upgrade for Offworld Trading Company.


I admit to contributing to suppositions and conjecture about Civ6. But I do try to label them as such. We have no idea what's taken place behind the scenes and who are the bad guys (if any) to explain how the game has shipped with the problems that we can see in it. Tossing around suppositions and conjecture as if they were facts is the kind of thing I tend to associate with fanboys -- and we don't have any of those around here? Right?


- Sirian

[Sareln]

It's possible for the same group of (beta/QA) testers to produce drastically different results based on what their PM prioritizes, how much time they're given, how stable the rule-set is, etc.  The people doing the testing, like everyone else, are also constrained by their inputs.  That doesn't mean that differences in the tester-pool don't make a difference, it just means it's impossible from the outside-not-looking-in to distinguish between bad testing, bad process, and different objectives.

The fact that the benchmark suite exists and ships with the game could help explain how the thing is so stable (few CTDs, though they do exist, the only one I've seen is CTD after choosing to exit to desktop).  If looks like it does a little bit of everything, rolls a few turns, etc. you can run that against a suite of machines and see if any of them crash out and harvest logs.  This also implies that most of the work necessary for an automatic framework has already been done, which if I find myself doing a TC I would want to shamelessly steal

If the "quality" priority was more "does not crash" and less "accurately implements the rule-set in Ed Beach's head, with all corner cases including the ones he may have forgotten to write down", a perfectly good team of beta-testers, developers, and designers could still produce the game that we saw on launch day.

[MJW (ya that one)]

We know the testing for five was miles worse than the testing for four, coming from the fact that they hired fanboys rather than those willing to break the game and find the problems.

You use the words "know" and "fact" incorrectly. Try these instead: "suppose" and "conjecture".

The pre-release testers on five all contributed to four. They were a smaller subset, minus the MP ladder folks and some of the single player testers.

You could, I suppose, go with the conjecture that half the Civ4 contributors were fanboys, and that Jon found a way to exclude the "good" testers from Civ4 and bring along only the bad ones to Civ5, but then how did Civ4 turn out so well with a half-bad testing group?


If you do want to label the Civ5 testers as fanboys, I suppose you'd have to put me at the top of that list. Soren doesn't view me that way, based on the fact that he's hired me to work with him again twice since he left Firaxis. First at Zynga, on a project that vanished when Zynga got in to financial trouble and closed a ton of the studios they had bought up. More recently at his own company, where I just finished designing a campaign upgrade for Offworld Trading Company.


I admit to contributing to suppositions and conjecture about Civ6. But I do try to label them as such. We have no idea what's taken place behind the scenes and who are the bad guys (if any) to explain how the game has shipped with the problems that we can see in it. Tossing around suppositions and conjecture as if they were facts is the kind of thing I tend to associate with fanboys -- and we don't have any of those around here? Right?


- Sirian

The testers name's were in the credits. One could find out what kind of people they are by looking at Apolyton and WPC...well mostly WPC. Some guys also broke the NDA so he could use that to crush you too. WPC really doesn't deserve respect and you only worked on maps so I think Brain would be able to grind you down if he tries. There's no way to know why Jon picked Apolyton/WPC without him confessing but I suspect that he doesn't care about MP at all (or only FFA MP--also his new game doesn't have MP in it) so it didn't make sense to use duel-league CivPlayers anymore so he had to pick a new group and so picked the group he grew up with: Apolyton/WPC. That's just a guess though but what's not a guess is what WPC is like.

[Ranamar]

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.

There are also several civic cards that give amenities and/or housing.  Even without New Deal, if you're willing to sacrifice a couple of civic cards and do some specific builds, you should be able to get to size 8-10 without straining your amenities:
+1 garrison +1 for 3 districts +2 for entertainment complex with arena gets you to size 10 at the cost of one of your district slots.  (Without the entertainment complex, you're using one luxury to get to size 7 for the third district...)

[Brian Shanahan]

We know the testing for five was miles worse than the testing for four, coming from the fact that they hired fanboys rather than those willing to break the game and find the problems.

You use the words "know" and "fact" incorrectly. Try these instead: "suppose" and "conjecture".

The pre-release testers on five all contributed to four. They were a smaller subset, minus the MP ladder folks and some of the single player testers.

You could, I suppose, go with the conjecture that half the Civ4 contributors were fanboys, and that Jon found a way to exclude the "good" testers from Civ4 and bring along only the bad ones to Civ5, but then how did Civ4 turn out so well with a half-bad testing group?


If you do want to label the Civ5 testers as fanboys, I suppose you'd have to put me at the top of that list. Soren doesn't view me that way, based on the fact that he's hired me to work with him again twice since he left Firaxis. First at Zynga, on a project that vanished when Zynga got in to financial trouble and closed a ton of the studios they had bought up. More recently at his own company, where I just finished designing a campaign upgrade for Offworld Trading Company.


I admit to contributing to suppositions and conjecture about Civ6. But I do try to label them as such. We have no idea what's taken place behind the scenes and who are the bad guys (if any) to explain how the game has shipped with the problems that we can see in it. Tossing around suppositions and conjecture as if they were facts is the kind of thing I tend to associate with fanboys -- and we don't have any of those around here? Right?


- Sirian

The testers name's were in the credits. One could find out what kind of people they are by looking at Apolyton and WPC...well mostly WPC. Some guys also broke the NDA so he could use that to crush you too. WPC really doesn't deserve respect and you only worked on maps so I think Brain would be able to grind you down if he tries. There's no way to know why Jon picked Apolyton/WPC without him confessing but I suspect that he doesn't care about MP at all (or only FFA MP--also his new game doesn't have MP in it) so it didn't make sense to use duel-league CivPlayers anymore so he had to pick a new group and so picked the group he grew up with: Apolyton/WPC. That's just a guess though but what's not a guess is what WPC is like.

I remember reading through a thread on CFC where Sulla's review of the game (shortly after the Daring Deities RBSG) and Dale one of the more notable testers came on to the thread and made an attempt to thrash Sulla's reputation, simply because he was critical. It was obvious after a few posts that he hadn't even read the review and couldn't address the problems raised when directly put up to him. A few of us got angry with him when his attacks got too bad (he'd long gone past breaking the forum rules), but he didn't get banned or even upbraided.

If that's the level of the testers in public (defensive attitude and offensive behaviour), and there's no indication that Dale was atypical, I can guarantee you that the testing process for five wasn't worth a shit.