4097

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.

4098

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.

4099

cc @Enidigm

So, Whiskey lead me to Spiffy Brit. What is his deal with “GAME IS PERFECTLY BALANCED WITH NO EXPLOITS?” I assume he’s just being funny?

4100

Yes; pure sarcasm. He frequently points out ways various games can be utterly broken by their own rule systems.

4101

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).

4102

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.

4103

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.

4104

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.

4105

Five years is not a long time. Remember, that time is filled in with DLCs and expansions. They go from game, to expansion, to another expansion, to a new game in the series. It’s very hard to come up with anything amazing with that kind of process.

4106

Spiffing Brit is funny but a bit like Zeropunctuation he has a shtick (watermarked stock art and Yorkshire Tea) and to keep the algorithms working his videos are getting longer, so the first couple videos are hilarious but he’s becoming a bit of a try hard as time goes on. Actually the funniest thing he’s done in a while is his “visit England” satire video.

Still, he’s famous enough that Amplitude studios made him an in game avatar as well as some other prominent influencers when they released to the YouTube community a preview build of Humankind.

4107

I’m all in for Humankind, got into the December beta trials or whatever. But that bit left me cold. Who are these ‘influencers’ and why do I want to ‘play against them’? Now, I do actually know they have their YouTubes and what-all. But just, “Really? We’re doing this?” Oh well. Not going to dissuade me from Humankind. I’m looking forward to wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth when I try to decide whether to play Old World or Humankind night to night.

4108

Yeah I absolutely despise putting influencers into games in any way or courting them. Just feels really gross or shameless.

4109

why nobody has told me this before? “goat simulator for x4 games” is exactly what I love!

too bad I don’t play pc games anymore :(

4110

Civ VI is getting a Zombie defense mode! Loving these fun alternate modes like Red Death. Still need to play the pirates one.

In Zombie Defense mode, every unit slain in combat has a chance to rise from the battlefield as a zombie, which will then chase and attack the nearest non-zombie. Units successfully killed will respawn as zombies themselves.

You have new trap and barricade improvements, which are built on owned or neutral territory, to deal damage to zombie units passing through or near them. You can also build two city projects that let you temporarily control the zombies within your city limits, which then lets you redirect zombies to target enemy units or move them out of the city.

There’s also the zombie defense spy operation, which lets you try to spawn zombies on worked tiles in another player’s city

4111
4112

TIL this week: competitive multiplayer Civilization is a thing.

4113

Did competitive Civ6 multiplayer ever move beyond the “first to rush and mass upgrade swordsmen” meta?

4114

Civ6 is free until Sunday for Xbox Live Gold members. Which made me do a double-take. What? Civ6 is out on consoles? I wonder how they made that work? I might download it just to see how it works with a controller without a game specifically designed that way like Civilization Revolution (which was brilliant).

4115

It is on Switch too and that has cross-save syncing with the PC version.

I don’t know if the Xbox version has cross-save too, but maybe.

Such a great feature.

4116

If anyone misses Civ4, I just recently discovered that Fall from Heaven 2 has actually been updating into an iteration called “Ashes of Erebus” that is still being updated today. They added a bunch of new stuff and looks like they rebalanced a lot of things.