Initial thoughts

[ThERat]

I am currently playing an Always War game, so diplomatic penalties don't bother me. What bothers me is that barbarians are better at posing a challenge than those other leaders. Barbarians will advance to your cities without thinking of the consequences and hence, the hassle is bigger.

AI is too tame and will overrun you when given huge bonus on higher difficulties. Besides that, the information at hand for city micromanagement is terrible. We need some MODs badly

 

[Esperr]

Most of my complaints are minor, the edge scrolling thing is a world full of tilt. The actual technology tree is kind of lame to, it still has that civ issue of late game techs that are world changing in real life not really doing anything that impactful on the game. The civic tree is cool, the new government thing is pretty neat, but its almost like there are to many options. All in all game seems fine.

Wide empires seem strongish, but I can never build one, because of the minimum distance limit, and how fast all the good spots get taken up, you cant really spam cities every where. Warmonger penalites are unbearable until late game though, which is fine, because taking cities early is super OP.

 

[Sobornost]

From the point of view of someone that likes most of what I see, but adopted a wait-and-see approach for various reasons:

How does the melee vs ranged unit balance feel? Are ranged as dominant as they were on Civ 5? Unit stats I saw from beforehand seemed like that would still be the case, I am curious to see how it has gone in practice though.

 

[retrocity5]

So I fell the game could use more content. Don't get me wrong it has it's own unique enhancements as well as Civ V's expansions but, it's kinda like how most people feel about Civ V; best to have all the important DLC and expansions. The only complaint I could think of is while the Agendas are interesting, they seem to make diplomacy much more difficult. I played a passive game as Germany, almost everyone was mad at me. First, I forgot the agendas. Second I did nothing else but try to make amends. That's all I can say from my 8 hours so far of experience.

 

[WillowBrook]

Played about 30 turns into my first game. Definitely getting that "one more turn" feel I had from Civ I-III, despite starting on an island alone (besides barbs). (Real life kept me from Civ IV, and although I picked up V cheap earlier this year, I only competed one game.)

I'm pleased the game runs on my computer, but only on the lowest settings. I hope to get a graphics card for Christmas.

 

[PhilBowles]

My experience so far suggests that it's ok to have cities close together. They don't get massive where you need all 36 tiles, so having cities spaced out 4-5 tiles apart works out ok. I haven't yet been cramped by doing this, although I suck at the game so take anything I say with a grain of salt!

Anyone else feel the same, that closer together cities is OK, and preferred considering the borders don't grow fast anyways, and cities seem smaller? Or am I out to lunch?

There's at least one feature - the Colosseum Wonder - that actively rewards you for having as many city centres as possible within 6 tiles of it, so the intent seems quite clearly that you should build cities close together. It's also the way I've seen the AI expanding on Emperor (the AI may be lousy in most areas, and a trip down to King to compare suggests that AIs are barely capable of expanding at all at lower levels, but in my main Emperor game the two civs I know are each a city ahead of me, and the Indians have three within minimum distance of one another).

 

[BenZL43]

They need to balance out games in Tiny map.
I got new Great Person and Envoy in almost an alternating turns that it becomes annoying.

1) I only have 1 city state discovered, Lisbon, which have 12 Envoys already
2) Germany, my only rival, doesn't seem to care much about Great Person so that I claimed most of them and now have no place to put their great works!

More,
It's very hard to interpret what the other leaders are saying. I got twice pop-up saying "Are you not afraid to bankruptcy" while I have 1000+ gold and going strong. Their agendas also weren't shown clearly whether they were disapproving or approving my move (at least that's what happened in the non-animated leader, because I can't play with animation.)

 

[Acken]

Currently cruising through my second deity game. I try to play as legit as I can (no disband exploits etc). A few thoughts :
-Difficulty is all kind of wrong. Basically everything is set in the first 60 or so turns. I had a game where Rome just had 10 warriors at turn 20 standard to kill me with oligarchy + deity bonus. Your only hope is that the tactical AI sucks and it runs around while you can shoot those warriors down with your 3 archers you barely had the time to get out. And then once that's driven off there's probably another guy coming. And then you can safely play up to the end.
The start is totally unfair but then the AI just stays at warriors/swords while you can reach higher techs to kill it. Anyway it becomes shy and won't DoW you.
-The production balance is off. There is no reason to give 100% bonus to cavalry 50% to units 15% to wonders and 0 to district. It's really dumb. Without trying myself I'm pretty sure MP players have noticed that you have no hope of surviving without getting the massive 100% bonus against someone that does. Why is economy so much of a higher investment compared to warfare ?
Although in a way it helps against the crazy AI.
It also feels that you must have an Industrial district everywhere. I'm not sure that's intended but otherwise the cost of basic stuff is just too high without the factory spam.
-I'd like a better balance of housing. No water cities are too much trash. Good to hook a strategic I guess.

 

[Lucius_]

One thing to note about production, I agree industrial districts are very important for any kind of production, but there are also trade routes. Early game, encampment buildings, barracks etc, provide production. I haven't tried it, but prioritizing encampments and barracks earlier may help in production poor cities during the early game, and like others said, trade routes in your new cities to give them an early boost helps.

 

[onmy6]

The game has been out 2 days. Like anyone will value your opinion? Wait a couple weeks dude. jeez

Wait until the first expansion is out more like, If it's anything like Civ5 (bug and balance wise) it'll be bugged and/or out of balance until then at the least, hopefully not of course... but most probably

 

[Raider]

Currently cruising through my second deity game. I try to play as legit as I can (no disband exploits etc). A few thoughts :
-Difficulty is all kind of wrong. Basically everything is set in the first 60 or so turns. I had a game where Rome just had 10 warriors at turn 20 standard to kill me with oligarchy + deity bonus. Your only hope is that the tactical AI sucks and it runs around while you can shoot those warriors down with your 3 archers you barely had the time to get out. And then once that's driven off there's probably another guy coming. And then you can safely play up to the end.
The start is totally unfair but then the AI just stays at warriors/swords while you can reach higher techs to kill it. Anyway it becomes shy and won't DoW you.
-The production balance is off. There is no reason to give 100% bonus to cavalry 50% to units 15% to wonders and 0 to district. It's really dumb. Without trying myself I'm pretty sure MP players have noticed that you have no hope of surviving without getting the massive 100% bonus against someone that does. Why is economy so much of a higher investment compared to warfare ?
Although in a way it helps against the crazy AI.
It also feels that you must have an Industrial district everywhere. I'm not sure that's intended but otherwise the cost of basic stuff is just too high without the factory spam.
-I'd like a better balance of housing. No water cities are too much trash. Good to hook a strategic I guess.

Your post addresses the main issues that are keeping me from committing to this game and playing past the initial 2 hour limit on Steam past which I cannot ask for a refund. The game is very clearly unfinished, untested and its mechanics are not thought-out. The AI is mind-boggingly dumb. Agendas seems to promote just outright capricious and inexplicable preferences. The AI is, again, too dumb for them to be anything but slapstick. "Oh I don't like you because you have too little money!" Like, ok, that makes perfect sense.

Obvious other things such as clearly too fast tech versus production. Absurd warmonger penalty.

And yeah, again, coming back to useless AI. And, you know why I don't buy that they can't make it better? Because I can see what modders (often just 1 guy) with no resources can make and it's 100x better than the joke AI that comes out of Firaxis. And because AI in Civ 6 does the same exact dumb things as it did in 5.

So far, I am leaning towards getting a refund and not supporting an unfinished game.

 

[Xger]

The simple answer is that you are playing on Prince. If I was playing on Prince it wouldn't matter too much about anything and I would be just fine with the way the game looks and plays. I played a few games on Immortal and it really didn't matter much either. I usually have 3 Civs wiped out before turn 100 so I guess it doesn't really matter much on that level either but the Fog and the Animation is hard on my eyes or at least I mean that everything blends together for me. I try to play very fast too so that might factor into it. I'm about done with Immortal for now and back to Deity like usual but honestly the Fog and UI/Graphics bothers me so much I am not sure how much longer I can play this game. I guess my main problem is that I am just a Weirdo lol !

Wow, this is new--being down on Prince players, but saying the difficulty somehow changes the way the game looks, visually....

The two main initial thoughts I had:
1. I do not like the new movement system. Maybe it's just a "new" thing, but I feel more annoyed with it now than when I started.
2. Why are so many bars (XP and scroll), and the city "target" icon so small?

 

[The Highwayman]

Played the game all night Thursday and never went to sleep. I just finished my first game, which was a culture victory with Gorgo on King. I'm going to up the difficulty to Emperor as King got to be a cakewalk.The game runs great on my machine, even late game. No real complaints, love it.

 

[Raider]

Wow, this is new--being down on Prince players, but saying the difficulty somehow changes the way the game looks, visually....

The two main initial thoughts I had:
1. I do not like the new movement system. Maybe it's just a "new" thing, but I feel more annoyed with it now than when I started.
2. Why are so many bars (XP and scroll), and the city "target" icon so small?

They never really explained why they did the new movement thing. In every article and video, I just saw it presented as, "We this is how it works now, CHECK IT OUT, IT'S NEW AN TOTALLY WORTH MENTIONING AGAIN!!! CIV6!!!"

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

So I fell the game could use more content. Don't get me wrong it has it's own unique enhancements as well as Civ V's expansions but, it's kinda like how most people feel about Civ V; best to have all the important DLC and expansions. The only complaint I could think of is while the Agendas are interesting, they seem to make diplomacy much more difficult. I played a passive game as Germany, almost everyone was mad at me. First, I forgot the agendas. Second I did nothing else but try to make amends. That's all I can say from my 8 hours so far of experience.

Really? I consider Civ6 to be the most content rich Vanilla Civilization game I've ever played. Almost everything that made the final expansion of Civ5 great (tourism, trade routes, espionage, religion, archaeology) has made it into this vanilla game, along with a far superior government system and city state system than we had in Civ5. Great People also offer up a far more unique experience than they did in Civ4 or Civ5, and the Civilizations/Leaders are also far more unique than in any previous iteration.

That's not to say the game doesn't have its flaws. I'd hoped that they would retain the strategic resource system of Civ5-and I'd hoped that they would extend it to luxuries (so that one copy of a luxury might not provide "happiness" to every single city in the empire-especially if the size of that copy was small). I'd also hoped that bonus food resources would play a part in the housing and amenity system, in a similar fashion to how they played a role in City Health in Civ4. I had also hoped that bonus resources-both food and non-food-would be commodities you could trade (not sure they even play a role in trade routes, which is a bit disappointing). I'm also thinking that Inspirations and Eureka moments might need to be toned down just a litte.

However, those quibbles aside, I'm having more fun playing Civilization than I've had since Civ4 came out in 2005.

 

[EpicWestern]

Some initial thoughts after a couple full games:

I can't really attest the difficulty of the game yet since I've only played on prince and emperor levels, and both my games were a breeze (a religious and cultural victory). Like all CIv games, the AI is just not good at all offensively. I did not feel remotely threatened and felt I could take down a neighboring civ at pretty much any time I wanted.
Still, there were some major and actually radical improvements to other civ games that were overwhelmingly positive:
- builder system (as opposed to workers) is just much better, saves a ton of time and concentration
- district system takes a little getting used to but is far superior to just having buildings that only really amount to a line of text
- reduced trade routes saves a lot of hassle
- no manufactory or academy spam (it was too tempting to abuse those)
- there's still a form of happiness but its role has been much reduced since Civ5
- taking over a city involves less penalties

The cons are rather minor (aside from poor AI), not really huge problems with civ6 in itself things IMO could be better touched up on:
- animations are still too slow and graphics aren't quite as smooth as they should be
- games in general are still too long (just my opinion though)
- tons of minor bugs here and there
- still feel there needs to be a better trading system so there's something other than laziness that prevents us from constantly looking for optimal trades
- lack of any sort of ongoing campaign or storyline

Overall pros far outweigh cons and I'm sure game will get much better with patches.

 

[Raider]

Some initial thoughts after a couple full games:

Overall pros far outweigh cons and I'm sure game will get much better with patches.

To me that can't possibly be true with the AI the way it is. Not even taking into account all the other poor balance and design choices at the moment, with the AI where it is, this game is basically a fancy SimCity.

 

[MkLh]

Really? I consider Civ6 to be the most content rich Vanilla Civilization game I've ever played. Almost everything that made the final expansion of Civ5 great (tourism, trade routes, espionage, religion, archaeology) has made it into this vanilla game, along with a far superior government system and city state system than we had in Civ5. Great People also offer up a far more unique experience than they did in Civ4 or Civ5, and the Civilizations/Leaders are also far more unique than in any previous iteration.

I considered it just a bad game with a lots of meaningless "content". Totally broken balance, abysmal AI etc. can't be compensated with tons of policies, trade routes, religions and what not (most of it being totally useless, as warmongering is the vastly superior way to play).

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

I considered it just a bad game with a lots of meaningless "content". Totally broken balance, abysmal AI etc. can't be compensated with tons of policies, trade routes, religions and what not (most of it being totally useless, as warmongering is the vastly superior way to play).

Well, you think what you want, it's a free world. I do know, however, that your views don't reflect the majority of those who have reviewed the game on Steam.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

I considered it just a bad game with a lots of meaningless "content". Totally broken balance, abysmal AI etc. can't be compensated with tons of policies, trade routes, religions and what not (most of it being totally useless, as warmongering is the vastly superior way to play).

BTW, in my current game, I see no evidence that warmongering is vastly superior. If anything, I'm hearing that it is far too hard to warmonger.