It’s really just that one frame, I get a much more Owen Wilson vibe from him in motion.
Nice civs you got there. Shame about the game.
Last time i looked there are 40% more people playing Civ V concurrently than Civ VI. Of course it has a much larger user base, but still…
That’s a shame. I like the mechanics of Civ VI much better than V, but I wish they’d at least put some more effort into getting the AI to play Civ VI and improve diplolacy.
To be fair, Civ V has also been on sale about 20 times over the past few years, including all DLC.
So I’ve been thinking about this.
I like many, most, maybe even all of the individual mechanics of Civ VI. Districts, the most visible, are a cool way to branch city specialization, and they feel cool to use.
But I’m not convinced they’re right for the game.
City placement has worked really well as a problem to solve since Civ III, where you’re trying to balance hammers/food/commerce and snag resources and use land efficiently and sometimes create defensible military and cultural borders. That’s 3 variables to solve for, and it works great.
Adding districts, adjacency bonuses, and (ugh) Wonder tile requirements adds another axis to the problem, and a lot of it isn’t visible or at least presented to the player on the screen (main map, maybe with resource/output overlays) when you’re solving that problem. Plus the impact of the decision is delayed for up to hours and hours of gameplay, when you find out a thousand years later that you don’t have a good spot for an industrial zone or whatever.
God forbid you ever want to build a National Park.
Fundamentally, you’re over-complicating a problem that was already at a good (possibly ideal) complexity state in favor of adding a mechanic that’s cool in a vacuum, but ends up not really adding much other than forcing certain cities to develop along certain lines (if you’re trying to play optimally) and weighting the map RNG more heavily in determining the game’s development and outcome.
Oh for god’s sake, I forgot about the totally opaque scaling of district costs that still doesn’t make any damn sense to me. I guess it’s to punish wide empires? But in a way that literally isn’t presented to the player until you realize that the harbor you’re trying to build in Liverpool is going to take 30 turns to build for some damn reason. Yeah, nice work there.
I’ll give Civ6 credit on the technical front. The Civ6 engine is so much better than Civ5 it’s not even funny. This is doubly apparent if you try to play any sort of game with a friend or two.
I do like a good chunk of the design decisions as well, despite potential issues that @inactive_user raises. For my individual tastes, I like the added complexity of city placement and customization that districts bring, although I do agree that the need to do a significantly better job at communicating a lot of this stuff to players.
At the end of the day, though, I’m in complete agreement with @Enidigm when he says “Nice civs, shame about the game”. I know Firaxis has made the decision that spending resources on AI and the like is wasted effort, but at least in my case it is costing them DLC (and later, expansion) sales. I can’t get interested in new Civs or new mechanics when the game just kind of falls apart in general.
At this point what options do we have upcoming for serious 4X games?
Crusade looks like only one. (but that should be really good, and the base game improved to solid B+ status already)
Yeah, I agree with @inactive_user on the UI front too. Until you’ve played enough games to just know what the districts require it is near impossible to plan. My memory is bad enough that once I step away from the game for a little while, I can’t recall the details. This does hurt the game. Also, damn straight about the National Park - I’ve tried to build it many times and I just couldn’t find the right spot.
The thing is though, as a long time Civ player it’s fun to get a new twist on Civ every 5+ years or so. They need to change up the mechanics, so even if they’re solving a problem that isn’t really there sometimes different is good. The problem is that if they’re going to make something more complex, they need to have a UI and AI that supports it. It seems like Firaxis just unfortunately sucks at that now.
I think the only way we’re going to get a well-done Civ like is if some like @SorenJohnson comes along and makes one. I’d buy one from him even if it doesn’t have the Civ name on it. So Soren, no pressure but we need to to be our Civ savior.
What’s weird is how… loosey goosey Firaxis is with their franchises. They seem to have a model now where they let lower level employees move up to designer roles, have their stab at the franchise, then leave and move on to other things. It really does seem like the Civ franchise is kinda not looked at all that hard by the heads of Firaxis anymore, like they’re older guys who take all this in stride and are more interested in the evening than the morning, so to speak. It’s been two-four while releases since there’s been anything like tight in Civ - the last Civ V expansion, the Beyond Earth stuff, and this all seem to be very “/shrug! Have fun kids, going out to eat, show me what you came up with tomorrow.”
They guy who built civ3? Hasn’t he had his chance?
Is my sarcastometer busted?
Civ2 was of course Reynolds…it’s not like FIraxis letting juniors sit in the big chair is a new thing.
Endless Space 2 is another.
Soren did Civ IV, which is the one I consider the best. So it would be interesting to see if he could take what he has learned from Civ, Offworld Trading Company and the rest of his experience and make another Civ game.
Isn’t Soren busy with At The Gates?
You’re thinking of Jon Shafer.
Endless Space 2 is shaping up really nicely, so far.
My bad…:(
It seems like At the Gates could use Soren’s help too…
And now I’m sad again.
EU IV will have new DLC soon. Did that help :-)
You know me so well ;)