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As a French person I feel like it's my duty to explain strikes to you. - AdrienIer |
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Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread
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(December 2nd, 2016, 12:26)T-hawk Wrote: Perhaps we could use one problem to fix another. Take advantage of our existing established split between the names of the Epics and Adventures. Adventures could be open for spoiler discussion and Epics the closed competitions. That sounds like it would satisfy everybody with good optics, right? And better for understandability than opening a third line of "mini-challenges". This seems like the best solution with all that's been discussed so far.
We did a number of weekend occ threads for civ iv. Common challenges make sense.
It's probably best to figure out how to play the base game first before going hog wild with variants though.
Variants *are* a critical part of learning how to play the base game, IMO. It's far too easy to get stuck in a rut.
Taking elements off the table to see how useful they are/forcing you to optimize other parts of the game is a useful exercise. Even if only as AB testing to prove, definitively, that everything else sucks. 
I like a lot of the ideas here, but I most support doing a bunch of them. We go ahead and we do mini-challenges/adventures with full spoiler threads; we run weekend occ's or whatever; we do some simple challenges in the forum itself - stuff like let's all try and see who can get a fastest finish with x variant in y style and the just talk together in one thread about our findings, etc. I think a few more folks than just Sullla probably need to be spreading the wealth of getting this stuff started, though I really appreciate his attempts to keep the fires stoked.
This stuff will get the conversation going, we'll all get better at the game and maybe we'll attract some traffic. Maybe we also need to throw the occasional post at CFC/Reddit to let folks know what we are doing. I know Brick did some of that for Adventure One and I'm sure it contributed to the outpouring of contributors. I do still think whatever the main competition game is should be handled the same way it has always been, it can be the one part that is pure competition and left as is. Its very much part of the fabric of this site. I actually really like the idea of splitting the adventures/epics, maybe rename adv 2 to epic 1 now, or whatever, we spit out a new adventure which has full spoiler threads and interaction as a goal and we also do Sullla's mini-challenge in the forum. Its a lot of good stuff.
I've got some dirt on my shoulder, can you brush it off for me?
OK, I held off on setting up anything this weekend to allow for further discussion. I think that we should go forward with the idea to designate "no spoiler" events as Epics in the future, and "full spoiler" events as Adventures in the future. We can also set up smaller challenges as well, and something along those lines feels like a good fit to have going on while waiting for the current Adventure 2 game to close. I will put a simple mini-challenge together tomorrow evening, which anyone will be free to play and report as they see fit. We'll put something together more substantial for the first official "full spoilers" Adventure, launching time TBD, probably after the holidays. Feel free to offer more ideas/suggestions, thanks.
I know I'm late to the whole discussion, but I started playing VI a couple weeks ago and have been enjoying it quite a lot, more than I expected to be. The overhaul of the economic system is in particular much appreciated. I am not a "numbers guy", and have always found Civ IV's system burdensome to play optimally; is it better to go cottage-heavy or focus on a workshop economy? Specialists or trade routes? Should I make any investment in espionage or largely ignore the system in favor of getting the most out of my science and/or tax sliders? I end up always playing games by ear, which generally works out well enough, at least in SP, but the time and intellectual investment needed to play at the higher levels is beyond what I am willing to commit. VI's system isn't as dumbed-down as I had feared- there's a certain degree of sophistication and foresight required in placing districts optimally, selecting a pantheon, prioritizing builds, etc., but the overall apparatus is much more immediately intuitive. It reminds me in a way of Civ III, where the emphasis was on larger-scale empire management, rather than weighting options for improvements for dozens or hundreds of individual tiles.
I'll hop on the bandwagon that the AI isn't performing at nearly the level it should be, although I do recall the vanilla IV AI being terrible at release as well. I believe that much of the AI's weakness in expansion is directly attributable to its lamentable inability to wage war effectively. In game after game (Emperor & Immortal difficulty levels) I see the AIs cripple themselves in early wars which go nowhere. In Civ III AIs could acquire massive empires early on by eating their opponents; here they simply waste cogs trading units while ultimately failing to make substantial headway against each other. I have seen a grand total of one civilization get eliminated by another in almost a dozen games played past the T120 mark, three of those to completion. The AI also struggle against the barbarians, which sets them back perhaps more than any other factor. In my current Immortal-level game, Scandinavia was playing OCC for the first 50 turns or so. I recently stumbled across a barbarian Settler near their borders- I assume there's a second somewhere nearby. This happens constantly, with seemingly the majority of AI on any given map losing their critical starting & early-game Settlers and Builders to the Barbarian hordes. Their wartime ineptitude obviously also hurts them when accounting for the human player- like half the available civs are already geared toward rushing, and even Immortal-level neighbors make easy targets. One or two Classical Era conquests, and the player has essentially won. It's not that the AI is terrible at everything, either. They tech reasonably well (although this may be more a function of how cheap most technologies are), and they're surprisingly adept at the unfortunately atrocious religious system. Rarely I'll see an AI manage to build a 9+ city empire on a standard-size map (always either Saladin or Trajan, presumably due to their being loaded with passive bonuses). In those situations they can at least force the player to commit some thought and resources to their conquest. The game would be vastly improved if that minimal standard of performance was the baseline for all AI opponents. Oddly, city states appear to be much more proficient at carrying out combat operations, which leaves me hopeful that whatever fixes are required for the civilization AI code will be relatively simple to implement. There's a lot of potential in VI- nothing here screams "fundamentally broken". I suspect it'll be in a much better state within a year, whether through community modders or official patches- or both; what the game really needs now is a Blake to step in and do Firaxis's job for it.
If anyone is looking for a different AI experience I recommend checking out the AI+ Mod.
The AI still isn't nearly as competitive as it should be, but on Immortal difficulty I've observed it being much more willing to go to war, build troops, actually attack units, capture city states, and build Settlers (using the latter competently still seems to be an issue). It doesn't expand as well as I'd hoped, but I did have Scythia settle very aggressively against me in one game. The AI also invests far fewer resources in religion, which seems to be to its benefit. It's not a Blake-level performance boost, but I've at least gotten the sense from my more recent games that I can't just ignore the world around my empire entirely and still be assured of winning; the reality of that impression still requires more observation to fully appraise.
Played a bit further into a game using AI+. The improvements are definitely noticeable- at turn 200 Peter the Great has an almost 20-city empire and appears to be pursuing a cultural victory (he won't obtain it before I can win by space, but he does have an impressive number of "Great Works" stocked). He also managed to take a fortified late-era city from Egypt using siege tactics, which I've never seen the default AI even attempt. His beaker output is close to 200 per turn. He's currently attacking me with an army of Cossacks and AT units- I'm not in much danger, but would be were I still attempting a Farmer's Gambit.
That said, the other AI aren't faring so well; most are stuck with 4-6 cities, even with excellent land still remaining, which I can attribute only to their habit of declaring war on each other every other turn. The Norwegians or whatever were particularly pathetic, squatting in two barely-developed cities for the first 180 turns or so. After I eliminated them, I found an island off their coast with two Barbarian settlers, plus another in the frozen wastes to their north, so it's clear that the AI still struggles against Barbarian pressure. |
