I am a devoted Civ VI player, keep going back to it, so of course I am interested.
However, the more that I play, the more I feel that this game has become less rather than more enjoyable since its original release.
The problem, in my view, is that they are heeding the #1 criticism of the game, poor AI, in the only way they know how, probably the only possible way. They are manipulating the human player’s start, such that the player has general disadvantages, and, in particular, that the map is designed to disfavor whatever advantages accrue to that particular civ. Especially at higher difficulty levels.
(If you play as Poundmaker, for example, you want to see lots of bonus resources strewn around the map, because tiles adjacent to two of them gain +1 food and +1 production by building a mekewap even very early in the game. Quite a boon! Now, a Poundmaker game will replace the bonus resources with multiple copies of luxuries. Or the “in between” tile will be a flood plain, which, in an undocumented move, they have made ineligible for a mekewap… Similar too-clever-by-a-half solutions exist for various other civs, as well.)
The problem with this approach is not that the game is too difficult, but rather that it makes playthroughs more bland and repetitive. It takes the thrill out of exploring if the map features are always doled out according to some formula. No sense looking a few tiles further in case something fantastic waits there, if the algorithm has been set up to be sure that that is not the case.
I guess what I liked best about the game early on was that it was not very well balanced. One playthrough, the map would screw you over, the next time great opportunities abounded. So it was an adventure and fun. A lot of that has been lost, because it is game unbalancing to give the player opportunities to use the civ’s inherent advantages, when the AI civs are incapable of using theirs. For me, this is far more of a wet blanket than the fact that the AI cannot fight a war competently.
