Civilization VI

I’m not sure I understand you here. It’s fairly normal for games to reward progress by telling you you’ve made progress. Is the problem then that the bonuses are large enough that you need to make sure to chase them if you want to play well, thus driving your strategy rather than allowing you to choose your own strategic goals in a more freeform manner?
If so, I certainly agree with this assessment, when contrasted against Civ IV. There I guess most of the big moments were new techs unlocking new things, but I never felt railroaded into a particular route through the tech tree. Instead the situation in the game determined the best strategy to take out of many viable ones.

Old World is probably your best bet from what I’ve seen. For all that it has its flaws, it has the longest Chick parabola of any 4x game I’ve tried in a while.

Can you elaborate a bit on what you don’t like about the great person mechanics?

I agree with the general complaints in this thread on the districts. As much as I like some of the city building moving out onto the map(and seemingly every 4X designer has decided this is a good idea) the adjacency bonuses are too complex and ideal placement is based on bonuses unlocked further down the tech tree that the UI doesn’t clue you in on. Humankind falls into this a fair amount too with how dependent on various bonuses their districts are, but you’re a lot less locked in to your choices in that one. My hope for Civ 7 would be that they keep something like districts but completely rethink bonuses for them.

I’m also with you on the governors, but that also feels like something that could be good but just isn’t in its current form.

I think the attitude towards districts depends on how much of an optimizer you are. I don’t min/max my way through Civ VI and so the fact that my district placement winds up being suboptimal because haven’t done the thousand turn lookahead doesn’t bother me. With that, it gets hard to play at higher difficulty levels but being stuck at emporer doesn’t bother me.

There’s a lot of systems in Civ VI and their interaction can end up proving huge advantages (or exploits idepending on how you view it). For example, if you decide to enable heroes and legends mode, getting Sindbad generates a ton cash, and if you’ve managed to build the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and grab the Great Engineer Shah Jahan, you can basically instabuild two wonders with cash.

I’m the same way. While I’m playing the game this whole district optimization thing doesn’t bother me at all. But when I consider it from a game design perspective it’s just bad design. The capacity to min/max this stuff exists, but it’s based on knowing what’s coming further down the tech tree. So either you have to memorize that or go hunting for the information and then do some work to count tiles and make sure you’re hitting it right.

Is there anyone from Firaxis on this forum? I have an issue with phantom MP play-by-cloud games still being registered on their servers that’s preventing me from hosting new MP PBC games. I haven’t found a way to contact Firaxis to help resolve this issue. I figured the games would eventually time out, but they haven’t.

I made 2K aware of the bug that’s causing these phantom games and they said they forwarded the bug to the dev team (but it still exists). I’m more than happy to work 1-on-1 with a Firaxis employee to resolve this.

Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of weird MP stuff the last few months as well…to the point that we’ve almost totally abandoned it.

Finally picked this up during a sale (minus the last DLC, which didn’t seem to be rated too well anyway), and I’m curious about city spacing and districts - should I be prioritizing standard tile upgrades like mines, farms, etc, or go for districts asap, and second, since you can now buy tiles, how far apart roughly should my cities be?

The last dlc provided a bunch of alternate ways to look at the game. I found it to be of value, but then civ6 is one of my goto comfort games.

You don’t want to improve tiles that you’re not working. Improving tiles that you are working ramps you up just that much faster.

I don’t think you have to choose between districts and tile improvements. You need both.

I settle cities as tight as the map allows me too. More cities is (almost always) a good thing.

Frankly, I would settle the cities more tightly than the map allows if I could, but I can’t so I don’t.

I find city spacing to be very situational. Sometimes I look and see plenty of tiles for distric finets and resource gathering, so placing a city the minimum 4 tiles away is. Other times, one or both cities will be squished for food gathering, etc. unless I place them 6-6 tiles apart. And then there are those times I choose the location largely based on blocking competitors from an area of the map.

btw, the ability to buy tiles is of limited value. Great if you see a great tile that will really help the city, but you’re going to blow through your gold really fast if do this indiscriminately. Cost scales up with time.

Seems funny to me to be starting this game all these years later. It’s my favorite game and like a blanket from my childhood at this point. Lucky for me a mod I installed stopped Steam from counting hours of game time.

On that note, do subscribe to the “Civ 5 environment skin” as it gives the game a more mature look with better landscapes.

The basic advice above is good. To me the main point is try not to fall into the min/maxing perfect play trap, where you restart 67 times because you don’t like the starting location, rip your hair out thinking of future district adjacency etc. It’s not worth it, the game’s not hard in general, and ‘perfect play’ along with ‘tactics use tactics!!’ will lead to frustrations.

Focus on food to get your cities above 3-4 population, then focus more on production and whatever seems appropriate (harbour, university, etc). Spacing wouldn’t worry about. Plains hills make good City spots.

Thanks for the heads-up about the Environment Skin: Sid Meier’s Civilization V. I did not know it existed and I believe it will improve my Civ6 gaming experience.

Here is a video about the skin:

After more than a year hiatus, the Civ Youtube channel has been posting small videos again over the last couple of weeks. Makes me awfully suspicious that they’ll be announcing something soon.

Just a new DLC, Leaders Pass. I wonder if there are any other changes. I haven’t played in quite awhile, maybe I’ll go fire it up.

Lame!

So was that really a “leak” or is Firaxis floating this out semi unofficial to gauge interest?

Oh, look, an announcement video for their announcement of their DLC: Announcement tomorrow, November 15, 2022. #civ6 - YouTube

Is a ‘Leaders Pass’ really going to amount to much of a draw to bring anyone back or is this more for the fans who’ve stuck with it? I still have Civ VI installed, and probably will always have a Civ game close by, but I’ve not played in a while.

Just a quick look at the steam stats currently and there’s nearly 31,000 current players with a peak of 65,000 players. So I think there’s a bit of a market there, though players might be wary given the mixed views of the Frontier Pass.

According to my own library, the last time I played Civ VI was in October 2020. That was when the Sects were released (Vampires and the Ley Lines etc), but I never tried the heroes part of the game or zombies which started to cross a bit of a line for me. I’m amazed at how long ago that was now, and a little saddened that time has flown by.

I’ll admit, this new DLC might bring me in for a bit given I’ll have a bit of time to play games soon. Depending on pricing though. Like I think new Pokemon game release this week might be what I’d rather buy.

Also, it looks like the last big update was in April 2021, and the changes there look good with a few nice balancing changes and filling some gaps in the tech tree (ie: trebuchets and linemen gunpowder units).

I bought the Frontier Pass. It was okay and I enjoyed. As somebody from the Great White North, it was fun to play as Canada, even if the bonuses and uniques sucked. But unlike the demands in that trailer, I don’t really need more DLC, more leaders, etc. Of the game modes they introduced, the only two that I really played with any regularity was the secret societies, and the heroes. The other game modes just weren’t fun for me. I haven’t fired up Civ VI in ages, and I don’t expect this new announcement to change things.

Other than the game constantly crashing on some of my systems, the thing that keeps me from playing this is the damn missionary spam. I loathe that the map gets cluttered up with endless swarms of missionaries roaming about like an army of demented door to door proselytizers. Just kills the vibe.

Is that still a thing? My expectations for Firaxis are pretty low these days but I would have thought they would have addressed that. It was awful when I played.