Civ 6

What's everyone think? IMO, the new mechanics are pretty neat- I'm still wrapping my head around my city taking up more than one tile.

Not having to worry about happy/angry citizens is really frigging nice too.

I've only played in earlygame until now since I'm a compulsive restarter when I think I've fucked up - and with all these new mechanics it's easy to fuck up. So, these are just initial impressions:

Pros:

Complexity: It is more complex than civ 5, which will make it uninviting and overwhelming to players new to the series - it's still a bit too much even for me and I've played every civ game from 1 to 5. Of course, I personally like it.

Strategic depth: They've made cultural progress and religion much more potent mechanics than before, I like this. Culture is almost like a second science tree but it retains its unique feel. Religion is now a legitimate path to victory. I like that too. Diplomacy has also received an upgrade.

City planning: The districts system makes me stare at the screen for what seems like hours, trying to plan my tile placement from early to endgame. A bit overwhelming at first, but I like it a great deal. This is perhaps the single most important, noticeable and IMO good change in Civ 6.

Builder system: no more mind-numbing midgame road and improvement network management, that's great. This is perhaps as important as the district system although it's more like a part of it.


Cons:

Army stacking: They've made a step in the right direction from Civ 5 but there's more to be desired. I don't know why the ability to form armies is pushed so late into the game. This doesn't make sense from an immersion standpoint, since we all know the ancient world had armies and military structure, and it makes earlygame wars fucking tedious, just as before.

AI: the single most glaring negative. Same shit as civ 5 - the AI is dumb as fuck but turbocharged in higher difficulties, so to beat it you have to abuse it instead of playing in a more balanced and flexible manner as you would against a human.

Leaders: They are too few, many old friends from previous civ games are lacking and they seem as imbalanced as ever. Good luck having a competent human Scythia or Babylon player as a neighbour, you'll get crushed in earlygame - especially now that cities are extremely vulnerable initially. Arabia's mamluks also seem over the top. Some other leaders are too lategame oriented without anything to make them interesting in the earlygame. I hope they'll add more leaders and balance them out to a certain extent.

I think it's quite interesting. Spent all my free time on it since release, and I still haven't really wrapped my head around it. Coming from Civ 5, a lot has changed. In many respects it's an entirely different game, it can be quite confusing. :)

Bars makes several good points, I generally agree with him.

The balance seems off, it just feels "early" like so many Civ's in the past. To me the most noticeable difference is that games take much longer, the overall pacing seems deliberately slower. Playing on Quick mode feels like Standard used to in Civ 5. I'm not sure I like that.

It's also a lot more "busy" than Civ 5 is. Cities are much, much more intricate and you always need to balance things to fit everything you need. This adds a whole 'nother level of complexity which I'm sure many will love. I like it too, but careful balancing needs to be done so as not to make it "too much". They're walking a fine line I think, it'll be interesting to see how it evolves.

The biggest problem so far is the GUI which I feel is quite a mess. It needs polishing, for sure.

Oh well, overall I'm super happy to finally have a new Civ to play with. I think this is going to be really great. :)

About leader balance - I can kinda understand almost everything except the regenerating Mamluks and Scythia. Here's a video of Marbozir demonstrating why this race is broken:

https://youtu.be/Ft6WEwqfLpw

I realize it's at the default difficulty (cause he was playing pre-releaze, the others were locked) and the AI there is laughably weak, it illustrates the point nevertheless. The horse archer tech is ridiculously easy to get, then you pump a horseman and a horse archer and you suddenly have a powerful 4-unit army. Why build settlers? Your neighbours will even build up their cities for you.

And let's not even comment what happens when you get another earlygame tech, Military Tradition > Maneuver from the civics tree (+100% production for ancient and classical heavy and light cavalry LOL)

Oh, another thing:

WTF's up with the fucking iron?! It seems to be incredibly rare. I seem get it only rarely, including with a 5-city sprawl. Am I missing something or the random map generator is busted?

Yeah, so far my biggest complaint that can't be handwaved away with the "Civ gets better with time" excuse (as if we all aren't used to that by now) is the GUI. Something about it I can't put my finger on.

The game is great, I love the new stuff, but the AI fucking suuuuucks.

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Antnee wrote:

Yeah, so far my biggest complaint that can't be handwaved away with the "Civ gets better with time" excuse (as if we all aren't used to that by now) is the GUI. Something about it I can't put my finger on.

Yeah, indeed.

I can help you a bit with the GUI problems, here are some of my issues on the top of my head:

- it doesn't scale well with higher resolutions. I'm playing at 2560x1440 and it's literally unplayable without a magnifying glass. ;) Luckily you can hack the XML and raise font sizes a bit to make it readable, but since the rest isn't scaling too well it looks like shit. This is almost game-breaking for me, it's really frustrating.

- It's cluttered. The whole screen is just full of crap, much more so than earlier Civ's I think.

- Units everywhere, barely visible. Who thought that faint blue-grayish colour was a good idea for inactive units? I swear, most of the time I've no idea where they are.

- Lots of small annoying things, like the Spy system. So ok, I have to decide which town to put my spy in, and I get this huge list that's FULL of little icons to show what's available and not in each city.. Great. I select a city, and confirm my selection. Then I get the same screen again and have to select what task he should perform even though that was displayed on the previous screen as well. Why couldn't I just do both at the same time? And why do I have to do this like once every 5 turns or whatever? I'm like, fuck spies, I'll do without them.

- That screen with all the policy cards, oh dear.. What a mess that is. That entire screen needs a complete rework, it's just terrible.

- Leaders spamming how much they hate or love me, with their fullscreen animations that are slow and hard to get out of. Way too much of that crap.

- Moving units around can be unresponsive. Sometimes when I try to move someone it just won't complete, I have to slowly drag and click to make it happen. I've no idea why this is happening, it's probably multiple systems clashing for some reason.

- Missing a lot of options from Civ 5, especially when creating new games. Why can't I decide how many city states I want, for example? Where's all the advanced options anyway? It doesn't help that that entire screen looks and feels like something made in Flash. Oh, and it also doesn't scale with resolution at all, it's a tiny fixed size in the middle of the screen. Ugh.

"

Missing a lot of options from Civ 5, especially when creating new games. Why can't I decide how many city states I want, for example?

Actually, this is my big complaint. (all the rest of what you said is also pretty spot on)

I really fucking hate city states. I see them as just big black holes in the map.

Lots of negativity in here tbh, that's a bit unfair. I think we're just overhyped mostly. ;)

All the weak points aside, I think most of them will be fixed one way or another, and I do think Civ 6 is going to be the best one yet - once it has matured a bit.

It was clearly released too early, and needs a lot more polishing and tuning by Firaxis. They'll get to it though, too late as always. Overall I'm having flashbacks to the Civ 5 release which was much worse. But the feeling is there, like why the F are you releasing this so early.. Civ 6 is in a much better spot now than 5 was days after release though. Much better. It's almost fully playable ffs, lol..

And yeah, Civ 6 is really fun, even now with all the problems it has. There's likely no chance I'll launch PoE before 3.0 now. Sorry, GGG.

Wouldn't call it negativity, it's all valid criticism IMO. Also, I'm mildly optimistic about Civ 6 and so far I'm glad I bought it. It's just that I'm extremely fucking critical and can always find the weak spots, so to speak. Same as my posts about PoE, it might look as if I can barely stand the game but I actually like it a lot. If a game fails, I just don't write about it at all. It simply doesn't interest me enough to warrant my attention.

As they say, the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference :P