I agree, I think it’s a huge problem. I played a fair amount of Civ6 in MP, and whoever finds the most city states at the start would run away with the game every single time, without exception.
I like the fact that there’s a bonus to the first person who finds them, but I think the city state bonuses should unlock after 2 envoys, not 1 (or just give a one-time boost instead of per-turn). I don’t think the first tier of City State bonuses are too big, they’re just too big for how early in the game you can get them. If the +2 science/culture/whatever were delayed a little bit, it’d be fine.
And yeah, other than that, my strategy is always to rush archery and build stacks of military units because it is guaranteed that 1) the AI will forward-settle me almost instantly and 2) they will declare war on me, as they have more warriors (via harder difficulty bonuses). So I need a huge military to defend myself, and I need them to expand. All of this typically results in the game feeling “over” in the classic era, as I’ve either been swamped by numbers or I’ve demolished my neighbors and taken most of their cities, which lets me run away with the game. It’s really boring, honestly, and is why I haven’t touched the game in months.
That’s what’s feels funny about Civ VI: it’s ostensibly the more hardcore, number crunching game, yet the numbers don’t add up. It all comes off as being more amateurish, or maybe, just less insightful and more iterative; more fan fiction than canon, as the kids say. The Quotes are mundane, the math doesn’t really work, there’s the illusion of depth without an deep understanding of where that depth goes, an almost old fashioned Eurocentricm, borrowing a lot from other 4X games rather than leading with new ideas, etc.
Also the art! Civ V has great and inspired Wonder Art. Civ VI doesn’t care about art, it has 3D animated cheesy buildings. Also the repair animation is hilariously cartoonish for some reason? And on and on… Civ V was the historian and wargamers game, Civ VI was made by engineers.
The game would be infinitely better in the early stages if they eliminated the city-state-finding bonus. You can save literally a thousand of years of R&D if you find a couple of research cities, or can crank out a warrior army if you find the military ones, or can jump to classical republic a hundred turns faster if you find cultural ones, etc. And if you’re as usual stuck in the middle of 3 AI kingdoms, then you won’t get any first at all. It’s a very bizarre design decision on the devs’ part.
[quote]
Multiplayer teams and mod tools have been two of the community’s most-requested features, and we’re happy to bring them to Civilization VI. Steam Workshop will allow you to browse, add, and subscribe to mods more easily, and the other tools will make it easier for artists and modders to express their creativity within the game. With the update to multiplayer you will be able to team up with your friends to conquer the world together against AI or human opponents.[/quote]
I’ll be curious to see the details on the modding tools. I know there was worry among the modding community that they were going to be limited this time around, with no access to the DLL.
I don’t know, it was just a common worry among the modding community that they wouldn’t allow you to do so this time around. It had something to do with interviews where modding was discussed during the games development, I believe.
That addition of Australia’s culture bomb effect (from pastures) going up against Poland’s culture bomb (encampments and forts) would be an interesting battle, depending on how the land is diversified. I was happy to have it return and my game as Poland had me using it at every opportunity to steal land from the encroaching civs around me. Australia’s offers less flexibility (you can’t choose where the pastures are, after all) but you have the potential of having more of them. I wonder if you can erase the pasture and have it rebuilt in order to redo the bomb on a neighboring civ? If so, it’d be more useful since building pastures are some of the first things I would do and I wouldn’t wait for another civ to be right on top before improving the tile.
This and @KevinC synopsis are part of the reason I hated city-states being added to Civ in the first place (with Civ V). To me they always felt like gamey cheese added to the game. And sadly if you play without them you cripple the Civ’s with those dependencies. I really feel like the last two games would have been better without them had they redirected those programming resources to fleshing out things like better trade, more strategic resources, better AI.
The devs live-streamed the new multiplayer scenario, “Outback Tycoon,” set in Oz. The victory condition is economic only: most gold per turn, I think they said. Perhaps more interesting, the scenario features random events that the devs say will eventually be plugged into the base game.
One thing I’m not sure about: can you play a multiplayer scenario in a single-player mode? The devs played against a human and an AI, so maybe yes?
So can more clever players than myself explain Kongo’s Converted ability? While I get the basic bit of him piggybacking on another player’s religion, doesn’t it just mean that any future conquests he makes he’s simply helping the founder of his adopted religion get 1 step closer to a Religious Victory?
With those tech dependency changes they might as well not even have a tech tree. Just let it give you all the advances in fixed order, since they’re all dependent on one another anyway. The point of a tree is to have a lot of leaves. Now they have, what, 2 or 3 total leaves before the end?
Yeah, the problem with the tech trees was not the lack of requirements, it was the explosive and crazy boosts you can. They should have really figured out by now those boosts should be worth maybe 10% or maybe 20%, but not fucking FIFTY.
ModBuddy will also receive additional updates in the future, as part of a modding SDK update later. These tools do not include DLL source for Civilization VI at this time.
The tools they’re releasing today look like we can change everything but (loosely speaking) the rules, eg. if a mechanic already exists, it can be tweaked, but a totally new one can’t be invented.
