Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[HansLemurson]

More than half of the problems with the AI will be fixed if it can just found more cities. Then it will have more stuff to threaten the player with, and compete for the finite resource of land. Without a lot of cities, giving the AI production and combat bonuses is like giving somebody long-term caffeine injections to substitute for sleep.

If the AI has 2x production bonuses, but I have 2x as many cities, then we are even, but I am still smarter. Give the AI an even number of cities as me, and now it's a battle of my smartness versus their bonuses. The way civ ought to be.

The Civ6 AI actually reminds me a lot of the Civ2 AI at its most dysfunctional.

[The Black Sword]

3. The community (at least the portion that's most-often active) has a bias towards multiplayer (in particular slow multiplayer), and I've seen nothing on that. Has anyone tried it? I know neither Pitboss nor PBEM exist, and that there's a special online speed, but not much else.

As you say, PBEM and Pitboss don't exist yet but I'm really looking forward to trying them out when they do. I really like a lot of the game's systems, I'm still enjoying some SP right now but all the military stuff(which is a lot of techs) feel pointless, I'm hoping it will be very fun in MP.

[yuris125]

So just out of curiosity, how many people are actually playing and enjoying Civ6 right now? We've had such a relentless flood of negativity and AI-bashing in the last few weeks that the mood in this forum can feel really depressing. It's been a bit frustrating when we can't even post in my succession game thread about what's going on without someone hopping in and telling us "your game is pointless because the AI in Civ6 is terrible and doesn't know how to win." Great, thanks, very helpful addition to our discussion.

And look, I don't think these posts are necessarily wrong either. The AI is a real mess in Civ6 at present, and it doesn't play the game well at all. I certainly know the feeling, since I was posting much the same kind of things about Civ5 when it came out. You could accurately call me a hypocrite in this regard. But as T-Hawk correctly told me back then about Civ5, it's not helpful to keep jumping into every thread about Civ6 to keep talking about how terrible the game is. We've already gotten the point by now: yes, we all know that the AI isn't very good in Civ6. Some of us still like the game anyway. We don't need to keep hearing about why it's so bad over and over again.

Of course, maybe I'm the one out of step with the community. It could also be that there's no interest in Civ6 at all, and we'll just keep maintaining a slowly-shrinking community of Civ4 diehards. If that's the case though, then please let me know so that I can stop wasting my time creating Civ6 succession games, Civ6 Single Player events, and writing lengthy Civ6 reports. I can just switch over to personal solo games and save myself a lot of time and effort. I'm enjoying this game a lot right now, but I can understand if not everyone feels the same way.

So what do people think? We've had about six weeks now. Is this game worth our time as a community? I certainly hope so.

Firstly, to get it out of the way: I completely agree that posting criticism of Civ6 in every thread is not productive. Someone criticising Civ6 in a thread for a succession game they aren't even playing is just bad manners

That being said, this is the exact thread where Civ6 should be criticised, so here goes

I think the biggest problem with Civ6 is that it looked much better on paper than it does in reality:

* "AI rewritten from scratch" was music to ears after the mess than was Civ5 AI. No one expected it to become worse!
* Eureka boosts are a neat concept which should reward forward planning and optimising other actions to get the ones the player needs to prioritise. In theory. In practice they just mean that you don't have to bother with research at all, just collect the boosts and the progress will be fine. Especially with cost scaling actually rewarding the player for completing as few techs as possible
* Religious combat - Civ5 had the attrition mechanic where if you had no open borders with an AI, their missionaries lost their strength for each turn inside your borders. Civ6's religious combat seemed like a good idea to make the player to actively defend their religion. But removing attrition means that religious units inside your borders no longer die after a few turns, and continue interfering with your Builders - you may have to wait many turns to improve one tile the AI insists on occupying, until they randomly move elsewhere. And I'm scared to think how this works in MP - in previous versions you had to declare war to choke an opponent, now you just have to send a few missionaries and camp them on key tiles!
* Player not being able to take control over distribution of amenities, and the automated obscure system constantly doing it wrong, is just awful. Also the amenity system working differently from what how the devs described it on stream (with extra copies of a luxury not providing extra amenities) is hard to explain

And so on - pretty much every new system has flaws. Which is not unexpected in a game as complex as Civ6 - but means that the game is just not very enjoyable in its current state. Especially with UI which has a lot of flaws as well

Also, lack of support for slow mode MP (Pitboss and PBEM) means that the game is currently not very interesting for RB-style multiplayer. Hopefully if/when GMR implement Civ6 support, there will be interest in a PBEM

All in all, think I finished two games after adventure 1, started a couple more, and realised how boring the game was becoming after the initial rush. That's probably the biggest flaw of all Civ games - once the player is ahead, there's no way they're going to lose. Pity in Civ6 that happens much earlier than in pretty much every other previous version - including Civ5

(I do still have 73 hours played - just haven't opened the game for over 3 weeks)

[Ruff_Hi]

I have the game ... but it is stuck under the christmas tree. I won't get to play any games until the end of the month.

I would like us to move from identifying issues with the Civ6 AI (and game mechanics) to identifying solutions. For example ... the missionary carpet that yuris mentioned above ... can we mod the game so that it is 1 civ unit per tile meaning that units from different civs can stack? Is this sort of code open to the modders?

We say the AI doesn't throw down enough cities ... do we know what in the code is stopping that? Do we know how to mod the code to change that? Is it just an assumption change (ie boost 'new city now' percentage)?

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I have the game ... but it is stuck under the christmas tree.  I won't get to play any games until the end of the month.

I would like us to move from identifying issues with the Civ6 AI (and game mechanics) to identifying solutions.  For example ... the missionary carpet that yuris mentioned above ... can we mod the game so that it is 1 civ unit per tile meaning that units from different civs can stack?  Is this sort of code open to the modders?

We say the AI doesn't throw down enough cities ... do we know what in the code is stopping that?  Do we know how to mod the code to change that?  Is it just an assumption change (ie boost 'new city now' percentage)?

Interestingly the lack of cities problem seems quite civ specific. Brazil especially is a rexer, as Russia tends to be. France AI especially seems woeful. This makes me hope there is an easyish fix.

I think it could certainly be possible to mod to 1 unit of a type, because you can stack a combat unit and builder/settler. Possibly even a religious. Should be able to make it at least 1 combat 1 support 1 religious unit if not at formal war.

[Gaspar]

I'm sort of in between here. I have 129 hours in Civ VI, actively started a SG, have read the other SG with interest. I played the first adventure, started the second. FM17 came out at a bad time for this or I'd probably have more. I can definitely see the fun game in this edition, am actively playing the game, and fervently hope RB keeps playing the game.

I also think it is 100% correct for people in this thread to talk about issues with the game. This is literally the place for it. While I do think the balance of negativity to positivity probably influences the general lack of Civ6 talk in the forum, I can't fault anyone who is going under the hood and discussing why the things that suck, suck. I think its especially true that this game is going to need an expansion or a mod to address the most egregious issues, and I think that we as a community might have to be more willing to be accepting of SP mods than we have been in the past if we want to see this game truly embraced by this community.

It was said earlier, but forget all of the other issues - the issue that makes the game a curbstomp at almost all difficulties is the AI's inability to settle. The code for settling is very poor, as the AI is totally unwilling to plant a low-housing site and generally by t100 you find the human at 8-10 cities to the AIs 3-4. We all know enough about Civ to know that's game over. Whenever I've seen the AI perform well, it is almost always because it was able to get out to a more competitive number of cities, either due to isolation or due to exceptional land. Only a couple of us have talked about just how bad the map generator is for this edition, but once we get a real world builder, this is a thing conceivably that can be fixed relatively easily for our events, both the single player and succession game variety. The map generator is really bad, guys. I mean it can't be intentional to routinely have no strategic resource distribution of any significance except for Horses, which are everywhere. There also doesn't seem to be any attempt to make sure each civ has x amount of fresh water to plant enough cities to get going, which I think would be at a minimum a map option. Changing the code so the AI is more willing to settle marginal locations would also improve things a ton. The map is less important in the later game, when districts and trade routes are king, but its still vitally important in the early game, when most games of civ are won and lost.

So see, that's criticism but baked in optimism. Those are very real issues but they're very fixable. The AI is never going to be good at combat and if that was what was necessary to make the game competitive, the title would be screwed. But it just needs to be able to get back to where it was in previous iterations, able to out-expand the player on high difficulties. That would open up a whole host of options in the game being more interesting - making military more meaningful later on, which would make whole swaths of the tech tree more interesting, etc. I think this game will get there, probably it will take mods, but I think it will get there.

The other thing is, we need to do more to create that buzz in the forums which is what I think Sullla and Dave are bemoaning. The style of the adventures/epics, while fun, is very boom-bust for the forum. We launch one, talk about it for a few days, radio silence, then four weeks later we talk about it again when its complete. It is the way it has to be for a competitive event of our style, but it certainly isn't conducive to creating forum chatter. The succession games were always more successful when the teams were formed here and the games were posted at CFC, a larger community. CFC doesn't do SGs anymore, so we shove our games in a forum that's lightly visited and they don't get the traffic and commentariat they used to. That's all okay, we just probably need to do more if we want to be a talkative community. The MP events are perfect for that, but in terms of SP, maybe we can start other little mini-games in this forum. Things like attacking strategy - maybe a mini-competition for fastest of a particular victory type that we talk about in the forum as we play. I don't know if we can artificially create that, we might just be talking into a vacuum and there simply aren't enough regular RB'ers playing the game right now for this to be interesting. But I think that's the right approach - trying new things to generate productive conversation amongst those who are enjoying the game. Trying to discourage dissent will never work, this community is way too smart and way too stubborn for that.

[scooter]

I'm not really enjoying the game very much. I haven't played in weeks after clocking in 22 hours early. I just feel very lukewarm about it. Today was the first time I've even opened this thread in awhile. It's also possible I simply need a little break from Civ in general which happens to me periodically, so that may not entirely be the game's fault.

That said, I'm also not interested in raining on other people's parade. It's clearly enjoyable to a much bigger chunk of this forum than Civ5 was, and I also think this game will probably be quite a bit more fun further down the road. And I'm also very interested in the prospect of PBEMs with humans if that ever gets added or modded into the game because most of my qualms with the game would go away against humans.

So I guess I'm saying that I'm not playing it right now, but I hope Civ6 games continue to happen here. I'm definitely not interested in discouraging that.

[Ruff_Hi]

The deviant mind loonies are starting some Civ6 SG games (hosting at CFC).

[fluffyflyingpig]

I also want to point out that the comment in the sc game seemed pretty topical and accurate, not pointless complaining about the ai. Saying that you appeared to be cruising to victory, variant play and all seems like an entirely pertinent. If there's real disagreement about that, there's something to discuss!

[oledavy]

I also think it is 100% correct for people in this thread to talk about issues with the game.  This is literally the place for it.  While I do think the balance of negativity to positivity probably influences the general lack of Civ6 talk in the forum, I can't fault anyone who is going under the hood and discussing why the things that suck, suck. 

I want to elaborate on this a little bit. I don't mean to convey for a second that I think we should not critique the game. Most of the criticism in this thread I find no fault in and agree with. My concern that there has been an increasing minority of posts in this and the patch notes thread that are just rants:

Well, I found out, that steam sells cities: skylines for a mere US$6. When you can buy the better city builder, why go for a beta Civ6, when you can have the far superior alternative.

etc.

This is all well and good. We perhaps should even have a Civ6 rants thread. I can't speak for everyone here obviously, but I feel it's difficult to discuss the game when any discussion point inevitably breaks upon the rocks of "the AI sucks."

I'm also concerned that we're wasting the energy Adventure 1 brought to the forums. We had an unprecedented number of sign-ups for an adventure, many people for the first time. The experience of many of these people is going to be/has been: play adventure 1, go the Civ General, see which way the wind is blowing, and keep dissenting thoughts to themselves. 

To that end, with the game about 6 weeks old now, I feel we should start moving past general first impressions and start figuring out what we want to do with the game going forward. 

Sure the AI is easy to roll at the moment, but this community is ostensibly about devising variants to find additional challenge, about setting victory and scoring conditions that are not in the game. I think future Civ6 SP events should really emphasize this to maintain interest and allow us to explore the game systems in anticipation of eventual MP.  

For those who have the ability to mod, or have thoughts on rebalancing the game, I think it would be worthwhile at this point to start really thinking about what changes we would like to make for both the SP and MP end of things.