I didn’t like Civ5 at all, but Civ5 with VP is the the bomb (droppin’ some ill 90’s slang, yo).
Is there any use for Military Engineers?
By the time the tech for them is researched, traders have criss-crossed everywhere with roads. Forts aren’t particularly needed for defense. My air force is rarely so big that I am unable to stage the aircraft I need in my cities near where I need them to be.
So missile silos. I’ve yet to go nuclear in the game. I guess they are needed if that’s the path you’re taking?
The only reason I’ve ever used an engineer is for the eureka.
History Respawned takes on Civ VI.
No matter how big a map you chose the game is hard coded to place a fucking civ 9 tiles away from you, this is the same shit Stellaris did, don’t they get the genre at all? Crowding the player at the start is just unfun
Are you counting minor civs? And it’s definitely tuneable if you choose to use fewer civs/minors than it recommends for a map size. I think the default packing is about right for making early-game aggression useful - if you’re picking a civ with an ancient era UU you really want to have someone within range for having an effective war.
No, it hard coded, doesn’t matter how big a map or otherwise, all civs start with no more than 9 tiles to the next ones, this causes even bigger problems on huge maps cause it will be a clustered start with huge empty tracts of land.
This is superiority annoying tbh, and just shows how inept they are, I guess it’s to satisfy early warmongers or something…
I play on huge maps and found that really aggravating as well. The fact that the distance doesn’t scale with map size and there’s no slider to control the number of city states is annoying.
In terms of Stellaris, this is controlled by the clustered start option, isn’t it?
At least in Civ V, I believe this was something hard-coded into maps and not the game engine. I wonder if it’s the same.
There’s a setting in the XML files that control minimum distance to other cities, but it seems to include city states. What often ended up happening in my games is that on a Huge map with ~10 players (whatever the default is), 9 of those players would start off sitting on top of each other, since the game is set to spawn civs/cities 9 hexes apart. On Emperor where the AI starts out with 3 warriors, a scout, and a free settler, this often means you’re entirely swamped and boxed in from the start.
But what about that 10th player? Yeah, for some reason that player spawns at the other end of Pangea with nothing but empty land and citystates in between them. And with how Civ6 works with the ridiculous bonus for getting that envoy for first meeting a citystate, it’s pretty much GG at that point if you’re playing with another human (the AI is so bad the advantage won’t matter).
That’s one of the things that ultimately turned me off on the game, as my opening move always had to be to warmonger. That’s not what I enjoy about Civ and not how I want to play, but the game forced my hands 98% of the time.
I mean, you basically have to warmonger to start with anyway to handle the barbsplosion, so why not use that army to do something useful once the map isn’t in danger of killing you itself?
It’s just not what I’m interested in, with Civ games, and especially so since the AI is so poor at that aspect of the game. I like building up an empire and having to deal with external military threats, but I don’t like conquering my way to victory because I feel like the game is over by the Classical era.
Actually, let me walk that back a bit. I don’t mind springing for a domination victory or something down the line, but I dislike the early game being a bloodbath. Building up stacks of warriors to deal with their stacks of warriors is dull. Wars later in the game are a little more interesting because how you have played and how well you have built your empire/cities impact what kind of military you can produce, both in terms of numbers and tech.
Oh I hear ya. I’m just opining on optimal play given the current state of Civ VI ;)
Seems to me that this crowding got more pronounced with the recent patch. Until then, it seemed to me there was more variety in starts.
Also, I have a sense that it is somehow related to your choice of Civ. I’ve started a lot of games with Victoria, and I have never had space. Often, even the starting spot is crappy, with zero decent locations between me and the next sim, in any direction – almost as though they are trying to force you to colonize distant lands in order to survive. But that doesn’t work – it is mid-game techs that allow you to cross oceans and generally create a farflung empire, and by that time, England is pretty much cooked. By contrast, playing as Germany I am often surrounded by city states, giving me the early meeting bonus, plus room to expand in and around (or over) the city states.
btw, Civ placement is much more erratic on the map with the sea in the center. A couple times I began totally isolated – although honestly that leads to a rather boring game, in my experience.
Has anyone played with the AI mods? Are they any good?
I haven’t played for the past couple months, but I couldn’t tell much of a difference with the AI mods running. I know they’re pretty limited in what they can do since they lack DLL access.
The AI mods are pretty hit and miss but getting better I think. AI+ for one and Civ++ (I think) for another. The mods I like best make other changes. Quo’s package is cool and one I can’t recall which changes things like min distance between city centers from 4 to 5 (and inc. synergy from factories, etc. from 6 to 7) which actually makes a huge difference playing. Also the 8 Ages Of… mods which change the pacing of the game in ways are cool.
I have every expectation that a modpack will eventually and soon be available which makes the AI as good as reasonably possible and/or gives you the chance to tweak enough settings to play as hard as you like (and not the mostly arbitrary Prince, King, Emperor settings).
Id love to get into Civ again, but I can’t if the AI just a drooling idiot. I do not expect them to be human good, but at the very least, I do not want to be constantly asking myself , “Why on god’s green earth did you do that?”. Even if the tactical combat is not very good, I want them to use modern units and to only declare war when it makes sense.
I would actually like some “truth in advertising” in some of the civ powers. For example, everyone is supposed to want to be friends with Egypt because they get free food for trading with them. The truth is, the AI makes zero consideration as to valuable trading partners or anything at all in fact.
Yeah, and some other civs are described as having traits that have no game implementation, too. Cleopatra is a good example. There is no reason at all for anyone to ally with them, and yet they are supposed to thrive on allies. At least Pericles has some slight bonus motivation to become citystate suzerain, but there’s a huge benefit to any civ that does this, and Pericles gains no more influence points than anyone else so the Athenian AI will not be any more successful than any other civ at this endeavor. It’s also both sad and funny that Monarchy is the government that gets bonus influence points, so the Athenians will be motivated to switch from Republic to Monarchy for this purpose. And who thought that making Catherine excited about espionage would be a good idea? It’s 2/3 of the way into the game before you get your first spy, and still she spends all her time nagging you about not having any.
Yeah, I especially love how Cleopatra is supposed to cultivate allies, but with the simplistic way the AI relationships and agendas work, she ends up turning into a murdering psychopath on the harder difficulties because she has more units than you (never mind if your units are inside tanks and hers are armed with clubs).
Honestly, though, there’s no benefit to her being friendly. You don’t need a trade treaty or anything to send trade routes to each other. Hell, you don’t even need open borders to do so. So why cultivate allies and friends? Not to mention an alliance doesn’t actually bring your ally into the war, it just gives them a CB to be able to do so without warmonger penalties (which also don’t really mean anything).
It’s turds all the way down.