I am secretly hoping to pick up the expansion some day after reviews and strong word of mouth sway me and finding I like the game as much or even more than I did when I first played it.
One of the reasons they do that is because when the game is unlocked via an IAP, it doesn’t work with the family sharing that Apple has.
I’ll buy it for the iPad, but not for $60. I would be on board for $30.
I pre-ordered the expansion on the slim hope that this expansion will do what Gods and Kings expansion did for Civ V and reignite my interest in the game. While this forum has been fairly negative towards both V and VI. In my own experience, I’ve since gotten a lot of entertainment value from Civ V thanks to both expansions that released, so I’m hopeful it happens again. Even with Civ IV, the base game had a few failings and the Warlords expansion did a lot to enhance the game. I can not remember what, but I remember Warlords, then Beyond the Sword making Civ IV the much loved game in the series that it is.
Firaxis have a lot of work to do though beyond the whole AI issues plaguing the game. I started a new game the other day to get familiar and ended up quitting before I built my first city thanks to the bug where I started too close to my neighbours. I know there is a fix, but that shit should have been rectified by Firaxis sooner and I’m horribly disappointed.
The second area I want to see improved is the diplomacy angle. Civ IV had a functional system. Leaders had their personalities, relations were a series of positive and negative numbers and it was elegant and functional.
The third area is the religious unit spam. I think that has been addressed, but I don’t know. I tend to ignore religion most of the time with Civ VI as it stands. Last time I played was some time after Australia was released as a DLC and religion didn’t really matter much with that game. Which brings a fourth area that is the end game. Fucking boring. With any luck, the run of golden ages/dark ages might encourage and add a challenge to the end game. I’d love to see a tight finish again that I would experience with Civ IV as opposed to mindless end turn button waiting for long projects to finish or the ponderous slow domination/world conquest.
AI doesn’t really matter to me. In my experience when I frequented the Civ fanatics forums, the most common way to play was builder mode. Civ VI achieves this and I can appreciate that might be part of the design philosophy of building a civilization as opposed to conquering the world.
For me it really is this. The 1upt is interesting in the early game but by the time we get to the middle ages turns take forever. I am not talking about just the waiting time. I am talking about my own turns. I would routinely play through a Civ IV game in 3-4 hours. Civ V and Civ VI, with 1upt and general bloat, take upwards of 10-12 hours. I simply have a difficult time remaining interested, especially as those last half a dozen hours are taken while the game is a fairly foregone conclusion. I am bored to death with the game long before I am done with it. Even if the game was competitive I still get bored with it as it ponderously goes from turn to turn with little really happening.
No wonder that I usually stop playing around 1500 and never return to those games.
1UPT sounds good in paper. I was initially quite excited for it when Civ5 was announced. In practice it’s a terrible fit for this franchise, at least the way it’s currently implemented. Like you guys said, it can turninto a real slog just moving your units around and the AI simply cannot handle organizing and moving units cohesively.
I was kind of surprised that they kept it in Civ6 and left it mostly untouched.
This a hundred millions times. When the game gets sprawled later on it turns it from a game into a job which is no fun. I played so many Civ IV games to completion because I could make a comparative stack of awesome (or the AI did) and rule the map. Splitting the stacks as necessary multiple times as strategy dictated and in a way, if there was a wide front you had lots of units nearing 1UPT. But when a power punch was needed you could breaththru. Not have the clogged maps of Civ V/VI.
Speaking as the resident Civ V apologist/fan, I agree that’s the one piece which still needs improvement to this day even after mods have had their way with the game. If I had my way, we’d have stacks of doom and scene shifts to “battle views” where 1UPT is a lot easier to handle. Of course, each turn would take infinitely longer, but my thousands of hours spent on the game seem to argue at least I’d still be up for it.
For some reason most people seem to think the choice is 1 unit per turn or unlimited stacks of doom…
How about stack limits as determined by technology level/logistics?
To be fair, I think some people use “stacks of doom” as shorthand, but yes; that would have made IV a better game imho.
I thought that’s what they were doing in Civ6 when I heard about Corps and Armies at later tech. I was so disappointed at the implementation.
Ha I had that exact same thought too! For those brief seconds I was like “YES!” Then it was like… ohhh darn.
Once again leave it to Paradox and EU IV to find a better way.
Supply limit, which can vary based on terrain. It’s a limit, but a soft one if you can stomach the attrition damage.
For all the complaints of “Stacks of Doom”, I don’t think they were really ever the major issue people made them out to be. If there was a stack of doom that utterly annihilated you, that meant you got severely outplayed (whether due to playing poorly or just massive AI bonuses). Civ4 had siege weapons which could inflict collateral damage and beat the crap out of stacks. You had stacks of your own. I don’t know how the AI carpeting every available tile in the region with cavalry is a superior system, other than it’s so inept that it can’t understand how to move them when they’re all in a traffic jam like that. And if someone is really after the inept AI experience, they can just turn down the difficulty and roflstomp all over the world.
I think something like Call to Power or Endless Space have good concepts that would fit the Civ franchise far better than what they have now.
It was that stacks of doom made the game grind on interminably. It was that they were slow and obnoxious. With no group select option it made moving troops take 10x too long.
That was my issue.
Yeah, I can agree with that!
For CIV4? Wasn’t there a ctrl+select and alt+select for select all on tile and select all of type on tile?
Serein’s right. Moving that stacks was easy. Select all was definitely one option, and the grouping remained through the turns. It was also possible to easily split off certain units as well if required.
The issue I believe with stacks was the way combat was handled: suicide artillery/catapults/trebs etc, then throw cannon fodder to kill down the most defensive unit before hopefully having enough steam in the stack to use the highly decorated/promoted soldiers kill off the weakest defenders and wipe the stack. The most defensive unit always defended the stack, and once those were gone, the rest would crumble quickly. 1UPT got around this. Dare I say, I love, love, love 1UPT when it comes to naval battles! On land, it needs refinement and I can be counted into the list of people horribly disappointed that Firaxis didn’t go the route of Call to Power with their armies.
I agree with CraigM where I think supply limit would be a nice middle ground. My belief is to base that supply on the amount of food available on a tile. Pillaging becomes a defensive option, as tech improves and the landscape is more developed, larger armies can be fielded because those farms become more advanced.
Err…doesn’t 1upt do all of that but worse?
This. Imperialism also had a tactical system like Call to Power. Battles were short enough in duration not to bog down the strategy part of the game, but were interesting. 1UPT is just awful IMO.
Comparing lesser games to Imperialism is just unfair, though.