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

[Cyberarmy]

It's not like that you need to upgrade your units for every 10 turns. Archers became crosbowman and remain like that for a long time. Same for melee units, I used swordsman and pikeman for a looong time before any upgrades.
I'm still trying to figure out how my cavalary upgraded to helicopters though. Poor horses.


Edit: Also gold is a bit less of a problem this time. Accumulates quickly and you don't really need to spend it on quick construcitons thanks to the new "distirct" mechanic.

 

[Raghar]

It's not like that you need to upgrade your units for every 10 turns. Archers became crosbowman and remain like that for a long time. Same for melee units, I used swordsman and pikeman for a looong time before any upgrades.
I'm still trying to figure out how my cavalary upgraded to helicopters though. Poor horses.

It's jab at how US is calling theirs helicopter units.

 

[Bliblablubb]

Finally had the time to play a "real" session after a 50 turn "relearn the basics" run.

Whoever said the AI is pants on retarded was spot on, it's sometimes even worse than the Total War one, and THAT AI only knew "off, cheat and do random things to feign activity".
The Civ6 AI is incapable to deal with the 1UPH limit, one can watch them dance for years because their long distance waypoint is blocked every other round. Diplomacy is just a random toss of a coin.

In my game I was sammiched between Greece, Monty and Ghandi, which promised to be a bumpy ride with their early special units. Also no city states close by, which gave me a huge bonus with the free first envoy last time.
Alright, let's roll.
After about 50 turns Pericles has 8 units dancing polka between my cities for several turns, but since we are BFF4life, I didn't think much of it. Of course, then every Civ AI's ancient nemesis came into play: the lone unprotected worker unit.
Function MUST_HAVE_SHINY triggered!
The rest of his army was as surprised as I was by this attack, because they continued with their polka performance for a few more turns. My 5 archers against his 8 hoplits is going to be painful tho, amirite?
Ahahaha nope. For the next 10 rounds, his units approached my city, then moved back out again, rinse and repeat (function PILLAGE failed, because no impovements present). Picked them off one by one with my achers. He didn't even attack them when I got cocky and placed them in striking distance.
After they were all dead I got bored and offered him white peace. "Nevah!", he says. One round later he offers me all his gold + 30/turn for peace. Awsome AI.
Now Monty wants a piece of action too. Bring it on biatch! He brings a whooping 3 brrrd warriors that never even enter my city radius. After one got killed he too offers me all his money for peace. Monty had more than double my military power mind you.

What is this, happy Codex Giftstravanza?

Then Ghandi offers me 30 bucks for open borders. I try to push him for 40g. Nope? Let's try "make it work". Now I am supposed to pay HIM 40g. Wut? Whatever, from now on I am gonna stick to rat diplomacy instead.

I am only 100 rounds in, but when I skimmed over my neighbors nobody would really pose a threat to me. Most of them only build a religious district and farms, nothing else, while my cities already have workshops and shit. I could spit out medieval units in 4 turns, while they could only throw wheat and their ancient warriors at me. Especially Greece focussed only on wonders (he never finished), religion (his missionries getting killed by city states) and his units (dancing polka all day).
I am only on princeling difficulty, which seems to be the "filthy casual xbawx player" setting now, but upping it would only give them more units they don't know what to do with, so that can't be the solution either. On top of that I am playing a half blind first run, learning things as I go. I even completly ignored religion, because it didn't seem to produce happiness for all the effort it takes anymore.
Still going to continue this until I punished Pericles for his un-bro treachery, but unless Ghandi travels back in time to outfit his lolifants with nukes, I am facing the classic "unevitable victor" dilemma here. Already getting so much shekels each turn now that I can maintain a HUEG army.

TLDR: game AI is in desperate need of rewrites or "modders will fix it". Also still laughing about the "not being able to rename cities is a bug, we totally implemented it". Yeah, sure.

 

[coldcrow]

I can't drive this home enough: they had the perfect UI in Civ4, the best iteration of their civ formula and were basically free to implement actual simulationist systems in the next game, while refining the engine. And Bethesda shows what you can do with a dated gamebryo engine. Instead they broke the frame, clothed it in a fancy art-deco dress and let a braindead AI rape it. Clumsily. GJ firaxis.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

but it still sells and/because the media say it's the best thing ever since the invention of the pussy.
why should they care?

 

[Kayerts]

I'm still trying to figure out how my cavalary upgraded to helicopters though. Poor horses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalry_tactics#Cavalry_in_modern_warfare
http://www.aircav.com/cavrole.html

Helicopters are actually classified as "air cavalry" in the US military, since they serve the functions of recon and rapid movement previously occupied by cavalry. (It's worth remembering here that the US has never really had heavy cavalry, in which context this is a little more intuitive.)

 

[Dickie]

There are a lot of things that they could easily have done to make this game better. All these complaints about the AI are somewhat more understandable because writing a good AI is probably hard. I don't think that gets them off the hook, since it's their job to make an AI, but there's no excuse for things like:

• No Alert functionality for units, so I gotta wake them all up manually
• No build queues
• Awful Civilopedia that doesn't explain any game mechanics or even the differences between unique units/buildings/districts and their counterparts, so you gotta click back and forth and compare values. I didn't even know that all unique districts are half cost for a while, which makes them much better.
• Horrible notifications that require you to hover over each one to see what it's about and then move the mouse off and back on to see the next one after removing it. This is especially fun in contrast to your screen being covered with text about how Gandhi had a worker get captured and Gilgamesh built a farm or whatever the fuck.
• The bullshit unit list that I'm wondering how many people even know how to find
• Game settings going back to defaults every time you start a new game
• No map icons for districts, so I can easily tell which is which
• Having to move great artists, writers, and musicians around the map for no god damn reason when I can just move the works out of the building they're standing on and pop them in the same place anyway. Why can't I just pop them in a city and they just put the work in an empty spot no matter where it is, like Civ 5?
• No interface for showing how fast your borders are growing
• No icons in tech tree for passive abilities like "+1 food from pastures" like the icons that were in Civ 5. This makes it really fucking hard to keep track of everything a tech/civic does without hovering on each one
• Trade routes not being sortable, as far as I can tell, and no idea of which one was the last city you were going to
• Some way to toggle off the delay between other leaders popping up and the "fuck you" button popping up on the screen. Hell, that whole screen should be reworked, so you don't gotta click "nevermind" after going to the deal screen if you realize that you don't want to make any deals. The red x should just be on the screen the whole time

I just have this constant battle with the UI and everything being as tedious as possible. Getting rid of the city screen is a huge gripe of mine because it would really simplify a lot if you could see what tiles your dudes were working and buy new tiles without having to click between the different views. Hell, just having to select a city then click another button to see what tiles it's working is too much effort for me. It's weird that resolutions keep getting higher and the UIs in games just show less and less information.

 

[Space Satan]

It drives me mad that they absolutely HAD to make huge icons so you have to scroll city menus and lists of things to produce. It was awful in CivV but in CivIV you had ALL buildings right before you. This incompetence is aclear sign of indian programming and management in stuff.

 

[Cyberarmy]

No build queues

Wow, how did I forgot to bring this one up. Another shitty, needless micro managment decision.

 

[rezaf]

I think I ranted about the two seperate screens when communicating with leaders first, so I obviously agree.
What really annoys me is how out of touch parts of the UI are with other parts.
Often clicking or hovering while supposedly in one mode will do something unexpected - like clicking on a city when planning caravans, why can't this make the city the caravan destination instead of opening that cities production screen?
Many tooltips and sometimes actions will "belong" to another context. This starts right at the menu screen, where you can see tooltips before the button has been materialized.

My favorite UI quirk is how the most efficient way to bring up the disband unit screen is to hit DEL on the keyboard. This opens up a requester ... which does not accept keyboard input. If you hit DEL->ENTER like you would in any given windows application, it'll apply the keyboard command to any random action currently active in the background. Fun times.

 

[spectre]

My favorite one is when you issue orders by mouse, issue for unit one, naturally instead of wating like a moron for unit 1 to complete the move, you click to select another unit.
As you start issuing another move command...the game decided that you should be toying with another unit instead and changes your selection.
How the fug did it get past any sort of testing? Oh, right. There was probably none.

Also, as the game switches to another unit, it might screw with the move order you were trying to give.

 

[Starwars]

I have no idea how that did not make it into an actual menu somewhere but thankfully one can turn off the unit cycling by editing a file somewhere. Was driving me insane.

 

[Great Deceiver]

This incompetence is aclear sign of indian programming and management in stuff.

(I know you meant indie.)

 

[baturinsky]

I think he meant indian

 

[Bliblablubb]

Just when you think the AI can get any more stupid, the game proves you wrong: I found one of Greece's settlers on the other side of the continent. He is either using him as a scout or tries to settle in a place he hasn't even uncovered yet because it has a resource he wants.
And Ghandi? A lone worker beelined around my empire towards a barbarian camp. Dafuq?

Wouldn't even put it past them to hardcode some handholding shit into the AI, like workers/settlers suidicing at barbarians so the player can snatch a free worker. After reading that others had a friend declaring a surprise war against them during medieval era as well, just in time to trigger the eureka from it, nothing seems impossible anymore...

How come this hasn't created any angry mob yet, can't be everyone is just playiing it as a multiplayer game.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

How come this hasn't created any angry mob yet, can't be everyone is just playiing it as a multiplayer game.

Because nearly all the mentioned faults are nearly all the same faults that nearly all the previous Civ games had. Call back next year when there are more difficulty settings, more tribe variety and 100 mods to choose from.

 

[coldcrow]

^
Blatant lie. The AI was never that bad, the UI was never such a mess, instant gratification systems were not part of the franchise in that amount (I don't count civ5 that game is just the same mediocre shit). Only a moron with the attention span of squirrel can cut those retards at firaxis such slack.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Only a moron with the attention span of squirrel can cut those retards at firaxis such slack.

Only a moron would assume my words were somehow cutting them some slack. But then only a moron would expect a Civ game to suddenly have good AI. The least appealing part of any Civ game is when you realise it's all bollox. If you've never realised your Civ game is all bollox then you're a moron who doesn't deserve to even shitpost bollox.

 

[kris]

Heh, the biggest problem with the AI is how it cant handle the 1upt.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

The Barbarians do just fine with it tho...

 

[Destroid]

Barbs only have like 3 units.

 

[Average Manatee]

So, conclusion seems to be: Good mechanics and ideas, horrible UI/polish, disastrous AI?

Will sit out for an expansion or two.

 

[Sranchammer]

This game just seems unnecessary

 

[Great Deceiver]

When is MOAR money ever unnecessary?

 

[Bliblablubb]

Aaah, this game is just a gift that keeps on giving with it's wonderful fuckups..

So I was doing a test war against an old man in a wheelchair the future WMD lunatic Ghandi, carefully denouncing him before declaring official war years later. I immedeatly lost 50 shekels of income, even tho I have no trade routes with him. Okaaaay.
Next turn everone and their mother denounces ME, which is especially eyeroll-worthy, considering that THEY are switching between war and peace among each other so often, that 1984's Eurasia/Eastasia/Oceania relationship looks like a constant. Just without repercussions, must be less of a problem if the player isn't involved...

Whatever, I am through with those fags anyway, back to expanding the glory of Prosperland!

Huh, Ghadi's cities are completely empty... how does the AI even build units in their cities, must take him 40 turns for a worker at that rate. No improvements aside from a few farms, he didn't even connect the luxury resource. Razing the cities is not only an option, it's the better option here, since there is NOTHING inside it. For a capital after 100+ turns mind you. Oh, he built an empty religious district, now that's important...

A few turns after I kicked Ghandi's skinny behind into the sky, my cities started revolting at an alarming rate. The "war weariness" was still happily rising, so... I guess I misread it? Maybe the proud people of Codexistan are unhappy because there is NO war?
Nah, it just didn't occur to the programmer that a war might be over after eleminating a leader, because.. just a thought.. the other party has been removed from inventory? Nope, looks like if the player doesn't make a peace treaty the game consideres him at war. Thankfully you can fix it be restarting and reloading a savegame, after the next round the game updates it...

Carthage didn't get that memo either, still trying to beeline for Dehli. Well "trying" being the operative word here, because missionaries/asspostles must be classified as mountains, since nothing can coexist on their hex.
Normally, that wouldn't be a problem, but Ireneus I. Pedro I. is going apeshit by flooding my country with his religious wackos, over 20 of those are trampeling my gardens already, blocking EVERYTHING in their way. Can't even move my workers.
:ehue:
Heh, that is actually a funny strategy to keep the AI low: park a religious unit on a resource and he won't be able to connect it.


Yeah the game is still fun, because, you know, when the game gives you a turd you make lemonade from it or something like that. Periclulz is still in for it with his mighty army of 50 hoplites against my fucking field artiillery.