Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[oledavy]

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.

Likewise. I'm also hopeful that whatever the expansion AI for Brazil is can be extended to the other AIs to make them actually expand. 

On a similar note, while the AI armies pose little thread in war, the barbarian armies will attack with wild abandon, assault your city centers and pillage all your improvements and districts. We don't need an AI that understands how to effectively utilize 1UPT. We just need an AI that will attack. To that end, if the coding for the barbarians could be extended to the AIs, I feel like the AI would pose an actual military threat.

[BRickAstley]

There is a modding discussion thread, but it's kinda hidden I'll move it out here for increased visibility.

[Gustaran]

On a similar note, while the AI armies pose little thread in war, the barbarian armies will attack with wild abandon, assault your city centers and pillage all your improvements and districts. We don't need an AI that understands how to effectively utilize 1UPT. We just need an AI that will attack. To that end, if the coding for the barbarians could be extended to the AIs, I feel like the AI would pose an actual military threat.

That is my main issue with the game. Even if the AI won't ever be anywhere close to a human when it comes to 1UPT tactics, let it do some initial calculations and then throw a bunch of units against a target. Right now, AI warfare seems close to absurd with useless declarations of war and nonsensical AI unit movement.
I can live with a suboptimal AI, but if the warfare is so bad it's actually breaking the immersion of playing a tactical game, I won't settle for "well, but the builder part is really nice".
Maybe extending and tweaking the barbarian AI can fix that.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I think one needs to remember is we are the minority... Civ 5 currently has more active players than civ 6. I cannot understand how it has so many. I think after the succession game I will be not playing any further games personally. It has become very samey quickly for me, although I may dust it out for an attempt at multiplayer.

[Sareln]

I think one needs to remember is we are the minority... Civ 5 currently has more active players than civ 6. I cannot understand how it has so many. I think after the succession game I will be not playing any further games personally. It has become very samey quickly for me, although I may dust it out for an attempt at multiplayer.

Anecdotal point, my wife went back to playing CIV5 after a couple of days of CIV6 b/c the AI was such a mad-dog she couldn't play a peaceful game.  Didn't matter that it was easy to deflect, she just didn't want to play a war-game every time.

[T-hawk]

Civ 5 currently has more active players than civ 6. I cannot understand how it has so many.

This one's easy. Civ 5 has way more installed copies from five years of cheap Steam sales. Civ 6 only has top-dollar first-adopters at the moment.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Civ 5 currently has more active players than civ 6. I cannot understand how it has so many.

This one's easy. Civ 5 has way more installed copies from five years of cheap Steam sales. Civ 6 only has top-dollar first-adopters at the moment.

A couple of weeks ago it was the other way around.


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[T-hawk]

Sure. There's a big dropoff from 2 weeks to 4 weeks after the release of a brand new game. There isn't much dropoff from 6 years to 6 years plus 2 weeks.

Comparing the raw total of each game on Steam is pretty meaningless. Apples-to-apples would be Civ 6 now to four weeks after Civ 5's release, or else Civ 5 now to Civ 6 six years from now.

[Sullla]

Well. I'm glad to see that this kicked up a good bit of discussion in the thread, which was part of what I was hoping to see. Sometimes you have to stir the pot a little with these things.

Oledavy summed up my feelings very well with one of his posts yesterday:

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.

A new Civ game represents a huge opportunity to bring in new life to this community and these forums. I share the concern that we haven't been doing enough to take advantage of this chance with Civ6. Rightly or wrongly, we aren't going to see much in the way of new posters if the bulk of the discussion about Civ6 is about how terrible the AI plays the game, true though that may be. Those players will head off for greener pastures elsewhere. We had pretty much that exact scenario happen with Civ5 when it came out: initial enthusiasm, followed by (deserved) heavy criticism of the game, and then almost nothing afterwards. Outside of T-Hawk's solo games and a very small number of PBEM games, this community completely ignored Civ5. The comparison is striking with the previous games in the series; we ran 50 Epics for Civ3 and close to 100 total succession games. For Civ4, we ran about 70 Epics/Adventures, 75 PBEM games, 35 Pitboss games, and several dozen succession games back in the earlier days. For Civ5 we did what, 5 PBEM games? I think we did a single unofficial Epic event? Regardless of the actual numbers, it was a gigantic dropoff. From what I was seeing here, we were rapidly heading in the same direction with Civ6, and I wanted to pause before we headed down that path.

I also want to make another point clear: no one should feel that they have to self-censor themselves on these forums. It's perfectly fair to be critical of Civ6, and I've tried to stress that I also think the AI is very poor in the current state of the game. (However, I also feel that the game's actual mechanics are quite good, and this is the difference for me between Civ5 and Civ6. Bad AI is fixable, bad mechanics aren't. I also think the AI can be remedied in time - it just needs to expand and be willing to suicide units against the player. Feel free to disagree with me on these points!) The problem is not criticism of Civ6, it's a forum where we do nothing but serve up negativity without offering anything else. That's how we end up dropping the game as a community, as anyone who is interested will leave and head elsewhere.

So what we really need to do, as several people suggested, is not attempt to stifle criticism (which was not my point), but rather to find more outlets for the part of the community who is enjoying Civ6. Gaspar summed this up really well:

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.

Agreed. Succession games served this role back in their Civ3 heyday, but I don't think we're ever going to reach that point again. I think that Civ6 Multiplayer can take some of this role once PBEM appears - and I'm very eager to try a game once that option becomes available. (Hopefully soon?) In the meantime, I think we should jump on that idea of mini-challenges here in the forum. Open thread, one starting savegame file, everyone has the same goal, post away with full spoilers and see who can do the best. We did some of that with Civ4 back in the day and it was a lot of fun. I can put one together tomorrow, I already have a simple idea ready. Feel free to suggest away with more ideas like this - what would people like to try?

Exploring the modding side of things could also be a solution. I am the wrong one to ask about that though, since I know almost nothing about modding.

I'll add one last point here for tonight. There are lots of problems with most games on release now. There are often bugs that don't work properly, exploits that can wreck gameplay, poor balancing even when the exploits are fixed, and documentation / scenario design tools are often missing or nonexistent. These kind of problems can be avoided by playing games that have been out for some time, places where there is a lot more polish and community experience. However... there's also something to be said about being part of the community that experiences something for the first time. A game can only be new once, and learning how everything works can offer the best experiences in a game's lifecycle. Right now, Civ6 is still largely virgin territory waiting to be explored. What's out there that we don't know about yet? Who's going to play this game's version of LOTR2 Zealous Zulus succession game (Arathorn's first-ever Always War game in Civ3), this game's version of the Cuban Isolationists or the Apolyton Demogame? As Sirian has written on these forums, there are drawbacks to being an early adopter, but there can be great benefits as well. Many of my favorite moments with the Civilization series have come with recently released, buggy, unbalanced games. Especially with Civ3, which was a disaster on release as well. That doesn't mean anyone should waste their time on a game that they don't like, of course - I only want to suggest that there's something to be gained here as well.

[oledavy]

 Feel free to suggest away with more ideas like this - what would people like to try?

Variant idea I've been mulling over: No building or purchasing military besides slingers/warriors. No upgrading units. You can only utilize more advanced military through levying it from city-states.