I agree with that - I hate the cartoony style
In one of my Fall From Heaven 2 games, I invaded an isolated Elven continent and took one of the cities. The next turn took 40 minutes to resolve a battle between Elves and me. No Master of Magic combat in my experience took that long.
I think this feeling comes from a lack of challenge. 1) Civ 6 isn’t great as a city/civ builder so the depth doesn’t keep you occupied. 2) It’s also terrible as a wargame as there is no challenge/fun in the combat.
As the A.I. doesn’t provide a challenge, you have more time to consider each decision you make, which emphasises the lack of 1 as being enjoyable.
If you had to consider every single precinct, the risk of every new city for fear that you could lose your investment, it would matter. Constantly worried your capital was going to be attacked, forcing you to focus on defense rather than expansion. But other than rampaging barbarians in the first 10-20 turns, the A.I. doesn’t offer any challenge.
The A.I. in Cities : Skylines provides more of a hindrance to building a city than Civ 6 and that game is a f*cking simulation!!!
Bluddy
3880
They kinda gambled everything on the first point, right? They tried to provide extra depth by making all these terrain-based combos, after completely failing to make a challenging AI yet again.
Yeah, I think they did. It was fun for the first few games, but didn’t take long before you realised it wasn’t as deep as you thought.
I agree with this. I didn’t want to become a Civ hater (I love V), but Civ VI broke me. It is a textbook example of design creep. It believes adding more stuff makes it more ‘strategic’ and rewarding, but most of the systems aren’t well thought out and, for me, it mostly feels like busy work instead of interesting decisions. I don’t hate it, but I don’t enjoy playing it either. Which is weird because its designer produced some clean, elegant board games and did good work on Civ V expansions.
To be fair, this isn’t just a Civ problem. Nearly every ‘grand strategy’ game series of late is guilty of it to varying degrees (looking at you Paradox). I have hopes for Old World to be a corrective to this trend.
Bluddy
3883
I tried to get into Paradox games. Honestly, I have. I just can’t look at them and not see the gazillions of meaningless decisions, mixed with games that don’t know whether they should simulate their historical subject matter, or even how to do so in any reliable way rather than just letting the player figure out how to artificially dominate the game.
I get hung up on this too. Civ has no pretension to simulate anything, EU does and fails miserably at it. This only really bothers me because some people seem to hold it up as being a historically-accurate sim when it has limited value to that end beyond political geography (knowing where certain polities were). I know it’s a popular game, especially on these forums, which is fine, but it’s not quite for me anymore either.
Fall from Heaven 2 was the best Civ.
Yeah, I’m with you. When they do Civ7, the only hope I have is that they bring in someone with a fresh outlook (like they did with Soren years ago), and strip down the bloat of Civ6. I doubt that happens, since it’s such a massive franchise that sells zillions of copies. I don’t see any big changes happening. I see tons of people online who rave about Civ6, although I doubt many of them are the more hardcore Civ players.
Bluddy
3887
Yeah it’s a real problem. The best strategy games are ultimately the ones that can encapsulate the minimal amount of complexity necessary for the subject matter and to give you fresh experiences (IMO). If Civ went back to simplicity, and just tried to fix what wasn’t working in the Civ1/2 model, that would be amazing IMO, but it would not suit the people who played Civ5-6 religiously. So they have to keep adding bloat. That’s why a new IP (like Old World) has a better chance of cleaning up the mess.
JoshoB
3888
Isn’t that basically what Civ3 tried to do? Improve on Civ2/fix the things that weren’t working, then creating new problems in its stead (pollution!) that Civ4 then solved for the most part while also introducing its own issues, especially in the last expansion pack (Warlords was great)? Civilization Revolution is definitely an attempt to strip out all of the bloat and make the game playable in a shorter time frame (and therefore the best iteration in the series, obviously – fight me).
Civ5 is a far more radical retooling, while also stripped things back, even removing religion before adding it back in an expansion pack, along with other unnecessary bloat, and lobotomizing the AI, of course. I actually prefer vanilla Civ5 over any of the expansions, precisely because it’s a more stripped-down experience, even though imperfect. (I haven’t touched it in years, though, so take that as the most lukewarm of recommendations.)
Civ6 is the first Civ where the release version felt bloated already, and instead of streamlining things they just keep adding more and more junk to the messy core game design, while doing nothing about the abysmal AI. I think I got both the expansions, played for a while, and then just grew frustrated with it, uninstalled the game and never looked back.
Agreed!
Bluddy
3889
Ideally that would be true, but I don’t think that’s how it worked in practice. Civ 3 was a very turbulent experience built by a desperate company over Alpha Centauri tech. Civ 4 was purely an improvement iteration (as were its expansions), but it clearly wasn’t the final one needed (as can be seen in Old World). Further Civ iterations have taken the series in unfortunate directions.
Digging into Master of Magic for the first time really frustrates me, because it’s clear Simtex had a lot of excellent improvements to the Civ formula which were completely ignored by Microprose for their own series.
Yeah Civ4 Warlords was a bit cleaner than BTS imo, the corporation micromanagement late game was very bloaty and there was some weird additions to mid game unit balance iirc. I think Warlords was where unique buildings were introduced which were good.
I have a Civ5 semi-rant I don’t think I ever posted regarding my view on its failures on a strategic/“interesting decisions” level, dunno if that should go here.
Civ3 has some very unintuitive mechanics (though I can’t recall all of them now…) and was very micro heavy.
I really should purchase Civ6 at some point so I can actually assess its mechanics…
JoshoB
3891
I think @SorenJohnson even recommended playing Civ4 with Warlords? It was during a podcast that he said this, I think, but I can’t remember which one (3MA?).
Don’t buy it for full price is all I can say; it really isn’t worth it. ;-)
…hmm. Where is this thread you mention? I have been looking for this thread and could not find it. I would also be interested in the map keys you have found.
I got CivVI for free on the Epic Games Store. I fired it up, tinkered for 15 minutes, and went back to Old World. Maybe I didn’t give it long enough? Should I persevere?
That frees some room up on my hard drive at least.
vyshka
3896
Possibly in here somewhere:
@malichai11 it doesn’t look like you shared them, you were trying to figure out a way to do it. I’d love to have them as well. Perhaps converting into a google sheet from the excel and linking that?
