3193

So after trying a bunch more games, I feel like all this expansion does is further widen the gap between AI and human since it’s a bunch of new exploitable mechanics that the AI has no clue how to use.

Loyalty was a nice idea to encourage more gradual expansion. The downside is it applies to newly conquered cities that will rebel instantly so your only option is to raze. The AI also has no clue that loyalty even exists and will constantly overreach with settlements and have its cities rebel then flip to you. Thanks for the gift?

Governors are insanely imbalanced. Most are crap. The science one is okay. Magnus is beyond broken and is always the only choice. His starting +100% harvest yield applies to forest chops, which should cause any veteran civ player’s jaw to drop (it is ALWAYS the correct choice to chop; you do not sacrifice long term growth because more resources early IS more long term growth). His later promotions of industrial zone production and unlimited factory bonus overlapping (just like release version) is just icing on the cake.

Emergencies just don’t work. It won’t tell you what the goal is before you accept them or not (oh, THAT city state I can’t possibly reach and conquer in that time limit?), and it has no way of fairly dividing the reward. You and Civ A accept the emergency mission to take cities from Civ B. You do 100% of the work attacking and taking the cities, Civ A who never once attacked gets 50% of the gold reward. It’s like high school group projects all over again.

This isn’t even getting into smaller stuff like how research boost nerfs are a nerf to the AI (free boosts is how they tried to keep pace economically), or how the AI has no clue how to maximize dedication bonuses.

3194

I just finished my 4th game with Rise and Fall. Korea was like easy mode (still playing on Prince until I get through the new Civs). I got out so far ahead with science that I could have won with just about any victory condition except religion. I decided to go for domination since I haven’t done that in a long time. I had 1 city building the space race stuff as a backup.

I ended up taking 2 civs on my content fairly early, with an army of a couple catapults, a couple swordsmen and an archer. The next civ I waited until I upgraded my catapults and went to infantry.

The other 4 civs were all on one big continent. The first I softened up with missile cruisers and a pair of aircraft carriers and took their capitol. Then I went on a rampage where I started to burn it all down. Got peace with the first one and moved to the second. Since my aircraft couldn’t reach I pulled in some rocket artillery instead.

I just swept through, taking capitols and burning down the rest. I had a couple rebellions and had to retake the capitol, but after getting some governors there and burning down the neighbors I was able to hold on. My warmonger score must have been through the roof.

3195

> Oooopss

<Row Item="YEILD_PRODUCTION" ListType="DefaultYieldBias" Value="25"/>
<Row Item="YEILD_SCIENCE" ListType="DefaultYieldBias" Value="10"/>
<Row Item="YEILD_CULTURE" ListType="DefaultYieldBias" Value="10"/>
<Row Item="YEILD_GOLD" ListType="DefaultYieldBias" Value="20"/>
<Row Item="YEILD_FAITH" ListType="DefaultYieldBias" Value="-25"/>

In each line, ‘YEILD’ is a misspelling of ‘YIELD.’ That wouldn’t matter if it were misspelled everywhere, but ‘yield’ is written with the correct spelling in every other instance across all of Civ 6’s data files.

3196

How much you want to make a bet this micro patch won’t show up officially for months?

3197

So the religious unit spam in this game might come down to developers not knowing “i before e except after c”.

3198

“We’re aware of a community-reported bug that has a minor impact on AI behavior. We’ve also made sure that everyone knows that I goes before E except after C… or other weird exceptions. Thanks to all who helped bring this to our attention and there will be a fix included in our next update.”

3199

Sure, but when can we expect that update, 3 months from now?

3200

Probably! Doubt they’ll hotfix.

But it’s easy enough to edit the files yourself, or use the mod that apparently fixes it.

3201

Does a mod like that disable achievements?

3202

I don’t think any mods disable achievements in Civ VI.

3203

Welp, I gave this another shot after the expansion had been out for a bit.

I still strongly dislike the overall game.

There are individual bits that work reasonably well, are creative and/or clever, and fit the whole Civilization thing well. But ye gods, the overall game is an unending series of spinning plates into which the expansion just throws a bunch more plates. I’m not even joking that I’d prefer the game with about half of the features ripped out and/or simplified, not because I’m some kind of tiny visual-novel baby or whatever, but because they’re boring maintenance mechanics (aka plates to spin) that add a lot of busywork for little reward.

Amenities, f’rex. Okay, city happiness is local again! I can dig it, even if that wasn’t something that bothered me about V. But wait, the majority of your amenities are in fact global and automatically apportioned among needy cities silently between turns. So…I guess you can’t build a bunch of +happy (excuse me, Amenities) in one small city and keep the rest of a large empire happy? …congrats? To pay for that ONE TINY GAMEPLAY EFFECT, you remove a clear “how happy is my empire?” display/interaction, you add a whole pile of rules complexity about what a local amenity is and how global amenities are apportioned, a terrible UX interaction where a city grows and complains about not having enough amenities until the silent end-of-turn Great Flattening takes place. Overall, it’s a total design failure.

Almost every mechanic is like this. Religion, diplomacy, espionage, fucking Wonders – everything remains a freaking mess. There are some small things I like, like fresh water, builders, and Natural Wonders, but my god. This is better than Beyond Earth, but not by much.

3204

I was such a big fan of the series up to Civ 3. I’m not sure why I couldn’t get into Civ 4. I think it was the way the interface had such an information overload. But again, you needed all that information in Civ 4. Right from the beginning, each tile around a city was cultivatable in multiple ways, giving you way more to do in the early game than in previous Civ games. And I kind of disliked that. But I think if I’d stuck with Civ 4 long enough, I would have gotten over that and fallen in love with the game, just like I did with Civ 3 despite it being quite different from Civ 2 in many ways. All the little changes like that to the series always take a while to appreciate. You get so used to doing things one way, and then being forced to change the way you play kind of grinds on you in the beginning.

I still think I’ll play the Civ series, maybe when my son gets old enough, and I can teach him to play whatever the latest entry in the series happens to be at that point. Maybe at that point, it will have been long enough that I won’t be annoyed when the early game is not the same as Civilization 3.

3205

I like your plate spinning analogy. That’s the reason I’ve held back on getting the Rise and Fall expansion, The impression I got was it was more stuff to do to make each turn have “meaningful decisions”, but as you say, I get the feeling it’s just more plates to spin.

I’ve played one game since the expansion came out. The updates introduced an annoying bug. I was unable to form corps. I was playing for world domination and had artillery units built and ready to form up into corps for seriously quick wall damage. But there was no option to form corps after I got Nationalism. A quick google found that others were reporting the same problem.

I’m guessing the AI factors in loyalty in determining where to settle. I’ve read that forward settling is calmed down with the Rise and Fall expansion. However, I’m playing without the expansion, and thus without the loyalty mechanic, and the AI still seems to want to push their settlers out and get next to your territory,

3206

The AI is more than happy to forward-settle cities that rebel into Free Cities shortly thereafter on account of being too far from their home empire.

Also happy to conquer cities that it immediately loses to rebellion, because you have to slam loyalty ASAP in captured cities or they revolt, and lord knows the AI can barely capture undefended outposts to start with.

3207

It doesn’t seem like it. It just spams cities per usual and then loses them. It still sucks at fighting war. I was at war with England for oh I don’t maybe 100 years or so. She declared war on me and never showed up. She didn’t actually have the ships to get her troops on my continent which she is not a part of. So at the end of it, I demanded money just to end it because, well I have ships.

I really dislike this game, my sister loves it so i bought the expansion to humor her when she has this Civ urge.

3208

This has not really been my experience. Pre-expansion, foreign civs continuously snuck settlers into every possible crevice of my civ, especially if there was friction between us. It went way beyond forward settling (which is aggressive but is a technique for getting ahead in the game), bur rather seemed to be a sacrifice on their part just to mess me up. Post-expansion, I see none of that. Just forward settling that aims to hit the outer limits of what the loyalty system will allow – but once in a while they misjudge and lose a city. However, until well into the game when decent settling locations are gone, well over 90% of the time they are doing their best for themselves.

Truer words never spoken. Anyone who wants a game based on war needs to find another game.

I’m okay with the game as-is, where I am trying to build a civilization, and the need for defense and occasional wars is simply a speed bump, a temporary drain on my production or money. But almost never a real threat, certainly not after the very early stages. (Though Genghis Khan can sometimes get such a head of steam that you wouldn’t want to get too cocky with him next door.)

Anyone who wants to play this game for a domination victory, well, maybe it would be fun once, but I cannot imagine how it would be fun over and over. Maybe on deity level? I don’t know, but no lower than that.

3209

Well I took my little troops into the enemey’s territory and encountered a number small cities too close together. Naturally I razed a few because I don’t want cities that close, and this was the same person who spammed me repeatedly trying to get to the other side of me so she could spam some more over there.

As for war, I almost never start wars in Civ; i just finish them. They can’t play the war game well. If they have an overwhelming number of forces, sure, but what fun is that? There is a lot I like about Civ, still but when they moved to a strategic war the AI can’t win without giving them a huge bonus to do so… it’s just not fun.

My sister finds the exploration, the building and the discovery of it all enough to outweigh that negative, plus it’s turn base and slow, we like slow sometimes. But the war, the horrific UI… ugg why do I have to go to the pedia for everything. The icon is right there…

I am glad others are enjoying it. I get why they do, but the expansion didn’t really fix much for me.

Also your quotes syntax must have gotten a little messed up because it’s not showing correctly.

3210

Did she play Civ V at all?

3211

Yep and she liked it a lot too. I’m the reason we stopped playing CiV IV. To be fair, we played it for years, like five, six… maybe even seven years. It was the go to game for I want to play something not too fast paced, maybe watch TV, surf the net. We played a ton. I asked to stop because I wanted something else. I felt like we needed to try something newish.

I got out of CIV V because I hated the demo, like really hated it. When she asked for CIV VI… well it was past time I gave her something because I keep dragging her and others into these other games to try myself. If I suffer through this game enough, I am sure I’ll get her try another others with me later.

To be fair to CIV VI, I do like the early parts, and the barbarians can be hard, like I started with a horse barb showing up on my 5th turn or something but I hate the wars, diplomacy and the AI speckles cities around they can’t defend.

3212

If you both like WWII, you should give Strategic Command a try. Once you get the rules down it is so awesome.