Civilization VI

So the religious unit spam in this game might come down to developers not knowing “i before e except after c”.

“We’re aware of a community-reported bug that has a minor impact on AI behavior. We’ve also made sure that everyone knows that I goes before E except after C… or other weird exceptions. Thanks to all who helped bring this to our attention and there will be a fix included in our next update.”

Sure, but when can we expect that update, 3 months from now?

Probably! Doubt they’ll hotfix.

But it’s easy enough to edit the files yourself, or use the mod that apparently fixes it.

Does a mod like that disable achievements?

I don’t think any mods disable achievements in Civ VI.

Welp, I gave this another shot after the expansion had been out for a bit.

I still strongly dislike the overall game.

There are individual bits that work reasonably well, are creative and/or clever, and fit the whole Civilization thing well. But ye gods, the overall game is an unending series of spinning plates into which the expansion just throws a bunch more plates. I’m not even joking that I’d prefer the game with about half of the features ripped out and/or simplified, not because I’m some kind of tiny visual-novel baby or whatever, but because they’re boring maintenance mechanics (aka plates to spin) that add a lot of busywork for little reward.

Amenities, f’rex. Okay, city happiness is local again! I can dig it, even if that wasn’t something that bothered me about V. But wait, the majority of your amenities are in fact global and automatically apportioned among needy cities silently between turns. So…I guess you can’t build a bunch of +happy (excuse me, Amenities) in one small city and keep the rest of a large empire happy? …congrats? To pay for that ONE TINY GAMEPLAY EFFECT, you remove a clear “how happy is my empire?” display/interaction, you add a whole pile of rules complexity about what a local amenity is and how global amenities are apportioned, a terrible UX interaction where a city grows and complains about not having enough amenities until the silent end-of-turn Great Flattening takes place. Overall, it’s a total design failure.

Almost every mechanic is like this. Religion, diplomacy, espionage, fucking Wonders – everything remains a freaking mess. There are some small things I like, like fresh water, builders, and Natural Wonders, but my god. This is better than Beyond Earth, but not by much.

I was such a big fan of the series up to Civ 3. I’m not sure why I couldn’t get into Civ 4. I think it was the way the interface had such an information overload. But again, you needed all that information in Civ 4. Right from the beginning, each tile around a city was cultivatable in multiple ways, giving you way more to do in the early game than in previous Civ games. And I kind of disliked that. But I think if I’d stuck with Civ 4 long enough, I would have gotten over that and fallen in love with the game, just like I did with Civ 3 despite it being quite different from Civ 2 in many ways. All the little changes like that to the series always take a while to appreciate. You get so used to doing things one way, and then being forced to change the way you play kind of grinds on you in the beginning.

I still think I’ll play the Civ series, maybe when my son gets old enough, and I can teach him to play whatever the latest entry in the series happens to be at that point. Maybe at that point, it will have been long enough that I won’t be annoyed when the early game is not the same as Civilization 3.

I like your plate spinning analogy. That’s the reason I’ve held back on getting the Rise and Fall expansion, The impression I got was it was more stuff to do to make each turn have “meaningful decisions”, but as you say, I get the feeling it’s just more plates to spin.

I’ve played one game since the expansion came out. The updates introduced an annoying bug. I was unable to form corps. I was playing for world domination and had artillery units built and ready to form up into corps for seriously quick wall damage. But there was no option to form corps after I got Nationalism. A quick google found that others were reporting the same problem.

I’m guessing the AI factors in loyalty in determining where to settle. I’ve read that forward settling is calmed down with the Rise and Fall expansion. However, I’m playing without the expansion, and thus without the loyalty mechanic, and the AI still seems to want to push their settlers out and get next to your territory,

The AI is more than happy to forward-settle cities that rebel into Free Cities shortly thereafter on account of being too far from their home empire.

Also happy to conquer cities that it immediately loses to rebellion, because you have to slam loyalty ASAP in captured cities or they revolt, and lord knows the AI can barely capture undefended outposts to start with.

It doesn’t seem like it. It just spams cities per usual and then loses them. It still sucks at fighting war. I was at war with England for oh I don’t maybe 100 years or so. She declared war on me and never showed up. She didn’t actually have the ships to get her troops on my continent which she is not a part of. So at the end of it, I demanded money just to end it because, well I have ships.

I really dislike this game, my sister loves it so i bought the expansion to humor her when she has this Civ urge.

This has not really been my experience. Pre-expansion, foreign civs continuously snuck settlers into every possible crevice of my civ, especially if there was friction between us. It went way beyond forward settling (which is aggressive but is a technique for getting ahead in the game), bur rather seemed to be a sacrifice on their part just to mess me up. Post-expansion, I see none of that. Just forward settling that aims to hit the outer limits of what the loyalty system will allow – but once in a while they misjudge and lose a city. However, until well into the game when decent settling locations are gone, well over 90% of the time they are doing their best for themselves.

Truer words never spoken. Anyone who wants a game based on war needs to find another game.

I’m okay with the game as-is, where I am trying to build a civilization, and the need for defense and occasional wars is simply a speed bump, a temporary drain on my production or money. But almost never a real threat, certainly not after the very early stages. (Though Genghis Khan can sometimes get such a head of steam that you wouldn’t want to get too cocky with him next door.)

Anyone who wants to play this game for a domination victory, well, maybe it would be fun once, but I cannot imagine how it would be fun over and over. Maybe on deity level? I don’t know, but no lower than that.

Well I took my little troops into the enemey’s territory and encountered a number small cities too close together. Naturally I razed a few because I don’t want cities that close, and this was the same person who spammed me repeatedly trying to get to the other side of me so she could spam some more over there.

As for war, I almost never start wars in Civ; i just finish them. They can’t play the war game well. If they have an overwhelming number of forces, sure, but what fun is that? There is a lot I like about Civ, still but when they moved to a strategic war the AI can’t win without giving them a huge bonus to do so… it’s just not fun.

My sister finds the exploration, the building and the discovery of it all enough to outweigh that negative, plus it’s turn base and slow, we like slow sometimes. But the war, the horrific UI… ugg why do I have to go to the pedia for everything. The icon is right there…

I am glad others are enjoying it. I get why they do, but the expansion didn’t really fix much for me.

Also your quotes syntax must have gotten a little messed up because it’s not showing correctly.

Did she play Civ V at all?

Yep and she liked it a lot too. I’m the reason we stopped playing CiV IV. To be fair, we played it for years, like five, six… maybe even seven years. It was the go to game for I want to play something not too fast paced, maybe watch TV, surf the net. We played a ton. I asked to stop because I wanted something else. I felt like we needed to try something newish.

I got out of CIV V because I hated the demo, like really hated it. When she asked for CIV VI… well it was past time I gave her something because I keep dragging her and others into these other games to try myself. If I suffer through this game enough, I am sure I’ll get her try another others with me later.

To be fair to CIV VI, I do like the early parts, and the barbarians can be hard, like I started with a horse barb showing up on my 5th turn or something but I hate the wars, diplomacy and the AI speckles cities around they can’t defend.

If you both like WWII, you should give Strategic Command a try. Once you get the rules down it is so awesome.

That’s a war game right? We don’t really play war games. That’s an actual war game right. The them she likes is more of the build civilization stuff and not the war pieces so EUIV, CIV, and then a numebr of city builders like Tropico. War is…secondary, tertiary at best.

Yes it is :)
You mentioned how bad the war part was, so wasn’t sure if you wanted a game that focused on that aspect, does it well, and is fun to do mp.

While I enjoyed BattleMasters as a kid, ever since GemFire, Genghis Khan 2, Nobunaga’s Ambition days, I like games with heavy building part and then some war. I feel like since they got rid of the stacks of doom they wound up with a game the AI just doesn’t play very well which wouldn’t be that bad if they didn’t also give it the most idiotic reasons for declaring war too.

The English can’t even reach me… and she declares war. wth.

I’m never sure what irks me more with that stuff. Is it that the developers never bothered to put in a simple check (If I’m not on the same continent, do I have ocean going vessels? No? Then no war) or is it that the AI clearly has no idea of what it’s supposed to be doing?

There should at least be a motivation of some sort to declare a war. Wars are costly and wars are risky. Even if the AI is playing like board game players, they shouldn’t just randomly declare it. They should declare war when they have something to gain by it. If you’re on the opposite end of the continent or on a different continent entirely, it’s impossible to even wage a war, let alone actually gain anything from it. The AI should put those resources towards more settlers, workers, buildings, etc.