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

[IncendiaryDevice]

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

In two, civil wars were implemented, an attempt to add realism. In Civ III civs had unique traits and units, to add to realism. In Civ IV Religions were added to add realism. In Civ 5 bombard units became more useful and realistic and there were serious attempts to hinder roflstomping the globe with one unit per tile and a whole host of other tweaks, which was an evolution from III onwards where corruption was supposed to limit expansion.

You can get all semantic if you like about what is or isn't abstraction or abstracted gameplay, but the intent of the series has been to try and prevent complete abstraction and attempt to add more realism.

 

[Lone Wolf]

You say 'realism', and all I see is gameplay variety. Triggering a civil war in II? The civ in question must be stronger, have less than 1,000g in the bank, one of the color slots must be free etc. etc. Very realistic.

None of the stuff you pointed out strives for actual realism; it only makes the experience more varied. Civilization uses historical tropes (civil wars, religion, culture) to conduct a simple and highly abstracted 4X game.

Speaking of, how has the series been 'reduced in complexity from iteration to iteration'?

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Regards to this whole hyperbolic conversation about whether the original Civilisation game was truly a complex and micromanagement game, to which I seem to be suddenly influxed with classic "lol, scrub" bullshit from some mythical plain where Civilisation games are/were somehow the popamole of their day, I've gone to the bother of looking up the history of 4x games, to which the entire list of those that either preceded Civilisation or came out the same time consists of just this list:

Year Game Developer Setting Platform Notes
1983 Cosmic Balance II SSI Sci-fi (Space) ATR, APPII Cosmic Balance from SSI in 1982, is a tactical level starship combat simulator and not a true predecessor.
1983 Reach for the Stars SSG Sci-fi (Space) DOS, WIN, APPII, MAC, C64, AMI
1984 Strategic Conquest Peter Merrill Historical APPII, MAC
1984 Imperium Galactum[citation needed] SSI Sci-fi (Space) APPII, ATR, C64
1984 Incunabula Avalon Hill Historical DOS Based on Avalon Hill's board game, Civilization.
1987 Anacreon: Reconstruction 4021 Thinking Machine Sci-fi (Space) DOS
1987 Xconq Various Historical, Fantasy or Sci-fi (Planet) CROSS A strategy game engine hosting multiple fan-made game modules.
1987 Strategic Conquest II Peter Merrill Historical APPII, MAC Sequel to Strategic Conquest.
1989 Warlords SSG Fantasy AMI, DOS First title in the series.
1989 Millennium 2.2 Electric Dreams Sci-fi (Space) AMI, DOS, ST
1990 Khalaan[citation needed] Chip Fantasy AMI, ST, DOS
1990 Spaceward Ho! Delta Tao Sci-fi (Space) MAC, WIN, AMI
1990 Centurion: Defender of Rome Bits of Magic Historical DOS, AMI, SEGA
1991 Armada 2525[citation needed] Interstel Sci-fi (Space) DOS
1991 Deuteros Activision Sci-fi (Space) AMI, ST Sequel to Millennium 2.2.
1991 Civilization MicroProse Historical DOS, WIN, MAC, AMI, ST, SNES First title in the series.

To which barely any of them are historical and I seriously doubt any are games which 'make Civilisation obviously popamole and decline' or whatever crap was intended in previous posts.

(and suddenly the thread derails into discussions about how awesome and perfect Millenium 2.2 was....)

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

You say 'realism', and all I see is gameplay variety.

Semantics. Whatever they implement will have to have a gameplay function, obviously. But what stuff they choose to implement as gameplay comes from a desire to add more realism. A game which truly abstracted the Civ concept was SMAC, because it's now on an alien world using undiscovered technology and only the barest detail of reality, such as faction traits and origins and some sense of logic behind technological development, but SMAC 'feels' less abstracted than the main Civ series, it 'feels' more 'real' while also providing the illusion of greater complexity. And you want some kind of rational explanation of why this is the case? Why even try if you refuse to 'see' greater realism as anything more than gameplay abstraction. They could make a 100% perfectly historical sim and you'd still view it all as gameplay abstraction, because you'd still be trying to play the game for no other reason than manipulating the gameplay to your maximum advantage, ergo, all you want to see is gameplay abstraction.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Speaking of, how has the series been 'reduced in complexity from iteration to iteration'?

That's a very good question and one that would require a lot of time and forum posts to detail, suffice to say that it's lots of little things here and there. Some could be described as streamlining, but, again, it's a matter of semantics. Take, for example, national borders:

In the first two games your city created a cross shape border that a rival can't settle in. However, land is not cross shaped and you often had 'unowned' squares in an otherwise consistent land mass. Either you or the AI could sneak in and put a city in a right awkward place. So tessellation was a game skill in the first two games. From III onwards we had Cultural Borders which expanded beyond our city's worker limit, munching up these loose bit of land. Now, this is much more preferable for all those people enraged by the 'problem of loose squares', however, it does reduce the gameplay importance of good tessellation in placing your cities.

As I say, just one minor example. But there are many...

 

[rezaf]

Growing borders of all things are your example for reduced complexity? Jeez.

Civ1 had simple combinations of an attack and a defense value. Stacking was no problem, but losing a unit outside a city or fort lost you the entire stack.
Civ2 brought in unit strength (HP) making it considerably less likely that a battleship is defeated by militia or a settler.
Civ3 introduced armies and unit production dependant on special resources.
Civ4 had further nuanced the mechanics with things like artillery causing "splash damage" .

And then Civ5 reimagined things so they were suitable for toddlers.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Growing borders of all things are your example for reduced complexity? Jeez.

Ooooh, so I gave a wrong example did I? Or just a lame example?

It reduced micromanagement and reduced an in-game skill (complexity) while providing a more streamlined (read, less complex) alternative which was more 'realistic'. I think it fits the point of my debate with Lone power gamer particularly well. Feel free to list all the differences between the games, but without a point to each, you're just listing for listing's sake, mate. For example, resources for unit production - is that or is that not a move towards greater realism? As for complexity? It's a very unusual civ games where you don't have access to resources and when you don't have access to resources all it does is add linearity to the game, because, duh, I guess I have to go conquer Tribe A now because they've got the Iron, oh, that's a shame, I would have preferred the freedom to choose to attack Tribe B, thanks game for trying to dictate my game for me now

 

[rezaf]

Ooooh, so I gave a wrong example did I? Or just a lame example?

Nah, the example is fine, i just can't see what you see I guess. And I'm used to it as someone not too fond of Civ5 when most people love it unconditionally too.
To me, the growing borders stuff is clearly more complex than the thick cross. It's more complicated to code and follows more rules with more variables.

I guess you can argue it robs you of some opportunities for strategic decisionmaking in the same way using toilet paper robs you of the opportunity to strategically decide which hand you use to eat.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

It's not about robbing you of decision making in that example as much as outright removing a complexity. The pressure of cultural borders could have been a good new complexity, but it's power is so ineffectual below the very highest difficulty settings that all it provides is the odd lucky switch between completely outlying cities which are at the very noobest state of development, often not even worth the war it almost always starts anyway. You can't play to it as a growth tool. It's barely a tool for anything aside munching up awkwardly placed land squares and giving you an excuse to order ships to naff off while they sail round your coastline. Likewise, Civ IV Religions appear cool at first, but are surprisingly unmanageable and not overly 'worth the effort' of using as a growth tool. But they both add greater realism.

 

[Beastro]

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.

It was bad that even Quill18 struggled to remain his chipper self.

Looking back it now feels like if Paradox released Stellaris as is and then left it there without any DLCs declaring it a finished game.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

 

[Infinitron]

E3 Twitch stream: https://www.twitch.tv/twitch/v/72392973?t=05h17m10s

 

[Hitoshura]

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.

That's a major problem in video games, being able to play well even with adverse conditions is important as it can develop the gameplay significantly. In competitive games, being able to recover from a mistake is critical if you even want to become good at it.

I guess that it's a "solved" problem nowadays by always giving bonus to players regardless of what's going on. If you failed, you get +1 and if you did well, you get +2 to whatever stat. This way, the clueless player think he is still winning (he got a reward after all) and keeps playing. That's probably the reason why we have games that are orgies of + this and +% that everywhere lately.

 

[sser]

Yikes. Just from appearances it looks absolutely diminished in terms of complexity. Definitely looks like something setup for consoles.

 

[rezaf]

That's a major problem in video games, being able to play well even with adverse conditions is important as it can develop the gameplay significantly. In competitive games, being able to recover from a mistake is critical if you even want to become good at it.

While what you say is true, I think there where/are just far too many games teaching the player that playing suboptimally means entering a death spiral.
In RPGs, it's still often possible to, say build your character in a way that will bite him much farther down the road.
And if biting means game over or at the very least much increased difficulty, that's a problem.

 

[Hitoshura]

That's a major problem in video games, being able to play well even with adverse conditions is important as it can develop the gameplay significantly. In competitive games, being able to recover from a mistake is critical if you even want to become good at it.

While what you say is true, I think there where/are just far too many games teaching the player that playing suboptimally means entering a death spiral.
In RPGs, it's still often possible to, say build your character in a way that will bite him much farther down the road.
And if biting means game over or at the very least much increased difficulty, that's a problem.

Yeah, similar to micro transactions that is building a new generation of gamers on principles that a game is made to be a boring grind unless you decide to cough (mucho) bucks. Like many (most?) people on the codex, I grew on a generations of RPGs that a mistake in the creations of characters at the beginning of the game could make things very hard down the line. These games expected some form of mastery of the game system before you actually played it, which is weird design choice in the first place. Yeah, this comes from Dungeon and Dragons since if you play pen and paper, a good DM will adjust stuff on the fly to bypass problems.

In strategy games with long campaigns, with careful construction, you can allow the player to fail from time to time without making the long campaign impossible. For example, Eador Genesis.

For RPGs, it's always tricky, you want to reward the player for doing stuff by rewarding them with an enduring reward to progressively build up characters. Yet, it should not lead to a death spiral if things are not done optimally as you mentioned. This method doesn't work very well: as good players gets the better stuff which makes the game easier and easier, it gets boring after a while. Few games have solutions to this, maybe Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song where gathering the soul(?) stones shows that you have some form of game mastery and it will make the game harder. That's essentially making the difficulty system as part of the setting of the game, that's quite ingenious and people that plays casually don't have to care about this and still have fun.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Jimmious]

I'm gonna be the heretic and say that , yeah the graphics look cartoonish but they also look much clearer and defined than what we had in Civ5.
It seems to me it'll be much easier to tell where is what on a glance and tbh thats pretty important, especially late game.

 

[Starwars]

I'm warming to how the art style look on the actual map, I don't have a problem with that. But the leaders look fucking terrible still. I also think the UI looks really... boring.

Will be interesting to see how the cities will play out, especially when waging war. That's probably the only bit I find actually promising in terms of what's been said so far in terms of gameplay.

 

[Space Satan]

Game is way smoother I must say. And UI is still horrible but much better and quicker than CivV

 

[Jigawatt]

This bodes well

 

[Redlands]

This bodes well

To be fair, I think that's more to do with how crappy the Steam controllers apparently are, or at least how they're selling, than anything to do with Civ VI.

Unless this has happened with a lot of other shitty games...

 

[rashiakas]

Not going to judge this game after watching only some videos, but I really dislike the focus on unimportant stuff like day night circle or how those pyramids slowly build up. Its not what civ should be about and shouldnt even be the focus on a preview.

 

[Jimmious]

To be fair, I think that's more to do with how crappy the Steam controllers apparently are, or at least how they're selling, than anything to do with Civ VI.

Unless this has happened with a lot of other shitty games...

Steam controllers crappy? You have absolutely no idea how wrong you are.

 

[spectre]

Not going to judge this game after watching only some videos, but I really dislike the focus on unimportant stuff like day night circle or how those pyramids slowly build up. Its not what civ should be about and shouldnt even be the focus on a preview.

Notice how the presentation conveniently omits all this inconvenient "end turn" business? You click stuff and it immediately happens even though it should take a few turns at best.
Wanna see combat? Let's conjure up a bunch of units. See the countryside burn up like that? Whooooo! "Gameplay preview" my ass, but then again, it's nothing new in this line of work.
The journos are barely able to focus on anything else that spewing "Hurr durr, Ghandi is a meme now! See kids, we totally can into civilization!"
You're not the target audience for this shit and neither is anyone who's into the actual "strategy" part. Best you can hope for is glean some actually useful information between the lines.

It's been said already, but the cartoonization of civ leaders is really becoming quite obnoxious. I know it's been going on for some time, but it's the first time it made me cringe.
I am slightly intrigued by the new research by doing stuff mechanic but that's about it. Doesn't feel like the game offers much beyond what I can already get out of modded civ4.
TBH I thought the graphics would annoy me more, but at some point I stopped noticing.