Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[Bacchus]

@Archduke:

I didnt make myself clear, but Krill figured out the point -- the challenge is not necessarily to provide viable alternatives to conquest, the challenge is to integrate conquest properly into other systems, so you play a full and consistent game utilizing, or at least having the meaningful option to utilize all mechanics. PB38 really was a rare occasion of Civ being 'what it should be' -- a race to the wire where every decision matters to the end, and where the game really only ends at the end, not at 60% of the content, unless you selfimpose a variant, which the AI will then play along with, mostly due to stupidity.

@Rowain -- the diference with civs 1-4 is that we are in 2019.

[Krill]

A large part of the problem is that smaller games cannot and will not work within this system. Anything below about 15 players will reach a point where, even with competent players, one player will emerge victorious via Conquest before another VC is reachable.

Part of this is that all of the other VC are defined as a set end point (SS has a set beaker output requirement, culture is again based off a beaker requirement and then limited by a turn factor being able to reach enough culture in a city (in Civ 4, anyway)), but conquest is timed by the windows of opportunity. If you only needs two such windows to reach critical mass, and you start to play in the ancient era, then the game can end after those two windows have appeared, and been capitalized upon.

So rather than focusing on conquest as the problem, in reality it is the other victory conditions that need to be altered to fit the game settings. In an ancient era game, there should be a turn limit imposed that does not mean you reach the end of the tech tree, the science victory should be to be the first player to reach a certain milestone and build a different wonder (ie Renaissance and an enlightenment wonder), and culture should be scaled by a specific equation that is decided after the game is built and altered patch by patch for a bit until it's understood how to really play the game.

[TheArchduke]

@Archduke:

I didnt make myself clear, but Krill figured out the point -- the challenge is not necessarily to provide viable alternatives to conquest, the challenge is to integrate conquest properly into other systems, so you play a full and consistent game utilizing, or at least having the meaningful option to utilize all mechanics. PB38 really was a rare occasion of Civ being 'what it should be' -- a race to the wire where every decision matters to the end, and where the game really only ends at the end, not at 60% of the content, unless you selfimpose a variant, which the AI will then play along with, mostly due to stupidity.

@Rowain -- the diference with civs 1-4 is that we are in 2019.

Ah, I agree wholeheartedly then.

[Rowain]

@Rowain -- the diference with civs 1-4 is that we are in 2019.

Thats why we have better graphics. Those sell games. Putting a lot of resources into balancing victory condition when that doesn't really matter for the masses doesn't.

Not to mention that you should not wish the devs to look inoto balancing the VC because if they do they will more likely cut down Conquest with even more nuissances than speed up science/culture.

[Krill]

Yeah...removing warfare doesn't actually make games less violent. They actually get even worse. PBEM5B and PBEM22 were both played with Always Peace, and they were some of the most violent games even though no blood was spilt. People spamming cities left and right, settling in players faces, it would be even worse in a 1upt environment where you could just use carpets of units to stop expansion...

The reality is that all VC stem from conquest victory anyway. Most players don't understand that, and even more hate it, but all economic games have a form of conflict at the core which is how different actors interact. Accepting that is a necessary step to understanding everything else (both in game and in RL IMO).

[Bacchus]

So rather than focusing on conquest as the problem, in reality it is the other victory conditions that need to be altered to fit the game settings. In an ancient era game, there should be a turn limit imposed that does not mean you reach the end of the tech tree, the science victory should be to be the first player to reach a certain milestone and build a different wonder (ie Renaissance and an enlightenment wonder), and culture should be scaled by a specific equation that is decided after the game is built and altered patch by patch for a bit until it's understood how to really play the game.

The diagnosis is entirely right, and that kind of solution is at least worthy of proper investigation. It is also clear that the designers are just not thinking in this direction at all.

Other viable approaches: plonk a player-count modifier on non-production yields and the SS costs, effectively making the game faster at lower counts; scale the amount of free land per person, so that peaceful expansion remains economical until much later in the game; introduce greater defensive biases into early game units (Civ4 actually does this).

There is however one other problem, which is that the game has no ability to convert superiority into victory except by conquest. If you pulled ahead, for whatever reason, you now have a choice -- either mindlessly click through the end, or onerously micromanage a series of invasions. In fairness, they at least showed awareness of this problem by changing domination to capital capture (it's a shit solution, but hey, at least they are working on it). But thats why the vast majority of civ games end by just quitting (or concession in MP). Amd you'd think if you are the designer, that would really irk you. What kind of UX charting ends with 'player quits having no reason to go on'? And yet that's exactly what's happening.

[Bacchus]

@Rowain -- the diference with civs 1-4 is that we are in 2019.

Thats why we have better graphics. Those sell games. Putting a lot of resources into balancing victory condition when that doesn't really matter for the masses doesn't.

Not to mention that you should not wish the devs to look inoto balancing the VC because if they do they will more likely cut down Conquest with even more nuissances than speed up science/culture.

I don't buy this argument at all. In the last ten years we have had an absolute explosion in the boardgaming scene where, yeah, components are getting improved, but more importantly new designs are being invented, polished and streamlined continuously. People buy into that, it's worth doing. Not to mention that design thinking takes up far, far less resources than all the assets work they are doing. 

What great design needs is time though, and whilst you can simply scale your assets department by throwing money at it, you can't parallelize proper iteration and playtesting.  If there is commercial reason behind computer games being stuck with core mechanics of 20 years ago, it's gotta be this one. Well, and risk aversion.

[RFS-81]

So rather than focusing on conquest as the problem, in reality it is the other victory conditions that need to be altered to fit the game settings. In an ancient era game, there should be a turn limit imposed that does not mean you reach the end of the tech tree, the science victory should be to be the first player to reach a certain milestone and build a different wonder (ie Renaissance and an enlightenment wonder), and culture should be scaled by a specific equation that is decided after the game is built and altered patch by patch for a bit until it's understood how to really play the game.

I think the theme of Civ is really holding the design back here. If you want to potentially represent All Of History in a single match, you can't let every victory condition trigger before you went from the stone age to the space age. And you can't really shorten the time it takes to get to the space age either. Well actually, you can, and Through The Ages is a good game, but it just feels so bizarre when you're in the present day and parts of your civilization are still stuck in the middle ages.

[Krill]

Exactamundo.

There is too much to cram into the game to make anything else work. Civ will be best as a 30 player game, on a humongous map, with lots of regional interaction, in either SP or MP.. anything else is an abridged version of that game, but no one, not a developer, marketer or player, will accept that.

[Cheater Hater]

I don't know if there's a way to solve this problem--one of the cores of game design is that you should get out before the player gets sick of it, and game length has been getting much shorter on multiple axis (older players have less time to spare, younger players are being drawn towards more experiences like BR). Is there a way you could condense a 4X into an hour or two (or even less) and still have it be satisfying?