Things to improve/fix

[remconius]

Played the whole day after work and enjoyed it. Still getting used to it and finding quite a few bugs and things to improve, but it is a great game with potential to be the best one yet!
What I love is:
-diplomacy telling what is going on and how to improve relations.
-districts are excellent and allow specializing cities.
-builders work great
-even the first game got me very involved and thinking about every step.
-barbarians are more involving than they've ever been

My biggest improvement points:
-where is the action log to read back missed messages?
-where are the demographics?
-the unit icons are too big when zoomed out and clutter the view. In general the screen tend to be cluttered.
-after changing city with a trader, the trade route options stayed on screen.
- Overlays didnt always work. Settler one is useful, when its on, you cant see the terrain anymore.
-creating a road network is difficult when you have 1 trader and 5 cities. It takes 150 turns at least and stops trading with other civs and city states.
-there should be a tooltip delay=0 option
-the night and day is nice but not always useful. I turned it off to 11:30 but then sun kept glaring and obstructinh the view
-AI really needs to upgrade warriors....

All minor tweaks and improvements. Looking forward to tomorrow!

 

[Browd]

Moderator Action: Moved to Ideas & Suggestions.

 

[Sascha77]

Where to begin?

- UI is pretty terrible. Where is my city-screen and why do I need to click a plethora of buttons to get to basic city-info - like which buildings are present in the city? What was wrong with a single click on a city-name to bring up all the relevant info on that city *and* the UI to manage its citizens?

- The way active/inactive unit icons are displayed needs to change. A unit that can still move should be shown with a solid icon, one that can't move should be "transparent".

- Game lacks some of the handy functionalities that Civ V had. Why can't I click on the counters for trade-routes available, tourism, etc to open the appropriate detailed statistics? Why can't I hover over an enemy cities' name or the leader-portrait to get a pop-up with some basic info on the Civ in question? Like diplomatic status, resources available for trade, etc. Where's the permanently visible score list? Why is it so complicated to open a list of all my units? I actually only stumbled across that list when I tried to rename one of my units ... :/

- Speaking of units: Why doesn't the game show me a unit's XP alongside its health?

- Civilopedia is needlessly cryptic and often not very helpful. Take the entry on trade-routes: It doesn't say exactly how you can increase the number of your routes, only that "there are means to increase it" - or something to that effect. Other entries will just say "check entry XY for more info" ... and then there's no info on that page. Oh and BTW: Whatever happened to right-clicking on a unit's portrait to open its entry in the Civilopedia?

- Trader-interface lacks some basic functionality - like being able to see *all* available trade-routes from *all* mycities - not just the ones from the city the trader is currently in.

- AI is still dumb as hell. In my current game I have Arabia and Sumeria as my closest neighbors. Both have put down cities within minimum distance of my "frontline-city". My own religion's holy city is just a few tiles behind the "frontline", so Arabia's city can't help but get converted to my religion over and over. Which pi$$es them off and earns me constant denouncements for "having converted one of their cities". Well, yeah.. but I didn't send any missionaries over to them, the conversion simply happened due to their proximity to my religion. And Sumeria gives me constant "your army is at my borders"-whines, simply because I have a couple of units on defense in my frontline-city - but none of them are actually *on* his border. Basically, what the AI does is the equivalent of someone tail-ending another car at full speed and then blaming the driver of the other car for their own smashed up front-end.

- another point on AI: It seems that - like in Civ V - the AI will avoid trading with me if they think I'm getting too much out of the trade. Like when you built the East India company in Civ V, all AI civs would stop trading with the city you built it in. I'm currently playing Cleopatra who gives a pretty great bonus to trade-routes established to her and nobody is sending any traders to my cities.

- Both city-states and AI-civs spam an insane amount of units for basically no reason other than to occupy a ton of tiles and making navigating the map a nightmare. Rome is my buddy and has open borders - and now my heartland is constantly covered with legionnaires and other crap.

- Interaction with AI players is sure looking pretty, but feels pretty clumsy and not very intuitive. Yes: The leaders look great, but both random and "planned" interaction with them feels slow and time-consuming. Civ IV and V were much better in this regard. Plus I would've loved to see even more features in this screen, like being able to warn another player if someone just approached me with the request to conduct a joint war on said player.

- And on a less specific note: I'm not sure about the direction Civ VI has taken WRT cities and tech. So far, the game feels more like I'm rushing through the tech-trees without any real goal. Call me crazy, but I kinda like Civ V's approach to social policies and how you could use them to set yourself a path to a certain victory condition. Might be just me having to get used to the new game, but .. oh well. And the district-mechanic ...? Meh... At the moment, the game feels a little too much like a city-planning/-building game than a simulation of an entire empire. At this point, I think I still prefer the more "global" approach that Civ V took.

- I'm also not sure about the new movement rules. I guess that's another part of the game that I'll have to get a bit more used to before I judge it.



Overall, I have to say that Civ VI *does* feel very similar to Civ V in one regard: This is yet another game that feels like it's lacking a hell of a lot of stuff to make it as good as it should be. It might not be as bad as vanilla Civ V in this regard, but right now, I suspect that I'll like Civ VI a lot better once the first expansion comes out.



S.

 

[Carazycool]

I think this is a great game and I'm enjoying it so far, but there's definitely things that need to be fixed. If these things are taken care of, this definitely has the potential to be the best and most complete version of civ yet.

Things i'd like to see patched:
- reduce warmonger penalty (at least for the first DoW).
- remove warmonger penalty from partner in a joint war. your war ally shouldn't hate you because you agreed to his request.
- show city culture expansion numbers (how many turns? which tile is next?)
- when micromanaging citizen allocation, immediately update city food and production numbers on the little city-name-bar on the map, rather than waiting until the next turn to update.
- on the "city reports" screen, allow for sortable stats. I want to be able to sort my cities by various yields (production, income, culture, faith, etc.) in order to determine where to build certain things.
- allow manual city names.

It would be great if we could come up with an exhaustive list of things that should be fixed. I'm sure I'm missing some. What else is there?

 

[jamesviago]

Where to begin?

- UI is pretty terrible. Where is my city-screen and why do I need to click a plethora of buttons to get to basic city-info - like which buildings are present in the city? What was wrong with a single click on a city-name to bring up all the relevant info on that city *and* the UI to manage its citizens?

- The way active/inactive unit icons are displayed needs to change. A unit that can still move should be shown with a solid icon, one that can't move should be "transparent".

- Game lacks some of the handy functionalities that Civ V had. Why can't I click on the counters for trade-routes available, tourism, etc to open the appropriate detailed statistics? Why can't I hover over an enemy cities' name or the leader-portrait to get a pop-up with some basic info on the Civ in question? Like diplomatic status, resources available for trade, etc. Where's the permanently visible score list? Why is it so complicated to open a list of all my units? I actually only stumbled across that list when I tried to rename one of my units ... :/

- Speaking of units: Why doesn't the game show me a unit's XP alongside its health?

- Civilopedia is needlessly cryptic and often not very helpful. Take the entry on trade-routes: It doesn't say exactly how you can increase the number of your routes, only that "there are means to increase it" - or something to that effect. Other entries will just say "check entry XY for more info" ... and then there's no info on that page. Oh and BTW: Whatever happened to right-clicking on a unit's portrait to open its entry in the Civilopedia?

- Trader-interface lacks some basic functionality - like being able to see *all* available trade-routes from *all* mycities - not just the ones from the city the trader is currently in.

- AI is still dumb as hell. In my current game I have Arabia and Sumeria as my closest neighbors. Both have put down cities within minimum distance of my "frontline-city". My own religion's holy city is just a few tiles behind the "frontline", so Arabia's city can't help but get converted to my religion over and over. Which pi$$es them off and earns me constant denouncements for "having converted one of their cities". Well, yeah.. but I didn't send any missionaries over to them, the conversion simply happened due to their proximity to my religion. And Sumeria gives me constant "your army is at my borders"-whines, simply because I have a couple of units on defense in my frontline-city - but none of them are actually *on* his border. Basically, what the AI does is the equivalent of someone tail-ending another car at full speed and then blaming the driver of the other car for their own smashed up front-end.

- another point on AI: It seems that - like in Civ V - the AI will avoid trading with me if they think I'm getting too much out of the trade. Like when you built the East India company in Civ V, all AI civs would stop trading with the city you built it in. I'm currently playing Cleopatra who gives a pretty great bonus to trade-routes established to her and nobody is sending any traders to my cities.

- Both city-states and AI-civs spam an insane amount of units for basically no reason other than to occupy a ton of tiles and making navigating the map a nightmare. Rome is my buddy and has open borders - and now my heartland is constantly covered with legionnaires and other crap.

- Interaction with AI players is sure looking pretty, but feels pretty clumsy and not very intuitive. Yes: The leaders look great, but both random and "planned" interaction with them feels slow and time-consuming. Civ IV and V were much better in this regard. Plus I would've loved to see even more features in this screen, like being able to warn another player if someone just approached me with the request to conduct a joint war on said player.

- And on a less specific note: I'm not sure about the direction Civ VI has taken WRT cities and tech. So far, the game feels more like I'm rushing through the tech-trees without any real goal. Call me crazy, but I kinda like Civ V's approach to social policies and how you could use them to set yourself a path to a certain victory condition. Might be just me having to get used to the new game, but .. oh well. And the district-mechanic ...? Meh... At the moment, the game feels a little too much like a city-planning/-building game than a simulation of an entire empire. At this point, I think I still prefer the more "global" approach that Civ V took.

- I'm also not sure about the new movement rules. I guess that's another part of the game that I'll have to get a bit more used to before I judge it.



Overall, I have to say that Civ VI *does* feel very similar to Civ V in one regard: This is yet another game that feels like it's lacking a hell of a lot of stuff to make it as good as it should be. It might not be as bad as vanilla Civ V in this regard, but right now, I suspect that I'll like Civ VI a lot better once the first expansion comes out.



S.

i agree with most of your comments. about every two minutes i have a "REALLY? are you serious?" moment. and while it may be about getting used to a new game, i am very suspicious that noone on the design team is a "win civ v in under 350 turns on emperor+ on a standard world" player. feels like maybe they played a lot of small world fast simple games, and they've tuned the game to match that feeling. the science is fast and the turn-play is slow.

a few points to add - why move interface elements that we are so used to - swapping the map and the "currently selected" panels. switching the deal screen so that your/other are now on opposite sides to civ v. etc. so many "different for the sake of it but adding no value" differences to the UI. i could go on and on but i doubt the developers are reading these forums, as surely many of these changes would never have happened if they were serious players.

hopefully i'll get used to it quickly, but it's feeling like i'll go back to civ v for a year and wait for all the screaming on the various forums to convince to devs to clean up all these irritants.

 

[Carazycool]

some more:

- when you have a great general attached to a unit. it constantly selects the great general out of sleep instead of the unit.
- also when you have a great admiral on a ship. and select the ship to move (around a land mass over a certain amount of turns). it will path it to go over the land because it selects the great admiral
- allow player's military units to occupy the same tile as opponents' civilian units (when not at war with each other). This is a problem because as it currently stands, if you're trying to attack an enemy unit 2 tiles away and there is a missionary in between, you aren't allowed to attack because if you lose the battle you might end up on the same tile as the missionary. There's no good reason to have this mechanic be how it currently is.

 

[Sascha77]

a few points to add - why move interface elements that we are so used to - swapping the map and the "currently selected" panels. switching the deal screen so that your/other are now on opposite sides to civ v. etc. so many "different for the sake of it but adding no value" differences to the UI. i could go on and on but i doubt the developers are reading these forums, as surely many of these changes would never have happened if they were serious players.

That is perhaps the most annoying thing of all. Yes.. people are reluctant to accept change and all that, but in the case of Civ VI's UI, you can make a pretty rational argument for it having been changed just for the sake of change (and not to simplify things for the player or to add new functionality):

Let's take unit/building production as an example: In Civ V you had a single list of units in your city screen. Each entry was multi-functional, allowing you to either build it, purchase it with gold or purchase it with faith with a single click. That's two clicks altogether to build/buy a unit or building - one click to open the city screen, one click to actually buy/build the unit.

In Civ VI they took the same functionality and split it across, err, three? different sub-menus. So to build/buy you need to click on the city, then click on the sub-menu for build/gold-buy/faith-buy, then click on the unit or building in question. Other than introducing more submenus to the UI, this change doesn't have any benefit that I can see. Quite the opposite in fact, especially when you add to that the fact that they also "hid away" the city screen under another additional button *and* split the city info across another three new subscreens/menus. It used to be that we had all the relevant info on a city on one single screen. Now it's split across at least six submenus, all of which need to be clicked to access the info that you could get in one place in the older games.





Oh, and here's another thing that needs to be fixed: It seems that you can't cancel district building once you committed to a spot/started construction. Yesterday I put a harbor in the wrong place and wanted to correct my error (within the same turn) by simply cancelling construction - but I couldn't find a button to do so. I ended up re-loading an auto-save to undo my mistake.


S.

 

[marper189]

So I think CIV VI is a great game, with full of potential, bit there are two things that for me must be fix ASAP,

1 - Barbarians : It's funny for the begining of the game, I love the new mechanic of the scout finding your cities and then go back and tell them into their camp. That being said,, they just keep sprawling over the entire game and this is just ridiculous, plus most of the time they use low developed units like warriors or horseman, so when you move forward aver the eras, you still have to deal with this..... needs to be

2 - AI really need to get their units upgraded, I mean keep fighting with spearman, archers, catapults, the entire game, i mean all over the eras, it's crazy fighting with a tank against a horseman or a catapult in the atomic age for example, this need to be updated ASAP.

 

[criZp]

-Add unit alert/sentry
-Add border growth when/where
-Remove ability of citizens to work tiles with enemy units on top
-Sleeping units should not "black out" like units who're out of actions
-Tool tip on production screen comes up with 0 second delay and obstructs the build options
-Too much time between heavy/light cavalry upgrades, considering horsemen don't upgrade to knights etc
-You need to get a notification when a barbarian scout appears on your border somewhere
-Barbarian encampments produce units too fast, like one unit every 1 or 2 turns, that's way faster than my cities
-The trade system is boring, considering all traders can have unlimited range due to trade posts, and all traders can go to the same destination city, so they all end up going to the one city with best yields. Trade yields per turn must be reduced with the time it takes for the trader to move between the cities (this also makes naval routes better, and indirectly makes navies more important). You should also get some yield penalty for making multiple routes to the same city.
-The AI needs some " the enemy of my enemy is my friend" kind of thinking. They also need to quit whining about my units being on their borders cities all the time, considering this is usually their own fault.
-Add option for notification of city population/border growth
-The combination of slow border growth and high tile purchase cost leads to border holes in the middle of your territory, looks silly
-When resuming a game, the camera always start in the middle of nowhere, for no good reason
-The warning icon for low housing/amenities on the city name gives a warning when the city is content, but doesn't give a warning when a city has -50% growth from housing
-When hovering over a tile it says "worked by 1 citizen" if someone work it. Should be enhanced to "worked by 1 citizen (city name)"
-Add a notification log
-Make it possible to check what tiles are being worked without having to click into the citizen micromanagement screen
-Add notification on barbarian encampent spawn on charted lands
-Make it easier to separate hills from flat terrain (see pic attached, hill with sheep)
-Make it possible to stack units with units from other civs. If 2 military units from different civs are in the same tile at the beginning of a war, simply have them fight each other repeatedly until one is dead

 

[Sascha77]

-Add border growth when/where

How could I forget that one? I don't like the new alert-system and I'd love to be notified when my borders expand (like in Civ V). I'd also love to see the return of the "X turns until border growth"-message and visual cue. Why am I not allowed to see where my borders are expanding to?

Plus: I can't seem to find the "your relations"-screen in Civ VI. You know? The one where you can keep track of your current deals or see your diplomatic and trade-relations at a glance.

S.

 

[Carazycool]

-Remove ability of citizens to work tiles with enemy units on top
-Sleeping units should not "black out" like units who're out of actions

-The AI needs some " the enemy of my enemy is my friend" kind of thinking.

-Make it easier to separate hills from flat terrain

-Make it possible to stack units with units from other civs

i agree with all of this.

 

[funkyj]

- Civilopedia is needlessly cryptic and often not very helpful. Take the entry on trade-routes: It doesn't say exactly how you can increase the number of your routes, only that "there are means to increase it" - or something to that effect. Other entries will just say "check entry XY for more info" ... and then there's no info on that page. Oh and BTW: Whatever happened to right-clicking on a unit's portrait to open its entry in the Civilopedia?

And how about hyperlinks in Civilopedia!? I have a lot of understanding with regards to 1.0 version but no hyperlinks to other topics? E.g. when the entry on Districts mentions Campus and Commercial Hub these are not hyperlinks to the corresponding articles? How hard is that? With the current implementation I have to type "commercial hub" into the search box. And is there a way to navigate back? I.e. like a browser's back button?

Civilopedia being not up to snuff is one item I have little tolerance for.

 

[gunnergoz]

I want the menu option to re-start the game back in the menu, even if only for turn 1. I don't care to re-set all the game parameters if I don't happen to like the starting geography. I know there are other players who miss this too and it costs nothing to add it back to the game.

Second, PLEASE set up the game to begin on the last game settings chosen (difficulty, speed, map size, etc.) as this would save time with new game starts. Tiresome to keep having to do these inputs manually.

MODERATORS: My goof - Please move to Suggestions subforum, thanks.

Moderator Action: Merged with existing thread.

 

[Mr. Shadows]

My one real complaint is the brown on brown color scheme for the parts of the map that you have explored but can't see. It's way to hard to read.

 

[UWHabs]

The one I kind of want most is a more explicit icon/description on the tech tree when the tech gives you a bonus. I'm sure after a few games I'll know them, but stuff like what unlocks the improvements to farms, what increases quarry yields, etc... It tells you if you hover over the tech, but when you research and it pops the quote, it doesn't list it.

 

[marper189]

So again, for me two major improvements that needs to be done are:

1 - AI really needs to be ''obligated'' to update their units. It's so crazy that for ex they go to war with heavy chariots in modern era.... they have absolutely no way of winning a war, plus is frustrating to me as an adverssary (this is in king difficulty)
2 -Barbarians: So I think new aggressiveness and mechanics are great for the beginning of the game, but is so frustrating to have to deal with barbarians ALL THE ENTIRE GAME , there should be a way to reduce their sprawling in futures eras. Also I think that sprawling is a little bit out of control and is very, and is very low regarding once you deal with them.

 

[RedTopJay]

The numeric keys do not move units in Civ6, you have to use the mouse.
I am disabled which means the mouse usually goes in the wrong direction and I have to reload. CivFanatics will not accept my Game of the Month submissions because of too many reloads. Is there a way to activate the numeric key pad to move the units?

 

[volucris]

Really my only major complaint thus far is the auto-cycle of units. I've wasted so many turns now because of what probably seemed to be a good quality of life feature gone bad. Please give us the option to disable it.

 

[elbeasto]

Scrolling really needs to be fixed, bottom right corner doesn't scroll at all and top needs the mouse on the edge of the taskbar rather than the edge of the window.

Unit movement - If a unit has run out of moves the game waits for you to tell it what to do rather than skip to the next unit. As a result you have to click skip on every unit after every time it's moved.

Camera ignores battles - If you have a unit off camera being attacked, you have no idea what's going on until next turn.

FoW - One of the worst I've ever seen in a game. I have no idea what the terrain is even though I've already scouted the area, just awful.
I distinctly remember an argument for the horsehockey mobile graphics being that things are easier to distinguish at a glance. I knew that was BS & it is.

That said, I think the game play is pretty good in some ways but the annoying UI and stupid graphic design choices ruin the experience.

 

[Alondin]

I am enjoying the game so far, quite a bit; however there are some MAJOR shortcomings in the available information.

1. I need a city list with what is being built and how long until it is done. Jumping city to city is a PIA.

2. I need a UNIT list. The Civ V one was great - could list types or individuals, could highlight spearmen and see all
of your spearman flashing on the map, could click on a particular spearman and find IT on the map. Now I can't find
anything, and I'm not sure what I own; especially after some spy took all my money and the game started scrapping units
for me, without my input, and without giving me a chance to see what it took.

3. The game desparately needs a log of messages. I move into a village, and ... something happens. Sometimes I get
a nice clear message with an OK button - you have received INSPIRATION. And, sometimes a little +40gp floats off
into the sunset on the screen, and if I miss it there is NO WAY TO SEE WHAT HAPPENED.

4. There is way too little information on how culture works, it is really hard to find out about the adjacent area effects,
the spy system is completely opaque to the user, there is no easy to see what religion is where, and the diplomacy
effects seem to have very little to do with the explanations given as characteristics for each leader. Most of the Civopedia
seems to say things like ' this makes that better ' without providing the numbers, and frequently it says 'this can be improved'
by some mysterious and unknown (unit, build, event, discovery, who knows?).

I expect some bugs and other issues, but these just show a complete lack of thought, especially since you had
FIVE OTHER VERSIONS TO WORK FROM!

Alondin Octagorn, who hopes the Beta will work better than this Alpha you released.