Civilization VI

Games
4045

While I agree that EUIV diplomacy is absolutely marvellous, there’s no way I would ever want that captured in a Civ experience. Both Civ IV and EUIV both capture a similar transparency to them which is actually listing the modifiers to relationships. Civ V was a failure, making it an ambiguous black box. Civ VI is marginally better, but the information is hidden away in a cumbersome diplomacy screen. I can say though that Civ IV isn’t completely transparent because there are hidden diplomacy values too, typically associated with warlike Civs. Guess that’s how the player doesn’t see those surprise wars being launched. And honestly, that was the highlight of Civ diplomacy having those modifiers. And how those modifiers then built a personality in such a concise, elegant manner. Some leaders favoured similar religion giving a significant boost (eg: Isabella of Spain) while others loved similar civics (think Hammurabi) and others just loved long term trading. With Civ VI, it feels like a step back where they’ve tried to incorporate some of what makes EUIV so good with its diplomacy in a particularly awkward manner. Once again, more fuel to light the fire of why Civ IV was so good.

Actually, I will admit that I don’t loathe Civ VI. I do enjoy the board-gamey aspect of it, even though it has some serious shortcomings. And to balance things out, Civ IV did have that atrocious espionage system, and worse still, the feudalism system, and worse again, the corporations. It remains to be seen how Civ VI fares with its own Corporation system coming with the next segment of the season pass.

4046

Yeah, the expansions certainly added some bloat and poorly thought out systems.

4047

My feeling is that the biggest difference between EU IV and Civ IV diplomacy is in the number of diplomatic entities. The sheer number of them and the way that even smaller countries can be relevant to the conversation allows a much richer tapestry to unfold.

The extra diplomatic actions in the system certainly add to its depth but most would feel inappropriate in a game as abstracted as Civ.

All of which is to say that I agree with you that the EU IV diplomacy system far surpasses that in any version of Civ. But that Civ IV’s is well executed for the depth and scope of the game (unlike later iterations of the series). I would love to see a Civ-like game with far more diplomatic actors implemented meaningfully. EU IV is wonderful but the sheer complexity can be a bit overwhelming at times.

4048

Sure, EU IV and Civ are very different games. They have different emphasis, scope, and breadth. Simply dropping in the EU IV system doesn’t solve the issue.

But for me the big difference was the value. In EU there is an investment you can make, and feel like that has a meaningful payoff and impact. Yes it can be very numbers deterministic, the AI will always accept a vassalization if you meet the values, an alliance if they have the open spot and you are sufficiently valuable (rivals, size, not competing over same resources). But if you invest the effort to manage relations, then you will have the payoff. I just never felt that in Civ. The arbitrary changes, war declarations, trading with nations you should hate, etc. There is nothing similar to fostering a relationship with France as Brandenburg so you can leverage them to usurp Austria as the HRE lead. That is something you can spend 100 years laying the foundation for in EU IV, and engage it at the opportune time. I don’t feel the same value exists in Civ.

In fact I dug up my posts from the CGC.

This was specifically diplomacy, but I had others directly above for other game elements. The reality is that since I wrote that I tried going and playing Civ V again, spent 4-5 hours, got bored and haven’t touched the series since. I have absolutely no desire to ever play the series again.

That said I have to amend this post:

Rereading my thoughts it is clear that, in actual play experience, the mid to late game pacing was my biggest issue. Diplomacy was a problem, and the one I remember most because it was the one that changed the most from my nostalgic memories, but my long hated doomstack complaint was my biggest issue.

But I always hated that aspect, so in the last 4 years I forgot that, since I hated them coming in, and I hated them coming out. While diplomacy was serviceable going in, and extremely disappointing and unsatisfying coming out.

4049

I think that this is my biggest disappointment with the direction of all such games. It’s not really the fault of game makers, I think they are correctly reading the market, gamers want control, not simulation. But I am disappointed.

Of course, I am not just talking about diplomacy. This “transparent numbers” mindset runs through all the systems of these games. Count up beakers or manna or points or whatever. Go for tech A because it will lead to tech B in 8 turns, which will lead to the kind of unit or building which will give me what I want.

As noted above, a game is always going to be more open to maximizing long term strategy than real life, because of repetition. But this numerical determinism massively exacerbates the problem.

As opposed to the the more real and interesting: A new communications technology could be pursued… It is likely to accelerate technological innovation. But it is also likely to tear at the social fabric of society and cause religious friction. But how much innovation and how much social upheaval? One never knows ahead of time, but if your rival is allowed to get such technologies ahead of time, there is a price to that. But how much of a price? Maybe the friction between his fundamentalists and his thinkers will leave him weakened long enough for me to strike a fatal blow.

But that is not the direction of these games. Not in diplomacy, not in technology, not in leadership of government or military. Depth is a matter of simple or intricate number systems to be gamed out, which, to my mind, means that the potential for computers to improve on board games is not being fully tapped into.

4050

The trouble with hidden numbers is one of familiarity. In real life we can use our understanding of other people to estimate how things will pan out.

But an AI with our current level of technology will never really behave like a human. So if the diplomacy numbers are hidden, the AI will give the impression of acting inscrutably and abnormally. Providing the numbers lets the player ground their understanding of how the AI works in something concrete, allowing them to strategise to make allowances for AI behaviour.

Similarly if you are simply offered a choice between two options (faster tech with upheaval vs. slower tech), in reality you could estimate how bad this would be, but in a game system it’s much harder to have enough of a feel for the effects to make an informed choice. Great writing can help with this.

That’s not to say that all numbers need to be precise. Quantifying the upheaval as “+40-70 to unrest” allows some uncertainty while letting the player estimate the effects well enough to choose wisely. It does come with the problem that players could be put out when it turns out to be +70.

4051

This would be ideal, but I think it would be incredibly hard to do in a strategy game. It’s reductive to say that computers are all numbers under the hood, but it’s true in that this would ultimately have to be implemented as an algorithm, which people would figure out the second (or third or fourth) time through. In a plot-based game (RPG, etc) you could get away with it more because you’d tie it into the overall story in some kind of branching path.

Basically this:

but not just in terms of diplomatic opponents, but also in terms of game systems. Maybe we can get there sometime relatively soon if someone figures out how to really get something like GPT-3 going in a game context, but I wouldn’t bet on it in the next 5-10 years. (People have set up GPT-3 to run like an old text-based adventure game, and it’s really impressive in terms of text content generation but IMHO not really at the “game” level.)

Re: EU diplomacy, I think this is a very good point:

but the other half of the equation, I think, is that the positions of the powers are fundamentally different than in Civ–there was never a level playing field. I think there’s a very different expectation when you’re madly working the levers of diplomacy to get Lithuania into your German sphere instead of rival Russia’s (or whatever), compared to a 4X-style setup where all the powers are notionally equal players on a game board. Combined with the strongly historical setting, this allows EU to really go deep on the diplomacy in a way that Civ (and, for example, Stellaris) cannot.

4052

Well, I wouldn’t want other Civ leaders in a Civilization game acting like human players. Would you? I want them to behave like a Civilization leader might in the in-game fiction, not like someone trying to win a game, which is how a human player would behave.

4053

One of the things that holds me back from playing EU IV, even though I enjoyed my time with it when released, is that it is too much about diplomacy. I love developing the land in Civ and building the various buildings and wonders. EU IV is so much more limited in that aspect - the games just focus on different things. They really aren’t the same type of games.

Like mentioned above, I think Civ could learn a couple things from EU IV, such as a greater variety of diplomatic modifiers.

4054

Anyway, I just finished my first game of Civ 6 which is why I am in the thread in the first place. :)

I was randomly assigned as Kongo, which was probably for the best in that I totally ignored the religion system (despite generating a ton of faith thanks to this city-state I befriended from the beginning) and focused on other things. (I bought a couple great people and a naturalist, iirc.)

I am generally quite favorable on a lot of the new systems that 6 brings to the table. The districts and the idea of building things outside of your cities is pretty cool, and things like factories that affect other cities within X tiles is a great idea. (Cities building things that affect other cities in a region is neat, and new to Civ as far as I remember.)

They’ve tried a lot of variations on governments and civics over the years and I think the slots & policies approach here is a good one. It’s generally fun to try to pick the different cards based on what you’re doing–I went cavalry-heavy early on as I had horses but not iron, and the feudalism-era ones were good with that, and later on I went trade-route heavy. Getting new governments felt pretty great, because all of a sudden you get to add more bonuses to your empire. The main downside to the system is that there were no, well, downsides. The best government system IMO is still Alpha Centauri, where each social engineering choice had definite tradeoffs and going from green to econ-focused to police state really changed how you’d play. I think that because there were no negatives in the policies (IIRC there was all of one policy that had any kind of negative effect) they couldn’t really add in too many positives, and I think in the end it might end up feeling a little inconsequential.

I don’t think I got a full grasp on their general tall-vs-wide mechanics. The amenities thing seemed really weird at first (I was expecting luxury goods to be empire-wide, instead of each new luxury counting for four cities or whatever) but in the end I think it is reasonable. Other than that and a scaling settler cost I didn’t really see what there was to prevent me from expanding other than good city locations.

The dual tech-tree system was also neat. IIRC all the governments and policies were in the culture tree and all the units in the science tree, and I think it is a bit of a missed opportunity not to mix them up a bit more. I like the (baby steps) move away from the thesis that “scientific progress is the sole driver of civilization” and I think if they put some things that really are cultural developments in the culture tree it would be cool. The tech boost system was cool, and definitely altered my gameplay–maybe I didn’t really need that third privateer but it was worth half a tech = X hundred research points, so let’s do it. The downside is that I basically optimized my tech research through the boosts, instead of what was needed for my empire. I suspect that in future games I’d do it differently, though.

Diplomacy, as discussed above, needs a bit of work. I’m just playing the base game, and I gather the expansions, uh, expand it a bit, but it seemed pretty lacking that I allied Sparta and there was no way for me to join their defensive war against Rome. I did the standard Civ maneuver of conquering a neighbor when you get knights and then digesting it to outgrow the rest. However, the warmonger penalty from that seemed to stick with me for basically the rest of the game. OK, that’s not quite fair, but the warmonger penalty meant that everyone other than Sparta hated me, so whatever, guess I’ll take out Rome next, and then the warmonger penatly basically nullified diplomacy for the rest of the game.

Broadly speaking I think the 1UPT system is improved from Civ 5, though I don’t remember too much about Civ 5 at this point. They seem to have rolled it back a bit, in that there are now a lot more units that can share a tile (i.e. support units). The corps and army mechanic is neat but seemed a bit underbaked – +10 strength is great and all, and I understand that concentration of force is key in a cramped 1UPT system, but that’s it?

I also liked the promotions, in that they seemed to be a bit more unique and less rote “+10% everywhere” or “+20% in X situation” kinds of things. Splitting light and heavy cavalry was neat, though I was thrown for a loop when I couldn’t upgrade horsemen to knights.

Fundamentally, though, I was disappointed in the end by the AI. This was my first game and I made plenty of noob mistakes (like planning a whole conquest based on upgrading my horsemen to knights) and at basically no point did the AI present any challenge. I was playing on totally default settings, at Prince difficulty. So clearly I’ll up that next time. But when I effected my early conquest of the Vikings they had a couple underdeveloped cities and only a few archers. Rome did manage to raze a Spartan city, but when I took them on they again had only a couple scattered defensive units–they never seemed to rebuild their losses. Similarly there were maybe 3 to 5 units tops from each of my subsequent conquests (Brazil, Aztec, America, and eventually Greece), except for the Spanish who had a bunch of cavalry and conquistadors (maybe 10?) that didn’t do much against my end-game army. (Granted I’d already “won” much earlier but it took me a while to get across the oceans and find everyone’s capital.)

I let Sparta hang on until last because they were actually somewhat competitive, scientifically, and even managed to launch a satellite. But they weren’t competitive in any other sense, and the conquest was trivial.

At risk of cheesiness, I must say that I did learn some things about myself. For one, this:

And to expand on it a bit, I also love just exploring the different gameplay systems and building my way through them. This was also one part about Stellaris that I really loved–yes, I’m going to build an army of clones and an army of robots, and tweak my battleship’s laser cannons, because even though there’s no functional point to it (the game is already won or lost based on economic strength), it’s just cool. So it goes for manipulating the governments and trade routes and district placements in this game.

I also realized that I really don’t mind not having a nail-biting challenge in the game. According to Steam, I played this for 18 hours, which means maybe 16 hours on this game (given 2 hours of fighting with the broken tutorial). That’s roughly a week and a half of my free time, and I just don’t want to lose a game that’s gotten all of my free time for the last two weeks. I spend plenty of time losing in the rest of my life. Yes, I’m a weak participation trophy millennial, whatever, go ahead and rant about your superiority if it makes you feel better. The flip side is that what I really want is something to do with all the stuff that the various system-manipulation gives me. That is, I’ve spent all this time tweaking my policies and trade routes and whatnot to get a great empire, and now I need something to do with it. Rolling over conquistadors with tanks is unsatisfying–maybe what I should have done is see if I could beat Sparta to space.

I guess what I’m really saying is that maybe the real civilization is the friends we made along the way.

4055

I think people fall on both sides of this. On the one hand, yes, I’m with you, but on the other hand if I’m barreling toward a culture victory it would be nice if somebody tried to stop me, even if historically maybe Gandhi would have been fine with it.

But to the original point, it doesn’t matter which you prefer–we don’t have the AI for them to honestly act like either right now. I think it’s easier to fake leaders acting according to the in-game fiction in an EU style game, because you expect them to act according to a pretty narrow set of constraints. (And of course in Crusader Kings, whenever someone starts a rebellion they can’t possibly win, you just say, “well, that’s definitely historical!”)

4056

For Old World, we have a “Play to Win” setting which means the AI will meta-game to beat the leading player. Otherwise, they behave more like NPCs, so to speak.

4057

Brilliant, as is to be expected from you.

4058

I think that’s a great idea!

I know you’re not primarily on here to shill your game, but it is definitely on my list and I’m looking forward to it’s release. ;)

Edit: of course the downside is that you have to code two different AIs, or at least put enough effort into it to fool me.

4059

That’s absolutely not the case though. It’s definitely a bit more gamey because the “geopolitical” assessment is not exactly well developed, but you absolutely are able to generate game long alliances in Civ4. And the wardec/demand/religion RNG just sets up along what lines those will be if you understand Civ4 AI diplomacy. It is true however, that manipulating diplomacy into changing the status quo is something much more difficult and dependent on the specific AIs left around.

4060

So I want to think through some more of the differences between Civ and EU. Civ is clearly more focused on building up and then tearing down (in war), with many people completely avoiding the latter.

  • As has been mentioned, there are many more entities in an EU4 game. You couldn’t really do this in a turn-based game unless you did simultaneous turns – it would just take too long.
  • EU4 also has much less building up to do – going tall is very limited. As such, you have to focus on expansion, and there’s no empty land to take – it’s all occupied by AI entities, which need to be fought or diplomatically eliminated. This is a very different process than the Civ one.
  • EU4 doesn’t bother bother filling your time with building roads or land improvements, or assigning workers in cities. In fact, the focus is never on the land itself (squares or hexes) but on counties i.e. logical entities that represent politico-geographic power. This is a huge difference, as it means the focus is no longer unit-centric either. Fog of war is based on distance from your counties, allowing you to see what is going on around you quite clearly and what your enemies are plotting, and to plot against them.
  • EU4 is therefore a political game (focusing almost exclusively on external politics) first and foremost. War is one of the ways to expand, but it’s not particularly well developed. In fact, the main innovation in war is the limitation of it so you can’t gobble up everything right away but must chip away at enemies gradually. Civ, on the other hand, is a resource management/building/warmaking game, with a little bit of politics on top.
  • Now for my personal opinion: from my perspective, I would have preferred EU4 to have fictional entities rather than historical ones – kinda like the animal world option in CK2. Because one thing EU4 is not, is a simulation of world affairs as of 1444. Instead, it’s a fictional politics/conquer the world game inspired by the political entities as present in 1444, with some real-world events thrown in for fun. EDIT: In actual history, countries were far more stable and had far less fighting in this time period due to the balance of power. So the game really simulates complete fiction as giant blobs grow over time. Which is fine, but in my mind it’s really important to highlight what the game is and what it isn’t.

EDIT: I think a good tl;dr is that EU4 is a politics/war game, whereas Civ is a builder/war game. They’re really completely different sub-genres.

4061

Terrific news. That’s perfect. I want AI players in a game modeling history to “stay in character” a bit, I hate when AIs play like they’re playing a boardgame. If my civilization has had friendly and fruitful relations with the Persians going back millennia, I don’t want Cyrus to suddenly turn into a psychopath because I’m about to hit a win condition. It completely pulls me out of the game narrative that has been built up over the many hours of a campaign.

Just a personal preference so the fact that you have options for both is amazing.

4062

I think the way they’ve put it is that they do not attempt to simulate history, they want to make a game that is historically authentic. So you get things like royal marriages, the HRE, personal unions, the rise and decline of the Ottomans, the colonization of the New World and the establishment of trade companies, coalitions against aggressive Great Powers, the Reformation, religious wars, etc. The game brings all those elements to the table but it’s not trying to simulate history. I would say the intent is more that a skillful player can take it off the rails and create their own timeline.

That being said, things like world conquest aren’t possible without abusing/exploiting game systems and mechanics and those tend to get patched up. You can blob more than was historically possible though, absolutely.

4063

I think that’s still overselling it. They haven’t figured out any way to come close to anything resembling real history of the time period other than sticking some random real-world events in. In other words, it’s not doing history, and it’s not doing alt-history either. They’re not simulating any of the forces that would have really prevented a country from taking over many other countries in the time period (which existed aplenty). And honestly, not only is it really hard to do, but given the focus of the game, you can’t really fault them for that. There just isn’t much to do if you eliminate taking over countries and counties in various ways – that is the game. They could transform the game into a country-management simulator, where just holding on to what you’ve got is a challenge (ie. closer to real history), but that would be a completely different game. Victoria 2, from what I understand, is closer to that, and to a certain degree I think CK2 is too.

EDIT: re-reading your post, I’m not sure if I’m debating with you or agreeing with you.

4064

More specifically

For the RNG demand thing, different AIs will stop that at different levels of positive relations and/or power. And acquiescing is actually useful to build relations in cases. It is true that it’s not linked to any goals (outside of join our war requests) though.

And actually yes, you can do it as a human too! It’s part of play at high difficulties. The AI tracks a decaying gift/tribute value and time since request. At low relations (again, different for different AIs) this counts as a tribute demand (with a diplo hit) and also checks against power. At higher relations it counts as a gift and is just checked against given value. Knowing this can let you slingshot harder by knowing you can get some free minor tech or gold to fund deficit research!

Wardecs can be random, but usually not (and it can snowball due to AI “dogpile” wardecs which is a thing). Also a wardec at friendly is only possible if they were planning a war at a lower relation before things ticked up.