Civilization VI - Now available, so you can sink all your free time into it

[Modron]

1 million units sold in under two weeks.

Of course, look at all the retards who bought it in this thread.

They suffer so we don't have to.

 

[Irenaeus]

They suffer because they are retards.

 

[MilesBeyond]

1 million units sold in under two weeks. That's a record for the franchise. So much for PC gaming being dead fairy-tales.

Has "PC gaming being dead" even been a narrative that people have been pushing recently? I haven't heard it since, like, the mid-aughts. Digital distribution and increased user-friendliness has made PCs more popular than ever, and, I mean, look at the things that made consoles attractive compared to PCs in the 90s: Generally less buggy products (I mean as glitchy as a lot of console games were, they usually avoided hard crashes, unlike many PC games), and split-screen multiplayer (having a bunch of friends over for a few drinks and some gaming was a lot cheaper and easier with a console than with a bunch of computers - albeit not as satisfying, IMHO). Both of those things are dead now. So... What's the edge that consoles provide?

 

[Zarniwoop]

They suffer because they are retards.

So we don't have to be

 

[ArchAngel]

1 million units sold in under two weeks.

Of course, look at all the retards who bought it in this thread.

Bought it? Don't you mean "bought it"? :D :D

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

So... What's the edge that consoles provide?

Well, you're not exactly having an Eureka! (shitty pun intended) moment here, consoles are basically retarded little PCs for many years now. And yet they rule the market - due to being cheap and having better mass market appeal (and gaming becoming very mass market thing along the way).

 

[flyingjohn]

 

[A horse of course]

I'm no maths whiz but I don't think there are a million players in that photo.

 

[MilesBeyond]

So far my experience with Civ VI is that I played it twice, thought it was the best launch Firaxis has had in years and a decent game in its own right, but haven't touched it since, nor even thought about touching it. I don't know. It's not the complete wreck Civ V or BE were at launch, but it's just kinda... meh.

I feel like the difference is that as the 4X genre has seen something of a renaissance in the past five years or so, Civ doesn't hold the monopoly on the genre that it used to. I mean, Civ 1 and 2 had decent competition, but I feel like with Civ 3 and 4, and even 5 to an extent, there was kind of this "Love it or hate it, what else are you going to play?" (The answer being older games, obviously, but every once in a while you want to get something new in there). But I feel like there are so many recent 4X releases that I could be sinking my teeth into instead. To me, why would I play Civ 6 when Dominions 4, Age of Wonders 3, EU 4, Endless Legend, and others, all provide more enjoyable experiences? And that's to say nothing of the vast wealth of older 4X games. Honestly if a crazed terrorist were to say "I'll nuke the world if you don't stop playing Simtex games" then I guess everyone should probably say their last goodbyes now.

That being said, I understand Civ's appeal. It's a simple game to learn that offers an amalgam of playstyles. I think that Civ V's mechanics, while not the best in the series, did offer a degree of empire customization that was heretofore unseen, and I think that's kind of the direction the series as a whole is going to end up taking. Make your empire, your way, and become, in a way, the SimCity of 4Xs. Nothing wrong with that, and I understand the appeal. It's just not really what I'm looking for right now.

I am glad to see that Civ 6 is following Civ 5's lead when it comes to wonders. This might be a controversial statement (lol, "might") but I think these past two games have done wonders the best out of the entire series. The problem with wonders in Civ 1-4 is that the amount of hammers the wonder would take to build would often yield you an army large enough to capture the city where the wonder was held. Then you could build that army, take the city that built the wonder, and wind up having the wonder anyway, except now you've also got a new city in your empire, and your standing force is increased by whoever survived the invasion. Civ 5 and 6 have subverted this a bit by continually introducing wonders that provide a one-time bonus upon construction. It's still true that there are generally better things to spend hammers on, and wonder-whoring is often going to be a suboptimal strategy, but at least there's now some benefit to being the one who actually builds them.

(Obviously every Civ game (except maybe 1? I don't remember) has had at least one wonder that gives an immediate bonus - The Oracle or Darwin's Voyage or the like. But it's becoming more common).

 

[A horse of course]

Civilization is the perennial Dad Game. Its success doesn't really have a whole lot of bearing on perceptions of the "core" PC gaming market.

 

[Irenaeus]

Civilization is the perennial Dad Game. Its success doesn't really have a whole lot of bearing on perceptions of the "core" PC gaming market.

Do you have kids?

 

[A horse of course]

wat

 

[Great Deceiver]

S Age of Wonders 3, Endless Legend, and others, all provide more enjoyable experiences?

Agreed. There have been some pretty awesome TBS games released recently and I'm particularly fond of AoW3 - they scratch somewhat different itches (Endless Legends is more akin to Civ than AoW), but they're just objectively better, more playable games.

(Obviously every Civ game (except maybe 1? I don't remember) has had at least one wonder that gives an immediate bonus - The Oracle or Darwin's Voyage or the like. But it's becoming more common).

I think every Civ 1 wonder gave immediate bonuses.

 

[MilesBeyond]

Agreed. There have been some pretty awesome TBS games released recently and I'm particularly fond of AoW3 - they scratch somewhat different itches (Endless Legends is more akin to Civ than AoW), but they're just objectively better, more playable games.

Word. AoW 3 is one of my favourites right now. Had a funny history with that game, actually. As a longtime fan of the series since the demo of the first game back in 98 or thereabouts, I was absolutely appalled to see some of the changes they were making for AoW 3. No more Attack stat and attacks automatically hit? Flyers landing at the end of every combat turn? Classes replacing races? But then it came out and I actually tried them and now I can't go back. Just so good.

I think every Civ 1 wonder gave immediate bonuses.

Nah, I checked. Just Darwin's Voyage. I should note that by "immediate" I mean "exclusively immediate," as in one-time benefits upon building the wonder itself.

 

[rezaf]

But are there really that many wonders of that type in Civ6?Don't you get things like additional policy slots when you capture such a wonder?
Other than that, as we discussed previously, the game has far too many wonders that just suck. Considering you need to spend a shitton of cogs on them and thus are bereft of that city's production potential for quite some time, you need to sacrifice a potentially valuable slot and fulfill all kinds of adjacency conditions, most wonders pack not nearly enough punch.
Also, where's the "Wonders of the World" screen? And what about something a little more prominent than the easily overlooked, sometimes auto-disappearing icon informing you about a wonder having been built elsewhere.
It's especially jarring if you were building the wonder yourself and just get to reassign that cities production without neccessarily realizing what just happened. I actually fell back on a save 5 turns earlier in one game and wasted a ton of a great engineer's hammers to finish a wonder I wanted before some AI - I had only two more friggin' turns to go! Ah well, I guess that's happened to every civ player, but at least in previous games, we were instantly made aware, whilst now...

I've graduated to playing on prince now and tried a handful of starts - anyone agrees the game is a bit too ... random doesn't feel like quite the right word, but something like that?
For example, I had a start where three barbarian camps spawned around me extremely early in the game, and one produced cavalry units. I was constantly struggling to fight off those barbs, and while I did hang in there, I could not build districts or wonders or whatever during those one and a half thousand years, so I completely lost touch with the other civilizations when it comes to progression.
In another start, I was put on a continent with almost all other civs and only a single city state which one of them quickly conquered. It was a somewhat interesting, competitive game, but when the dust settled and I finally could go out and explore the rest of the world, I discovered the Germans had spawned on another continent, with six city states they could exploit without competition and a ton of room to grow. I ended up on the wrong side of this funny situation where one civ researches gunpowder and the other builds a spaceport.
Starting in some areas, such as smallish islands or tundra, seems to be totally unfair now because ocean tiles are kinda worthless and tundra tiles cannot be irrigated.
In one game I spend like a dozen turns moving northward from my starting location (in the middle of some tundry without fresh water access) and it totally felt worth it. I think they need to improve on that.

Also, as I mentioned above, I've yet to see a map where you can explore around a bit with coast-hugger ships. I remember in Civ3, on most maps you could even circumvent the globe with your first trireme, as there usually was a ton of swallow sea.
I've also noticed a trend for continents to cling to the poles, further inhibiting your movement ... but maybe I just had bad luck.

 

[Beastro]

Civilization is the perennial Dad Game. Its success doesn't really have a whole lot of bearing on perceptions of the "core" PC gaming market.

Wut?

When I think of something like a Dad Game I think of games they've always played and can't seem to stop playing. I think of Harpoon or Fighting Steel for Baby Boomers and MMOs like EQ or cira 2000 RTS' like RA2 for Gen Xers.

 

[Irenaeus]

My DAD hates video games.

Only exception I remember was racing and shooting games at arcades in the 80s.

 

[Space Satan]

Just finished my first monarch game and it was unbearable. A horrible quagmire of shit and bad design. Epic speed is too slow, normal is too fast. I skipped entire branches of military just because they are passed almost instantly. Eureka right now is abomibable. 5 turns for every tech? Sure, why not. City states still had warriors, yes, first melee unit, when all had modern armor. Chariots rushes on modern infantry - that's what CivVI is. Techs are insanely boring and banal.
The only good thing is that you must think how to place your city and districts.
Oh and they released a patch:
Changelog:
File Size: 1GB
- Sid Meier's Civilization 25th Anniversary Soundtrack changed from .MP3 to .OGG.

- Sid Meier's Civilization VI OST Artwork Updated

Also, a common feature of past-CivIV Firaxis games - I NEVER touched a diplomacy screen during entire game. Good tradition to uphold...
Also, a quick reminder on hugely successful Beyond Earth reviews:

 

[Jaedar]

. City states still had warriors, yes, first melee unit, when all had modern armor.

This is really an issue with the ai. It seems entirely incapable of upgrading its units for some reason. And stacking them up into corps. It's like they're trying to make one unit per tile as shitty as it could possibly be.

 

[kris]

Also, a common feature of past-CivIV Firaxis games - I NEVER touched a diplomacy screen during entire game. Good tradition to uphold...

Now that you say it.. Wait, I did try to tell them to stop settling near me, before I realised that is only there to get you a casus belli. Because I never saw them listen to my demands.

I given up on the game now. It was some fun, but I came to the conclusion that all games played out the same and the only real diffiult lay in whether you got some bad barbarian experience. I once had two horse barbarian camps spawning near enough and they ran me over.

 

[coldcrow]

Always a pleasure to watch a proper trainwreck.

 

[Destroid]

. City states still had warriors, yes, first melee unit, when all had modern armor.

This is really an issue with the ai. It seems entirely incapable of upgrading its units for some reason. And stacking them up into corps. It's like they're trying to make one unit per tile as shitty as it could possibly be.

To be fair upgrading your units costs a bajillion gold. Is there a way to disband them? I couldn't find it.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Watching more streams and seeing how on Immortal, the AI has enough bonuses to have twice as many mil units as the player and a settler(!!!) on turn 3, and they are still getting steamrolled by competent players.

Finished on deity with Holy Roman Empire without a sweat, I was first at everything except religion. First victory was cultural victory at late 1800 but I have no idea what triggered that victory. Second was scientific after some decades and third one was domination with heavy nuking.
AI is really weak against ranged, it is fairly easy to defend against 10 units with 2-3 archers at start. AI masses units near your border before a "suprise" war, buy a couple powerful units that turn and you mess up the AI, that units will wait there for like 600 years and rot.Holy agent spam is ridiculous as well, as soon as I encountered some religious Civ they zerg me with missionaries. To what effect I didn't really notice, most of my cities were converted without any harmfull side effects.
Produciton is easy to mass and triggering "Eureka" or similar effects for science/civic trivializes the game a lot. I had tanks at early 1800 and space station at early 1900...

Shallowest and most soulless Civ game ever. An amazing achivement after 5th game and Beyond Earth imho.

 

[kris]

Watching more streams and seeing how on Immortal, the AI has enough bonuses to have twice as many mil units as the player and a settler(!!!) on turn 3, and they are still getting steamrolled by competent players.

I came upon the AI on turn 3 in deity and apart from its city it had two settlers, three warriors, a scout and a builder. that i could see.

. City states still had warriors, yes, first melee unit, when all had modern armor.

This is really an issue with the ai. It seems entirely incapable of upgrading its units for some reason. And stacking them up into corps. It's like they're trying to make one unit per tile as shitty as it could possibly be.

To be fair upgrading your units costs a bajillion gold. Is there a way to disband them? I couldn't find it.

I never found the upgrading costs to be that limiting when playing, even if I many times changes civics to the one that halved it when i needed to make the most upgrades. Instead i found the increased unit upkeep cost to be a problem during a short phase of the game. the archers are just to cheap in all ways (and still effective enough) that I hesitate to upgrade them.

 

[Space Satan]

. City states still had warriors, yes, first melee unit, when all had modern armor.

This is really an issue with the ai. It seems entirely incapable of upgrading its units for some reason. And stacking them up into corps. It's like they're trying to make one unit per tile as shitty as it could possibly be.

To be fair upgrading your units costs a bajillion gold. Is there a way to disband them? I couldn't find it.

Upgrading is cheap, just use policy to make it 50% cheaper. Even before it's 200 gold at most.