Civ4 Lovers/Civ5 Haters Level of Optimism for Civ6

Like many of you, I am a Civ4 Lover/Civ 5 Hater. Its just my subjective opinion but main reasons boil down to:
- 1UPT (Enough said!)
- Global Happiness Mechanic leading to absurd game developments and choices and 4 city empires
- Population=Science model (completely ahistorical and nonsensical)
- Diplomacy model fail, etc

My Civ style of play is largest maps/most Civs/slowest games possible. I like to simulate history on a planet wide scale so I call myself not an Empire builder but rather a History Builder. My best Civ4 games were epic games where I can weave in my head thousands of years of plausible human history on an alternate planet.

I also don't play only vanilla Civ5:BTS. Rather I only play with very historically immersive mods like "Legends of Revolution" (LoR) or "Rise of Mankind" (RoM).

Civ5 OTOH simply was far too flawed for me to play it as a history building game. That's because the way a typical Civ5 game developed and flowed from beginning to end was completely ahistorical and nonsensical. And AFAIK, there is nothing like LoR for Civ5.

With all that said, I am somewhat cautiously optimistic. They have ditched global happiness. It appears they have ditched population=science. Diplomacy and AI behavior appears to be favor history builders like me.

The district idea, on paper, also is promising.

The biggest unknown is 1UPT. They are clearly tweaking it but is it enough for us 1UPT haters?

I'll say this. If a modder can someday write a version of LoR for Civ6 that blows away Civ4:BTS w/LoR, that is when I know Civ6 is better than Civ4 and is even more historically immersive. Until then, Civ4:BTS w/LoR is still on top for me.

In case you have missed it, there is a rather big Civ 6 discussion just below. Still, a poll thread is interesting regardless.

I'm cautiously optimistic myself and agree that the handling of 1UPT is one of my major concerns. Honestly though, I am interested in something new with respect to combat/warfare but still not sure if developers of 6 will find the right compromise. 1UPT gets quite cumbersome, not to mention the logistical issues, while the AI just plain doesn't handle it.

Also, just hope that the changes and new stuff make the game interesting again and actually bring some strategy and complexity back to the game.

I'm thinking that the main point will be making the AI deal with the 1upt situation effectively. Whether the devs recognize that as the main point, and whether they then succeed in getting it done, is the big question. If they don't get that sorted no amount of spiffy new stuff is going to cut it, but if that was literally all they did differently from Civ Five they might actually make a game of it.

I'm very pessimistic. It appears like another step away from what made the Civilization games so great, the game appear to be sort of going through the same transformation the Settlers games did. But considering Civ 5 sold a whole heap of copies, despite being a turd with a ribbon, it is sadly understandable Firaxis are continuing down that path.

Only time will tell how the game actually turns out, but I certainly won't be buying it early on, and most likely never.

I likewise am cautiously optimistic. I wouldn't quite call myself a Civ5 "hater" but I'm definitely more of a Civ4 fan.

I don't know if the quasi-stacking approach of Civ6 will be enough to address the worst aspects of 1UPT. If the supporting game mechanics create enough of an incentive to combine units into corps/armies then it might help. Although I still think we should allow unlimited stacking on the main map and carry out tactical battles on separate local battlefields.

Replacing Workers with limited-charge Builders is an even more intriguing aspect to me. It should more or less eliminate civilian traffic jams and also one of the most tedious aspects of both Civ4 and Civ5: Worker micro. Seems like it could be a much better approach.

To me "unstacking the cities" sounds quite bad, if I understood it correctly, it sounds like 1UPT for buildings and that feels like rather limiting on infra. I mean building infra is already rather limited with civ4, with civ5 it's good only because expanding is so bad.

I'm somewhat pessimistic. From the initial reports, it looks like it won't be as bad as Civ V. But that's a long way from being as good as Civ IV:BtS.

Somewhat pessimistic. If I get the game, I'll definitely wait until patches, expansions, and a Steam Sale.

Everything I've read and seen to date leads me to believe that Civ6 will be more "streamlined" and "simplified", so I'm not holding out for a game that appeals to my intelligence.

The problem is that I want to play Civ. Not a combination of Panzer General and Farmville. If I wanted to play those games I would buy them, or be on Facebook.

Civ-ville doesn't appeal to me at all. It's going to take a pretty good Steam sale to convince me to buy it, though I did see Civ5 complete on the Steam Summer Sale for $0.90 CDN. I might be convinced to pick up Civ6 and its expansions for that price.

More than anything i hope Civ6 can give this great community we have here at Civ4 something new to talk about and figure out..

I also wonder, where would that happen lol..
i cannot imagine myself posting in the Civ6 section, for some reason that seems..
well it does not fit.

duckstab said:

Although I still think we should allow unlimited stacking on the main map and carry out tactical battles on separate local battlefields.

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This is what they should have done with Civ 5, by using a similar approach to the Total War series. Just the fact that a Catapult could fire on a unit 400 or so miles away, based on the relative size of a single tile, turned me off of that version. Among other things. I don't have a problem with 1UPT as such, but that change to combat was poorly implemented IMO. As for the unit combos in Civ 6, they tried the same sort of thing with Armies in Civ 3 and the AI did a very poor job of it. So I'm not going to hold my breath that it will be any better next time around.

It's a scaling problem more than a 1upt problem, in my opinion. 1upt just doesn't work on what's supposed to be a strategic world map.

Lexicus said:

It's a scaling problem more than a 1upt problem, in my opinion. 1upt just doesn't work on what's supposed to be a strategic world map.

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Exactly right. There should be a little tactical map the pops up for battle and you can move your 1UPT units to your heart's content.

I've always thought of the stack in Civ4 as an army (you have different battalions of troops, air support, artillery, etc. All as a battle group. That's how navies work too), and in my head, I know that they un-stack and spread out when they get to a battle and fight on a tactical battlefield. That's just the way it's always been in my mind, at least. Maybe I'm weird, but it always seemed logical to me for it to be that way.

I'm optimistic because one can't live forever in the past, games have to be able to do new things, new dynamics, new challenges, new potential.

I'm cautious because it's using the 1UPT system that hurt Civ 5's potential thanks to AI incompetence, and made the game far more tedious than it had to be.

Above all else I think it will be fun to play. The question is, will it just be that, or will it be great.

Infinite stacking is a much more believable and organic abstraction at the level of a civ game. Fighting with ww1-style fronts in the medieval era just feels fundamentally wrong to me. I always imagined large stack battles as actually covering an area of many tiles around the tiles where the combat actually takes place, and I imagine large stacks operating in much larger areas than one tile at a time.

There are elements about Civ V I like, for example cities covering more tiles and the more sensible progression. Civ IV goes bananas after Renaissance, when everything grows exponentially, and at that point you also breeze from city to city in 1 turn. But at the same time 1UPT and the hexagonal grid ruins it all anyway.

Civ IV early/mid game is perfectly designed, a sequel expanding on that would only need minor additions and tweaks to make me buy and play it.

I've never understood the philosophy behind completely revamping a game and calling it a sequel. Civ V is a decent game, but it plays out completely different from I-IV, so why can't we have any square-based Civ-games anymore? Right now the entire game model that makes up Civ IV is stuck in 2007 and no more games are being made, whereas hexagonal Civ games are the only option
To me it's like EA games would release FIFA 2017 and all the sudden they were playing hockey instead of football... Regardless if the game was good I'd be a little disappointed if I was expecting a new football game.

Lexicus said:

Infinite stacking is a much more believable and organic abstraction at the level of a civ game. Fighting with ww1-style fronts in the medieval era just feels fundamentally wrong to me. I always imagined large stack battles as actually covering an area of many tiles around the tiles where the combat actually takes place, and I imagine large stacks operating in much larger areas than one tile at a time.

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Agreed.

ztrapon said:

Civ IV goes bananas after Renaissance, when everything grows exponentially

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You mean like in the real life industrial revolution?

ztrapon said:

There are elements about Civ V I like, for example cities covering more tiles and the more sensible progression.

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If as more sensible progression you mean "getting four cities and clicking end turn until you win" then it's true. As you might have imagine my expectations are really low for Civ VI , they are just going to do Civ V again with a few additions

Lexicus said:

Infinite stacking is a much more believable and organic abstraction at the level of a civ game. Fighting with ww1-style fronts in the medieval era just feels fundamentally wrong to me. I always imagined large stack battles as actually covering an area of many tiles around the tiles where the combat actually takes place, and I imagine large stacks operating in much larger areas than one tile at a time.

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They should have gone with something using the SMAC type or Call to Power type mechanic as a starting point. The way I envision it is that you'd still build stacks but instead of controlling each unit turn by turn, you'd command the whole stack and it would be stack vs stack turn by turn. This would be more "realistic" and less gamey.

One of the big issues of Civ4 combat is how whoever attacks first with suicide collateral damage units basically wins. In stack vs stack mechanics both units would move into position and then there would be a combat "mini-game" of sorts.

You could also easily add some elements of 1UPT in stack vs stack system as well!

I've always felt the that stack mechanics of Civ4 could use a lot of improvement. But 1UPT at the strategic level map is going the wrong way. If you really wanted 1UPT, it should have been in a zoomed-in mini-game map and I would have been okay with that.

Pepo said:

If as more sensible progression you mean "getting four cities and clicking end turn until you win" then it's true. As you might have imagine my expectations are really low for Civ VI , they are just going to do Civ V again with a few additions

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Pretty much my sentiment as well.

I'm extremely pessimistic. The only reason I played Civ V at all was because my youngest got it for me as a birthday present. To be fair, after BNW came out, and the mod community managed to get their hands on it ( which still took awhile), the game was what I would consider decent to play.

As for 6, it looks to be more of a city expansion/builder type of game than a true 4x style type of game that Civ used to be known for. Do I like some of the concepts in 6? of course. But whether they can be implemented into the game to make worth me actually sinking any money into it to buy? well, sorry Firaxis, I'm going to wait until I can see some good quality reviews from peeps I trust, not bought and paid for by the PR budget.