1887

The AI has attacked me repeatedly in every game for no reason that I can see except perhaps that I was deliberately not building up a big army. No doubt in the next patch the devs overcompensate again a la Civ V and then they’ll never attack no matter what you do.

And there’s another annoying thing in the diplomacy messages. Japan for example seems to find exploring important despite being the least exploratory civilization ever. So they send messages that seem to suggest they are pleased I’m not taking away all their exploration fun, and immediately turn hostile. Similarly China tells me they’re pleased I’m not building wonders and also turns hostile. Makes you wonder what they’d do if I did piss them off. Probably ally. Sigh.

So far the biggest challenge is 2 or 3 undiscovered barbarian villages cranking up 3-unit attack forces while it’s still the 4th millenium and I have no resources to deal with them. Rarely happens but when it does it’s deadly. No doubt they nerf that soon too.

1888

Where is Firaxis in all this? For example, Stellaris came out with some issues and the devs were all over that. Blog posts, streaming multiple times per week, all over social media talking about the problems and what they were doing to fix them. Firaxis can’t even be bothered or what? Like, how about instead of Reddit having to reverse engineer the game to find out how basic game mechanics work, they maybe just put up something somewhere explaining it? Maybe something saying “Hey, we know about x y and z bugs, we expect a patch next week”. Anything? Hello? Wtf?

Ugh, I’m really annoyed because I was totally into this game and then it’s like after my first run through everything went to shit. I don’t understand! :(

1889

Also, I haven’t played all the civs yet, but so far the best bonus seems to be for Peter, because of the big city terrain advantage they get. In BC times I don’t usually have enough money to just buy all these bonus and luxury hexes, and they get enough for free along with bonuses later for great folks that I can save thousands over the course of the game.

1890

Game just came out 5 days ago, give them a chance to gather feedback and such. It’s not like it’s broken or unplayable, there are just some (in many cases) slight balance tweaks that need to be made. Some larger issues to be addressed sure, the AI for one will always be a work in progress, but “Firaxis can’t be bothered” is kind of a knee-jerk reaction.

1891

All I can say is that I’d rather play Civ VI than play Stellaris even after the patches.

1892

That’s not the point he was making. :) For what it’s worth, Firaxis is just not on board with the level of communication and interaction that Paradox and some other devs have. They strike me as much more… corporate.

1893

Yeah, I started a game with Heinlein installed the day before Civ came out and haven’t gone back to it since. I probably will, eventually.

1894

This has happened to me twice. I’ve met Gorgo as Gorgo, and Perry as Perry. It immediately played havoc with tracking who actually had influence with city-states, so I ditched both games.

1895

I find it a very strange programming decision that the default behavior is not to eliminate the civilization you end up with from being picked as a random AI Civ.

1896

Programming? Ed Beach pretty much said it was intended when he talked about it. He seemed to think it was a good idea.

1897

OK, so it’s a design decision. I will stipulate it’s not a very good one.

1898

Well as someone said above, he did say that they plan to make it so you can select not to have certain leaders in a game. I am guessing there will be enough push back on this that they will change things up to fix this particular problem. I have faith that Firaxis will fix most of these issues (outside of the AI being as good as many want it to be), but my question is how long will it take? Seems like it took them a month or two to patch Xcom 2 earlier this year. Still, I haven’t had a lot of playing time, but I think it’s fun as is.

1899

Arg, I was going to get either a domination victory or a science victory, but inadvertently got the culture victory since I had so many wonders. If you continue playing, you can’t get other victory conditions, can you?

1900

If you want to play an aggressive game, Montezuma is pretty crazy. Getting free builders and being able to cash them in for districts is a huge accelerant.

1901

I am liking the game a lot. Context: I have played all of the Civ games except Revolution. It would be impossible for me to rank them all over the course of 25 years or so. But I like this one better than vanilla Civ V, for sure. More context: I have never been the kind of player that enjoys playing at the highest difficulty settings where the AI gets a ton of fucking bonuses and I get a lot of penalties, that just pisses me off. Also I like the empire/city building aspects of the series and so I focus on a relatively small number of cities with a lot of Wonders. I am a sucker for Wonders.

I started with America on the lowest difficulty. I won pretty easily, culture victory though I was going for science victory.

Next game I bumped it up one difficulty level, went with China. I won easily again, another culture victory even though I was going for a religion victory.

Current game, bumped difficulty up again, playing as Rome. I am going for religion again just because I want a different victory condition win. Pretty early on, 1000AD or so, but I feel like I am winning fairly easily (as I should be given the difficulty setting).

My next game would be at Prince, which is the difficulty where neither the player or the AI gets bonuses/penalties.

So far I think the AI sucks pretty bad, but that can be said of all 4x games. My beef here is that the AI just has some fundamental issues that should be easily fixed in a future patch. In no particular order:

AI declaring war on me when they are objectively weaker. This has happened in all three of my games. Inevitably a random AI will declare war on me and mob me with a bunch of units from a previous era only to get destroyed and sue for peace.

AI not wanting to trade resources at a reasonable exchange rate. I notice this with luxuries mostly. Why won’t the AI trade luxuries at 1:1? No idea, but they won’t.

AI denouncing me for no apparent reason. I’ve had a friendly AI ask me to declare a joint war and then denounce me after declaring war on the target they asked me to declare war on. Grr. I have also had an AI denounce me for things that were objectively false.

Diplomacy is lacking. AI goes after city states I am suzerain of and I can’t fight them without a warmonger penalty. Irritating.

UI sucks. No sentry option for units? Lots of other irritating things, some of which can be fixed with editing files.

I really like the Great People. Some of the bonuses/abilities are great and are really impactful in ways I did not expect. Examples: GPs that can copy a luxury resource on that map and give it to you. GPs that can give you strategic resources.

I like the government/policy stuff overall, lots of situational policies, which a lot of times can feel useless but occasionally can really help.

I think they have done a better job with strategic resources this go round. As in, its easier to work around not having a strategic resource in your borders but they are still important enough to drive a decision to found a new city or declare war over.

1902

I love building Wonders too, especially in this version of Civ – the Wonder movies are great! But I have a question about the lighting. I toggled on “automatic time of day,” but now the game seems always to be at night. Is it adopting my local time of day? I was hoping for the day/night cycle I read about pre-release. How do I get that?

I’m really enjoying this Civ, but I agree that Firaxis should be more forthcoming about what they’ve got planned. I can understand not wanting to get into the weeds of a 30-page thread on civfanatics on the UI or on science/production balance. But even a generic statement of priorities like “We’re working on a patch that includes AI improvements, UI enhancements, more hotkeys, tweaking tech/production balance, choose your opponents, rename your towns” – I would think that would be good public relations. My working theory is they wanted to keep the decks clear for today’s announcement that the game is now available for the Mac.

1903

So I just finished my first game at King as Kongo cultural in 1890 a space victory was probably 40 or 50 turns away…I actually “won” 3 other games also at King, but didn’t slog through to finish them. Unfortunately, that is the still my biggest issue with what is otherwise the best Civ ever. The mid to late game is just boring. I didn’t do much the last 100 turns and looking at the nice charts at the end I was on top cultural, scientifically, and pop around turn 200. Literally the last 30 turns were me sleeping all my units, having fun with spy missions. and hitting next turn. Waiting for the inevitable moment when I had enough tourist to win.

I think the tactical AI is improved from Civ V, but only has gone from brain dead to really bad.

There is a ton of wonderful new features in this game. Many of them contained in the late game, like espionage and others I’m intrigued by like the popular nuke option and changes to how airplanes work. I didn’t build a single airplane cause why bother my opponents had even research early airplanes. However, it is just not worth spend several hours of doing nothing to but end turn to get to that point.

One of the things that Civ IV, did best was the hey lets gang up on the leader. It maybe unrealistic from each leader has public and secret agenda, but I sure love a challenge in the middle of the game.

Don’t get me wrong, I really love this game and it is lot of fun for the up until around 1000 AD or so.

1904

Strollen, we’re in parallel universes: I just finished my first game, as Rome (but on Prince level), with a cultural win in 1950 or so, with a space victory maybe 20 turns away. I had many of the same reactions as you. I love the game, but the late game was not nearly as interesting as the first 150-200 turns. Like you, in my last 30 turns I played with spies, and I also built most units in the game just to see what the models and animations look like. (Short answer: cool!) The AI has improved a lot over Civ 5, most notably in the early game. But by late game, I had such a big military and religious lead that the AI understandably didn’t declare war on me. As you say, the Civ 4 gang-up may have been annoying, but it made for some exciting endgames.

My final score was 722 - Neville Chamberlain level, just above Andrew Jackson and just below Louis XVI. (But the game doesn’t store this info! No Hall of Fame!) I built one National Park and many seaside resorts. I had 17 Great People, and my museums and holy places were stuffed full of works of art. I built 11 Wonders. The Eiffel Tower is a thing of beauty at night. Cristo Redentor is a thing of beauty, period. The Terracotta Army promoted every unit in my army, which was cool. The Pyramids buffed my builders all game. Others included Ruhr Valley, Bolshoi Theater, Forbidden City, Hanging Gardens, Mont St-Michel. (Come to think of it, I didn’t really take a close look at Mont St-Michel.)

Now that I’ve got one win out of my system, I might try Kevin’s suggestion of a Marathon or Epic game, as that would focus on the part of the game that’s most interesting and challenging.

1905

Would that not just make the mid to late game even more tedious?

(It’s a problem I’m having too)

1906

Like many of you I just won my first game on Prince (cultural victory, but that’s what I was going for). I made it a point to maintain a strong military since Cleopatra was a neighbor, and faced almost no pushback from the AI. I think Cleo was going for a Religious win, since she converted all of my cities, but never ventured overseas (from what I can tell).

I paid no attention to religion or espionage, yet somehow managed to capture one of Teddy Roosevelt’s agents. (I only discovered that I had when he offered a boatload of his shit for her release).

Time to bump the difficulty and try a random leader (something I rarely do) and let circumstances determine the victory condition.