f13.net

Launches in October. I've got over 1000 hours into Civ 5 so I can't wait.

http://www.polygon.com/features/2016/5/11/11653620/civilization-6-release-date-preview

Official announcement trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvBf6WBatk0

After Beyond Earth I was feeling like it was time to stop buying Civs at launch. Maybe next time. This sounds decent.

Is that Sean Bean narrating?

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.... Damnit, at least it's still 5 months away.

I think so.


Ooh, this sounds exciting. It could mean"Three out and drop" will no longer be the quickest possible rapid-expansion method. It's one thing if your cities are limited in size, it's another if they simply can't build things like granaries or monuments because of geography or layout.

Read the article now. Holy SHIT. SO fired up. Half-hoping I am still unemployed when this comes out :awesome_for_real:

Shit time flies. I kept thinking it's ridiculous we're getting a new Civ 'so soon' then read one of the last paragraphs:


Goddamn I'm old.

I won't buy at release, as these people are on the same rules as Total War now, but I am interested to see if they can make the AI actually decent without turning it into a RNG cheating machine.

Well, I don't expect it to be great until an expansion or two later. Par for the franchise.

If it's Sean Bean narrating, that means all Civs have to die before they get to the endgame.

This is stating the obvious, but more of the sound is taken from elsewhere: https://youtu.be/NQXVzg2PiZw?t=1m1s

I still don't think I've launched Civ 5. Forgot I had it.

Same here. I bought it once the 2nd expansion came out, but I think I installed it, launched it then quit without actually starting a game. 19 minutes played according to Steam.

2 minutes here.

Edit: Which is pretty reasonable considering I played 4 minutes of Civ 4.

There was a Civ 5? *looks up from Civ 4*

No, but there was an expansion for it.

I've heard good things about Civ 4 mods.













 :why_so_serious:

I was wondering when you'd bring that up.  You scamp.

I feel kinda burned by Civ V.  I should pick up the expansion at some point, see if it ever became good.

Not really keen on Civ VI, but I can see picking it up at some point.

Don't make me post jacking Daffy...

I warmed to Civ V at some point after the expansions. You do have to let go of the old ways, but since that's the trajectory they're on, it's a worthwhile exercise. There's enough improvement the interface trips me up when going to play /that mod/.

Beyond Earth was a let down, and I felt burned by that one. Felt like an intern project that got pushed out the door.

After the expansions fixed the hell out of it, Civ V is my favorite of the franchise so far.  Their decision to take away death stacks made warfare about 20 times more enjoyable to play.  I’ve come around to prefer several of the other major gameplay changes as well.  It has a lot more depth than previous titles.

Because of this, and how good Xcom was, I actually pre-ordered Beyond Earth (something I almost never ever do).  My thinking was that Firaxis was on a roll and knew exactly what they were doing, so I could trust them.  After THAT particularly bad burn, I’ll wait and see on this.  Still, with what they’ve done with Civ V, I have high hopes.

Civ 5 is an amazing game, fully expanded. It's probably the 4th most played steam title over the last few years, behind CS:GO, TF2, and Dota2; longevity which I think speaks to its quality.

I loved Civ 5 with the expansions, though I didn't play it pre-expansion so I don't have a basis of comparison. Based on all the bad things I heard about Beyond Earth and Civ 5 on release, Civ 6 will likely be a "wait until Steam sale and first expansion" type of purchase.

Has anyone actually used the Steam controller before?  It seems like an odd game to bundle one with since I can't imagine anything better for a 4X style game than mouse and keyboard.

Maybe that's why, though.  I expect most people have an XBox controller (or a controller that can emulate one) for typical controller stuff, so maybe they're trying to show why you'd bother with the Steam controller.  Allegedly it's supposed to be better than the XBox controller for mouse games because of the touchpads.

If you have all of the content for the game it would really behoove you to pick up the community balance patch.  Makes it a completely different and awesome game.

I felt burned by Civ 5 too. Thought it was bland, and I didn't like the military changes much. I do like the idea of having tiles with actual building on them as it would make sieges with slash and burn more strategic.

Still, the AI has always sucked. It got worse in Civ 5 in my mind.

I hated Civ V at launch, and eventually loved it after all the expansions. The one thing I'm still not wild about is that they got rid of a little of the wild randomness of the very beginning game--it often feels a bit too predictable to me, no matter how I set the world up.

I agreed with getting rid of death stacks, but I think they turned that dial too far in the other direction in V.
Trying to move an army of single units, one hex per turn, was dreadful. Especially if the terrain narrowed at all.

Endless Legend handled this by letting you stack a limited number of units. I think Civ would benefit by stealing that concept.
(EL units were also more mobile, but there was a lot more distance between cities in that game.)

Endless Legend also had pretty complex terrain that could lead to making cities harder to attack (in good ways) and harder to expand or develop (in somewhat annoying ways). Sounds a bit as if Civ VI is going to imitate that, actually.

I got Tropico 5 as one of the PSN monthly games this month and I've been playing it with a controller. I'd actually say that it works really well, since you don't need to make incredibly precise movements rapidly in this sort of game. I realise citybuilders aren't exactly the same as a CIV game, but I'd say there's far worse games to play with a controller. If anything I'd say that the map controls are more comfortable, panning and zooming is a lot easier with two joysticks.

The Steam controller's niche is to be a mediocre-but-passable substitute for KB+M in couch gaming situations where the real thing isn't viable. It can also be a mediocre-but-passable substitute for a real gamepad, but that's irrelevant since you can already use a Dual Shock anywhere you can use a Steam controller. So Civilization is actually basically the only reason for it to exist.

Better to find a kb/m solution that works for your living room than deal with a mediocre solution in an awesome gaming environment. I've moved to a wired mouse because I got tired of wonky response issues with wireless mice, but the wireless keyboard has been great. Been using this setup for 13 years now (as my only computer in the house) and it's great.

Do you just have a really long USB extension cord for the mouse then? I'm with you on wired vs. wireless, though my DeathAdder has been pretty shit recently with its wheel button. Fucker scrolls at inopportune times.

Summary by PC Gamer:

http://www.pcgamer.com/civilization-6-everything-you-need-to-know/

I bought a cheapie Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse, then set the mouse aside and ordered a wireless Viotek "gaming" mouse instead. Been working great -- any lag I'm getting is due to my crappy home network and not my interface devices, as far as I can tell.

I tried the long usb extension thing too, but several tripped dogs and one wife later I realized that the performance increase just wasn't going to be worth the collateral damage...

Yeah, it's an active 4-port hub to boost power when I plug other random crap into it, and I figured it might help signal strength over the longer cable, maybe 10-12'? It has a 4 port hub I mount under the coffee table, I plug the mouse and keyboard's receiver into it (as well as a card reader for convenience). I run the cable in a flat cable runner I bought from work, in summer config of my living room it runs under an area rug for zero trip hazard, but even in winter when it's more exposed nobody has ever tripped over it.

Gameplay video. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZRWTN4Zl_4&feature=em-uploademail)

Immediately fire the kid doing the video. Admits not being a civ fan, I mean can't PC Gamer find someone who plays Civ hundreds of hours? I do and I'm not exactly hardcore. But worse than that (and probably related) he spends most of the time talking about the artwork and 'complaints' (1st lesson: ignore commenters, dude), and casually brushes off the main change of the new iteration that he should've spent his entire play session exploring so he could report on it.

Waaankah.

I turned it off when I heard him say he never really played the game.

Well, the footage was gameplay. Unfortunately it wasn't narrated gameplay and whomever was playing didn't take the time to display any features.

Journalism!

Lots of comment complaints over colors/ look. Ah, PC gaming public, never change in your quest for gritty, shitty, boring palettes. Taupe, black, and brown, the only palette for real games.

I was going to say, since when have graphics ever been a civ thing? Like, of all the games to complain about.

The only thing I want from Civ graphics is to be simple enough to not make my GPU gag when it tries to render things late game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qzC5cUQcFk&list=WL&index=11

That one is a lot better.  It's the same 2 minutes of footage, but at least the dude sounds super excited about it.  He discusses as much as he can remember from his little invited playsession. Some fun info in there.

Also, fuck hearing about Civ, total fucking trigger for me. Booting up Civ5 with the Community patch/mod is a completely different game and better/improved in every direction.

There's a TON of information in that 2nd video and he's genuinely positive. Nice find.

A few that really stood-out to me:
* Builders w/ limited use vs. Workers is appealing. No more will I build 12 workers in my first 3 cities who do all the lifting for my global empire. That'll change the build strategy quite a bit.
* Along with the above, no more roads via worker. They're developed by trade routes which makes the trade even more valuable. It also means no more building a road to your enemy to move your army faster.
* The terrain bonuses seem pretty damn significant. The one tile that had +4 science due to its adjacency to mountains is a big boost with the right building. Plus you'll have a reason to build near mountains now instead of avoiding the blights on your city's expansion.
* Bombardment from military structures as well as the city means I'm less likely to build only one post-barracks building and use it to churn my armies.
* Barbarians are going to be a GIANT pain in the ass now.
* Global happiness gone. We're back to local happiness and managing it with amenities. While I didn't hate GH the per-city value always made much more sense.

I hated global happiness so I'm glad it's back to local. It made zero sense to have it global.

The Worker changes and road changes confuse me.

GMG got me again with 25% off for this. May as well. Though I will be pissed if it's a Beyond Earth deal.

I have the Deluxe Edition sitting in my cart with the discount applied, but I am trying to find out what is in the DE before I pull the trigger. If there is anything gameplay related, I want it. If it is a bunch of art books and soundtrack nonsense, I couldn't care less and will buy the SE instead. Anyone know more than is posted on GMG?

I think it includes 4 DLC if I remember correctly.

I was thinking about it, but I'll just snag the DLC during steam sales. A season pass is more inviting, because expansions > dlc, especially for Civ. But yeah, it's basically Civ + 4 DLCs that sound like the usual 'new civ' DLC.

This weekend, for those needing a reminder.  This is my major time waster series.  I won't be getting it until I upgrade my PC, but should get it around Christmas time. 

Pre-ordered and downloaded the pre-load. Can't wait.

Forgot to preload last night. Woops.

If anyone is still thinking about it, Greenmangaming has it at 20% off once you plop it into your cart, both standard and deluxe editions.

Not getting caught again. C'mon, you all know that it's not going to be any good until after the second or third expansion.  :awesome_for_real:

Excellent point.  I'm going to be watching the comments before I invest.

I enjoy them even before the expansions but I'm weird like that.  Need to preload tonight so I can play on the plane back from Vegas Friday.

Yeah, I always get in a couple solid games of the vanilla release, and then end up playing it for years. No ragrets.

Thanks for this heads up, saved me a few bucks.

Edit: I also end up having plenty of fun pre-expansions. They improve with the xpac, but they aren't a trainwreck before them, generally.

I expect fully unbiased and glowingly positive reviews out of all of you for a week.

Followed by shitting on every feature when the honeymoon is over. COMMENCE THE WINNOWING!

I know I  shouldn't have read this  (http://well-of-souls.com/civ/civ6_overview.html)but I did. Damnit. I won't buy it, I won't.

.

..


Maybe just a little taste..

At least they stuck with the same bullshit they've said since forever with "And we’ve rewritten the A.I. from the ground up, learning all the lessons that we had from Civilization V, so we know how best to solve some of these problems in military combat and so forth."

Haha okay buddy. Maybe this time you'll get it right. Sixth time is the charm!

I can't get steam to patch on my laptop.  I am not pleased and will be denied civs until Sunday it seems. 

Nice writeup. No diplomatic victory worries me a bit, though. Preordered it anyway, because Civilization.  :awesome_for_real:

Fug it, I caved.

Civ V is the only one I thought was pretty bad out the door.  But turned around in a huge way after the first expansion.

I've played all the others without any of the expansions I think.

I didn't enjoy Civ IV at launch and it ended up being my favorite (with mods, cough).

Civ V I initially rejected but learned to really like it, though my aforementioned love of the Civ IV mod meant my playtime there was exponentially higher.

Strategy view is beautiful.

must...go...to bed...

... just one more turn...

So far a nice experience, a bunch of stuff to get up to speed on but it still plays well. I didn't get too far (responsibility!), but I was a bit annoyed when my neighbor (I'm Rome) is constantly referring to himself as the Emperor of Rome (Germany is the HRE this time around). Going to have to irrationally kill Germany early, I guess.

I can't figure out how to move using the keyboard. The graphics are too cartoony for my tastes.

Turns seem to bog down immediately instead of later in the game.

I only played for a few hours last night.

I plan to wear this thing out over the weekend. It is still Civ.

I was actually impressed with performance. I'm not very late in the game, but turns are going by quickly. My machine isn't something spectacular either.

I stopped using the keyboard for much with Civ V, movement on hex wasn't wasd-friendly. I turned on mouse scrolling at the screen edge but didn't make it many turns before turning it back off again. I prefer it, but they've obviously set up the UI for their click-to-scroll setup, since many UI elements are in the edge scrolling zone. Not a real big deal yet, since there's always a few things to get used to like that, the last few iterations.

Man I screwed up my first game so badly already. Getting used to builders having a limited number of uses but also being instant is going to take a while. As is not spamming "Farm, farm, farm, farm" initially.. Whoops.

Getting the groove of the limited city layout now, however. I like it, it's a very nice meta planning layer on top of the usual "spam goddamn cities" game. Those who like to play tall rather than wide are going to hate it, I think. That was also part of my fuck-up. I was trying to nurture 2-3 cities then realized I wasn't going to have space to do everything and had to start spamming settlers in the late-classical period. That doesn't work when the AI has 5 going already.

The new Civics system is a BIIIIG improvement over 4 and 5. The way you're essentially running two research trees flips a lot more switches and the cards for policies is fantastic.

Only got a few emissaries to the local city-states but I like the system more than the old "feed them gold" bullshit. You can really focus a few and make sure they're cleaved to you forever because the AI can't catch-up. Conversely the same can happen to you so be strategic in which relationships you nurture.

The game feels a LOT slower; not performance-wise but turn-wise. I played for about 3 hours and didn't hit the Renaissance, and I recall watching a project count down from 5 turns and it felt like it took 30 minutes to get through the turns without me doing much of anything else. Not sure I'm a fan of that at all, but we'll see.

Fuckup #3; I was playing Rome and didn't capitalize on the free roads properly. I was going one direction down a coast instead of going spoke and hub. Big mistake.

Love that I don't have to fuck with Roads and caravans build them. Makes you really focus on those trade routes and want to develop some internals (if you're not Rome) early on.

Having an early-stage ranged unit that wasn't an Archer was weird. Weirder still that I had to be adjacent to fling stones. I guess this is so you take advantage of the new promotion tree earlier for your ranged folks. BTW, nice to finally have it on-screen instead of trying to remember the upgrade path each time you fire up a game after a few months. Kudos there.

The art's beautiful but I agree the leaders cartooniness is kind of lame. A little too much Civ 3 here, they could have dialed it back a bit.

So far I really like the changes to Civ 5. The builders are better. Government better, I like the boost system, I like the district system.

AI seems poor still, but that happens.

Edit: I love the cartoony strategy view. I play the whole game in that view.

(http://i.imgur.com/XtezwQJ.jpg)

Yeah, art and style is amazing in this version.  I'm a huge fan of the normal map as well.  How every thing that you've discovered but is hidden by fog of war, instead of just a grey fog, is rendered as a hand drawn map of what you last saw there.  

Also so happy they finally created a science and a culture tree to go up.  It's been heading that direction for a long time, so its a relief to see them have those two different tech tree's running side by side.

Yes I'm really impressed. The district system with local and regional elements, and the luxuries, it all works really well for me. Favourite civ to date so far.

Now to sleep, it's 4am...

So far I'm really liking the city planning/district building stuff.

This thread needs a trigger warning. damn you all.

Still playing through my first game as I chose Epic speed. It's rather slow, feels somewhere in between epic and marathon speed in Civ 5, so I'll probably stick to standard from now on.

Been aiming for a science victory, me and Teddy seeing who can hammer out space parts the quickest at the moment. Going into the game relatively blind has been fun, even with all the stumbles I've had. It might just be the game being new, but going for a science victory in this feels less dull than it has in past Civs. Might be due to the early chaos that can erupt with barbarians, wars, etc. and districts providing an even more fun perfect city spot hunt.

The leader's random trait abilities can offer some interesting encounters. Teddy is a devout naturalist, never chopping down forests and loves to keep things the way they are. Harald however, is an orc and mows down everything purely for exploitation and expansion. Those two have been duking it out the entire game and neither side has let up. Then you have the Kongo leader Mvemba, he's paranoid. He has the largest force in the game because he's scared of anyone being stronger than him. He even thanked me for not being a threat to him. I've actually gotten quite lucky this game due to the trait clashes, as the AI has been fighting entirely amongst themselves whilst I bumble about trying to figure out how things work by trial and error and old general civ knowledge.

Interesting start as the English on an islands map (like a 5 hex island with nothing else nearby). Super tiny island, few resources. I rush galleys and then... seafaring? The one that lets general units embark so I could embark settlers.

Galleys meanwhile explore a bit, find China stuck in a desert with great lands on either side and some nice strategic islands. Pop a city on the desert borders on either far side from China and in the bay they can use to sail out...what looked like a total crap start is blossoming into a decent Classical Era already...

This is the best Civ has been, and I can only see it getting better with expansions.

The game is just as deep and involved, but makes more sense, has more fun elements to the micromanagement, etc.

Just won a close immortal game on epic with a cultural victory as Norway. I was behind for most of the game, but the Eiffel Tower and Terracotta Army helped be go nuts late game with museums, natural parks and seaside resorts. Pericles was on the last bit of the science victory, so the race was very close!

Epic is a bit slower than I'd hoped, will go back to standard next. Probably only going Epic for a fast domination.

Edit: Standard is too fast, back to epic.

I've played one game so far on the third easiest difficulty. I definitely need to up that for my next game. It's 150 turns in and they're still riding chariots against my field cannons. I'm liking how complex the district system is. It'll be a lot of games before I get the hang of which ones I want to build and how to plan my city out in advance. I also need to memorize all the tile yields, and what improvements increase what yield, and also what technologies add to tile yield. I played as Greece and that Acropolis district is OP. I think any of the unique Civ districts might be OP, simply because it doesn't count against your district cap. As a side note my first neighbor was the OTHER Greece leader and that was really confusing because the game doesn't differentiate at all. In the Great Person screen it says Greece twice with no way for me to know which one I am.

Yeah some UI issues around things like that. One that annoyed me is a lot of artifacts get the same name and icon, but will be from different eras or civs, and working out what is what when trying to trade away the ones you don't want is almost impossible.

Meanwhile I'm back here on Warlord with Internet Game-speed (fastest) because I'm trying to learn the systems and hate the epic-length games.

Then again I'm old now and can't sit and play anything longer than 2 or 3 hours. Meaning my second civ game still isn't to Renaissance era, even with the speed boost, and I haven't seen how most of the systems work.  I don't have time to research and explore anymore. Alas.  (Oh, and I've never used the cheese strats because I dislike them. :D )

The trick is to not sleep.

I've got that down. I just get restless if I sit for more than 2-3 hours. It's not that I don't have the time, I don't have the desire. There's other shit I'd rather do.

I'm seeing some players saying that even for a Civ game, the AI is pretty dumb, particularly in city placement?

Define dumb.  They're following their agendas well as far as I can tell.  They may not be optimal game strategies but nobody ever REALLY wants that.  Ask the chess champs how much they enjoy losing to deep blue. 

As for city placement, the requirements are different from old Civ games.  The recommendation made to the player tries to optimize city size and available resources but doesn't seem to take buildable land into consideration.  That does lead to some suboptimal recommendations, which have lead to some bad placements like on the end of a narrow 1 hex wide 4 hex long peninsula. Oh look, no room for districts. Ow.  This place will never be more than a village. It's not a huge problem so far as I can tell, since you need to build more cities not fewer.

So, from your posts I'm getting the impression that the game is polished and finished enough to invest in?

I have yet to encounter a bug that I'm aware of. Online players are complaining of exploits but I don't play Civ online so I couldn't tell you. I do feel like it is very polished. The load times are still pretty bad, but overall performance seems just fine.

I normally tell people to hold off until the second expansion, but this time I think they got it right out of the box.

I played pretty extensively this weekend and after notching my first win, I don't feel the urge to fire it up. The game is fine - I think if you liked Civ5 and want a more interesting version of that, this is worth it. My main complaint would be that the late game was largely just spent passing turns, and the game took a good 30-45 seconds to process the remaing AI civ's turns I had 3 of 7 civ's that made it till the end of the game. I got into the habit of pressing pass turn, tabbing out, and reading stuff while the turn processed. This started at around turn 250. I ended up winning a cultural victory around turn 360.

I did get the chance to play a multiplayer game Friday night with some friends on discord, and that was quite fun figuring things out together.

If you have a bunch of steam bucks/spare cash or really feel the itch for a newer shinier Civ, you can be happy with this. If you are on the fence, maybe hold off till an xpac or interesting mods are developed.

Dunno if it's a bug but I'm beating up on Roosevelt and he's in the modern age. I'm using Infantry artillery etc and he's spamming horsemen. It's not working well for him. the barbarians otoh are using era appropriate units so I'm not sure what the problem is. Overall I'm really liking the game.

I think it's worth it out of the box, if that's not clear.

I started my first game on a Huge map on Marathon time. I am thinking that was a mistake...it takes fucking forever to do anything so exploring the new shit is a lot harder. Think I will table it and start over on Standard time and see how that goes. I wish there were more map types...looking forward to the mods.

I still have no idea how borders expand. I think it's just culture produced by the city locally but unlike Civ 5 it doesn't tell you how many turns until next border growth nor does it say which tile it will take. I also wish you didn't have to mouse over techs to figure out everything they do because a lot of them have "hidden" things that are only shown when you mouse over it. There's no diplomacy screen so if I want to figure out if anybody has an amenity I could trade for I have to click all of them individually instead of just browsing one screen. When looking through the religion lens it seems like a city will revert to pantheon worship when no single religion has a majority but the problem with this is that it doesn't tell you how many followers there are of which religion. A city of 11 with 3 Buddhism, 4 Shinto, and 4 Catholicism will just show as 'Stone Circles' with no other information presented.

If you mean Teddy Roosevelt, that seems proper.  If you mean Eleanor, then I guess it's a bug.

Are you sure they're horsemen and not Rough Riders? They're Teddy's special unit.
http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Rough_Rider_(Civ6)

The framework of the game is great, and I look forward to playing it in years to come, but right now the AI is completely broken and there are numerous large bugs which create issues as well, plus a lot of rebalancing that needs oding.

In terms of AI, it doesn't upgrade units - ever. Partly because upgrade costs are ridiculous this time around, but you see city states and enemy empires running around with warriors in the modern era. Happens at every difficulty level, they just don't upgrade units. Similarily, they don't build industrial zones (or indeed, many districts). All three of my games so far great engineers havent been claimed by the AI once. It also doesn;t udnerstand religion - I've had Ais generate waves of missionaires and apostles to convert me - and yet they haven't bothered upgrading their religion slots 3 or 4 at all.

So it's basically in the same state every previous Civ game was in shortly after release? Great foundation and probably really great after the first six months have passed, all the bugs have been fixed and most of the rebalancing is finished?

In terms of AI yes.

The most glaring one I've seen is the warriors/horseman problem (I suspect its due to that civic that lowers maintenance costs by 1 gold) and not stealing tribal villages at the start.  Some easy coding there.

There is also the random "I'm going to declare war on you because I view you as weak" again. Seems to happen from every civ regardless of what their motivations are.

Civ V had pretty good AI for some of the basic fundamentals--the AI got out and scouted aggressively in the early game and went for goodie huts, it placed cities sensibly, it put a premium on getting to luxury resources, it developed its territory well, etc.  That's all important--you really don't want to be playing computer opponents that don't grasp some of those basic gameplay elements.

Not really, no.

The AI is bad in regard to unit control. It will get better, but I doubt it will ever be good.

There are some balance issues, but they'll get sorted quickly.

Some of the bigger supposed issues are probably due to people playing the game like it's Civ 5, rather than adjusting to this game. This is not helped by the UI and quite a few game elements being opaque and not explained.

Otherwise the game is in a really really good state. It's way way better than Civ 5 at launch. It's a lot of fun.

Sorry, but as an ardent defender of vanilla civ 5 I have to disagree. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love this version and think I'll be playing it for ages. But right now the AI is broken, in numerous ways:

1) It cannot cope with the player spamming archers, and hardly uses archers itself. Even at the highest difficulty, just beeline archers and conquer your nearest rival.

2) It doesn't understand districts, and doesn't build many of them. Again, even at Deity you won't find industrial districts in most cities, and given how production is King in civ 6 that's a crippling issue. The only district they seem to really go for is the Holy site, which leads me to:

3) It doesn't understand religion. Every AI that gets a religion will expand large numbers of resources trying to spread the religion, even if they aren't trying to win via religion, or when it has absolutely no benefit to them. Often, the AI will do this at the expense of boosting it's own religion - so its spending literally thousands of faith on missionaries to convert me, for no benefit.

4) Balance wise there are numerous gaping issues (like the fact most social policy cards are worthless, whilst the others are insane - or the issue that coastal cities are garbage and should never be built, etc etc).


They've had to bump up the difficulty bonuses as well, and even those don't work. Emperor in Civ 6 gives the AI an extra settler for example, which it didn't get in Civ 5, and yet despite that its actually easier to beat than Civ 5. It's quite bug free for a civ game, but in terms of AI it is definitely dumber than in Civ 5 because it doesn't understand some of the games basic concepts.

The sell values are borked. When you delete a unit you get gold back, a LOT of gold back. Like, half the gold it would take to just buy the unit, or somewhere around that value, I couldn't tell for sure. You can sell builders when they have 1 action left and get half a builder worth of gold. Considering half a builder is at minimum 1.5 actions, you can see how silly that is. it gets even funnier when you play as Scythia with her duplicate horse archer production ability combined with the 100% extra production to cavalry policy. A city with semi-decent production can crank out 2 horse archers worth 400 gold every 1-3 turns. You will be drowning in enough gold to just buy every building outright. You can chop forest/rainforest for full value no matter how far away it is from your cities, so for all the buildings you can't just instantly buy like districts you can just chop all the forests everywhere with an army of purchased builders.

Of course, this breaks the game pretty substantially so if you want to play legitimately ignore everything I just said. But if you want a laugh, give it a try.

Yes, the unit AI is crap. Forget archers you can wipe put a few rivals just with warriors. Doesn't mean the game isn't fun.

It can still be a challenge, the AI can win a space race by turn 300 on Deity.

And yeah, don't do sell exploits they need a fix.

But that doesn't stop the game being fun.

Good I see the honeymoon is over and the AI is still shit. It is a Civ game.

Yeah civ 6 is a civ game, it's in the title...

It's a very good civ game.

The AI does have the issues mentioned, but I am still enjoying the crap out of this.

Ok, I'm ready to buy.  Just one question:  Is the digital deluxe edition worth it?

Dunno, I didn't get that.

I bought it, it's only worth it if you're into having the DLC and will play Civ VI a ton.  You get the first 4 DLC packs with DD along with the 25th anniversary soundtrack (Woo.) If you only want the base game and don't care about the maps, scenarios, and leaders that will be added don't bother.

I usually wait until DLC goes on deep discount, if they had a season pass for expansions, maybe.

New fairly big patch out: the notes (https://civilization.com/news/entries/civilization-vi-fall-2016-update-now-live)

Good stuff, nothing completely game changing, don't expect the AI to be not retarded or anything, but the tweaks they did to it sound good.
More importantly: they rebalanced religion a bit, which was sorely needed, and removed gold for deleting a unit and clearing tiles outside of your territory.
But most of all a bunch of UI updates happened, like being able to see which tile a city will 'culture-capture' next and in how many turns.

If you're not jonesing for some CIV hard I'd still recommend waiting a patch/expansion or 2 though; there's still too few map options and playable cultures I'd say and the districts need to be looked at to really work (like the never build a city on a coastal tile bs for instance).

What? I've had tons of coastal cities and no problems. What BS are you talking about?


What.. 50% cavalry production combined with the "get an additional calvary for each one you produce" was in no way whatsoever unbalanced. I was just lucky to have 12 calv units destroying my neighbors faster than they could produce 3 warriors.

I think its a reference to how in Civ 5 you could build at the end of a peninsula and still have a decent potential city. In Civ 6 you can do that, but you won't have anywhere to build districts or wonders.

Ah, yeah. Though it seems that we don't have as many 1-2 tile landmasses as older versions of Civs had, which isn't a bad thing. The snaky mess of continents we could get from some of the old algorithms were often annoying.

I think the smallest island I've had so far was 3 tiles. That's enough for the city, an industrial district, a Harbor and a commerce district. A city stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere doesn't need more than that. At least not the way I play.

Yep, I have a little naval fortress set up in a contentious sea set up just like that. You wouldn't want a civilization like that, but an island civ would be distributed anyway.

That would be the most egregious situation, but it's more that there is simply 0 advantage to building on the coast in this iteration. Coupled with the fact you're almost certainly giving up 2-3 of your best district tiles (many districts benefit from being adjacent to your center) you're actually being penalized for building on the coast.
Sea-resources got a nerf in Civ 6 as well.
It's not game-breaking, but it is a design flaw.

[edit] At the very least you shouldn't be able to build harbors in non-coastal cities.

posting whoopsie

I like the new way cities work. The place the settlers settle is just the city centre, and I like building sprawling metroplexes out of that centre. And I very much don't like to build my harbor in the centre but at the outskirts of my cities. :awesome_for_real:

Navy?

I like to play on Archipelago and still bitch about them taking out transport ships.

People use navies? Always seems a waste of production. Can't believe they switched the special unit of Germany from Panzer to uboat,who the hell uses subs????

Until I choke your empire out and you can never leave your tiny corner of the world because nobody can ever embark.

My game as England went exactly that way. Tons of trade routes and blockades on anyone who dared declare war.

I've pretty much played only on the pangea map every since Civ came out. 

Currently stomping the shit out of the world as America. Harald made the mistake of declaring war on me after I had 40 or 50 turns of peace. I sent several armies of Rough Riders and artillery to take him out...and it took me an extra 10 turns at least because Scythia had so many missionaries and apostles swarming around that I couldn't get through to the cities. I should have taken a screenshot- there had to be 30 of them at least around 3 cities.

Speaking of faith purchases- switching to Theocracy for war seems grossly overpowered. I was able to spam about a dozen Rough Riders out the turn after I was attacked. I had 7 or 8k faith, since I didn't get one of the 7 religions and thus had no interest in spreading religion. I would be surprised if it doesn't get nerfed.

(http://3.images.southparkstudios.com/images/shows/south-park/clip-thumbnails/season-3/0311/south-park-s03e11c10-pat-robinson-16x9.jpg?quality=0.8)

I really hope they fix diplomacy. Right now it's bad enough that it interferes with my ability to enjoy the game.

Giving each civilization some actual personality quirks was a great idea. The problem is that it doesn't affect them enough. Scythia should always have a legitimate casus belli if it's attacking me, given how much she supposedly hates surprise attacks. None of the civs actually behave as if their quirks are structuring their behavior, it's just what you need to do in order to be friends with them. And you should not be tagged as a warmonger if you are the one attacked--that's just stupid, the AI civs can surprise attack you and even if you don't keep a city of theirs, you can end up with warmonger points. Even keeping a city under those circumstances should be low warmonger, if any. Basically, the game forces you down the path of a domination victory even if you're trying to do something else. I also think they could have kept a small touch of the play dynamic that created economic pressure on you if you spawned too many cities too quickly.

There's other little stuff that annoys me. City states aren't at all grateful if you liberate them--it doesn't affect your standing with them one bit, from what I can see.

Most of what's annoying me can be fixed in the same way that Civ V was improved steadily. But the diplomacy system is the big thing that needs serious changes.

Yeah liberating a city should generate envoys for you.  Those are the only rep you get with city states anyway. 

Agree that there's no penalty for city spam and it's how I've won all my games so far. Throw out 5-7 cities before 1ad and you're golden. Even if assholes like the Vikings attack you for not having a strong enough navy. Wiped him out with little effort, no more whining.

The warmonger penalties get stupid, I agree. It's way too easy to be flagged even if you've only ever defended yourself. As America I just said fuck it and wiped out everyone else on my continent.  I was such an economic juggernaut the  that nobody stood a chance.  Cultural victory before 1800.

See, the different personalities for the AIs *should* generate more divergent gameplay, but instead it basically nearly dictates just wiping them out. You're going to be max warmongered anyway no matter what you do.

Another dumb thing: alliances. They make zero sense: I have more useful negotiating options with non-allies! The fact that an alliance just means "open borders and not much else" just screams to me "We went live with diplomacy not entirely finished".

Ooh yeah good one. I entered my first alliance cautiously having rebuffed guys who'd been at war my entire first game.  The. Found out it means nothing. No defense agreement or mandatory war.  The only benefits are a few economic policies that generate more goodies for you and them if allied. Dumb.

Yup. By somewhere in the midgame every other Civ hates me but it doesn't really affect the game at all. They declare war on you if they think they can win, how much they like you or not doesn't factor in. If they hate me but I've got a good army they'll do nothing, if they love me but my army is weak they'll betray me first chance they get. I've learned to completely ignore the diplomatic aspect of the game until they fix it. Embassies and all that are a waste of gold.

I've got to stop getting blindsided by victory conditions. There's no notification for 'X has launched a satellite' or 'X only needs to convert 1 more civ' and I really wish there was. I know, I know, I should be checking that stuff semi-regularly but I forget a lot and randomly find myself facing down defeat screens wondering what happened.

Also, do you get any compensation for a wonder you don't complete?  Otherwise you have to spend a lot of time checking the other civs to see what they're building and how long they've been building it, because you can waste a looooong time for production otherwise. You can get info about what the other civ is doing but it's a chore to keep track of it--you get a notification from an ambassador or spy if they start a wonder but not updates about it.

I'm 99% sure you get bupkis for building but not finishing a wonder.

Overall I've been kind of disappointed with this installment thus far, I get what they were trying to do with the added complexities of district management, more varied diplomacy and whatnot, but it just served to show how monumentally retarded the AI really is in CIV.
It actually feels dumber than any CIV since 3 to me.

Also; I'm just not a fan of the district thing as is atm, it's finicky without adding much depth and makes any map below large feel small and clustered.

The district thing is interesting but overall yeah, I don't think it adds that much without some constraint on city forming like Civ V had. If you had to think very, very carefully about your cities and manage starting them carefully, that would mean something.

They tried to make districts and adjacency meaningful without making them overpowered. Which means they're actually meaningless because while that +2 or +3 bonus might mean a ton over the life of the city it's never multiplied and doesn't add much to the city itself. Neighborhoods have a greater impact per-city.

Plus, never locked-out from just building them all in your major cities. If they had bigger bonuses and required more critical thinking about placement and choice they'd have been a game changer. It feels like that was the idea, what with some of the buildings like Arenas and Factories having impact radii but they were TOO timid about implementation.

You get zip for a wonder being built before you, which has pissed me off enough to wipe-out other civilizations. Turn 59/60 for the Great Library and fucking Zimbabwe completed it right before my turn. Fuck him, his cities became my trophies.

This edition also really has me missing barbarians being able to take-over cities. I've left a few wide-open and it's cost me nothing. So long as my settlers don't get kidnapped on their route I have no reason to send escorts. That's disappointing.

The enemy civs literally never send escorts with settlers, and since you can capture settlers as in IV and before, that can sometimes be a bonanza. I found a medium-sized island that three different AI civs were trying to settle, so they kept sending settlers without military units, the barbarians kept capturing them--it was something like six or seven settlers when I just sent two military units over there, about all I needed to just flood the remaining space on my continent.

Barbarians are a bigger nuisance and a weaker threat, really--late in the game they can be really annoying.

One of the few good things I like about the AI is that it sometimes launches surprise attacks, which previous Civ AIs have never done, and it actually does a certain amount of troop build-up beforehand in a good way.

Civ 6 is on sale this weekend with Steam, but all I see are an endless series of negative reviews slamming the AI and the "warmonger" status.  Any of you have buyer's remorse?

I still play it occasionally. It'd be nice if diplomacy worked but it's still fun without it. I've heard there are mods to improve the AI but I haven't used them since it doesn't seem all that different from other Civs to me. Civ AI has always been dumb as a bag of rocks and needing copious amounts of headstart to compete with the player.

Good game, unlike Beyond Earth.

I'm Cived out for a while tho.

I want to like this. I have yet to complete a game though. One of my biggest complaints is that its too difficult to really get a feel for how a city is doing statistically. Plus too many things that you basically have to memorize in the civipedia if you don't want to screw yourself. Hmm, where should I build this district? - pause while I look at the adjacency requirements for 17 different wonders.

The game is not focused on "tall" cities much at all, so you're worried about adjacency too much if you're researching it like that. There's a limit to the number of districts a city can have based on population anyway.  Build wider and don't worry about maximizing tiles of your cities. The max radius of the city combined with hex maps means you have too many possible productive tiles to ever work them all efficiently anyway.

Just what I've found playing through. I'm no civ expert these days. I never go above Prince because it requires me to be too aggressive with the military. 

It's a poor game.  Gorgeous to look at, and with more buckets to fill than any version of civ yet, but it might actually be my least-favourite iteration in terms of gameplay.  Over-complex and overly inter-dependent systems (this from someone who even enjoyed Hearts of Iron 3) and surprisingly dull (and this from someone who plays Eve).

It's not even hard, as such.  Just meh.

Note to self: Never be alone around Endie and anything sharp.  :why_so_serious:

I want to like it more than I can. Fundamentally the brokenness of the diplomatic AI combined with its pervasiveness is what makes me unable to do it. If it were just a flavor sub-system, well, ok, but it's not--it's interwoven into most of the gameplay.

Absolutely got buyers remorse here - I even bought the season pass, which is the first and last time I've ever done that.

The game's AI simply does not work. It is in a worse state than any other version of civ, and 5 months later still hasn't been improved. The AI does not understand the basic gameplay rules - it doesn't build districts properly, it doesn't build armies, it doesn't understand how to move its troops. At the same time, it's insanely aggressive on the diplomacy front for no reason - nations who have no reason to dislike you will declare war like clockwork (it's on a timer, and as soon as that timer is up they declare). Although they often don't have an army anyways.

It looks pretty, and has some interesting ideas inside it, but right now it's just broken. My least played version of civ to date.

I'll wait for the 2nd expansion pack.

I didn't buy it, but I watch quill18 on YouTube play games. That satisfies my itch.

AI is definitely terribad.

You folks just saved me the cost of the game.  I'll wait for an expansion that fixes the game.

Man, I used to love playing Civ...  For those with a Civ itch that don't want to suffer through this game's faults: What game would you recommend to scratch that itch?

I hear there's this mod for Civ IV...

 :why_so_serious:

But seriously, I would also like to know.

There's nothing wrong with the game. It's the best Civ game out there, you will not find something else that scratches the itch better unless you already have a previous version of Civ you really really love.

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Yeah, the AI is awful but mechanics-wise I find it a lot more fun than all the prior versions. Lots of little things to keep track of and the systems are genuinely fun for me.  I haven't found anything that scratches the Civ itch like Civ. 

Alpha Centauri

Nope, AC is its own thing that doesn't scratch the itch, largely because of the unit upgrades and integrated story.  Also it's nearly 2 decades old at this point so the mechanics are more like Civ 3.

Have to disagree. You can pick up Civ 5 plus both expansions for nothing nowadays, and it's a far superior game than Civ 6. With a couple of expansions under its belt civ 6 might get there, but right now it's a complete mess of a game. The AI is fundamentally broken in a way it never has been before.

I will always miss transport ships.

Disagree completely, and I've got a few hundred hours in Civ 5.

Don't mistake taste for some sort of objectivity.

Never has that last line been truer than when reading Lamaros' opinion on civ 6, which is, to say the least, far from a universally-held opinion.  The recent reviews on steam are down from 75% to 52% positive (a horrible level for a AAA series game) and falling, for instance.  I've not heard the AI defended like that elsewhere since people worked out what it was doing.

The AI is objectively broken. It's nothing to do with taste - I like what they are trying to do with Civ 6 and distrcts, and I've even come around on the graphics.

But the simple fact is the AI doesn't work. At all. It is far worse than even vanilla civ 4 and 5 were. It cannot move units properly. It cannot take cities properly. It doesn't understand districts at all (watch how it places them, which ones it chooses to build, and the fact it just fills up district slots with the first districts available). The diplomacy is completely borked - AI civs have a timer by which they can and will declare war, and you can set your watch by it even if they aren't anywhere near you and have no competing objectives.

None of that is taste. The game objectively has significant issues with the AI. I could list all my other complaints (such as balance!), but AI above all else ruins it for me. When the optimal strategy no matter what is just to spam archers and rush your opponent no matter who and what you are it's not fun. When the fact you're playing on immortal and deity and the AI has two starting cities makes it *better* for you because it means you get more cities from conquering them indicates something is wrong.

None of that is personal opinion. Now, you might be able to ignore those issues - but they are objectively in the game, listed on the forums, and complained about by a huge number of people and still haven't been fixed.

Whether you like the game or not is largely down to how much the clownshoes AI bugs you. As for me, it doesn't bug me that much, so I still play it and enjoy it.

It was a bridge too far for me in this one considering one of the things that was supposed to be cool about this version of Civ was a new diplomacy thing.

I could deal with the AI not being able to handle city building and so on. That's generally been the case with most iterations of Civ. I could deal with it not being particularly brilliant in its deployment of units--the danger from AI civs in any iteration has generally just been if they get too much time and space and have enough units to really crush you before you build up a head of steam.

I can't deal with the diplomacy. It's just crazy broken, AND it's a major new element to the game. The diplomacy is supposed to give each civ some personality, but none of them really act according to that personality when all is said and done. They declare war in ways that make no sense at all. Once you're used to it, you realize that all of the trappings of distinctiveness are exactly that: a 'skin' that has nothing to do with how the AI behaves. And the diplomacy is really intrusive--it's one of your major activities in a given game session, but it very quickly becomes total nonsense bullshit. I can't play the game as long as it is a major part of the gameplay.

Eh, I ignore it like I always have ignored interacting with other Civs. They're never a real danger if you can make it to gunpowder, which is the real bullshit.

Their motives and declaration of war are always transparent. Viking guy wants you to have a navy. You don't have one - WAR IS DECLARED.  Stygia wants you to have horses. You don't have them. WARS IS DECLARED.  China wants you to stop exploring. You didn't. WAR IS DECLARED.  Brazil is annoyed you have more Wonders... etc. etc. etc.

Far more annoying is they will never, ever, ever embark units. Which means the other Civs are never a threat. Play on islands and win. That's more damning than anything else. However, since I play it as a city and empire builder and not a "I must conquer the world" game I'm fine with that.

I didn't play enough to notice the embark thing, but wasn't the reason transports were supplanted by embarking because the AI couldn't figure out transports?

I really wish the naval game was better, since I prefer island maps.

But why bother fixing something that has never worked and still moves units?

They were, yes. And it worked in IV and V ok. Not great, as they'd do dumb things like send units one at a time without escorts, but at least they'd send them.  Now it seems like the AI never realizes it can send armies across oceans and only embarks them if it's the last point of retreat.

Hell, I'm not entirely sure the AI realizes it can create Corps and Armies, either. I don't think I've ever seen one from an enemy civ. Those things are fucking effective, especially if you Army-up some heavy cavalry or fortification busters.

Never seen one make an army, yeah.

But the Civs actually ignore their own personalities because they're all on a war clock. Scythia doesn't like backstabbing! Except, well, they backstab if their war clock goes off. Gilgamesh likes loyalty and friendship! Unless his war clock goes off. The Viking wants you to have a navy! Unless his war clock goes off, and then he doesn't give a shit if you have one or not.

You really begin to realize that in this one the AI is really just a series of hacks to cover up that there isn't an AI particularly.

I'm watching  a run nd AI scythia is pumping out cores and armies like crazy.

I've seen AI armies too.

Civ 6 is currently a game that you enjoy despite the diplomacy/AI though, because most other aspects are well done.

I should probably give this another try.  I tend to ratchet the difficulty way down in Civ anyway and just roll over everything with my massive empire.  Much more cathartic than getting into another nuclear war with Gandhi.

Play EUIV instead, with the (I seem to remember) El Dorado expansion.  Create a custom nation for 800 points with a bunch of maxed-out national ideas in morale, discipline and infantry ability, and give yourself both coasts of the channel from Oldenburg down to Caux and south to Paris but with your capital in London.  You'll still have decisions to make but France and England will be crippled enough that you can steadily progress.

The AI is a bazillion times better tha the current state of Civ VI (not perfect, especially around naval warfare, but functional even there) and you will still "win" at most difficulty levels.

Also why are you not on discord this will not stand and is going in your annual review, young man.

Sorry but don't listen to this advice. EUIV is *not* the same type of game as Civ, and even on easy difficulties it is astronomically harder to play than Civ. I love EUIV, but would never advise people to play it if they like polaying on the lower, more relaxing difficulties of Civ!

If you do play on the lower levels, Civ 6 is fine and works great -0 it looks pretty, has some interesting mechanics, and you can crush Gandhi into the ground as all good Civ players should.

I'm sort of a weirdo but I like playing Civ with no AI Civs and just colonizing the world. This usually means opening a game, going into the editor and deleting all the other Civs. Seems like VI wouldn't be terrible for me.

Yes. That's how I enjoy it most as well. Huge world but with only 2 other Civs.

You want the other 2 Civs just for trading partners. Sure you could do trade routes with city-states but that's less fun and you don't have good candidates to drop nukes on later.

I usually play huge archipelago with 4-6 civs, so yeah...not exactly a strategy crunch. Mostly colonizing and relaxing.

Though the Mod Which Shall Not Be Named was my one exception in the series, that was way more fun with tons of civs, because each had a flavor and strat of their own.

I happen to know that Phildo is very aware that there is a difference between civ 6 and eu4.  I'm not sure if he has ever tried using the custom nation designer.

And Ghandi will always nuke you.

Truth.  I've never played EUIV, but I'm well aware of it.  I've just had less and less patience for trying to figure out complicated UIs and new systems.  Civ is pretty, largely intuitive and I've been playing it since the first one.

Also, I'm still in discord.  I'm going through a lurking phase.

And a year later, I guess that answer I'm reading is a solid no. Shame.

Yeah, as far as I can tell, they're not as committed to improving this as they were with Civ V.

Its sad, but I just can't bring myself to play it. Still play Civ V with the Community mod pack on a regular basis.

I still haven't pulled the trigger on this.

It looks beautiful.

But right before Civ VI release, I revisited Civ V and like every game, no matter the settings (and I randomized all of them, every game), every game played out exactly the same.

And then I read all the issues with gameplay upon release. Compelling me to wait until 1st major expansion / patch. But I'm still waiting.

I don't play Civ 5 anymore because of what you said, every game plays out exactly the same. Get 4 cities, build stuff, win game. It's why I prefer playing Civ 6 because each game is at least semi-different. You could have some mountains nearby that would make a great campus spot. You've got to figure out where you can put your industrial districts for max efficiency. If there's some desert nearby you can go for Pyramids. You won't be able to do every eureka every game so you have to find out which ones are feasible and which ones you'll skip. Most importantly where you start and how much room you have to expand dictates how many cities you can build. There's not some stupid arbitrary limit of well I have 4 cities so I guess I better stop making settlers for the rest of the game.

This is speaking as someone who doesn't like early war and doesn't bother attacking people in the first 100 turns unless they're walking an unprotected settler next to my unit for some dumb reason.

It's a really difficult thing with 4X games in general. I've only played a few that produce dramatically different feeling endgames. That famous Civ IV mod that we all like to talk about here is one of the few. It really comes down to having strong factions that are also in some sense play-balanced so that one or two don't become the default alpha faction, and then having an AI that can handle the variations. I'm not sure we'll ever have a game that fully handles all that.

Has anyone played the new update yet? I was looking forward to it, then got busy with life and completely forgot about it. Saw an update on Steam yesterday and discovered it happened like a month ago!

That reminds me, I should reinstall Civ IV.  And that mod.

God I wish someone made a game around something like that mod.  That would be cool.

Oh, and Civ VI.  I also have not bought that, and I am not encouraged based on the reading here.  Although what Azuredream said was positive, and I will probably pick this up at some point on sale.

Since civ 5 ruined the series and this looks like more of the same, I'll pass.

Civ 5 with the two expansions is as good as Civ 4 with expansions IMO. Definitely not ruined (I much preferred it to 4)

Civ 6 is, atm, a waste of time though. Looks pretty, but despite a years worth of patches the AI is still fundamentally unable to play the game. I don't understand how the tactical AI from Civ 5 (which was never that great) is SO much worse in this game. Combine that with the Ais inability to build districts and citiers and its just a mess that's held together by giving the AI ridiculous bonuses, far more than it ever has had in previous games.

I ended up feeling surprising affection for Civ V.

Civ VI is a loss. I can't imagine how they could patch it to be a halfway functioning game, especially not with their basic ethic on this.

Its also worth saying that since the last patch (October 19th, so over a month and a half ago) the game has basically been unplayable. They broke the starting position code in that patch, and despite a subsequent patch it hasn't been fixed.

What this means is that you can start literally next to another city's civ. In my recent game, on turn 10 a city state settler wandered into my capitol. They were literally unable to settle because they had started so close to me. The AI has two civs with their capitals 4 cities apart. You might get lucky and be in an okay starting position, but the AI almost certainly won't be.

There's a SS of someones starting settler being literally in the hex next to another civ's starting settler on turn 1.

6 weeks, not fixed, but they do announce an expansion.

To be fair, the not-Alpha Centauri released reeked of being an intern project, so not sure why we thought VI would be any different.

Civ 6 is a good game. Just, not for AI to play.

I'd rather play Civ 6 from an interesting game systems point of view than any other Civ.

Saw something about the first expansion coming in Feb? Maybe that will save it  :oh_i_see:

Agreed.  Civ 6 has a lot of interesting and fun systems built into it that should make it a great game on paper.  Problem is that the overall game is a mess that doesn't work.  Maybe the expansion will be a miracle patch like the expansion for Civ V, which turned it into the best of the series.  But I'm not holding my breath.

So that's what happened. I started a Civ, moved a space (to get to a better position), and another civ plopped down a city right freaking next to me.

Not kidding. Turn 2, and my settler and scout got bumped a space because of a new city.

I guess this goes back on the shelf until they fix it. Just tried to start a game three times -- three times another capital within 10 squares or so.

This is available on Humble Bundle monthly for 12 bucks. So you can subscribe, get the game (plus the Australian! and Viking packs) and unsubscribe from Humble monthly.

I'm mildly curious about whether the DLC coming in February might fix this some the way that the Civ V DLC fixed that game.

Its hard to see that happening unfortunately, as they aren't talking about the AI at all. The expansion is going to add lots of new systems in, and I don't see how an AI that can't play the base game is going to cope with the extra features.

We're over a year in the AI is still not building or using districts appropriately at all. It cannot fight wars properly. And the diplomacy is still utterly batshit insane.

I could deal with an AI that fights badly if only the diplomacy made modest sense. It doesn't--and they've chosen to make it a central part of the gameplay. The gameplay implies that it's worth your while to play into the AI faction's particular goals/obsessions and it is not. You cannot ever satisfy an AI faction that has a clearly declared obsession or interest; some of them will ridiculously undercut their own supposed goals/interests on a regular basis. Every AI is basically an enemy from the first moment you see them, trying to do anything but kill them is pointless. There's actually no variation in strategies worth considering, compared to Civ V.

This still bad? It's on fire sale now on Steam (75% off, $15 for base game). There's also a Switch version now too (not on sale), which is kind of interesting intriguing.

I found it playable with the expansion. It still doesn't stand up to 5, but the mechanics are different enough for it to be interesting.

I haven't really played the game at all since my last post long ago up the thread, so I cannot speak to the current state of the game.  But its likely the fire sale is because they just announced a brand new expansion coming out in a few months:

https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/20/civilization-vi-gathering-storm-february-14th/

I think I'm done with Civ. Every new version is worse than the one before lately.

I will buy the expansion like a dutiful Civiot, but I can't say I am overly hopeful. So many problems. I can't win a game via anything other than conquest or space race. Culture just takes FUCKING FOREVER and religion is the most unfun micromanagement ever conceived.

The new expansion looks horrible.  Random disasters are the things I hate most in this genre, I loathe them with a passion.

It doesn't look like it fixes anything that still needs fixing, so I'm not in for it.

Yeah, I don't think Firaxis knows what to do with this or even why it was popular in the first place.  I'd prefer if someone else just made an updated Call to Power under a different name, because Civ 5 with vox pop is still the best civ.

See, that's the thing that gets me about Firaxis.  They are just so UNEVEN.  Either they hit it out of the park, or just fuck it up in a way that makes you think they have no idea whats going on.  But its not like they're on some downward trajectory.  They just literally keep releasing great and terrible games.

My guess is internal teams. If this is the case, there is at least one internal team that REALLY fucking sucks and needs to be shuttered entirely (the one that made the alpha centauri remake abortion).

So is the consensus that Rise and Fall is a solid addition to the game, but Gathering Storm and random natural disasters makes the game worse?

The random disasters are just stupid, especially in Apocalypse mode. I have sunk hundreds of hours into this game and still am not sure I even really like it. So many bad design decisions.

Same. I try it now and again and every time I'm close to liking it something really undoes me. Notably they just seem to have completely given up on having the personalities and goals of the leaders even remotely inform their diplomacy.

I don't have any of the expansions yet, and am playing it with a nostalgic eye of having last played a CIV during CIV 3, but I do see definite personalities for the different leaders - perhaps because I'm just playing it on King level and they let the leaders be a bit more eccentric?

They have completely distinct personalities and then in diplomacy after a while they'll completely ignore *really* strong commitments in ways that seem arbitrary. You'll also get a ton of rando messages later in the game from them bitching about commitments that you haven't violated and they HAVE. It starts to feel completely stupid past a certain point.

Not to nit pick, but that has been my experience in every single Civ game to this point.

The computer will build a city within a golf drive of my capital. I Build a new city on the other side of my empire from them. They phone me up to tell me not to found cities near them. Or: I am moving troops through my own borders, no where near the aggrieved party. They phone me up to ask if this is a hostile action. Later in the game, they then attempt to pull an Operation Barbarossa on me. The diplomacy in the Civ series has always been fucking scuffed and it irritates the shit out of me. Firaxis say they are going to improve it every time, and many of their cheerleaders clap along with them, but it never gets fixed. The problem is, in a game and genre that takes 500 plus turns, and 35-40 hours for a game play through, by the time the multiple reps required to see the issues are done, many people have already moved on.

More pertinent to your point though, yes in Civ 6 they, on the surface, appeared to give even more weight to how leaders 'act".
When in reality, they all seem to have less diverging personalities then they did before. Which is galling, because it was slim pickin's to begin with.

Civ 6 was one of my biggest gaming disappointments, and that is saying a lot as someone on this board (we who have witnessed the MMO gold rush of the 2000s). From its pathetic difficulty unmodded, to its pigeon holing methods of victory, to the overall cartoony look they are increasing leaning into. Like, the whole point of playing the series is to face off against the Mongols in, say industrial or modern, and imagine Genghis Khan as some alternate universe Napolean, or Stalin, or even go the other way and pretend you are some sort of fascist Mayan state, fighting the Battle of Britain vs a defiant Korea. But that is hard to do when all the leaders look like cartoony Facebook game fare.


Here's the weird part: they said they already learned this lesson. There is an interview with a Civ dev, where they talk about a great idea they had for the franchise. Basically, you would build up your civ, then a hardcore random disaster would strike and you would have to spend most of the game rebuilding your smashed dreams. They thought they would beam with pride at how their players showed fortitude in picking themselves up from the ashes. Only problem was. They playtested it and people despised it. They kept trying to reload and avoid the event, and had had little interest in watching everything they had built be wrecked so devs could see how much resolve they had. So, the developers shelved the idea. Sorry, I can't find that interview atm, I will post it if Ido.

I tried Civ 6. Honestly, I'm not sure why, but I just could not get into it.

I think part of the draw with something like that is telling your own story in your head. How you were forced to become a world conquering Fascist because everyone just would not bloody stop attacking you so you have to go HULK SMASH to stop the 2 sides of your empire getting wrecked. The one Civ game I really remember was one where I took over Africa, attacked Europe and was beaten back, so I built a line of fortifications along where the Suez canal is now, and hunkered down thinking I would rebuild and try again later. And spent the next 2000 years on complete defense mode scrambling to keep 4 other empires out and balancing the resources between research and military and making hard choices.

With Civ 6 though... you just have to juggle too many balls for that to work. You cant tell a story when you are trying to fend off 6 different ways to lose.