Civ 6 vs. Civ 5 in regards to future 7

[pholkhero]

One HUGE change between 5 and 6 was the access modders had to the bones of 6 the way they did w previous iterations. if you had the same ability to mod the game to the extent that was possible before, then i think you'd have a lot more love for the game than (not then) there is. Part of the greatness of 4 and 5 ARE the mods that give the game much more depth than was to begin with. edit to add: yes, i know there are tons of mods, but just look at the subforums for mods for 4, 5 and 6 and you'll see it.

Plus, like, the AI is awful in 6.

 

[pokiehl]

One HUGE change between 5 and 6 was the access modders had to the bones of 6 the way they did w previous iterations. if you had the same ability to mod the game to the extent that was possible before, then i think you'd have a lot more love for the game then there is. Part of the greatness of 4 and 5 ARE the mods that give the game much more depth than was to begin with.

Plus, like, the AI is awful in 6.

The Civ 6 database is way less hardcoded than Civ 5 and the ability to mod graphics into the game stomps Civ 5. Civ 6 also makes modded multiplayer completely seamless. I really don’t know what you’re talking about. In many metrics, Civ 6 is a lot more moddable than 5.

(Side note: this criticism inexplicably always comes from people who have never modded before, or often have never even played Civ 6.)

The AI is also awful in Civ 5.

 

[GeneralZIft]

I've heard that Civ6 is less moddable but I don't know if that's true. I have seen less in depth mods for Civ 6. You know there's no vox populi or anything like that.

But the AI is definitely better in 5. No question about it.

 

[pokiehl]

I've heard that Civ6 is less moddable but I don't know if that's true. I have seen less in depth mods for Civ 6. You know there's no vox populi or anything like that.

But the AI is definitely better in 5.

I’m a modder and I’m telling you Civ 6 is very “moddable.” I’m telling you from experience and being involved in the community, not based on what I’ve “heard”.

AI couldn’t even move and shoot on the same turn in 5. You have rosetinted glasses.

 

[GeneralZIft]

AI couldn’t even move and shoot on the same turn in 5. You have rosetinted glasses.

If we are talking about combat then perhaps. I'm taking overall experience with AI is more interesting in that game.

 

[Arcaian]

My understanding is that by not releasing the .dll, Civ 6 is incapable of having some of the extremely comprehensive mods that Civ 5 has, but that very few modders can even work with the .dll effectively, and that outside of this civ 6 is considerably more moddable than civ 5

 

[Marla_Singer]

To be honest, I'm not sure the rationale of this debate. Civ7 should be as different and innovative from past iterations as they all are from each other, and introduce new endemic mechanics and ways of handling notable areas the past ones differed in, and not ape mechanics in those ways from previous iterations.

According to Sid Meier (told several years ago but there's no reason it changed), the Firaxis rule for a new iteration of Civ is :

• One third of permanent rules that have never been changed since Civ 1.
• One third of rules directly inherited from the previous iteration (here Civ6).
• One third of rules which are innovations specific to the new iteration.

The untold consequence of these rules is: what used to be in a previous iteration of Civ and no longer in the most recent one is lost forever. Therefore if you enjoyed better Civ5 than Civ6, the most likely is that this feeling will only grow stronger with Civ7. But that won't prevent new demographics to discover the series and I have no doubt they will find it great. It's the circle of life and it moves us all.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

It's the circle of life and it moves us all through despair and hope, through faith and love, untill we find our place on the path unwinding in the circle of life.

 

[pokiehl]

The untold consequence of these rules is: what used to be in a previous iteration of Civ and no longer in the most recent one is lost forever.

I don't think this is necessarily true, but to the point, I do find it difficult to pick out any features from 3 or 4 that skipped 5 and returned in 6.

Edit: actually, Corporations! They were in 4 and returned in 6.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Although @aieeegrunt is largely correct, the correctness is largely irrelevant. The problem is that building new units takes time, so that constantly having to build entirely new units simply means you will frequently be playing with units about one Era behind, and I very much doubt that gamers will accept a mechanic that prevents them from playing with the shiny new units as soon as possible.

Yes, IRL every European Army between 1815 and 1890 (about 15 game turns) re-equipped their armies with rifled muskets, black powder breechloaders, rifled artillery, and then smokeless powder magazine rifles and long range rifle artillery. In game turns, starting with Line Infantry they 'built' every infantry unit twice and every artillery unit at least once (and then rebuilt them again into modern Artillery in the next 3 turns). In addition, they increased the number of units by about 100% (average field army went from 200 - 300,000 each for the Great Powers in 1815 to 400,000 + in 1870 and 1,000,000 + in 1900. Even allowing for larger units, that's a massive increase).

The game simply doesn't allow that unless you buy every new unit with Gold and Religion: Production is much, much too slow to replace your entire military every 5 - 10 turns at practically any point in the game. They could do a complete redesign of the Production/Unit cost interface, but that produces other problems entirely - like how you get enough Resources to build a bunch of units in a few turns and how you handicap Production to avoid turning the game into a Production Ratrace, constructing and reconstructing everything throughout the game at breakneck pace, and making invasions virtually impossible because by the time your units get a few tiles/turns into enemy territory the enemy army is an Era ahead of them!

I’ve been playing with a house rule that you can’t do upgrades for ages and this has never been an issue for me

If you don’t plan ahead and ignore that you are falling behind, then you deserve the “Mamelukes vs Napoleon” experience.

This is a feature not a bug

It also means over investing in your military has the balancing effect of the historical opportunity cost of falling behind in other ways.

The upgrade race DID happen historically. I already mentioned the Dreadnaught Effect. Another example from that era was the transition from rigid to recoiling artillery

The German army spends a fortune buying Krupp field guns, and then Schnieder unveils a gun with recoil management for the French Army and the Germany army is like Oh Noes.

Literally the next day Krupp reveals a new design with recoil management and the German Army had to shell out more money to re equipp (you’d almost think Krupp did that on purpose)

They couldn’t just rub money on existing guns and have them “upgrade”

I think the concerns you list here are great and valid points, and certainly something that needs to be taken into consideration.

I do think that an overall complete re-thinking of production costs is required, however, like I also mention above, I think the "few-but-very-expensive" approach applied in Civ6 was not healthy. Like I also suggested above, I think it's worth pursuing the idea of alternative parallel production lines so that you can produce military units without stalling your entire production system.

I also think the mechanism and cost of upgrading needs to be taken into account. The upgrade mechanism of Civ6 is problematic because it's instant and universal and costs less gold than buying a new unit. So you pay less gold in return for getting a superior unit when you upgrade an old promoted unit instead of buying a new one, which is clearly bad for balance. Like I said above, losing a highly promoted unit is devastating and makes the game system very prone for abuse.

To counter this, one could take any number of measures including and not necessarily limited to:
- Only allowing certain upgrades (as discussed above)
- Upgrades being as costly as buying a new unit
- Units losing certain or all promotions on upgrades (promotions relating to specific weapon types obviously should be lost on upgrade)
- Upgrades takes a number of turns to "retrain" the unit
- Units can spend turns "training" at encampments to earn experience and promotions (to level the field between new and old promoted units)

The fact that Civ6 allows you to upgrade units so cheaply and easily and even keep promotions IS the problem, it’s a positive feedback loop. My large veteran Legion army makes the conquests that let me afford to keep upgrading them and accumulating promotions to conquor even more. Anyone opposing me is doing so with a smaller noob force.

This is bad history roleplay AND bad game mechanics.

What should happen is that large legion force becoming a sunk cost holding me back in other ways. Because I invested in those legions instead of districts I start falling behind economically. Eventually my now obsolete legions get crushed by something better.

Hmm. I overall don’t love the idea of dropping upgrades, but I think you would create an interesting dynamic in that investment in war is guaranteed to be obsoleted. It could be an effective check on the rampant OPness of conquest.

I mean not allowing upgrades does exactly that.

This is surely true of naval vessels.
It is certainly not true for ground units. I have overseen the upgrade of Cavalry Squadrons from M60's and M113's to M1's and Bradley Fighting vehicles. Have also seen Engineer units change out equipment that gave them a new mission, yet they maintained their unit identity. Training is needed for the upgrade to happen properly, but it is a fairly common.

On the scale of Civ6 going from an M60 to an M1 won’t be represented.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I’ve been playing with a house rule that you can’t do upgrades for ages and this has never been an issue for me

If you don’t plan ahead and ignore that you are falling behind, then you deserve the “Mamelukes vs Napoleon” experience.

This is a feature not a bug

It also means over investing in your military has the balancing effect of the historical opportunity cost of falling behind in other ways.

The upgrade race DID happen historically. I already mentioned the Dreadnaught Effect. Another example from that era was the transition from rigid to recoiling artillery

The German army spends a fortune buying Krupp field guns, and then Schnieder unveils a gun with recoil management for the French Army and the Germany army is like Oh Noes.

Literally the next day Krupp reveals a new design with recoil management and the German Army had to shell out more money to re equipp (you’d almost think Krupp did that on purpose)

They couldn’t just rub money on existing guns and have them “upgrade”



The fact that Civ6 allows you to upgrade units so cheaply and easily and even keep promotions IS the problem, it’s a positive feedback loop. My large veteran Legion army makes the conquests that let me afford to keep upgrading them and accumulating promotions to conquor even more. Anyone opposing me is doing so with a smaller noob force.

This is bad history roleplay AND bad game mechanics.

What should happen is that large legion force becoming a sunk cost holding me back in other ways. Because I invested in those legions instead of districts I start falling behind economically. Eventually my now obsolete legions get crushed by something better.



I mean not allowing upgrades does exactly that.



On the scale of Civ6 going from an M60 to an M1 won’t be represented.

The transition to recoil mechanism-equipped artillery is interesting, because it represents the interaction of several developments to force change:
1882 Lieutenant Colonel Guk publishes his work on the geometry and trigonometry required to locate a target relative to the gun from a third position, an observer. This provided the technique for using artillery from what he called 'covered' positions, out of sight of the target - but it required that the gun remain in the same place between shots, which required a recoil-dampening mechanism
Then, in 1889, smokeless powder was patented, a new propellant for all kinds of firearms, that for artillery practically doubled the range of light artillery from about 3 to 7 - 8 kilometers. Now, to use the new ranges, most artillery would have to be out of sight of the target due to the nature of European ground - just hilly enough to obscure at ranges over 3 - 5 kilometers. This and Guk's techniques meant that non-recoil artillery would be massively out-ranged by any recoil-mechanism equipped opponent: it made equipping with new guns an absolute imperative, and so between 1897 and 1904 French, British, German and Russian manufacturers all came out with new pieces to sell: the French '75', the Russian M1902, the German '77mm', and British '18 pounder'

IF by M60 he means the original M60 and not the M60A1, the upgrade to M1 would be represented, because the M60 was the last of the Medium Tanks, the M60A1 (and later M1) was one of the first of the new Main Battle Tanks (Modern Armor). Between the M60 and M60A1 (I was a driver in one of the first US Army units to be equipped with the A1s) the range and lethality of the main gun almost doubled, the first 'composite' armor was introduced, and the first integrated gun computer-rangefinder was installed. The standard on the M60A1 was a hit within 15 seconds of identifying the target, whereas in late WWII the average was 12 - 13 rounds required to hit and disable or destroy a tank target - and that statistic was virtually the same in the US and German armies at the time. The Main Battle Tanks were a deadly Upgrade, again, by combining several different developments into one package.

 

[Evie]

According to Sid Meier (told several years ago but there's no reason it changed), the Firaxis rule for a new iteration of Civ is :

• One third of permanent rules that have never been changed since Civ 1.
• One third of rules directly inherited from the previous iteration (here Civ6).
• One third of rules which are innovations specific to the new iteration.

The untold consequence of these rules is: what used to be in a previous iteration of Civ and no longer in the most recent one is lost forever. Therefore if you enjoyed better Civ5 than Civ6, the most likely is that this feeling will only grow stronger with Civ7. But that won't prevent new demographics to discover the series and I have no doubt they will find it great. It's the circle of life and it moves us all.

The rule I seem to recall hearing (though it may be from more recent devs, not Sid himself - then again Sid hasn't been involved in developing Civ in a long time) is one third returning features, one third changed features, one third new features.

It would seem to make much more sense, because as written, the rule you could only ever bring back features that were in the latest game, and each game would be two-thirds identical to the previous one. And while it may have been suited to early iterations of the game when there were only one or two previous versions, the weight of "never changed since Civ I" grows exponentially.

 

[Marla_Singer]

The rule I seem to recall hearing (though it may be from more recent devs, not Sid himself - then again Sid hasn't been involved in developing Civ in a long time) is one third returning features, one third changed features, one third new features.

It would seem to make much more sense, because as written, the rule you could only ever bring back features that were in the latest game, and each game would be two-thirds identical to the previous one. And while it may have been suited to early iterations of the game when there were only one or two previous versions, the weight of "never changed since Civ I" grows exponentially.

That is correct, my memory twisted it.

Yet this being said, as told by @pokiehl, that generally results in features from previous iterations being gone for good. Since Civ 1, I can't think of any important feature that was removed in one iteration and came back again afterwards.

 

[Evie]

Isn't global warming/pollution a case? (present in I-IV, skipped V, returned in VI)

 

[GeneralZIft]

I think loyalty? Skipped V.

 

[Patine]

I wasn't talking to you there.

This is an open discussion forum. I'm talking to you.

But consider your idea. How do you tell the player to expect that their army of archers becomes obsolete eventually but that doesn't apply to their melee units? For example.

The same way the game notifies the player of everything else. Plus, a little planning ahead would be needed, Is that so offensive.

That describes the majority of suggestions here

No, it still derisively dismisses the reasons and context for such suggestions and insultingly declares a disingenous non-reason ("for complexity's sake,") to try and invalide it. It's toxic, insulting, and unproductive of a claim, and I should see no reason to hear it again.

 

[aieeegrunt]

The transition to recoil mechanism-equipped artillery is interesting, because it represents the interaction of several developments to force change:
1882 Lieutenant Colonel Guk publishes his work on the geometry and trigonometry required to locate a target relative to the gun from a third position, an observer. This provided the technique for using artillery from what he called 'covered' positions, out of sight of the target - but it required that the gun remain in the same place between shots, which required a recoil-dampening mechanism
Then, in 1889, smokeless powder was patented, a new propellant for all kinds of firearms, that for artillery practically doubled the range of light artillery from about 3 to 7 - 8 kilometers. Now, to use the new ranges, most artillery would have to be out of sight of the target due to the nature of European ground - just hilly enough to obscure at ranges over 3 - 5 kilometers. This and Guk's techniques meant that non-recoil artillery would be massively out-ranged by any recoil-mechanism equipped opponent: it made equipping with new guns an absolute imperative, and so between 1897 and 1904 French, British, German and Russian manufacturers all came out with new pieces to sell: the French '75', the Russian M1902, the German '77mm', and British '18 pounder'

IF by M60 he means the original M60 and not the M60A1, the upgrade to M1 would be represented, because the M60 was the last of the Medium Tanks, the M60A1 (and later M1) was one of the first of the new Main Battle Tanks (Modern Armor). Between the M60 and M60A1 (I was a driver in one of the first US Army units to be equipped with the A1s) the range and lethality of the main gun almost doubled, the first 'composite' armor was introduced, and the first integrated gun computer-rangefinder was installed. The standard on the M60A1 was a hit within 15 seconds of identifying the target, whereas in late WWII the average was 12 - 13 rounds required to hit and disable or destroy a tank target - and that statistic was virtually the same in the US and German armies at the time. The Main Battle Tanks were a deadly Upgrade, again, by combining several different developments into one package.

You can’t be this granular in a game on the scale of Civ6 unless you are literally replacing units every other turn.

I mean you have an even bigger capability gap between early and late war aircraft in WW2. Hell, within the same product line; compare a Me109 in 1939 to a late war Gustav.

You need to restrict this to major, major paradigm shifts or the unit roster gets pretty redundant, and I think Civ6 is already there. I ended up removing Medieval Infantry for this reason

An example for naval units

“Trireme”: powered by oar/sail, wooden construction, arrows/catapults/ramming

“Man of War”: powered by oar/sail, wooden hull, gunpowder cannons

“Battleship”: powered by some form of combustion, metal hull, gunpowder cannons.

“Missile Cruiser”: powered by combustion, metal hull, missiles

Sure there might be some grey areas or overlap, but a game at the scale of Civ requires abstraction. These are major shifts, and you can make them roughly correspond with eras depending on how you define those

That is correct, my memory twisted it.

Yet this being said, as told by @pokiehl, that generally results in features from previous iterations being gone for good. Since Civ 1, I can't think of any important feature that was removed in one iteration and came back again afterwards.

I’d like some form of Civ3’s cultural identity back

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

You can’t be this granular in a game on the scale of Civ6 unless you are literally replacing units every other turn.

I mean you have an even bigger capability gap between early and late war aircraft in WW2. Hell, within the same product line; compare a Me109 in 1939 to a late war Gustav.

You need to restrict this to major, major paradigm shifts or the unit roster gets pretty redundant, and I think Civ6 is already there. I ended up removing Medieval Infantry for this reason

An example for naval units

“Trireme”: powered by oar/sail, wooden construction, arrows/catapults/ramming

“Man of War”: powered by oar/sail, wooden hull, gunpowder cannons

“Battleship”: powered by some form of combustion, metal hull, gunpowder cannons.

“Missile Cruiser”: powered by combustion, metal hull, missiles

Sure there might be some grey areas or overlap, but a game at the scale of Civ requires abstraction. These are major shifts, and you can make them roughly correspond with eras depending on how you define those



I’d like some form of Civ3’s cultural identity back

Obviously didn't make my point: Mea Culpa.​

​

The point is that every Upgrade involves, in almost every case, a bunch of individual changes. For game purposes, as you state, someone has to decide when the cumulative changes become manifest as a New Unit (either an Upgrade or New Production). In the cases cited, this is between 'field artillery' representing black powder, fixed carriage guns and smokeless powder recoil-suppressed guns and howitzers, and between the Medium Tanks of the late 1930s through about 1960 and the Main Battle Tanks of the mid - 1960s to the present day. In both cases, we subsume a host of minor and not-so-minor changes into one Big Change, because the timescale of the game simply doesn't allow you to include a collection of minor changes individually.​

​

And sometimes a host of individual changes are simply ignored in the game because there is a single Symbolic Unit that is being modeled. Case in point, the Roman Legion, which is Known To All as a bunch of sword-armed armored professional soldiers trained to build roads, fortifications, camps, bridges and mop the floor with all opponents. Never mind that between about 350 BCE and 450 CE the 'Roman Legion' changed its major armament 3 - 4 times, its organization at least 3 times, and its source of recruits 3 times. In this case, the Image overcomes the minute details of 'accuracy', which is appropriate in this case (and in most cases) since there's no telling whether in-game events would make the actual individual 'Upgrades' necessary or desirable.​

 

[kaspergm]

I’d like some form of Civ3’s cultural identity back

Yes, minus the endless revolts and instantly kill your units each time you capture a city.

 

[pokiehl]

I’d like some form of Civ3’s cultural identity back

I agree as well. Civ 6 loyalty is very boring and bad in comparison.