CBP players, what do you think about Civ VI so far?

[Gazebo]

Well, that's certainly not encouraging . I think the most disappointing thing I took away from the pre-release interviews was when EB stated that he thought the combat (from civ5) was "fine" and left it at that.

Not suggesting that they never reuse code or basic models, only that they lose an opportunity for iterative refinement wherever there's a radical change. For example, if you guys decided to introduce limited unit stacking in VP, you'd no doubt undo a lot of work spent on tuning the AI to value certain tile positions. What I was suggesting is that we'd (in theory) have a better product if they went with more frequent releases and made gradual changes. If what you say is true though, they've missed the boat on something that's remained fairly static. Superficially, the biggest changes to combat in civ6 look to be the movement rules and how to handle city attack/defense. Corps and armies seem to just create a "super unit".

Haven't really gotten into too much player vs AI combat yet to compare or judge quality.

At least for me, the shine and novelty of Civ 6 are wearing off a bit, and the really big underlying issues (idiotic diplomacy, horrible tactical AI, unoptimized district use) are starting to show through to the point that my interesting is waning. I don't want to be a doomsayer, but this is starting to feel like Beyond Earth all over again.

G

 

[Enrico Swagolo]

At least for me, the shine and novelty of Civ 6 are wearing off a bit, and the really big underlying issues (idiotic diplomacy, horrible tactical AI, unoptimized district use) are starting to show through to the point that my interesting is waning. I don't want to be a doomsayer, but this is starting to feel like Beyond Earth all over again.

G

The retention of playerbase doesn't seem very promising for Firaxis too.

I mean right now less than 90k are playing it. Meanwhile, Civ 5 was often 30k-40k yesterday peaking at <60k, now it's back to a steady ~40k with 50+k peaks, while Civ 6's peak today was 135k. Yesterday, the highest amount of concurrent players was 150k. The game has sold around 700k copies if Steamspy is to be believed - meanwhile, Civ 5 has sold 10 MILLION. Sure, it is the amount in its lifetime with sales, addons, whatnots, but as it is, there's no way Civ 6 is ever getting near those numbers, sales or no sales.

I think the art style might be hurting them more than they have ever thought. That, and stupid pricing tactics in different regions - I'm sorry, but you can't expect it to sell well at this price in Poland. I bought it because I'm not badly off, but forget about the majority. I doubt people here will spend money to buy Civ 6 and then DLC to play with Jadwiga when she's hardly a super popular character. Sobieski would be a much easier sell not only in Poland, but also everywhere. Sure, she might please feminists, hipsters, leftists and other similar unpleasantries because she is a female - but those groups have one thing in common. They don't buy stuff, they just whine about it.

 

[heinous_hat]

The cartoon category isn't really where you want to be competing for sales when your product costs 3-4x the average item in that class (on Steam). So it's possible that they turned off veterans enough to at least delay sales while also not doing particularly well with the younger crowd.

Personally, I don't mind the art nearly as much as anticipated. Model complexity, animation, lightning and materials quality are all top notch. It's technically excellent. I even grew to like the map and FoW style, once I discovered camera rotation. TIP: If you use a 3rd party mouse utility, you can assign <ALT> to a mouse button. I use a chorded assignment between left and right buttons... so pressing <left> followed by <right> while holding allows you to easily swing the map around with one hand. You can also edit WorldInput.lua to get the camera to not snap back to center if you like. I find that being able to quickly rotate the image back and forth helps me to get a better sense of the shape of areas that seem ambiguous in a static view... specifically, that transition from revealed territory -> FoW -> terra incognita, which looks sort of muddled. It could still use a farther zoom maximum, but I enjoy it much more this way.

But the flow of the game is seriously hampered by the clunky, disjointed city UI. I played a brief MP match and while it was surprisingly stable, it was difficult to keep things moving because everyone was having a difficult time executing simple tasks in the (non) city view. I think they shot themselves in the foot with that design.

 

[albie_123]

I could write a lot but it looks like people already have addressed most of the issues that I have with Civilization VI.

All I can say is that I really, really wish there was a competitor in the field so that Firaxis was forced to lift their standards. Right now, they can easily get away with having lackluster AI or a few scrapped features - it's a Civilization game! You're going to get it anyway, so why would they bother spending more time and money to please you? The only game you'll be comparing it to is the previous game in the series.

Get the Endless Legend team onto a new game. Call it, uh, 'Empire' or 'Statecraft' or 'Totally Not Civilization Guys'.

 

[Stalker0]

Get the Endless Legend team onto a new game. Call it, uh, 'Empire' or 'Statecraft' or 'Totally Not Civilization Guys'.

Your wish is granted. Endless Space 2 was released to Early Access just a few weeks ago. While its the sequel to endless space, its more a spiritual successor to Endless Legend in many ways. I've been playing it a lot recently, but keep in mind its early access.

 

[albie_123]

I meant specifically a historical game, though - the vast majority of Civ players are drawn to it for the concept of the game (create and grow an empire, see the entirety of world history develop before your eyes) rather than the actual quality of the gameplay.

 

[balparmak]

Well, regardless of shortcomings like the AI and the UI and the diplo etc., I'd say it's still a good *base*, and will be miles better than civ5 when it is completed. In fact, it does not have to be completed, just a few major patches/dlcs and a SDK for modders will be enough. This may seem irrelevant if you think, by default, every new entry in a series would be better, but remember a lot of people still consider civ4 superior to civ5, and there are abominations like rtw2, inferior in almost every way to rtw1. At least we won't have that debate, so I'm happy with the game. All these show how low my expectations were, though.

 

[IcyAngel]

Let's just say, CiVI made me remember how great VP is.

The game is so unpolished it gives me a headache.

 

[Funak]

Since people here are all so negative I thought I'd say something positive. The multiplayer function seems to not desync every 2-3 turns from what I've seen of people on twitch, and that's clearly an improvement, even if the game apparently needs to enforce custom rules banning chopping forests outside your territory and disbanding units to function.


Well, hopefully they will release that modding-tool at some point and someone can start modding out the worst offenders.

 

[BiteInTheMark]

The tech tree is also damm boring. There are so many "filler" techs. Same goes to the civic tree. When you have to research a tech which only unlocks one wonder it is so boring.

There is no real difference if you research 3 things in 18 turns or 1 thing in 6 turns. But with the eureka mechanics, it make more sense to split technologies. You can be forced to achieve more eureka requirements to get the same reduction you would have for one technology with only one eureka requirement. It also gives more space for further expansions with more units, buildings and wonder.

All I can say is that I really, really wish there was a competitor in the field so that Firaxis was forced to lift their standards. Right now, they can easily get away with having lackluster AI or a few scrapped features - it's a Civilization game! You're going to get it anyway, so why would they bother spending more time and money to please you? The only game you'll be comparing it to is the previous game in the series.

This is funny, I created a civilization competitor 5 years ago. The document for that have 22 sides and some of the "new" inventions of civ 6 are already invented by me (cities growing over map, cities need space for population, customizabe government, army corps, faster improvement production). Also som early design for the UI is implemented, concentrating on a fast and intuitive interface. Unfortunatly I have no skill in programming and this idea is only on paper (and some animation pictures). XD

 

[Galbias]

I kind of miss specialists. Tall play is pretty much pointless, you just build your district and its associated 3 buildings in each city and that's about it. To be fair, there are the projects which use Production and give you GPP and a given yield, but they're also incredibly obnoxious to do over and over because they're at the very bottom and because no production queue. I wonder if they'll be coming back in a future DLC alongside World Congress.

This is my conclusion as well. Why bother when 90% of the users wouldn't know the difference?

And a lot of people (myself included) bought it anyways :\

Not that I didn't have fun with it, and I'm sure I'll be going back for more later when it's been polished up a bit.

 

[Gazebo]

Since people here are all so negative I thought I'd say something positive. The multiplayer function seems to not desync every 2-3 turns from what I've seen of people on twitch, and that's clearly an improvement, even if the game apparently needs to enforce custom rules banning chopping forests outside your territory and disbanding units to function.


Well, hopefully they will release that modding-tool at some point and someone can start modding out the worst offenders.

That is nice. Though we do have the VP's MP pretty stable now as well.

 

[Funak]

That is nice. Though we do have the VP's MP pretty stable now as well.

Tried it a few times, never gotten to play more than 5 turns in a row without having the game re-loading.

 

[Gazebo]

Tried it a few times, never gotten to play more than 5 turns in a row without having the game re-loading.

Recently?

 

[Funak]

Recently?

Not really, but I'm not giving civ5 mp another chance to disappoint me.

 

[Gazebo]

Not really, but I'm not giving civ5 mp another chance to disappoint me.

Lol, okay. It is only in the past 2 months that we've had MP stabilized.

Like after a bad divorce, you should give love another chance.

 

[merill]

I played a vp mp game (3-4 players, europe only) last week. 4 seances (~15+ hours), the game as ended with Mayans tanks rolling upon the world. Only 1-3 desyncs for the entire game ( not counting mandatory desync after loading), so it's rock stable for me.
My only problem are sometimes a problem to end turn because it's blocked on "move unit" or "choose production" (occurred 2 times). But it's the 10-9 version and a quit-rejoin-desync solve the problem.

And some big difficulties to load an un-buggy savegame (a player is often stuck after loading, it's like he wasn't connected to server).

 

[Funak]

Like after a bad divorce, you should give love another chance.

That's crazy, after a bad divorce you just stay alone, grow old and miserable and never give anyone a chance to hurt you ever again.

 

[Xaviarlol]

At least for me, the shine and novelty of Civ 6 are wearing off a bit, and the really big underlying issues (idiotic diplomacy, horrible tactical AI, unoptimized district use) are starting to show through to the point that my interesting is waning. I don't want to be a doomsayer, but this is starting to feel like Beyond Earth all over again.

G

I tend to agree. Though I think the foundations are in a good place and just need values to be played around with. Eg. relatively weak and numerous 'spammy' policies and being able to be changed so easily. This could be resolved by making policy and government choices more meaningful to your long-term strategy.

 

[ScooterDWiebels]

I am already reading about many mechanisms that can be exploited in Civ VI. Such as it is a net positive in gold do produce a multi-unit army and then disband it. You get a gold bonus when disbanding multi-unit formations. It has possibility but right now I'm more interested in VP.