It is most definitely encouraging. I hope they are putting work into the strategic / diplomatic AI as well. I hated that AIs from across the world, or ones that were super weak would declare war on you. I also didn’t like the fact that AI relations didn’t take into account the benefits of peace. For example, Egypts big ability is that trading with them gives you a bunch of food (IIRC). This in theory is supposed to make everyone want to trade with you and be a peace with you. In reality, it made no difference in foreign relations.
Over the last two weekends, I decided to see if Civ 6 as it currently sits has risen to be anything worth playing.
First off, what an absolute mess of an experience playing this game is. More than anything else, it lacks the kind of subtextual feedback that Civ4 and versions previous to that had regarding just simple things like progress. Basics like “Am I keeping up on tech?” For whatever reason, Civ4 (and even kind of in Civ5) you just had a feel for that stuff, even without having to check on it.
But right now I think my biggest issue with the game is how bloody long it takes for the stupid AI to complete turns. I’m in my fourth game to get to the Medieval era, and on a fast, beefy rig this game takes FOREVER just to process all its turns. Meh. Does this ever get better? Or is this mess a loss cause?
I’ve been in the mood for a non-war empire builder so I thought about reinstalling this and going into it with low expectations, just to see if it had improved at all since release. Couldn’t get myself to do it, though, as I thought about all the things that drove me nuts with the game. Then I read your post and I’m glad I didn’t waste the bandwidth.
On to your issue, I don’t know if this problem followed from Civ5 but one of the reasons turns took so long is because the AI just couldn’t let a unit sit, it had to shuffle everything back and forth every turn which took forever. Turning off animations helped, but it has its own problems when you start your turn with a bunch of damaged units and you’re trying to figure out what happened.
It makes one amazed to think of how good turn times and AI were in Civ IV.
I tried VI again after the expansion. Nope, still awful.
It remains a pretty good game when played against humans. There are certainly flaws, but the core mechanics provide for interesting decisions. Which makes it so much more of a shame that the AI is so woeful.
I mean…it is making me want to play Civ IV all over again, so it’s got that going for it. ;)
Kevin, I think that unit movement thing is definitely still an issue with Civ VI, and definitely part of why the turns take so long. But as you mention, turning animations off means losing pursuit, too.
I actually started a game of Civ IV a day or two ago. I need to get back to it. I get the feeling that special resources have a more profound effect on resource yield than Civ V / VI.
Civilization was the game that got me into PC Gaming, and I have played all of them to varying degrees.
It is sacrilegious to say here, but my favorite of the series was Civ5. Yes, the AI was garbage, but the rest of the product came together beautifully (except late game turn chugging, which I can’t believe has never been fixed). I like 1UPT because it gave me a greater sense of military fronts and strategies, even if the CPU couldn’t handle it.
Civ6 gave me a bad feeling the second I saw the art direction, but I was excited by the new city building. I played the game for maybe 40hours when it came out, and it has killed my love of the franchise.
This game is just a mess. The pieces don’t fit together to make any sort of coherent experience, and as such the AI problems which were an annoyance to me in 5 have become centrally destructive in 6. Meaningless wars, worthless diplomacy, missionary spam, city spam, poorly designed cities… The systems in 6 are poorly designed AND even worse they don’t mesh well with one another.
I haven’t played a Civ game since 6 released… But like Kevin above I thought of reinstalling this past weekend to see if time and patch had polished it up… But reading the comments here have just killed any desire I had to do that.
Before I jumped back in, I watched Quill18’s 6-part video series explaining some of the stuff with Civ6 for “Beginners” (which, even though I’ve been playing Civ since the very week the first one came out, was still useful).
I came away thinking that this game is absolutely the platypus that dionisus describes. It’s like this game built by committees, with all these bolted on parts that never come together. And all the while, you’ve got some invisible hand in the background in a vaguely worded design document saying “make it a little more like EU4.”
That I guess is the biggest issue for me with Civ6. It wants to have complexity that its scope and mechanics aren’t meant for. EU4 is ground-up built to support the absurd level of detail it aims for. Civ6 isn’t anywhere near as detailed, but it makes all these swerves into complexity that simply do not work. This is a game that desperately needs to get back into its lane.
@robc04: Civ VI resources give +1 to a yield. In Civ IV they give +1 unimproved and then another +1 or +2 when improved.
When you consider that supporting a farmer costs approximately 2 food and 1 gold in Civ IV, a 6 food grassland wheat farm is much more than twice as good as the 3 food you’d get from the same tile without wheat. Resources are super powerful in the early game.
@dionisus1122 / @triggercut: Could you give some examples of gameplay systems that you feel are bolted on and don’t fit the core experience? (N.B. That is gameplay as opposed to AI behaviour.)
The obvious one to me is the implementation of religious combat. Religion itself is a really nice strategic mechanic: a big (and continuing) investment that gives access to a number of useful powers. Religious spread works quite well (albeit the UI is dreadful). But the religious combat mechanic (and hence the religious victory condition) is pretty horrible. And worse, if it’s going poorly you can just flip the table by declaring war and instantly destroying religious units with military ones.
Some of the diplomatic options fit that as well, but in isolation from the insanity of the AI they’re either fine (e.g. friendship) or irrelevant (e.g. casus belli, research pacts).
Everything about districts is the worst. Just embarrassingly bad design on all fronts.
So, It has been a couple years now, so forgive me if my memory is a little imprecise… a lot this is going to be based on feelings I remember from the time.
The city districts were not fun. I was excited when I first heard about it during the previews, but I found them to be a frustrating puzzle. It was difficult to plan the city itself, and the bonuses and the numbers that drove those bonuses seemed hidden away somewhere, so I was playing somewhat of a guessing game. In the end, the specialization of the cities didn’t make me feel any sense of attachment to them, and the specializations themselves felt trivial over the course of the game.
Diplomacy was an absolute mess. Allies going to enemies overnight. Non-sensical wars being declared. Ridiculous demands. None of these things are new for Civ per se, but it was like they were turned up to 11, and it all felt very gamey. Maybe that was just me being spoiled from EU4 where the numbers are so apparent.
Eureka moments sounded like this great, organic function when I heard the previews… something to help you focus on different paths in the tech tree based upon your environment. In practice I felt like it did the opposite and almost put every game on the same tech rails.
Religion is the worst offender, and you’ve noted the part that drives me bananas - religious combat. It feels meaningless, and the carpet bombing of religious units was a complete and utter turn off for me. I struggle to understand how something so obvious has never been fix (unless it has?). It was a bit of a problem in Civ5 as well, but Civ6 just makes it front and center of your busywork.
But overall, for me it was a feeling of a game where i was pushing buttons and pulling levers, but didn’t feel any particular interest in what was happening. Civ5, for all its warts, had that for me. Maybe it is the cartoony art design of 6 (do not like), or the flippant quotes on the tech screens - or perhaps it was the direction to go in more of a boardgamey direction rather than simulation…but for me, as a guy whose played 25 years of Civ games, it just didn’t work.
As y’all have mentioned, religion remains a mess. The way various elements feed into a single “amenities” rating sounds like an interesting idea, but ends up as more noisy busy stuff going on in implementation. Districts are awful, the attempt to make the game a city-builder light just feels like a poor direction and even worse implementation. Another thing I hate is the way the City State mechanic has evolved. When it was introduced in Civ 5, I was wary. What it is now is just awfulness. Maybe my least-favorite thing about the game now.
City States and emissaries and all the related crap about them represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes Civ fun. “Oh look, a really nice spot for a city. Genghis Khan, Victoria, Teddy Roosevelt and I are going to race to get it.” Nope! instead of that competition, instead it’s sending emissaries, trying to be suzerain and get the benefits. And…having a trade partner. It feels like the designers heard the Star Wars theme, saw the expository text crawl up the screen, and while sitting there in Phantom Menace thought “This is the best Star Wars ever. Let’s do that to Civ.”
What’s the Civ 6 equivalent of the best Jedi fight in the franchise though? At least TPM had that going for it.
I like the day/night cycle in Civ 6.
Oh! One more thing. The 2D map is almost, almost good enough to play on without ever touching the 3D map. Almost. It’s a bit stripped down, but in many ways I actually prefer it better. But sadly, no day/night cycle on the 2D map.
Of course to get that 2D map, you have to play Civ VI. Eh…
The Civ V community mod gets city states right. Gotta build a unit and send it to the CS to generate influence, rather than just dumping money. Oh and they have to be in trade or trade route range iirc. Actually results in natural spheres of influence. It’s great.
I was trying this out again about a week ago, and and this part of your post says everything about how I feel about Civ 6. I had no idea how I was doing, especially regarding tech. As others have posted, it also feels like a mish mash off systems - they really need to let someone with some unified vision just create their idea of Civ, for better or worse, from the ground floor. If you can’t make stuff like religion and espionage not a mess, just throw it it in the bin wholesale.
I hate to say stuff like this about the game, because I know a lot of the people who worked on it are great at design. It did not grab me two years ago, and it doesn’t grab me now. I really prefer Civ 5, warts and all.
What I take from this discussion, and from my own 100+ hours playing this hotseat with my partner who pretty much echoes @Nesrie’s and her sister experience, is that perhaps Firaxis would be for the better releasing “Civilization 4 Remastered” editions at regular intervals, as Microsoft did with Rise of Nations and tries to do with Age of Empires, and start from scratch new lines of games (strategy or otherwise).
I can’t help the feeling that the worst thing of Civ 6 (and Civ 5) is that the push for it to be perceived as a “new” thing is what utterly breaks the balance between the basic gameplay elements that Sid Meier put together 25 years ago.
For those of you who like 5, why do you like it better than 4? I’ve been playing quite a bit of 4 over the last couple months, so interested in the difference.