Civilization VI

Just decided to redo the settings for the game again and was able to get it to work, even though they were the same settings. Just a temp glitch in the setup, I guess.

Been testing out the DLC and patch.

Nubians are fun and interesting. Production bonus is probably the best kind of bonus in this game, and although this is limited to districts, it is totally worthwhile. And since archery units are so central to the game, that bonus is also good. It’s fun having a three move archer in ancient times.

Playing at King level, I would say that you face more resistance than in the past. Some small portion of that is in tactical upgrades – I did have an opponent come and take my city in the early game, with unprecedented competence. But the game is much too complicated for AI to generally compete in the military game. As has been the case, anyone looking for a military-focused game that presents a real challenge, well, I wouldn’t be looking at Civ VI. But as a builder-type player, I am continuing to have fun.

However… I am not all that pleased with the direction of the latest patch. It looks to me like they have upped the level of resistance largely by doling out positive circumstances in a more calculating and stingy manner.

I don’t blame them, they are getting all kinds of criticisms for the game being too easy. But personally, this is what turned me off to Civ V. It always seemed to me that some hidden algorithm worked overtime in map creation to see to it that you were given precisely the correct amount of everything. Initially in VI, map luck varied greatly, which made exploration fun. Post-patch, far less so. When it comes to fortunate facts about your map situation, you are on a very strict allowance, and you are not going to find much variance, at least not upwards. (Unless you play the central seas map, and that strikes me as just broken)

Civ VI has some oddness with the latest patch. In my current game, Poland and I have been friends since we met, without a single negative diplomatic issue. Five military unit of hers started walking through my territory and I thought they were just on their way somewhere else until they started razing my farmland. I quickly took them all out with city bombardment and my own units but we were never at war, and that didn’t start a war. I’m actually at war with no other civ (there are 12 of us in this game, and 18 city states on a huge map). Every time a unit of hers comes into range of one of mine, the game acts like we are enemies and offers attack options, which I can do…while we are still friends!

I see they still have issues with civs making offers that they themselves don’t like, too, only to have me make it better by clicking the button…to offer the same thing and have it accepted (this happened with Poland, who I’m in the non-war with).

I feel that the game’s gone wonky on me since the latest patch.

You may have already thought of this but… I had trouble until I removed all mods. Then it worked fine for me.

No mods. Haven’t ever installed any. Just the game and DLC as they came.

That isn’t any oddness with the latest patch. That is bog standard Civ VI AI.

Wait, what? Are you poking fun at the AI or are you legit saying that being allowed to destroy units of another civ without being at war is normal? That’s not behaviour I’ve ever seen.

Oh, sorry. I assumed it went to war and that you were not at peace. I missed that par, about them not declaring war… The normal behavior is to move a bunch of military units into your area while you are ‘friends’ and then declare war.

I tried a new game after the patch and I cant seem to build any districts or wonders, is that a known bug?

Losing my religion…

I’m loving these quarterly updates! Gimme, gimme, gimme!

So what I get from this update is the AI has more types of religious units to choose from when they spam them across the world.

Religion gets fleshed out with new beliefs and religious units. Two new Pantheons will be get introduced into the game, along with new Founder, Follower, Enhancer, and Worship Beliefs. These beliefs unlock the ability to build two new buildings as well as a new combat unit, the Warrior Monk.

We also heard your requests for a deeper overall experience – and took that to heart with revamped religious combat. Religious units can now exert Zone of Control and receive Flank and Support bonuses in religious combat. Meanwhile, the Guru religious support unit can heal nearby religious units.

There is literally nothing here that I want.

The zone of control on religious units may help.

“Finally, the Religion Lens has been overhauled to improve overall usability and readability.”

This will make the religion aspect of the game playable again. The quote represents a masterful understatement – at many times, it was simply impossible to determine the religious status of a particular city, so the one time I went for a religious victory, I felt roughly as though I were aiming for a domination victory without a monitor. I really like the game and have played well over a thousand hours, but I have been pretending religion is not part of the game. It really boggles the mind that they left it broken for so long.

You summed it up a lot faster and with much less snark than what I was typing out.

Adding flanking and tactical elements to Religious units just sounds like a really bad idea. For starters, it’s just yet another area to showcase how the AI can’t play the game. Second, why make Religion act like combat in the rest of the game? Why is there even Religious Combat to begin with? In the next patch are we also going to get Bards and Fashion Designers to face each other down in dance competitions to generate Culture?

I like the idea of religious units in certain time periods, like Crusaders that can be recruited with Faith. But this added emphasis on Jesus fisticuffs is just doubling down on bad design, IMO.

Exactly.

My sentiments exactly.

These guys get it.

I finally took Civ VI for a spin.

You can add my name to the “meh” pile. I haven’t even gotten far enough to really start to mock the AI. I don’t like many of the new mechanics (some of which are not bad in and of themselves, they just feel out of place). I don’t like how there seems to be more of everything (more tech trees! More decisions on things!) yet every individual thing feels watered down (I founded a cult, and a religion, and made some civics choices, and I have +5 prod in the capital or something in total. dream big). I don’t like how they gave us a weird hybrid worker system that’s neither 4 (which is good, although it quickly turns into busywork so you automate a lot, as is tradition in the series) or 5 (which just removed them but lacked Call to Power’s elegance). I don’t like how the explore/build for bonuses thing basically points you down a rote/busywork path to be repeated over and over (and anyway the rewards are more slop). In my last game I looked up and had some sort of great person I didn’t care about and just deleted it because I really honestly couldn’t be bothered.

Think I will go back to Civ IV and SMACX.

The philosophy for the designers was “make a significant decision every turn”. But what didn’t occur to them was that in order to do that they would have to drain the significance of all the decisions in the game. The decisions wind up not really mattering. The desire to interrupt turns with pointless decision making motivates an awful lot of bad gameplay.

This is where all that inane firehose of diplomatic babble comes from, the repeating trade route issues, the repeating spy assignment issues, the meaningless tech tree choices in a tree that’s so narrow and cross-dependent you have to learn everything anyway. If I could press a permanent “fuck you” button for all diplomatic interactions to skip them all I would happily do so. Combine all that with the computer being quite unable to play its own game either in city design and planning or in army coordination and what’s the point really?

All things considered it’s a watered-down, denatured, and fundamentally uninteresting retread of a game, and moreover devoid of the stylized charm, personality, and fun fluff of some of the earlier games.