If we're going to discuss the patch notes, let's at least post the patch notes:
[NEW]
TEAMS:
Multiplayer Teams have been added to Civilization VI and this feature builds on updates to the Alliance agreement. Players on teams gain additional benefits (beyond those of an alliance), as follows:
When one teammate finishes research on a tech or civic, their teammate(s) receive a boost for that tech or civic.
Teammates share war status against opponents not on their team.
Teammates share allied status with opponents not on their team.
Teammates work together to win or lose the game as a single entity. The Religion and Culture Victories have been reworked so they are more cooperative.
The Religion Victory requires you to convert all civs to ONE of the religions started by your team.
The Culture Victory requires ONE member of your team to be culturally dominant over all players NOT on your team.
MODDING TOOLS
Updated lobby and in-game UI to better show Additional Content details.
Added Sid Meier’s Civilization VI Development Tools, which includes ModBuddy, Tools, FireTuner, and the Steam Workshop Uploader.
ModBuddy: A packaging and development tool.
Art/Asset Tools: Import FBX files into a format usable by the game, as well as customize existing art.
FireTuner: In-game debugging and editing tool.
Added Sid Meier’s Civiliation VI Development Assets, which includes the game art assets. This is a large download (approximately 7GB compressed download and 27GB on disk) which contains game assets, including models, textures, and interface elements.
STEAM WORKSHOP
Access mods created by the Steam community via Steam Workshop
Share your mods with the Steam community with the Steam Workshop uploader.
ModBuddy will also receive additional updates in the future, as part of a modding SDK update later. These tools do not include DLL source for Civilization VI at this time.
[MISC]
Added True Start Location feature, where civs start on the world map at their geographic origin.
Added a City-State slider to game setup.
[BALANCE CHANGES]
Start position and map generation has been tuned.
Updated ice generation to allow more for circumnavigation.
Commercial Hub and Harbor both provide +1 Trade Route capacity, but only the first one applies (used to stack for +2 capacity total).
Units that are embarked now use an era-based strength value instead of their base combat value.
Many of the techs that reveal strategic resources have been changed to reveal the resource before it is needed to build a resource-dependent unit.
Players can now build obsoleted units if they do not have access to the strategic resource required by the upgrade unit.
Tech Tree balance. Adding several prerequisites to address paths through the tree that were too quick and led to era transitions too early.
Horseback Riding now requires Archery. Archery is no longer a leaf tech.
Stirrups is now in the late Medieval era and costs 390 (was early Medieval and cost 300).
Industrialization now requires Square Rigging.
Scientific Theory now requires Banking.
Steel now requires Rifling.
Computers now requires Radio.
Updated the cost and strength of some Air units.
Change movement rules after disembarkation. Cannot land on shore with more movement than your Land Movement allowance.
Updated Vikings Scenario to 60 turns.
[AI TUNING]
Increased desire and ability to use nukes and aircraft, and maintain a standing military. General AI attack improvements.
Increased desire to declare friendship.
Reduced frequency of “your troops are on my border“ warning.
Updated settlement preferences.
Barbarians now rampage when their camp is destroyed.
Will now liberate minor civs and cities of current allies.
Tuned strategic and luxury resource trading.
Will now be more aware of gold income, and work to bring in more.
Support units will recognize that they are not under threat if they share a hex with a friendly unit.
Added a grace period of 2 turns after the end of open borders before the AI starts complaining you're too close to their territory.
Barbarians may now pillage tiles to heal.
AI will now continue to research repeatable techs and civics.
[BUG FIXES]
Kongo relics no longer get multiplied Faith yields if more than one is in the same building
Fixed some bugs with Great People not interacting correctly with Vikings natural wonders.
Sumeria will no longer share joint war experience with a player when killing barbarians.
Corrected tourism calculation from National Parks to ensure correct awarding.
Fixed an issue where you could sometimes not offer Joint War.
Spies will not have the Steal Tech mission available when you have already completed all techs.
City States gain territory for influence even if they get the influence before founding their city.
When a player is destroyed, his captured spies die with him.
All of your active spy missions stop in a city that you or an ally has just captured.
Fixed problem in tactical combat that was preventing units from capturing builders
You are no longer allowed to declare war on declared friends (or in an enforced peace period) from the "troops near me" warning.
Increased Jet Fighter and Jet Bomber sight range (up from 2 to 5).
Additional bug fixes.
Added more bindable keys (Toggle Resource Icons, Toggle Tourism Lens, Alert action).
Added a notification for when a player loses territory to a culture bomb.
[AUDIO]
Adding some missing UI sounds.
VIKINGS DLC:
Added VO, and updated quotes, for three Natural Wonders.
Added VO to Natural Wonders while in the scenario.
[MISC]
Credits updated.
Fixed some missing ARX images.
Updating game concepts for City-States, Trade Routes, and Great People. Explained some things that were not there before (ex. Patronage, gold income for foreign routes passing through city), as well as some clarifications.
I don't agree with the doom and gloom from the other posters. Most of the changes in this patch look pretty good to me. Adding team MP is a huge step forward, something that Civ5 never managed to include at all. That alone opens up the potential for a lot of MP games that would otherwise never be possible. The patch added a lot of modding tools and some kind of in-game editor, which might be the thing that we needed to start doing proper map/scenario editing. I'll need to look into that in more detail, but I've been hampered in setting up the Epics/Adventure games by the lack of any kind of map editor to date.
The balance changes also look pretty solid to me as well. The embarked unit change is a big plus; it was ridiculous how an embarked knight would have 48 strength and would be shrugging off attacks from frigates like they were nothing while swimming at sea. Those units are supposed to be nearly helpless while embarked. Teh mentioned why the fix to be able to build obsoleted units if the player lacks the resources to build the updated versions is a good one. That should help the AI in particular; the AI is always building warriors and chariots because they lack niter or something similar and everything else has been obsoleted already. Big improvement there. The tech tree rebalancing is also a major plus; it was way too easy to beeline Horseback Riding and Stirrups tech, then crush someone with horses/knights. These units came too early on the tech tree considering the power of the units they unlocked. Similarly, I've written about how it was ridiculous for Tourism purposes that Computers tech could be picked up by researching 2 Industrial era techs and 1 Modern era tech. Adding a few more cross tree tech requirements is a win for game balance.
The one potential misstep is the Commercial/Harbor district nerf. I agree that trade routes should have been nerfed in a different fashion; I continue to think that moving the trade route back to the market building (rather than the Commercial district itself) would be the way to go here. This change mostly just makes Harbors even weaker than they are right now. I doubt they are worth building at most cities any more.
But with that said, I think this is a pretty solid patch. It's not going to change how you feel about Civ6 - if you didn't like the game before, it's not going to change your mind. I doubt any patch is going to do that. If you already liked the game, this makes some small improvements around the edges. I'm most interested in seeing what those editing tools will open up. Hopefully this means we'll have a proper map editor.
There was a map editor shipped with the release version of the game, just a dysfunctional and hence hidden one. You could still get to it because civ5's fitetuner works for civ6. Hopefully they have now built it up to functionality, it's clear that they _planned_ on making this available to players. I do wonder how much half-baked and disabled junk games ship with nowadays. "Soz guys, not finished, switch it off".
Quote:ModBuddy will also receive additional updates in the future, as part of a modding SDK update later. These tools do not include DLL source for Civilization VI at this time.
I'll check out the tools they did release this weekend and see if that'll at least let us get a decent handle on tweaks etc.
Eh, It's strong, but I hesitate to call it OP given how godawful settling coasts is (especially now without being able to stack Commercial Zone/Harbor trade routes). With that in mind, a civilization that actually wants to prioritize coasts is a fun addition.
I will say though, as an aside, I really hate some of the UA names in this game. "Citadel of Civilization," "Land Down Under," - just cringey. It was bad in Civ5 but I feel they've gotten worse. While I do respect that they're approaching these individual civs from a "what do we want their play pattern to be?" and then building a kit to support that, the UA's with like 3-4 things packed into them do make me kinda nostalgic for the charming simplicity of Civ4's trait system.
Well I played a few IMM games and Scythia gives you enough production to keep up with the buffed barbs and worse tech tree. At least someone will always DoW and suicide their army allowing you to take out their cities and ride that out to victory. You need luck to win on Deity because there's no way to live if two guys DoW you so there's nothing to see there ether.
I think I'm getting to understand Civ6 a little more, it's seemingly strongly inspired by eurogames from the board gaming world -- there are all these hard-coded bottlenecks, and the game is pretty much all about clearing them in advance, because once you've run into one, unless you've laid down the preparatory work, you are screwed. This goes for Great Works, for wonder and district placement, and most of all of course for 1UPT, the most blatant and annoying hardcoded bottleneck of them all.
I played a religious game as Peter, on King, because I knew nothing about religion and wanted to have a little fun -- I ended up being ahead of AI on everything, especially on faith, but no victory in sight, even though I picked Mosques and built Hagia Sophia, so that my missionaries were carrying 5 charges each. Why? Well, roads is one -- movement in Civ6 is just too damn slow. The charge mechanic is another -- five charges sounds awesome, and in terms of charge per faith spent it is, the issue is that you are not really limited by faith, you are limited by turns, and 5 charges still resolve only once per turn. Maybe the way to go around is to have a troupe of 4 missionaries that arrive at a city, spend 1 turn unloading their 4 charges, and then move onto the next city. Still, this generated my most hideous Civ6 experience to date -- spending first half of the turn just cycling through missionaries pressing Spread Religion. Once I shut down, I wasn't clear which victory condition was the closest, as I could have as well been faith-purchasing Cossacks, or beelined Conservation and covered everything with National Parks (I was making around 200 faith a turn and with Peter, I could have always just put more settlers in the tundra).
Not sure how I feel about all of this. On one hand, long-term planning in terms of bottleneck clearance is awesome, on the other hand, in a game of Civ6 diversity, that requires considerable advance learning -- for example knowing all the wonders and all their requisites, so that you know which choices you must make some 50 turns ahead, so that you can compare different sets of strategies against each other. Its kinda awesome, but too much of an investment for me at this stage, wish I was 18 again. Eurogames work exactly because their rules/mechanisms tend to be fairly clear and simple, not a sprawling mess of particulars.
Skipping the previous patch, I have taken the time with this patch to test the AI in an AW game. On higher difficulty, it's almost impossible to play with barbarians as they are insanely difficult at times. It's just a matter of luck whether you survive the initial onslaught of especially horses. Or, if you happen to start next to Scythia and their ridiculous OP units, which they now used to attack you.
However, if you lower the difficulty to say, Emperor or king, it is the AI that can't cope with the barbarians. Once, you deal with the initial load of barbarians, you can start to steamroll as the AI really struggles to contain the barbarians. I also find that the Civs are not well balanced in terms of warfare.
The AI being more aggressive on higher difficulties makes for a somewhat better experience now. I will need to test again on immortal how it plays out.
