1747

I’m in the that mid-game lull where I’ve fended off the early war, wiped out the aggressor and just going through the motions of building improvements and waiting to see what happens.

It’s funny, whenever I’m at war I stress about how production and gold is getting sucked into the military costs and I’m missing out on building my Civ. But then during peace there can often be long periods of just making a few choices and clicking next turn, for a few centuries. So much of the ingredients of an epic game can be determined by chance, your starting location etc.

1748

I had a game last night where my entire continent was city states. All in the same area.

It was was me (Scythia), Brazil, China. But in the NE corner of the continent were 8 city states. Fucking Eight. All together in their own little thing. There was also one normally located one over by Brazil. Really, really strange. They were all basically within sight of each other. You could get 4-5 on one screen at a time pretty easily.

1749

My Yahoo review. First time I’ve written for them as a freelancer (sniff). They cut out my beautiful first sentence but whatevs.

1750

Hmm, I just fired it up to give it another go and I couldn’t click the Continue button when it loaded.
Then it went black screen while loading a new game when I tried to alt-tab and I had to reboot my system because it wouldn’t let me access Task Manager or end the application.

1751

Try adding the folder to Windows Defender exception list.

1752

This happened to me last night. I couldn’t even task manager.

Also remove Geforce experience. Reboot.

1753

Exactly the same thing happened to me. Then the next two tries it also hung but I could alt-tab out, and then after that it started working again. Mysterious!

1754

It has nothing to do with GeForce Experience. Add an exclusion to Windows Defender.

1755

It’s been locking up for me at the same spot repeatedly - right after the coliseum movie. Is there a way to turn Wonder movies off?

1756

I’ve started about 3 or 4 games, but I get to about the medieval period and start over because I realized I was doing something entirely wrong.

One thing I have noticed in all games so far is that I’m having absolutely no luck with strategic resources such as iron or nitre. I’ve still got Warriors who cannot upgrade. Frustrating.

1757

Not a spot of iron in the entire continent, from what I can tell, in my current game. Neither myself, nor Cleo or Betty have any swordsmen.

Chariots don’t require horses? That’s kind of odd. There are horses close to my capitol, but I haven’t been able to grab them yet.

Has anyone hit a “We Love The King Day”/“Golden Age”? I haven’t and I haven’t seen any references to it either.

1758

I don’t think those exist now. If your amenities get high enough over the threshold in a given city, production goes up - “Ecstatic” I think is the highest, which is +20% city growth and +10% yield.

1759

I’ll give that a shot, I seem to recall seeing something someplace else about that as well.

1760

I added the exception to Windows Defender and Civ6 seems to be doing better. Much, much improved load time.

1761

Wow! I was literally booting the game up in the background while reading about the Windows Defender issues and then it did the exact same thing to me. And then I added the exclusion and it loads SOOOOO much faster now. Thanks! :D

1762

I really enjoyed your review. A fair mix of praise and critique. I loved your opening story about that close game you had. I agree with your overall enthusiasm for the game, and I also agree with your criticism of diplomacy; it’s the aspect of Civ that’s changed least since Civ 1. As I write this I’m watching Trump (the gamer, not the candidate) stream a multiplayer game, and he’s negotiating with other players on all sortsa stuff. I keep thinking “wow, maybe some day AIs will work like that,” but I’m not holding my breath. I think I’m more excited about districts than you are; I love the new layers of decisions they impose on us.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to write the review and to share the link here.

1763

Ill write my steam review sometime in the next few days. It will be a reluctant thumbs down. The new mechanics are great, but the short of it is that the AI is pathetically bad. In my current game, I have modern military units while another power has swordsmen. I have less units than the AI, so he does the super predictable trick of asking for open borders and then began rolling in all his units. Of course I know what is going on and move a bunch of units near the city he has chosen to surround.

Now this wrong for a number of reasons.

  1. According to our reputation, he is super happy with me. So why is the AI doing this?
  2. I out tech his military by several ages, why isn’t this taken into an account?
  3. He has other wars going on, so why open up yet another front?

So I do something interesting, since the AI likes me so much, I ask him for an alliance, which he accepts.
Again, why? Doesn’t it have a plan? It can’t declare war now. Its units end up sitting in my territory for 30 turns until the alliance expires and then it leaves for some reason.

Then another AI from half way across the world declares war on me and I see nothing for like 20 turns. Then I see spearmen show up to fight my marines with assault rifles. WTF?! This war is stupid, I ask for peace, and it is not an option. So I erase the pathetic army and then the AI is like, oh, umm, here is a bunch of gold if you will make peace.

It doesn’t matter how amazing the game mechanics are or anything else if your opponent is just brain dead. I would say that Ill put this down until they patch it, but IIRC, they have NEVER patched / fixed the AI in CIV. Sure there were bugs, but nothing about making it actually smarter than it was. Hopefully there will be some community patch or mod that will make the AI half-way intelligent.

And before anyone says, “Good AI is really hard to do”, please go play Age of Wonders 3. It really takes the enjoyment out of the game when you know by the very early game that you have already won even though you haven’t even figured out what victory condition to go for.

1764

I came to the same conclusion.

The game just isn’t worth playing it its current form- and much like how Stellaris killed Paradox games for me, Civ VI has killed Firaxis games.

1765

Glad you liked it. :) Perhaps I’ll come to enjoy districts more with additional playtime. I ‘only’ logged about 50-60 hours for the review, and continued to find that the game improved with experience. It’s a bit like reviewing an MMO in that respect – no matter how hard you try, it’s tough to pick up on all the nuances. (Actually, reviewing MMOs in a standard one-and-done editorial format is pretty much an exercise in futility, but that’s a story for another thread…)

1766

I’ve been watching (listening really) to Sulla’s stream. It starts out optimistic and overlooks a number of troubling UI issues, but by part four opinion sours.

The AI, UI, bugs and scaled district costs (maybe it’s a bug?!), along with the sparse tech/culture trees really put me off so far. I guess I’ll until he patches roll in.