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

[oscar]

As I said the only real problem is AI not being great at handling it.

It's a pretty fucking huge one for a central feature on a game that 99% of players have never touched the multiplayer on and the developers have come no closer to fixing in two games now.

Even standard difficulty AI in Civ IV could be dangerous with it. Civ V and VI degenerate gameplay is sitting one archer unit in a city and being able to mow down endless hordes of attackers (even stone age tribes in NuCiv seem capable of Omaha Beach-esque 10-to-1 defences while only having a single unit in important cities was incredibly dicey unless you have the Protective trait or can get some early walls up). Spreading your forces thin like that in Civ IV could be very dangerous if you were surrounded by multiple hostile powers with even defensive playthroughs for large empires often encouraging a large mobile reserve to be able to counter-attack enemy stacks or at least try buy some time for you to get your production on a war-footing.

Civ IV fighting led to a lot of fun and desperate moments and also encouraged sensible precautions like keeping a good eye on your enemy and encouraging a best defence is a good offence attitude. I don't have a single fun memory of a war in the last two Civs they were boring and tedious with a timid and incompetent AI. No "holy shit" moments where you've got to scramble like a madman, use delaying tactics and even possibly sacrifice a city or two against enemy invasions if you're not properly prepared.

 

[FreeKaner]

Anectodal experience doesn't amount to much. For me Civ IV was tedious with boring city management and AI that also couldn't handle deathstacks except on occasions where it lucked out with artillery or something of that sort.

AI in Civ6 could be much better but rather they improve the tile management then improve AI to catch up then not improve at all. Besides, what's point of doing same game over and over again anyway? If someone wants to play deathstacks and particular tactics of CIV IV, they can just play CIV IV you know. I still play AoE2 to this day because it has some intricacies that are not immediately obvious and are more an unintentional result of technical limitations that are not present in other games, I wouldn't see the point of AoE2:2.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

For fuck's sake the pricing of this shit is like a whole new game

gotta pay the spyware somehow.

 

[vonAchdorf]

The 1upt games have some of this still, but it's completely ruined by the fact that even a small army requires so much space that the strategy aspects become irrelevant in the face of the traffic jam. Shit goes somewhere because it fits there.

Just yesterday I did a naval landing operation (Civ6) with a small army and it's just extremely tedious. In older games, you would have transports (high risk / reward again) and unload the units, now you have a fleet of embarked units covering half the ocean and have to land in waves or far away from the actual target. It adds nothing of substance. And the enemy did nothing to defend its city, even though it had lots of troops idling nearby.

The AI is just sad, especially compared to a low budget game like Aggressors: Ancient Rome.

That's really damn important, considering the AI in 6 was incapable of taking cities for a long while.

It still happens that the AI only attacks with lots of artillery units, but has no infantry nearby to actually capture the bombarded city.

 

[Delterius]

Stacks of doom are high risk / high reward and the AI could also use them. And there were always nukes (or artillery).

its only a true doomstack if the doom is big enough to be their doom

its only a high risk strat if your stack isn't their doom

solution: make bigger stack

 

[flyingjohn]

The 1upt games have some of this still, but it's completely ruined by the fact that even a small army requires so much space that the strategy aspects become irrelevant in the face of the traffic jam. Shit goes somewhere because it fits there.

Just yesterday I did a naval landing operation (Civ6) with a small army and it's just extremely tedious. In older games, you would have transports (high risk / reward again) and unload the units, now you have a fleet of embarked units covering half the ocean and have to land in waves or far away from the actual target. It adds nothing of substance. And the enemy did nothing to defend its city, even though it had lots of troops idling nearby.

The AI is just sad, especially compared to a low budget game like Aggressors: Ancient Rome.

That's really damn important, considering the AI in 6 was incapable of taking cities for a long while.

It still happens that the AI only attacks with lots of artillery units, but has no infantry nearby to actually capture the bombarded city.

I never understood the naval transport change.All it does is clutter the seas and make the ai not have a chance in hell to actually launch a successful naval invasion against anybody with a small or decent fleet.Even for a human it is very hard considering how open the sea is and how ranged combat destroys any attempt at escort operation.

As for the ai fielding artillery only,well that is actually the working a intended.There are operation level goals for each units but they only work at a single unit level and is not connected to the strategic level ai making the decisions on what to build.
Meaning the ai will make random units they will go their objective but how they reach that and general positioning of a siege are not possible to implement.
And this is not possible to fix with mods,the restrictions are way too entangled with everything else to be able to change.

 

[Cael]

Anectodal experience doesn't amount to much. For me Civ IV was tedious with boring city management and AI that also couldn't handle deathstacks except on occasions where it lucked out with artillery or something of that sort.

"Anecdotal experience doesn't amount to much."
*proceeds to recount his anecdotal experience*

 

[Fedora Master]

Checked out the new DLC.
That Kongo guy keeps complaining about my population.
Declares a surprise war.
Robert the Bruce is angry at me for being at war.

Fuck this game, fuck Firaxis.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

It's a rather silly discussion. No one cares if you like 1upt or not, the real question is whether it fits civ or not. And the answer is obvious: it doesn't. Who the hell wanted a classic 4X series to degenerate into watered down Panzer General that's 100x worse than the worst General game and a festival of utter inanity like global happiness, units carrying freighters on their back and 1 city being a vital strategy, topped with absolutely dysfunctional AI and diplomacy. And that's talking about V. VI is literally a dumpster tier game with AAA pricing.

 

[Luzur]

Checked out the new DLC.
That Kongo guy keeps complaining about my population.
Declares a surprise war.
Robert the Bruce is angry at me for being at war.

Fuck this game, fuck Firaxis.

Then you wipe out the Kongolese population, so your population have room to grow then without someone complaining.

 

[BING XI LAO]

I'm particularly buttblasted about the heavy decline in civ5 because it migrated over to the Age of Wonders series, and shat all over AoW3 with braindead garbage like autospawning transports.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Checked out the new DLC.
That Kongo guy keeps complaining about my population.
Declares a surprise war.
Robert the Bruce is angry at me for being at war.

Fuck this game, fuck Firaxis.

Then you wipe out the Kongolese population, so your population have room to grow then without someone complaining.

nope, if you win a war and conquer all the others civ will be angry you won and conquered. VERY angry. like "how dare you take a single city 6000 years ago? i'll rape your daughters!".

 

[Fedora Master]

Checked out the new DLC.
That Kongo guy keeps complaining about my population.
Declares a surprise war.
Robert the Bruce is angry at me for being at war.

Fuck this game, fuck Firaxis.

Then you wipe out the Kongolese population, so your population have room to grow then without someone complaining.

nope, if you win a war and conquer all the others civ will be angry you won and conquered. VERY angry. like "how dare you take a single city 6000 years ago? i'll rape your daughters!".

I haven't tested the new grievances system but honestly I can't be assed because they obviously never even considered working on even more fundamental issues, like their utterly retarded agenda system.

 

[FreeKaner]

Anectodal experience doesn't amount to much. For me Civ IV was tedious with boring city management and AI that also couldn't handle deathstacks except on occasions where it lucked out with artillery or something of that sort.

"Anecdotal experience doesn't amount to much."
*proceeds to recount his anecdotal experience*

That's exactly the point. I said anecdotal experience doesn't count for much and I can give exact opposite anecdotal experience. I am sorry your contextual comprehension is too weak to understand basic elements of communication.

 

[Cael]

Anectodal experience doesn't amount to much. For me Civ IV was tedious with boring city management and AI that also couldn't handle deathstacks except on occasions where it lucked out with artillery or something of that sort.

"Anecdotal experience doesn't amount to much."
*proceeds to recount his anecdotal experience*

That's exactly the point. I said anecdotal experience doesn't count for much and I can give exact opposite anecdotal experience. I am sorry your contextual comprehension is too weak to understand basic elements of communication.

I am sorry that you are so butthurt about getting your hypocrisy pointed out. Here, have an image on me:

 

[vonAchdorf]

I haven't tested the new grievances system but honestly I can't be assed because they obviously never even considered working on even more fundamental issues, like their utterly retarded agenda system.

It's incredibly stupid and in my opinion doesn't give the leaders more personality. It's the opposite. In earlier games, the differences were more subtle, but felt more realistic. In Civ 6 it's all in your face and utterly predictable. Leaders now not only look like caricatures, they act like caricatures and constantly spam you with the same messages. The zeitgeist can't into subtlety.

--

I'm just in the later phase of my first Gathering Storm game and I really don't like how they handle the climate change. So far it feels like Civ 1 did it better. In my current game, it feels like the effects set in way too early, but that's probably because they want some effects to appear before you can build countermeasures.

The best change so far is the new system for strategic resources.

 

[FreeKaner]

Climate change needs number tuning, it happens too early and caps too fast. Agenda system is dumb. Grievances system is really good.

 

[Cael]

Climate change needs number tuning, it happens too early and caps too fast. Agenda system is dumb. Grievances system is really good.

The quoted poster will be quoted out of context and lynched by a twatter and reddit mob in 5, 4, 3, 2...

 

[vonAchdorf]

Another ongoing problem in Civ VI is that research and culture progresses faster than production, something which may even be exacerbated by Gathering Storm, because it punishes your for maximizing production. This is also partially caused by 1UPT. They increased production costs, because there's not enough space for units on the map. In Civ, you were always ahead of "real" history, but, anecdotally, it's even faster in Civ 6.

 

[FreeKaner]

The research costs are way too low, you can barely make units before you rush past them. It has little to do with 1UPT and modding it to make research costs higher is mandatory. If you get even half of the eurakas the game will be in modern era in half the turns to end game.

 

[vonAchdorf]

It has little to do with 1UPT

I didn't compare the numbers, but high unit costs compared to the pre-1UPT Civs have been criticized since Civ 5 and 1UPT was seen as the major reason. The developers didn't want to allow players to build that many units, because without stacking there is no room.

I believe that these problems stem directly from the decision to make civ V a one-unit-per-tile (1UPT) game. 1UPT allows a lot of flexibility in how you arrange your army; however, it only works if your army has empty space to move in. It requires an army smaller than the map. 1UPT led to small army sizes, which led to lower production and faster science, which led to the broken economy system that this game has now. The combat in civ V was based on panzer general, but that doesn't work well in a civ style game.
...
A typical civ 4 army of ~50 units would be incredibly annoying to manage in the Civ V style, so they wanted to encourage armies of only 5~10 units.
...
In order to do that, they had to limit production. You can see that in the decreased yields- production and food yield have been decreased compared to civ 4, whereas the food required to grow a city was greatly increased.
...
Also, it's worth pointing out that there's two ways of effectively decreasing production. Either decrease hammer yields while increasing costs- which they did- or to make science go faster- which they also did. The beaker cost of techs decreased, great scientists became more powerful, and research agreements were added. All of these accelerated the tech pace, giving less time to build the units/buildings for each technology, which effectively decreased production.

 

[FreeKaner]

It has little to do with 1UPT

I didn't compare the numbers, but high unit costs compared to the pre-1UPT Civs have been criticized since Civ 5 and 1UPT was seen as the major reason. The developers didn't want to allow players to build that many units, because without stacking there is no room.

You don't nearly advance as fast in CiV5 and can very comfortably make 10-12 units of same type before they become obsolete. In CiV6 some units are obsolete before you can even train them. I use a mod that increases tech costs by double at ancient era and up to 6 times in future era, it feels right then.

Production's relation to science is real obviously, but the numbers being borked in civ6 has little to do with 1UPT. Because even if you could train units in 1 turn, the science goes past way too fast. When you take only 6 to 10 turns, it wouldn't matter if you had deathstacks either because you still have to move them, you can barely move them out of your state's borders before they become obsolete.

As I said, civ5 also has 1UPT and this problem largely doesn't exist there, with some key units lasting as much as 100 turns in effectiveness before becoming obsolete and you can easily trained a carpet of them.

You have to remember science relates to movement as much as it relates to production speed as well. If you have to spend 10 turns to go from one side of your borders to other, and you take 8 turns to research a new technology, what is the result? It's simply a numbers issue, regardless of production. Making factories in 700AD, 175 turns in when the max turns are 500 wouldn't be OK even if unit production was instantaneous.

 

[vonAchdorf]

In CiV6 some units are obsolete before you can even train them. I use a mod that increases tech costs by double at ancient era and up to 6 times in future era, it feels right then.

Do you have a link?

 

[vonAchdorf]

Production's relation to science is real obviously, but the numbers being borked in civ6 has little to do with 1UPT. Because even if you could train units in 1 turn, the science goes past way too fast. When you take only 6 to 10 turns, it wouldn't matter if you had deathstacks either because you still have to move them, you can barely move them out of your state's borders before they become obsolete.

That's what Marathon was for (in Civ IV) - but in Civ 6 I honestly don't have the patience for Marathon.

 

[Fedora Master]

Despite the speed of development most of the game still consists of skipping turns until something gets built/researched.