Civ 6 Solo Reports

[Sullla]

If anyone would like to see a report of a game played after the Winter patch (1.0.0.56), I played and wrote up a report for the CivFanatics Game of the Month 06, a Cultural game with Russia on Emperor difficulty. Back in the prior patch, I also completed a short Kongo One City Challenge game, which was also geared towards culture. Along with the current Epic One event, I've been on a bit of a Cultural victory kick recently for Civ6.  

On a scheduling note: I am hoping to open Adventure Three this upcoming weekend. While that means some overlap with Epic One and the potential to split up the playerbase, Adventure Three is going to be significantly different from Epic One, different enough that I don't think this will be a major problem. And we have a long history of having more than one event running at once. Since Civ6 games play out a lot faster than Civ4 (and especially Civ3) games, I think we should be able to have two of them running on the schedule every now and then. Adventure Three will be the first of the new "open spoilers" games that the community has requested, and I'll be interested to see how that plays out. Stay tuned...

[T-hawk]

Sullla, I've taken the liberty of splitting your post out from the "winter patch" thread to a new one here. This approach worked well for my Civ 5 reports, as a place for game commentary without getting tangled with other topics. (Because I want to make some commentary on these. )

[T-hawk]

I noticed how several of your concerns about Civ 6 are actually carried over from Civ 5, yet you don't know it because you dropped out of Civ 5 quickly and didn't follow it through the patch process.  Setting the record straight on some of these:

It can't be that hard to have a unit escort the settlers, even the Civ3 AI could pull that off without issue.

This is harder than you think.  The Civ 3 and 4 AIs could do this easily because units were so cheap (10 or 15 hammers) and the AI always kept several in its cities, so it could just switch one's function to settler-escort.  That doesn't happen in Civ 5 or 6 where there's no such thing as surplus garrison units.  In earlier Civ 5 versions, the AI would try to escort them, but that led to situations where a settler would sit around for six or eight turns waiting for a warrior to get built.  Later in Civ 5 the AI would send settlers unescorted to get around that problem, a behavior that carried over to Civ 6.  Overall the net gain of time saved going unescorted probably does outweigh the occasional loss of one.  What you're seeing is a perception bias -- you only notice when the AI loses a settler, you don't notice when it saves a bunch of turns by not waiting for an escort.

This is the cultural victory screen familiar to anyone who's played Civ6. When I played my initial Adventure One game, I had no idea what any of these numbers meant or how the tourism meter on the right hand side filled up. The interface itself has not changed, and the appalling lack of documentation about what's really taking place here is something that needs to be corrected for the future. Firaxis, there's no excuse for failing to explain what these numbers mean with tooltip help or additional documentation in the Civilopedia!

If I'm understanding Civ 6 right, this functions the same as the culture victory in Civ 5 BNW.  You need to produce more total aggregate tourism than the total aggregate culture of each opposing civ.  The "tourists" don't actually change that functionality, it's just a cosmetic layer to help players understand what's going on.  In BNW, everyone got confused about the difference between culture-per-turn and total-lifetime-culture.  So Civ 6 converts the latter into that "tourists" figure instead to establish it as a separate concept, and simplify the presentation so that you win when this counter equals that target.  And along the way, divides the numbers by 150 to be more manageable.

I agree that it's still clunky and overdesigned and AI-confounding, but that all comes from Civ 5 not Civ 6.

Open Borders is worth a 25% bonus and therefore the player should be running Open Borders at all times with everyone else when pursuing a cultural win. A trade route is worth another 25% bonus, and there's a lategame civic that can increase that bonus to 75%.

All three of these are exactly the same as Civ 5 BNW's culture victory too.

Here's the real problem with a One City Challenge cultural game: lack of slots for Great Works. I heavily dislike this aspect of the cultural victory while enjoying it in most other ways. I think it's ridiculous and silly to require "slots" to place the various Great Works.

This came over directly from Civ 5 BNW too.  That "slot" subsystem exists for a reason: to provide the theming bonuses for arranging your works in the slots correctly.  It's also deliberately designed to work against OCC-style play.  Because the pre-BNW Civ 5 culture victory was too OCC and entirely about a single heavily multiplied capital doing everything.  The slot system intentionally makes you diversify your works among your cities, so no surprise you found difficulty in trying to do it with just one.  In fact I think we should thank Firaxis that they recognized that OCC culture would be difficult and included an enabler for it via the Kongo civ ability.

Anyway, the whole slot system has the same problem that Civ 5's also had.  The theming bonuses are supposed to be the central feature of the tourism victory and the reason to play the mix-and-match great-work subgame.  Except that the numbers from the other sources of tourism (Sacred Sites in BNW, seaside resorts in Civ 6) blow up too big and overwhelm the great-work subsystem and leave it as piddly busywork.  It's a flawed design in both games, but not fatal.  And the solution is as always: acknowledge the reality and play the game that exists, not the game that you wish might.

[Rowain]

Thanks for your report Sulla

About the tourism: In your third to last picture (where you show the tourism you have with all Civs) you show that with Egypt you have more than 73000 Tourism over lifetime but you only have 30 tourists from Egypt instead of the ~60 you get from Germany or Scythia.

Is there a limit how many tourist you can get form a low culture civ (maybe no more than 10* their home-tourists ) or is there something else in play?

[Sullla]

Thanks for splitting this post off into another thread T-Hawk. It makes more sense here than in that thread on the winter patch. I'm at a work conference this week, and I finally had a chance to respond to some of these thoughts today.

I like the new VC's being relative to AI. "Spaceship" is just a time victory and stops the game from going beyond the tech tree but everything else is relative. This is good because it makes the actual VC harder with difficulty and stops BS like people beating "Kobayashi Maru" by using the fact that they cannot expand to their advatage (because if you cannot expand you cannot be attacked) to just beeline the culture win. If you made culture "get x culture" no-one average would be able to do it because that would be harder than killing the world on EMP.

I have no idea what this even means. Setting up the Cultural victory condition such that it requires overcoming the AI (as opposed to reaching an objective goal) has the unfortunate side effect of turning it into another form of a Domination win. For example, look at this submission from CivFanatics GOTM 06:



This player simply killed off everyone else until their civ had the most culture. This is just Domination by another name. I fully expected all of the top finishers in the GOTM competition to come from attacking the other AI civs, but it was still a bit depressing to see in practice. Whenever we do a cultural game here at Realms Beyond, I plan to take the conquest option off the table (much as I did in the Epic One game). If we want to play a military game, then we'll just play a military game, not one in disguise.

T-Hawk: your thoughts on the various mechanics that carried over from Civ5 into Civ6 are very helpful - thanks. The real solution to the settler issue (if the AI can't escort them properly) is to remove the whole settler capturing mechanic. I knew that would cause problems the moment I read about it, and it's very much as bad as I feared. The high scoring GOTM/HOF crew at CivFanatics are now keeping gamelong wars running to farm settler captures from the AI - yikes. It's a balancing nightmare. If Firaxis would make the simple change to turn them into builders on capture, it would improve things enormously. I do not expect this to happen of course.

All the mechanics left over from Civ5 in the Civ6 cultural victory are not exactly an argument in its favor. I do appreciate the greater background context though. The "slots" minigame for the Great Works is a classic example of overdesigned busywork, adding micromanagement and complexity for no gains in deeper gameplay. Scrapping it would be a definite improvement. And Firaxis also needs to retune the numbers badly. Great Writers are OK because it's easy to slot in the Great Works of Writing, and they automatically double in tourism for free early on at Printing tech. However, the Great Works of Art are just TERRIBLE, and the Great Works of Music barely more useful because they come so late in the game. (Seriously, for those of you who haven't played Civ6, the math on this is really bad. The archaeology artifacts are very easy to dig up, easy to theme the museums, and produce MORE tourism when themed than the art museums. There is essentially no reason ever to use Great Artists.)

Then there's the seaside resorts... I learned a great deal about them in reading through the GOTM reports. The base value is double the tile's appeal in tourism, and since you need "Breathtaking" appeal to build them (4 or higher), they are always worth at least 8 tourism. But Computers tech doubles that to 16 tourism, and Cristo Redentor doubles that again to 32 tourism. Plus you can build Eiffel Tower for +2 appeal on every tile, opening up more tiles for seaside resorts and adding 16 more tourism on EVERY seaside resort with the Computers + Cristo Redentor combo. I think Firaxis was expecting players to run Civ5-sized empires of 3-5 cities, where the seaside resorts would kick in a little bit of tourism here in there. Instead, it's easy to build huge empires in Civ6 and get seaside resorts everywhere. Like this GOTM entry I linked in my report:



There are a good 30 seaside resorts visible in this picture, and probably as many more elsewhere out of view. Firaxis needs to tune these numbers down right now in some way, although this is far enough into the weeds that there's a good chance it will never happen. I understand about playing the game as it exists and not as we would want it to be. But at least as far as the Epics are concerned, we can always rewrite the rules with variants and take various options off the table. I'm still learning about what all the overpowered options are right now, although I think I'm getting pretty close to having the cultural gameplay down.

Rowain: very nice catch! I did not see that myself until you posted about it. I wonder what happened there (?) Perhaps there are limits to how much tourism you can extract from a civ that has almost no domestic culture itself. I will have to test further with that. Thanks.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I'll try to be more clear:

If you make culture "let's get 50k!" then that's harder than killing the world on EMP. This would make the culture victory totally useless to 90% of gamers because they cannot beat EMP. You could make it ~40k at a lower level and then ~30k for even lower but that would be like saying "you suck!" to those players. Or you could make it harder to get culture at higher difficulty levels (like Civ4 where the game gives you penalties) but that's cheating. Or you could make it relative to AI which also stops cheese sandbox wins too; with the small sin of the game allowing you to mislabel a domination victory. Also, when you have so many more cities than the next guy you should be able to do anything including winning the culture victory.

My main point is "let's get 50k!" is not objective because of the players.

[Rowain]

If you make culture "let's get 50k!" then that's harder than killing the world on EMP.

I don't agree with that assessment. I found getting 1 city to 100k easier than fighting the whole world for domination.

[Rowain]

@Sulla I disagree on the points that Firaxis should stop unescorted Settlers and so on. If people want to cheat themselves while playing a SP-game they should be able to do so. IMO it is up to every player what cheesy tactic he chooses to use in an SP. In MP/competitive SP-games you can have rules against it.

EDIT I do agree on reevaluating Great Artists/Seaside resorts as those seem to break the victory-condition. OTOH Most tourism is towards seaside so maybe that is an accurate picture of reality

[MJW (ya that one)]

If you make culture "let's get 50k!" then that's harder than killing the world on EMP.

I don't agree with that assessment. I found getting 1 city  to 100k easier than fighting the whole world for domination.

That was just an arbitrary number to make my point about why just using Civ4's system (that Sullla was implying) wouldn't work unless you cheat like it.

Settlers magically transforming into workers/builders being another example of Civ4ish cheating should tell you how I feel about that...

[Sullla]

This is getting a bit far astray from the original post. However, just to address one of your comments Rowain:

I disagree on the points that Firaxis should stop unescorted Settlers and so on. If people want to cheat themselves while playing a SP-game they should be able to do so. IMO it is up to every player what cheesy tactic he chooses to use in an SP. In MP/competitive SP-games you can have rules against it.

A bad gameplay mechanic is a bad gameplay mechanic. Asking players to resort to self-imposed restrictions is poor response. That was the whole reason why we had to create the Epics and their lengthy list of exploits for Civ3, since the gameplay should have prevented such things, but didn't do so. And of course Civ6 absolutely is a Multiplayer game, as well as a competitive Single Player game, which means that there's no hand-waving away holes in the mechanics that the developers should have addressed themselves. (I even understand why settlers can be captured: so that the average casual player can lose settlers to barbarians and then capture them back again. It's a mechanic that 90% of the fanbase will love but which is very bad for the tiny minority of high-end users like ourselves.)

This is a small point and not terribly important or anything. Poor strategy game mechanics are one of my pet peeves though.