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

[Beastro]

Isn't shooters also kinda the same, I never understood the appeal of doing the same thing over and over but people seem to like it.

Most Civ5 players are either go multiplayer which they are pretty active on Twitch or modded games. Marbs plays a lot of Civ5 and he tries diffrent mod for each LP and its pretty fun to watch him win on deity. Mongolia, White Walkers and Scotland were pretty fun because how crazy it was.

Civ6 is supposedly will have hidden agendas or something as well while being true to the leader's personality, hope that will spice things up.

Civ and MP don't mix in my mind.

Like Pdox games, they're something I play(ed) to ease back and relax while I take time to enjoy what's going on.

To play something like Civ with MP just wouldn't be fun. It would be pushing you to do the unfun crap I always avoid because everyone else is and doing it with others around making it something of being on a timer because of that instead of playing a bit and then coming back to it 10-20 minutes later, especially these days when I find myself playing Pdox games as I watch shows and movies.

 

[BelisariuS.F]

Fundamentals of the game are annoyingly simply and kiddie now to me.

An alarming trend unfortunately not limited to the Civilization series.
HoI4, for example, also seems to be dumbed down a ton from previous incarnations.

I hope the trend stops before all our games look like these applications with which scientists "communicate" with chimps or dolphins.

Click the Hoplite.
Well done, you advance to the Iron Age.

Thing is, Civ always was that way. The earlier games were ok, I was growing up and growing with them, until i left with CivIII things were getting more complex, albeit very slowly, but it seems to have remained stuck in way that leaves you outgrowing the series. I don't like complexity for it's own sake, but there's just not much to pull me back in. The entire "pick a civ and go around planting cities across 7000 years" is a very old and unvaried way of playing, since CivII I've been waiting for them to go into a more different direction by having civilizations rise and fall where base, early ones can spawn different ones in a varied, dynamic game that is not a simple linear ascent of progress.

For me doing that would engage one of the more interesting aspects of games like this, that losing is often more fun than winning, but losing doesn't mean the end. You can play a basal civ, dominate, then cumble and the fracture of your civilization results in several offshoots, of which you can pick one and start it all over again weaker, but with newer tech. That way you can find yourself playing in a world steeped with history, taking cities you founded and lost thousands of years ago and battling over terrain that has been fought over multiple times since the beginning of the game that emulates the legendary "warzones" of history like the Levant. That can also allow the game to be harder and more challenging while not being crushing and unfun.

That sounds pretty fucking cool. Why don't the developers think about ideas like this?

They did. They implemented a possibility for your empire to start to degenerate but during testing they noticed that when that happened the players simply reloaded the latest save. So they ditched this idea.

 

[J_C]

Fucking save scummers!

 

[Beastro]

They did. They implemented a possibility for your empire to start to degenerate but during testing they noticed that when that happened the players simply reloaded the latest save. So they ditched this idea.

Well of course that's going to happen if you keep the game largely the same. There's no telegraphing of it and is presented in a punishing way.

I do recall it in CivIII, when a Civ was huge and their capital was taken, some conditions would result in it splitting and a new Civ taking over one half of the cities (it was rare as fuck and I always enjoyed seeing it happen however few times it did. Still the fractured civ and new civ weren't able to recover from it because the mechanics of the game weren't built with that in mind), but that was in a game where that could and should be avoided as oppose to going into a game being told that you're civilization WILL fall no matter what you do, so go with it and find ways of bouncing back.

Isn't that pretty much a big idea of tower defence games? I don't play much, but any game where the odds keep being stacked against you until you're overwhelmed has you getting into the game knowing you'll lose so you focusing on delaying it as long as you can while being freed to find enjoyment in things you wouldn't otherwise enjoy in a game like Civilization.

 

[BelisariuS.F]

Yeah, loosing and trying to survive can be fun. In EUIII, during my first playthrough after the damned cascading alliances had been introduced, I've tried to colonize the world as one of the states of the Netherlands region. During the first hundred years I overextended myself in the Americas and south Africa, then I was attacked by a large cascading alliance which triggered a hundred year period when I was steadily loosing everything until I disappeared. And it was fun. A two hundred year long period of rise and fall.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I do recall it in CivIII, when a Civ was huge and their capital was taken, some conditions would result in it splitting and a new Civ taking over one half of the cities (it was rare as fuck and I always enjoyed seeing it happen however few times it did. Still the fractured civ and new civ weren't able to recover from it because the mechanics of the game weren't built with that in mind).

That was Civ II, no Civil Wars in Civ III.

 

[Destroid]

There are some fun boardgames based on the theme of civilisation rise and fall, notably Smallworld and Tigris & Euphrates. Although since these games are rather abstract and your goal is to maximise your points over the course of an hour or two, players tend not to get that attached to the things they have built.

 

[Wintermute]

since CivII I've been waiting for them to go into a more different direction by having civilizations rise and fall where base, early ones can spawn different ones in a varied, dynamic game that is not a simple linear ascent of progress.

Your wait ended 10 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhye's_and_Fall_of_Civilization

 

[Beastro]

since CivII I've been waiting for them to go into a more different direction by having civilizations rise and fall where base, early ones can spawn different ones in a varied, dynamic game that is not a simple linear ascent of progress.

Your wait ended 10 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhye's_and_Fall_of_Civilization

Glad someone else was onto the same idea and put it into action. I never got into the fourth one after my initial look indicated nothing major changed, and I didn't expect a mod to be capable to doing all of that.

I do recall it in CivIII, when a Civ was huge and their capital was taken, some conditions would result in it splitting and a new Civ taking over one half of the cities (it was rare as fuck and I always enjoyed seeing it happen however few times it did. Still the fractured civ and new civ weren't able to recover from it because the mechanics of the game weren't built with that in mind).

That was Civ II, no Civil Wars in Civ III.

Yeah this is all back when I was a kid and fairly vague now. I just remember it being cool when it happened, but it didn't anything neat, the civs didn't even seem capable to rebuilding much at all and remained fairly static.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

and that mod in on the same civ4's expansion "beyond the sword"'s disc.

 

[Mr. Pink]

if hexes were three times smaller, or if the map was three times larger, it would make the scale of the game make sense. imagine spending most of your time in ancient age dealing with local competitors (like rome vs ectrucians and eprius) zoomed in and then getting more and more movement speed as technology advances, allowing more distance between cities, bigger borders and more grand scale battles. there would have to be a lot more civs that need to be simulated, but over time, they'd coalesce into larger nations and empires.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Why are people using the Civ franchise as a yard-stick of history?

Everything is abstracted to the point of absurd simplicity. It works precisely because it doesn't model history; it uses it as a backdrop for gameplay.

 

[Beastro]

I do recall it in CivIII, when a Civ was huge and their capital was taken, some conditions would result in it splitting and a new Civ taking over one half of the cities (it was rare as fuck and I always enjoyed seeing it happen however few times it did. Still the fractured civ and new civ weren't able to recover from it because the mechanics of the game weren't built with that in mind).

That was Civ II, no Civil Wars in Civ III.

Why are people using the Civ franchise as a yard-stick of history?

Everything is abstracted to the point of absurd simplicity. It works precisely because it doesn't model history; it uses it as a backdrop for gameplay.

It's fine up to a point, but it becomes unappealing how abstracted it is.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Okay, but you're talking about the entire Civ franchise. What can you possibly be expecting from #6 that #1-5 didn't already confirm about the vision behind the series?

If it's unappealing to you, so be it. That's a matter of taste.

 

[Beastro]

Okay, but you're talking about the entire Civ franchise. What can you possibly be expecting from #6 that #1-5 didn't already confirm about the vision behind the series?

If it's unappealing to you, so be it. That's a matter of taste.

Yes, and this is a thread where we're talking about the game and the series as a whole by default.

I haven't liked it for over ten years, other don't, no ones coming into this thread with some sort of presumption that we're here to hammer out how the direction of the series will actually go. If anything is going to happen it seems likely it'll be a direction we'll all hate...

 

[rezaf]

Okay, but you're talking about the entire Civ franchise. What can you possibly be expecting from #6 that #1-5 didn't already confirm about the vision behind the series?

As we discussed earlier, Civ5 was really the first to try and "steamline" more things than it's predecessor, which (I think) is why quite a few series fans aren't so fond of it.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

I didn't really notice how bad Civ 5 actually was until playing Beyond Earth, because I didn't really give Civ 5 that much playtime to actually figure out why I disliked it. I thought I was just "over" Civ until I played BE for a few weeks, hated it, and then retried SMAC and Civ 3.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Why are people using the Civ franchise as a yard-stick of history?

Everything is abstracted to the point of absurd simplicity. It works precisely because it doesn't model history; it uses it as a backdrop for gameplay.

Okay, but you're talking about the entire Civ franchise. What can you possibly be expecting from #6 that #1-5 didn't already confirm about the vision behind the series?

If it's unappealing to you, so be it. That's a matter of taste.

You can't have it both ways. On the one hand you claim the game is pure abstraction but on the other ignore the fact that each iteration has tried to make things more 'real'. The "absurd simplicity" was never there originally, the game was initially designed as a highly complex, highly micromanagement oriented empire building strategy/sim and has only reduced in complexity from iteration to iteration. You're using the direction of the game towards simplicity while also attempting to add more 'reality' as an argument against trying to add more reality but with greater complexity and it just comes across as throwaway antipathy, like "oh who gives a shit anyway", when people are quite clearly expressing they give a shit, particularly early fans.

 

[Beastro]

The "absurd simplicity" was never there originally, the game was initially designed as a highly complex, highly micromanagement oriented empire building strategy/sim

Civilization 1-3 were good as introductory games for kids getting into grand strategy/4x games. They were not complex, but good for what they were.

The problem is the series hasn't grown along side it's fan base and has regressed due to the same plague of reasons that are causes most games to go that route.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Civilization 1-3 were good as introductory games for kids getting into grand strategy/4x games. They were not complex, but good for what they were.

Citation please...

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

Citation please...

play the actual games again

 

[Norfleet]

I think the entire concept of "crumbling empires" would be kinda hard to implement in a way that doesn't massively frustrate the player.
My idea was to completely disconnect the actual civs from the player - i.e. you play more something like "the asians", and china can rise and fall without direct consequences to the player. But this would be a totally different game.

I recall Arcen did something on those lines, where rather than playing as a specific Civ, you played as an outside entity with the goal of keeping both sides fighting but alive, where it wasn't terribly critical which side won or lost any point as long as the fighting continued and neither side achieved total victory.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

So no citations then...

 

[ArchAngel]

I didn't really notice how bad Civ 5 actually was until playing Beyond Earth, because I didn't really give Civ 5 that much playtime to actually figure out why I disliked it. I thought I was just "over" Civ until I played BE for a few weeks, hated it, and then retried SMAC and Civ 3.

Beyond Earth is considered bad even by Civ 5 fans.

 

[Lone Wolf]

but on the other ignore the fact that each iteration has tried to make things more 'real'. The "absurd simplicity" was never there originally, the game was initially designed as a highly complex, highly micromanagement oriented empire building strategy/sim and has only reduced in complexity from iteration to iteration.

What?

You've got to be kidding me. Never there originally? Are you saying Civ II was a 'highly complex, highly micro-oriented' game, that's been further reduced in complexity in III/IV/V? What are you comparing it to, exactly?

There's absolutely nothing about Civ that isn't completely abstracted for gameplay reasons. Nothing.