I’m super late to the party (as usual) but I picked up Civ VI recently on a $15 steam sale. Tried to play it today and I do not understand this game. I figured I would because I’d played all the previous CIV titles and generally like 4x and builder genres. But in this game I can’t build anything in my starting city except military units? I researched the techs to build like granaries and stuff but it doesn’t seem to be an option. Also the map seems to be packed with barbarians? My scouts are constantly running from danger while my sole starting warrior has to stay pegged to my only city so I can avoid being caught defenseless.
Obviously the early game is much different than previous Civ titles. Anyone have some pointers for the first twenty turns? Should I only be cranking out warriors to secure the region around my capitol? Should I be beelining settlers and working on cranking them out ASAP?
The hardcore fellows basically are racing to make settlers and workers and so (they say) the typical build order is scout-scout-settler. They care most about racing the AI for the good city spots.
I mean you can play however but the min-max way is to try and get as many “eurekas” as you can. I also think you should run your units ASAP to find as many city states first as possible. The early boost to finding cities states first is (imo) basically broken, but Civ VI seems be operating on a BrEaK iT MoaR design now.
Your city is likely safe without keeping your one warrior around. The barbarian scouts are no threat to a city and you can bring him back if there is real trouble. Slingers suck as a ranged unit but if they kill a unit they make researching archery faster. Once you have archers dealing with barbarians is easier.
Slingers killing a unit gives you a Eureka, so you want to build one slinger. Taking a barb camp gives a Eureka.
Basically Civ VI is kind of annoying / awesome in that it wants you to have tons and tons of “micro” goals. Whether you like doing that depends on how you could think 4X games should play.
I wonder if you ran into a UI interface issue on the city building screen. There are buttons to “advance the list” to scroll to … buildings, wonders, units and projects. I suspect you hit the button for units and the buildings aren’t there till you scroll up? I’m just guessing.
About the barbs…yeah. It’s a different world. Scouts won’t threaten your cities but other units might.
I’ve now learned to be hesitant with any Switch ports, especially with a game still being actively developed on another platform, as Switch games seem rarely updated. No clue if Nintendo makes this difficult for the devs or if this is just a skewed view from the few PC ports I’ve tried on Switch.
I’ve just checked back in to try out the new content and particularly the new modes. My experience so far is similar to a few posters above. The new modes are (briefly) fun, but the main effect seems to be ridiculous and capricious advantages for the player. (As someone said earlier – find Sinbad in a coastal city early --insta-win). And the devs seem to be piling on even more game mechanics that the AI doesn’t seem to know how to use. I’m curious, has anyone observed the AI creating industries or monopolies? (I still haven’t over repeated playthroughs). Or has anyone seen the AI using heroes as anything but throwaway combatants (i.e. an AI Sinbad zipping around making money or AI Hercules completing districts)? Or going back a ways, has anyone seen the AI flip a city using cultists or create a vampire castle?
Even the less clearly advantageous modes – shuffled techs and civics, dramatic ages, apocalypse – all seem to confound the AI much more than they do the player. (I just played a shuffle game where Astrology and Theology were delayed, and as result I kept seeing great prophets sitting in AI capitals unused). With most of the new modes engaged, game difficulty levels are pretty much obsolete, and I’ve actually had to switch off culture victories entirely so I don’t accidentally win one (it’s happened three times) on my way to a different victory. (This last happened, in a Gaul playthrough, in about 1740 without me building a single theater square. Just bonkers.)
Even if this is a concession, as some people were speculating earlier, to the “break the game,” memes and exploits crowd, I don’t get the sense of that. Sure it’s fun to watch Potato McWhiskey or Spiffing Brit pull off some crazy min-max challenge on Youtube then attempt it yourself. But then what? There’s no replayability, no incentive to break the game a second time once you’ve broken it once, no “just one more turn” feeling. I guess the one solution is just to switch these new modes off, but then I wonder what’s even the point.
Just very confused by this new direction. I’m probably being a crabby old guy here, but I don’t know if it bodes well for the game’s future development or for Civ 7.
Honestly, Civ6 was always fairly shit as a strategy game. It sounds like they threw in the towel on trying to make it one and just went all-in on the meme / for fun angle.
On one hand, that’s probably playing to the game’s strengths. On the other, for a fan of strategy games and this franchise in particular it’s definitely not a direction I want to see them go. That’s okay, there’s plenty of other strategy franchises out there for me. Old World is sucking up my time and attention at the moment and that’s much more what I’m looking for.
I feel a bit the same way. The AI really cannot properly take advantage of the new game modes. The new game modes enable players to generate lots more of whatever it is that they need for victory (faith, culture gold, production). The civs being added also seem to have more and more extreme capabilities.
He’s entertaining, if a little smarmy and self-pleased. And his shtik sometimes feels less convincing depending on the game he’s targeting. (I think he uses a lot of save-scumming and careful editing to pull off some of his “amazing” feats). But his recent Civ 6 videos all seem totally accurate, in that you can fairly easily reproduce them on your own. (Same with Potato McW).
I’ll withhold any judgment on Civ 7 until they announce it. Every game in the series has had a different designer and at least since 4 they seem to try to throw some pretty big shakeups into the core gameplay of each one.
The problem is that the series needs a break. It needs time to breath and to develop some good ideas and test them out, or just to stop altogether if they can’t figure anything out. But they can’t – they have a cash cow to milk. If they can’t milk it, Firaxis stops existing or has to develop new successful game franchises. They got lucky with X-Com (and that game took a LOT of time to figure out), but not much else.
But aren’t they able to continue to milk 6 while they do what you say for 7? Maybe 7 will just be a cash grab, I don’t know, but they’ve also never rushed out sequels to Civ. We’re at five years from the release of 6 with no sign of a new entry yet. Five years is the average length between entries. I don’t know that Firaxis has any new games announced right now, so likely a new Civ is in the pipeline, but who knows. I just look at the series as a whole and don’t see any of the releases as cash grabs(ignoring the oodles of DLC in 6) or rushed out. Always a new designer and spaced half a decade apart. Now, 4X games as a whole need some fresh ideas and Civ certainly has suffered from that same stagnation.
