4177

Wow, it’s been that long?

4178

What they need to do is adopt Total War armies and battles into a civ game where you start in the stone age and end up in some high-tech age. Also fix their horrifically bad AI.

4179

I wish I could have as much fun playing Civ6 as I did when I played the original Sid Meier’s Civilization.

4180

Sadly, you’ll never be that age again.

4181

Yeah, VI is a failure in my eyes. I just can’t get into it. I’ve got hundreds of hours in V, but not VI.

Feels like we’re due for VII sooner rather than later, anyway. VI is five years old this month already.

4182

CIV VII: We heard you, you didn’t like one unit per hex, so we’re introducing a new tactical innovation: one unit per map! Each turn will still take half an hour as the AI decides where to move it, however.

4183

Silly. It’ll be multiplayer only so they don’t need AI.

It’ll still take half an hour per turn as loot boxes are generated though.

4184

I like 6 more than 5.

4185

Yes, me too. I loved the first three. The fourth, I got so distracted by Kael’s Fall from Heaven mod, I hardly played the base game, but I considered that mod the best game I had ever played. 5, though left me cold. I tried it over and over, and there wasn’t a thing about that I liked.

Six is filled with glaring weaknesses, and in my view, the company appears terminally ill based on their constipated response to even the most obvious problems. But the early eras remain highly entertaining and I use it the way many people use light TV. In contrast to Caster of Magic for Windows, it is not the slightest bit tense or thought-provoking, but it is easy fun and relaxing, at least until the Industrial era. When I simply start over again. Nothing wrong with some light entertainment.

4186

I don’t think we can ever go back to that.

I know for me it was more GalCiv then Civ, but I enjoyed 1 and 2 more than 3, despite 3 being a vastly better game in just about every way. One of the worst things about aging is losing that ability to have such joy, and we chase it.

I think recognizing what this is, and not trying to live in the past is important for avoiding being a fossilized boomer though.

4187

Same. Once I became familiar with the district placement bonuses for each type of district, I’ve enjoyed the planning aspect of district placement more than at first.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve played the hell out of V (mostly MP), but I definitely prefer VI to V.

4188

I’m sure that age is part of it, but I think it’s also a reaction to something that’s really new. In retirement, I have had chances to do some really different stuff, and those things had the same glow as, say, my early weeks with the original Civ.

Trouble is that when it comes to computer games, it seems to me that most games, even indie games, simply riff on a genre, meaning a minimal amount of newness. Especially these ongoing franchises.

And I understand why. The customer base generally wants more of the same, with better graphics and QOL stuff and maybe a twist or two. They line up to buy #3 or 6 in a series, where something really different, that’s a big risk.

Personally, I don’t get too worked up about this. There’s a place in most lives for safe, unexciting entertainment. And if I want something novel and exciting, it’s kind of ironic to expect it to be in pretty much the same place as previous novel and exciting – in this case, historical 4X computer games.

4189

I think for some folks it’s exactly what you said, however I think for others, it’s more a fear of wasting money.

When you’re young- you worry about short-term survival, being able to pay/rent bills.

When you’re older, where I’m at, but not as old as you, it’s more about getting to where you need to be, and having security for the old age you know is coming (or dealing with the things you put on your youth)

I think when you don’t have to worry about income in the short or long-term so much, and have that security, you can start looking for risks a little more.

4190

Yep. I didn’t really get into V. Despite the warts, I enjoy playing VI and enough so that I sprung for the New Frontier pass a few months after it became available. That was semi-enjoyable. Secret societies, heroes, barbarian clan, and corporations are fun modes to activate. The only mode that make me go WTF is zombies. I played one game of it and how is that fun? The zombies wiped every city state off the face of the earth. All of the AI civs were surrounded by zombies with their lone city being the capital which I guess cannot be wiped by zombies as the city health simply hovered near zero.

4191

Maybe more of a life lesson.

4192

I’ve been playing since CivNet way back when. Civ6 has by far been the worst iteration of the series for me. I really liked Civ5, put thousands of hours into it. Didn’t mind the brain-dead AI with 1UPT… but Civ6 just feels soulless to me. Just a series of design decisions that are supposed to make the game interesting, but don’t feel cohesive or fun. Districts, for example, I find to be extremely tedious - having to predict bonuses 100+ turns in advance. Missionary spam, AI that settle every tiny spot on the map… just hated it.

Just isn’t good to me. Maybe the whole formula has gone stale for me.

4193

That’s probably my biggest complaint about it. Having my 300BC ruler deciding where to place an industrial district so that in the Industrial Age, 1000 years later, the coal plant I build there will overlap with that of a nearby city completely breaks immersion for me.

4194

Reading this, I realize that although I agree with you that planning 1000 years out is ridiculous, it doesn’t bother me. I actually like the district system. And I ask myself why I don’t mind the absurdity and realize – I do not take this game or any of the similar games seriously as historical recreation.

Back when I was playing the original Civ, I expected and experienced immersion, to the point that I would go around thinking “grasslands” or “plains” traveling as I hiked or drove through real life locations. It was part of the magical glow of the game. And as much as I loved the gaming experience, I muttered over the failures of the tech tree, how particular advances did not really rely on their “pre-requisites.” And on the idea that luxuries were always the keys to a happy populace.

But that kind of immersion is long gone for me, but in all similar games. I think my breaking point was the idea that various civs start with and always possess innate traits. This is a terrible series of fallacies, not only that from prehistory there was an English people, but that something in their stock determined that they would be great seafarers and industrialists, and that they needed to find some coastal spots for cities. As opposed to the truth, that their location and other twists of history pushed them into these directions.

In the original Civ, Russia might have always been aggressive, but it got no concrete advantage or disadvantage, nor did your own civ. However, as the series and the entire genre matured, it became the convention to pretend otherwise. So no one raises an eyebrow at the idea that it’s sure lucky that the real life Kongolese found the jungle and the Scythians found the plains, because they never could have survived if it had been the other way around.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. After all, ancient people did not know the future value of various resources. And much the same kinds of objections can be made to other gaming genres and entertainment genres. (Police and detective shows are packed with ridiculous conventions.) But for me, this made true historical immersion increasingly impossible, and I long ago quit looking for it. It’s always just a set of fun (or not so fun) toys to play around with, and from where I sit, it appears some players are looking for tile puzzles to ponder and others are looking for battles to fight.

But my point is that your post reminds me that my acceptance of Civ 6 as good light fun is really just my acceptance of how far the entire genre has fallen from my original hopes for it. From what I am hearing, Victoria 3 is trying to backpedal in a neighboring genre. We’ll see how that goes over.

4195

This is the thing that I think killed VI entirely for me. What an incredibly un-fun mechanic. For me it’s not the immersion-breaking thing – I have always leaned toward the spreadsheet/optimization side of things in Civ, so whatever – but needing to know specific behaviors about specific improvements later in the game is just awful gameplay. The Coal Plant thing is a great example, or literally everything about Neighborhoods, or whatever the dumbass tourism thing is.

Civ has always been about spinning plates and guns-or-butter prioritization, but in VI it becomes nothing but plate-spinning and counting hexes to make sure you don’t plant a landmine you’re destined to step on in 150 turns. No thanks.

Which is all a shame, because there’s a lot of really great work in individual pieces of Civ VI. The art is absolutely fabulous. The UI is gorgeous (my goodness, it’s just A+ fantastic). Probably some other things that I’m not thinking of because I wrote the game off years ago, heh.

It’s funny how we all have different things that just kill games for us. I don’t share the AI complaint about V, f’rex, so I’ve enjoyed the hell out of my thousands of hours there. Others in this thread don’t mind the district thing in VI, so they are able to have a ton of fun with it.

Some of you are wrong, of course, but what can you do? :D

4196

This is why I think it works best in turn-a-day multiplayer. There’s plenty of time to devote to thinking about what you’re going to do every turn, and no next turn to go straight on to if you finish quickly.

In a regular single-player game, I can’t bring myself to consider it anything like that deeply, especially as it doesn’t really matter that much as I’ll have left the AI in the dust well before factories and coal plants are a possibility.