This is a money one paragraph description of Civ6. I have tried several times over the last few years to get into it, but it does not work for me.
rho21
3858
I’m pretty sure a lot of the reason people dislike the game stems indirectly from one unit per tile. The problem is that in order to avoid (or at least limit) massive logjams of units, production has to be severely limited. Instead of a traditional snowball, for instance in Civ IV where an early city will make maybe 10 production a turn while a late game one might make 200, those numbers simply can’t scale as much. This means that everything takes forever to build. So you spend a lot of time waiting for builds and are very unresponsive in an emergency.
Back at release, this could be worked around: the algorithm for production overflow was poorly chosen (they forgot the lessons of past civs there), meaning that you could boost the value of harvesting trees very significantly and actually produce things very quickly. This was undermining the design, but it was actually rather fun to plan carefully to maximise your chop overflow. It’s a bad sign when fun derives from defeating the game design rather than playing as intended. Once they eventually realised the problem, of course it got nerfed.
I think that most problems ultimately stem from this one decision: the AI was much harder to code for 1UPT, for instance. It’s difficult to tell but I suspect the lead designer’s hands were tied on this one by management. Certainly a lot of interesting new ideas were added, they were just all undermined.
It’s very interesting to see how Soren is approaching the problem in Old World (sorry to cross the streams again). Limited orders and a decreased timescale certainly help here, but I’m worried it might end up with huge numbers of units to fight through under optimal conditions.
I think both Age of Wonders: Planetfall and Warhammer:Gladius have shown that 1UPT isn’t a bad idea in a game. They both have competent AIs.
It is not proving to be a problem with Old World It turns out one the many problem with the Civ V/VI and UPT is the maps were too small and the units moved to slowly so both the player and the AI had trouble simply prevent traffic jams. The maps are bigger in older world and you can move units between 6 to as many as 20 hexes in a turns. The AI is light year ahead of Civ VI tactical AI. I haven’t played since it first game out so I don’t know how much it’s improved.
From that content roadmap, the one glaring thing missing is the one glaring thing that needs fixing…the A.I. Even the “Free Updates for all players” lists everything except A.I. fixes. So they’re going to add a lot of new game modes and complexity to a game that the A.I. is unable to actually compete against you already and charge you for the it.
Probably worth getting if you play online versus other people, but it’s a big fat nope from me.
The 1UPT problem had a big detailed article written up on it all the way back with Civ 5 by Sulla, an active civfanatics poster.
http://www.sullla.com/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html
He also has a bunch of Civ 6 articles on that site talking about the problems there.
It is not proving to be a problem with Old World It turns out one the many problem with the Civ V/VI and UPT is the maps were too small and the units moved to slowly so both the player and the AI had trouble simply prevent traffic jams.
That’s a reason that the 1UPT problem is compounded. They switched over to 1UPT while sticking with every other movement rule from classic Civ. Actually, they made it WORSE. Movement points were changed from rounding up to rounding down to see if you had enough to move into a tile (units could not move a 2nd space into a 1 movement requirement tile if they only had 0.99 movement left). That one change ended up being MASSIVE and is the reason that moving units always feels like a slog of a chore (even before you have enough units to create traffic jams). The one and only argument made for keeping that change is that it would make melee units overpowered against range since they could close and attack them at will. Again, 90% of the problems all circle back to them trying to turn Civ into a tactical war game instead of a grand strategy 4X with some military elements.
I’ll be a broken record and say that so many issues could be solved if Civ just learned some lessons from Imperialism. Keep the workers/settlers on a per tile basis, but shift the military aspect over to regions rather than individual spaces to avoid tedious traffic jams and snail movement (also focus all production on just the capital, with additional territories only feeding your economy).
DeepT
3862
So the AI is much better then it was at release? I am seeing kind of mixed messages on that.
It is. Before Gathering Storm it was insultingly bad. As in AI has several space ports and could win on turn 370 but just lets me get my space victory on turn 400. Now it’s somewhat tolerable. Not good, but serviceable.
KevinC
3864
I still found it insultingly bad after Gathering Storm, FWIW.
Me too. Went back after Gathering Storm released and didn’t see much improvement. Dropped it and moved on.
The combat AI is possibly the worst ever in any Civ game. Other aspects of AI civilization management are equally bad. And the diplomacy is still like some kind of horrible nightmare in which no one listens to anything you say, and anything they say is just babbling nonsense noises.
Steam says I’ve got 575 hours in Civ V.
I’ve got 74 hours in Civ VI, and have little interest in playing it any more.
Bluddy
3868
It’s so funny that Master of Magic solved the Civ army sprawl problem a few years after Civ I, and then all their work was disregarded by Civ 2+. Simply allow the units to group into larger armies, and allow for simplistic zoomed-in tactical battles when 2 armies meet (with 1UPT). Simtex was so awesome.
No, Civ should not be a tactical wargame.
Bluddy
3870
The tactical battles are simple enough not to dominate. Just a way to resolve large battles.
I never wanted that type of tactical battle stuff in Civ. The game takes long enough to play as it is.
Bluddy
3872
Moving an entire army as one rather than each unit separately means you ultimately save a lot of time (and it’s more realistic at this scale).
Let’s blame Brian Reynolds!
Civ V has clarity - or at least had clarity until some of the later expansions. Civ VI feel like an ironic muddle. Half the unique Civ bonuses are the most uninspiring Civ bonuses ever, like the kind of thing where a Civ would gain a different depreciation tax schedule or something. You know things are bad in Civ VI when the religious bonus table pops up and there’s literally nothing you want to pick.
I mean I don’t care about the AI in my complaints. Even a “solitaire” game Civ VI feels boring because most decisions I make feel so dull. Even most of the Wonders kind of suck, with a list of obscure minutia bonuses. And it still feels like the early game is nothing but a rush to find as many minor cities as possible to gain the stupidly broken bonuses they provide.
JoshoB
3875
One of the reasons CivRev was so good.
Bateau
3876
I wish Firaxis would drop this ridiculous artstyle they seem to use across all their games. I’m thinking about buying the game right now but for some reason this sticks out like a sore thumb for me.
