Ugh, since the September update I can’t raze cities anymore due to some UI bug. What a pain in the ass. I like managing very small empires and when I go to war I put everything to the torch. Currently this is the top multiplayer coop game I’m playing with my wife and daughter, but we’re moving to Borderlands 3 in a few days so hopefully when I come back to the game it has been fixed.
For laughs, I fired up a Prince game to see if anything had changed.
As always, every civilization was outraged at my failure to satisfy their ridiculous goals by 2500 BC. No, Trajan, I can’t even build my first settler yet, much less make a big enough empire to make you happy. I’m just as likely to have built an encampment by then or deployed spies or whatever damn thing it may be. And as always, two random civilizations declared an irrational war on me in early BC times when I wasn’t even adjacent to either of them, I suppose because the game randomly decided I should be forced to deal with a military “challenge” at that point, because even their primitive AI should have realized there was no point in a war. And later, as always, when I declared one little war with a painfully acquired casus belli, every other civilization instantly denounced me and followed up by begging for ludicrously bad trade deals. Come on, now. This isn’t diplomacy, even by Trump standards.
I haven’t played since the last big DLC update, but I remember the main problem was that going to war often spiraled into a warmonger-penalty diplomacy death spiral. Supposedly this was fixed, but based on what I’m hearing, there are still problems. I mean, I can always just go for the domination victory, but then it’s just a Civ-themed wargame.
Once you get powerful enough they tend to sit there denouncing you for hundreds of years and not declaring war, but it does make further diplomacy pointless after a while. If you even prosecute a war that was declared on you to the point of taking someone else’s city they get pissed off for a very long time. It’s really quite stupid, especially in pre-nationalist times in which everyone was warring on everyone else without these mysterious multi-thousand-year grudges.
My favorite is still AI civs that denounce you for not having a strong navy by turn 50.
As far as it goes, yeah, I am sure that even in very early times, people with a few ships might have sneered at neighbors with none. And thought that this sort of backwardness begged for aggression.
But it seems like this franchise ought to be able to fine tune those messages a bit better to make the wording fit the facts of the era. Some of Civ’s problems are just part of the beast – you can’t have a good AI for a game with so many (ever-changing) systems. But you can have hostile messages that fit the particulars of time and place. (And this one is far from the worst.)
Can you change difficulty levels on the fly? It would be nice to start out your game a level below Prince, then ramp it up once you get going and the AI begins to falter.
I don’t know whether you can adjust difficulty in mid-game, but there are mods that make the game easier at first and then ramp it up as things progress. Some of these eliminate AI start bonuses, like extra settlers/warriors. E.g,. “Smoother Difficulty.” https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1673479392
Whoa that’s fantastic. Thanks!
I used that mod once or twice and enjoyed it a lot – the start game was more fair, and the AI kept up better as the game progressed. It was updated after the most recent expansion, but I don’t know if it’s been updated since then. Supposedly it’s a pretty simple mod, and people say it generally still works, but I haven’t tried it in the past few months, so I’m not sure.
This is an amusing video and I couldn’t think of a better place to stick it.
Why did they never put in the throne room feature after the original?
IIRC the first one actually you built a palace. I think Civ2 was the one with a Throne Room. Either way I definitely miss this feature.
Or putting the slightest bit of effort into the wonder movies. I never skipped the ones in Alpha Centauri.
I miss that too.
It would be such a minimal effort to include it too. And why not since they’ve been pushing the series towards casual gloss anyway? Might as well make it gloss the old players actually like too.
What’s wrong with Civ6 animated construction? It’s very similar to Civ4 videos. Alpha Centauri had used videos as a narrative device and Civ doesn’t need that as much.
However with how bad tech quotes are Civ6 would benefit from something more inspiring.
I think SMACX was a high point for the writing & speech-work in the Civ franchise. I don’t mute the game / skip the dialog in SMACX whereas it’s mostly forgettable in most of the other games.
Diego
Like how much could it possibly cost to hire some starving grad student to write little tech quotes like that for each specific background field?