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

[Sranchammer]

Dont you people get tired of the same game?

 

[Renegen]

It's not the same game, it looks like town building will cover several squares now!!

Meh, if there's one thing that Civilization is good with is keeping it fresh, the whole 33% new, 33% improved, 33% same design. But the cartoony graphics makes me think they're not even trying this time, plus you gotta wait for 2 years of dlc.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

We should start a poll for "What unfitting/anachronistic leaderheads are there going to be this time?"

My vote is going to be Cleopatra for Egypt. Here's a question, why is it always Theodora instead of Justinian?

 

[Space Satan]

I don't care about art style that much. I can play even with cartoonish shit if mechanics are good, but it is exactly machanics which Firaxis constantly dumb down. This and atrocious UI,

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

You guys are acting like Civ has always looked grimdark.

 

[Beastro]

Fundamentals of the game are annoyingly simply and kiddie now to me. The whole city thing is crap, needs to be replaced by a creep-like territory that is developed or ditch the stupid circle city shit and go with the creation of provinces whose size is determined by numerous factors like population and geography.

Simple combat would need to be ditched too and the blockiness nature of the eras.

Then again I might be talking out of my ass atm, I grew tired of the series after III because it simply isn't nuanced enough and gamey instead of historical.

You guys are acting like Civ has always looked grimdark.

My favourite in the series was Test of Time, which had an overall dark and moody feel to it.

I do agree, CivIIIs base tiles were overly-light and bright and the game badly needed modding to darken them.

I don't care about art style that much. I can play even with cartoonish shit if mechanics are good, but it is exactly machanics which Firaxis constantly dumb down. This and atrocious UI,

Silly/cartoony graphics require charm to make them acceptable. A good example is the old models on Everquest and how the fat, stupid looking trolls and ogres are beloved while their updated models are try hard badass looking.

This games graphics lack charm, they're mobile one, deliberate but uninspired.

 

[Zarniwoop]

It looks so mobile it hurts.
All this CivV cancer is doing its work on VI and traditional Firaxis inability to make a somewhat decent UI is disgusting. This and constant dumbing down of the series.

Civ 5 had by far the best interface of the series. That combined with Catapults and Cannons actually being useful is basically the best things about it.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Civ 2 Wonder movies > that gay ass theme from Civ 4.

SMAC wonder movies > everything.

 

[Karellen]

Aesthetically speaking, I think the only part that looks really bad about Civ 6 so far are the diplomacy screens. I mean, Roosevelt looking like a moustached midget in a fatsuit is kind of demeaning - maybe it's meant to promote "body positivity", I don't know - but then, in the gameplay video he also had that stupid line about "stuffed bears". Does anyone even remember how in the original Civilization, your opponents declared themselves "he who makes mortals tremble" and kept calling you "the most untrustworthy leader of the infidels" if you stabbed them in the back? I'm not saying it wasn't a little bit goofy, but at least it didn't have Caesar making that awful pun about the salad all the time. One of the (few) things that Civ 5 really got right was that it afforded the leaders a little bit more dignity than they got in Civ 4, it bothers me that they'd backpedal there when otherwise Civ 6 seems to have some promising ideas about how to make Civ 5 actually work.

It might seem like a pedantic point, but it just baffles me that the atmosphere in these games seems to be treated as an afterthought. Don't people play these games to feel like god-emperors? That sort of thing calls for a little gravitas, it seems to me. I've been playing Alpha Centauri lately, and it's startling how good the diplomacy dialogue is, how it's at least slightly tailored to each faction and how it consistently stays in character. Imagine what it would be like if Yang said "excuse me, gotta go break some eggs to make an omelette" every time you ran into him, or if Zakharov kept yelling "It's alive! It's alive!" at random intervals for no reason. But ha ha, I guess, serves you right for being such a dweeb that you actually buy into the fiction of our stupid game.

 

[Spectacle]

We should start a poll for "What unfitting/anachronistic leaderheads are there going to be this time?"

My vote is going to be Cleopatra for Egypt. Here's a question, why is it always Theodora instead of Justinian?

Hillary Clinton for the American civ.

 

[Beastro]

We should start a poll for "What unfitting/anachronistic leaderheads are there going to be this time?"

My vote is going to be Cleopatra for Egypt. Here's a question, why is it always Theodora instead of Justinian?

Prolly cus of her role in the Nika Revolt and keeping Justinian from bolting.

My vote would be Ghandi, since you, know, he wasn't actually a fucking head of state and is only in here because of his overrated part in Independence.

Game needs to have Ashoka or someone more apt.

 

[Sranchammer]

Prolly cus of her role in the Nika Revolt and keeping Justinian from bolting.

My vote would be Ghandi, since you, know, he wasn't actually a fucking head of state and is only in here because of his overrated part in Independence.

Game needs to have Ashoka or someone more apt.

That Theodora shit is all propaganda

 

[an Administrator]

Civ 6 should add Nadir Shah as a Persian leader.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

Prolly cus of her role in the Nika Revolt and keeping Justinian from bolting.

Justinian still did more. Even then, both of them are pretty overrated. If I was to do any emperor as leaderhead for the Byzantines I'd do either of the "revival" emperors from during the crusades, I.E Michael VIII or Alexios I.

Or, here's a crazy thought, I'd make it Constantine. Y'know, their capital's only named after the guy. Some scholars consider the "Byzantine Empire" as having begun with the shift of the capital, anyway. Personally for me it's at 395 when the two halves finally split, but I'm not an academic so maybe there's something I'm missing.

 

[Beastro]

Prolly cus of her role in the Nika Revolt and keeping Justinian from bolting.

Justinian still did more. Even then, both of them are pretty overrated. If I was to do any emperor as leaderhead for the Byzantines I'd do either of the "revival" emperors from during the crusades, I.E Michael VIII or Alexios I

What I meant by that is "We need more female rulers for factions. Most people prolly won't care about the Byzantines leader, is there any vaguely strong female ruler that they had? Well, all the genuine female rulers were disasters... Oh, this ones wife did some ballsy stuff when he was thinking of abdication? Then we'll use Justinian's wife."

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

"We need more female rulers for factions. Most people prolly won't care

But then they use a Greek lady for Egypt

 

[Beastro]

"We need more female rulers for factions. Most people prolly won't care

But then they use a Greek lady for Egypt

Most people don't even know Cleo and the Ptolemy's were Greek. All they seem to know is her role in Caesar's life.

Besides, they'd probably wind up replacing her with Nefertiti if it became a problem. :/

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

Nefertiti

>heretic wife of a heretic pharaoh
>not 100% glorious and honourable Hatshepsut

your waifu status: trash

 

[rezaf]

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.

 

[Beastro]

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.

 

[J_C]

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?

 

[rezaf]

Thing is, Civ always was that way.

Well, Civ5 cranked it up to 11 at least. 1UPT alone is a testament to that.
I think Jon Shafer specifically argued that the rules should be much more simple, like board-game rules, so it was easier to understand them.

Anyway, I'd love to play a more simulation oriented Civ like the one you describe, and in fact I had similar ideas in the past.
Though I think for the vast majority of players, losing isn't fun, or at least not as fun as winning, and that's a problem.
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.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

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?

Because the hardcore Civ fans are all about min/max'ing and finding ways to achieve total victory in the shortest time possible. It has very little to do with engaging in a historical narrative or making a utopian empire or being rewarded for having the prettiest statues. It's about applying the rules/exploits of the game in the most efficient way possible to attain a victory condition.

I agree with Beastro that Civ could evolve into something altogether more satisfying and have often thought about this kind of idea myself many times. What irks me is that they never change the time/turn disparity between years, the early years shooting by in centuries while the latter years dribble by at one turn/year. My two big complaints about the series which go from iteration to iteration are:

1. There's no change in scale from era to era. As an ancient tribe, simply taking over one or two cities to expand your domain should feel like conquering the world. In the Roman/Medieval era controlling a continent should feel like conquering the world. Civ hampers this by having an ancient 4000BC Spearman move the same speed and cover the same amount of terrain as a modern Infantryman. So something civ could have done was to make each era a different world map with different rules, each in-game civ restricted to the rules of which era they were in, like gradually zooming out to ever larger and more detailed maps where one square has different values.

2. Change the focus of the Victory Conditions so that land domination isn't the greatest impactor of final score and just have score at retirement date as the aim of play. This score will add up all kinds of stuff from every aspect of the game. So you could get conquered in 2000BC but still come out with the best overall score up to that point in the game, for example.

3. By making every turn 1 year long the game would take 6000 turns to get to 2000AD, so you would have more interest in defining what kind of era is your favourite to play in and doing the full 6000 would be truly epic and allow a lot more room for era-specifc action and atmosphere.

It would become a really massive game though, it would take oodles of gigabytes that could be better utilised with better graphics (sarc) and, of course, QA would be somewhat of a nightmare as the amount of concepts in the game would increase dramatically. This is all fantasy though because a) money demands you keep things stupidly simple and b) the evolution of the game will come from whoever's mind is in control of the series and it's likely quite difficult to get a whole room full of Sid clones who all agree on direction, let alone a room full of Sid clones in the first place.

 

[Beastro]

It has very little to do with engaging in a historical narrative or making a utopian empire or being rewarded for having the prettiest statues.

Thing is, as much as I love making a narrative of history in these kinds of games, when it comes down to it, I just want them to be challenging again. My fondest memories of CivII and III are when, in the former, the AI actually had expanded and settled for once and gave me a challenging game, and in the latter, when I had a bad enough start that I played catch up and actually found myself quiet stalemated against the AI and primarily saved from being stomped by being on my own continent.

I just wish these kinds of games presented a slightly deeper difficulty in a historical context, by making things very hard, and the hardest thing of all is to keep going on once you've reached your apex that typically results in the game becoming a snooze fest of map painting. All civilizations fall, but the world doesn't end. What I recommended applies to a multiple of games, especially Paradox and something like I propose can maintain the sweet spot in all of them when you're initially expanding and struggling.

It's about applying the rules/exploits of the game in the most efficient way possible to attain a victory condition

So the game's player base have degenerated and want to keep the game similar to maintain their degeneracy.

What I mean is the increasing realization I've had that games are their most fun when you have no fucking idea what you're doing and you learn them. You eventually do and master them until you know the game so well you're trying to work those little nooks and crannies for advantages.

Thing is, as awesome as you are in that game, it's just not fun, the barrels been scraped clean.

In Civs case, it seems people just want to achieve and not be challenged then, they want that max efficiency without wanting to struggle new things. I might be wrong, but it could explain how samey many games are now.

Regardless, I see the degeneration in as games are mastered with Everquest, which I've played on and off. There's a massive minority in the game that have done it all and do it perfectly and they keep playing the game, not simply because they love it, but because they like to play to deprive others of enjoyment and dress it up as competition.

On PvP servers they work to drive the rest of the population off the server by cheating, hacking and griefing, then leave themselves when no one is left waiting for the next server to do it to. In a similar vein there are Blue players that hover around waiting for new progression servers (start the game over from day one and work through each expansion every so often) and play them in an unfun way seeking to dominate and exclude others from enjoying content and nostalgia tripping. The recent prog server had instances and these people bitched about it because it completely undermined their ability to take things from others they didn't even want.

Just this past weekend the main guild on the server I'm on did something that irreversibly removed content thousands of others were looking forward to doing on flimsy pretexts about another guild threatening their server firsts of 16 year old content that caused many of their own guild to quit, but all the drama is part of finding what little enjoyment is left in the game for them.

But going back to Civ. I got tired of the gameplay and it's lack of growth. I moved onto TW games for the RTS element, but the campaign, AI and other trademark bullshit made me quit those and hopefully I've yet to reach my limt with Paradox games, because I don't think there's much left to leap onto that isn't overly complex for the love of it niche games that I wouldn't find all that enjoyable.

1. There's no change in scale from era to era. As an ancient tribe, simply taking over one or two cities to expand your domain should feel like conquering the world. In the Roman/Medieval era controlling a continent should feel like conquering the world. Civ hampers this by having an ancient 4000BC Spearman move the same speed and cover the same amount of terrain as a modern Infantryman. So something civ could have done was to make each era a different world map with different rules, each in-game civ restricted to the rules of which era they were in, like gradually zooming out to ever larger and more detailed maps where one square has different values.

I'd rather find a way to expand the map as you grow in emulation of how the known world grew over time.

2. Change the focus of the Victory Conditions so that land domination isn't the greatest impactor of final score and just have score at retirement date as the aim of play. This score will add up all kinds of stuff from every aspect of the game. So you could get conquered in 2000BC but still come out with the best overall score up to that point in the game, for example.

I don't care about score and never played with any other victory conditions but world conquest, since all the rest were gamey and artificial to me.

3. By making every turn 1 year long the game would take 6000 turns to get to 2000AD, so you would have more interest in defining what kind of era is your favourite to play in and doing the full 6000 would be truly epic and allow a lot more room for era-specifc action and atmosphere.

It always bugged me what I vastly tuned it down when started resorting to creating my own scenarios to remove some fo the world aspects of the vanilla game. Creating some kind of mid-term goals to focus on every era might help with that and distract the player from climbing the tech ladder and get to the modern era.

As sad as it is, I found myself not liking other eras but the modern one because they simply didn't last long enough because of that timeline. I recall a old campaign where my Medieval era and early modern era was completely taken up by a simple cross-continental expansion and war. By the time I'd overrun the other continent I'd gone from galleys to ironclads shuttling my armies across and I'd wished that was but my first step as a civilization instead of finding myself rapidly modernizing and doing the same end game routine with tanks and mech infantry.

 

[Xeon]

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.