Alpha Centauri?
@jpinard Sorry I didn’t reply to your questions earlier, but I wasn’t sure of the answer, and I’m still not sure. I don’t recall seeing any ice-level options at game-creation, and I haven’t heard anything about desertification – although disasters do sometimes change tile yields (usually for the better, though, not the worse).
@Scotch_Lufkin I’m still learning how the favor system works, but essentially it’s a currency you can trade for money, diplomatic benefits, resources, or pretty much anything else. I’m now at about turn 100, and I still haven’t seen enough to know whether the irrational lurches in diplomacy have been mitigated. (I don’t think they’ve disappeared altogether.) I’ve seen only one diplomatic surprise far – Sweden just declared a surprise war on me, but I saw it coming. I had to stop playing at that point, but when I resume, I’ll see if I can spend my limited diplomatic favor to get other countries to help me in the war somehow.
My Maori have made something of a comeback, but we’re in a very odd position: my capital was founded in an area with no room to spread out, so my second and third cities are island states offshore, in one case half a world away. About to found a fourth coastal city near a city-state subject. By far the most dispersed civ I’ve ever played, but it’s probably not optimal to do this, as loyalty is a thing.
That sounds great, keep me posted! Thanks for the updates.
Sure will! One more thought on diplomatic favor: it’s the currency that ultimately can win you the Diplomatic Victory. So there’s incentive not to spend it willy-nilly, and doing naughty diplomatic things can cost you favor, at least indirectly. (I think.) Still not sure how it all works; will keep you posted.
Dammit, Spock. You got me to buy this. Well, you and @robc04 when he pointed out it was just a bit more than $30 on GMG, which put it within range of my wanting to try it since they did make at least some potential effort with the diplomacy mechanics.
I downloaded it remotely and when I got home I tried to launch it and … this can’t be right?
I verified the files and it found 3 were bad and needed replacing. It still looks like this though. Is anyone else seeing that?
I’m re-downloading it completely now though, after removing it. See if that works. I didn’t even click the green button, it may be working fine…
Aaaand I’m still getting missionary spam. Does my neighbor really need to send 10 units at once to convert my cities?! It’s super annoying and still not fixable via diplomacy. I can tell my neighbor not to settle near me but I can’t tell him to stop converting my cities? Wars have been started over that but somehow it isn’t an option here.
Where do I find this setting? I must be blind! :(
That only makes it easier for me to break down and get it Scott.
Look, a volcano went active right next to my capitol! Darn it all!
I’m actually really digging this so far, I forgot I liked a lot of the “board game” like mechanics of Civ VI, and so far my only AI neighbor has been perfectly friendly, helpful even, so we’ll see how that aspect goes. Right now I’m just trying to survive barbarian hordes.
I found it!
For anyone else curious, and I don’t know why in the world this isn’t on by default, you click on this Map Options icon above your mini-map to find this. I’d have never known it existed if @Spock hadn’t mentioned it was possible.
It really does make the gameplay map looks just a little more elegant.
Also, is it me or does this game just look a lot prettier than I remember? Everything from the map to the units themselves seem to carry more weight, somehow. And the colors! Oh, my. Anyway, here is a mountain range and a river with labels on, I can’t recommend the feature enough.
In their February 13 stream, the devs said they tasked the game engine team with pushing it to its limits, and they succeeded, according to them.
Got a brief opportunity to take the Inca for a spin. My only regret so far is that mods won’t be working again for a while. I forgot just how much I was taking some of them for granted. Particularly a couple of them that made city states more difficult to overrun.
It may have been just the luck of the draw (or my starting a difficulty level lower) but I had a little more room between me and my nearest neighbor.
Any of you ever play with Barbarians off?
I have when they annoyed me the previous game, but I enjoy the combat (I know many don’t, but I like the 1UPH units and animations, and the mechanics of unit placement, terrain and how it impacts the results, promotions, the various units themselves) and barbarians are a fun way to get me into the action faster and as such I usually leave them on.
The map generator still start civs way way way way too close for my tastes. I’m on a Large continents map with only 8 players (I removed a few AI and reduced City States down from 15 to 10) and I have 5 (!) cities within 8 hexes of my starting city. I restarted twice and have gotten similar results, it’s kind of annoying because there’s basically no exploration and very little expansion without bulldozing my neighbors.
Interesting. I only started/played one game so I don’t have a good slice to offer you by way of comparison, but my only neighbor is very far to the north. This is default number of AI’s on a default sized map (Small, I think).
He’s the only AI I’ve found so far, but I know my AI buddy to the north is considering war with the Mongols, so they must be around further North, I assume.
Good to hear. It’s only a sample size of 3 so I might just be really unlucky, but now I remember this being a huge frustration of mine when the game launched. I believe there was a mod to fix it, I should probably try to hunt that down somewhere.
I don’t have the expansion, but I definitely have a variety of starts - sometimes a neighbor or two and sometimes more crowded. I tend to also do large continents.
Just to follow up, I re-rolled the map again. This time I’ve hunted far and wide and I only have been able to find one neighbor, and I feel like I’ve explored a large portion of the continent I’m on. Which I’m guessing means that the other 6 AIs are piled on top of each other somewhere else. ;)
Can I just thank Spock and Scott for pointing out that map naming option. How on earth was that not automatically on? It makes the maps much more interesting.