It is very possible that Civ VI could be more complex than Civ IV - thoughts please

shakabrade

Praise Vivec!
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Pros (compared to Civ4 or Civ5):

+ larger tech tree + various boosts (many can be controlled)

+ civics tree - I would want so many of them at the same time and many situational ones (optimize, adapt, adopt)

+ religion serves more purposes

+ artifacts?

+ tourism

+ research agreements

+ limited number of districts

+ visible diplomacy modifiers

+ limited wonder spamming


Cons:

- 1UPT (partially offset by bigger maps but still huge problem and depends on AI - can it finally use it)

Also some very bad stuff are gone like global happiness.
 
A larger tech tree does not necessarily mean a more complex game with more decisions--just a game that may lost a bit longer. I'm generally able to win Civ IV around assembly line/railroad or so on domination wins, so I'm rarely researching the whole tree.
 
Possible, sure..
but let's see how much they watered down first ;)

Would be great if it turns out being good, great for everybody here so there's no reason hoping otherwise imo. But i also have been disappointed many many times by new games, so who knows.
 
It all depends on how well they've managed to balance everything. It appears their goal is to reward players who manage to focus on many different aspects of the game. The Eureka boosts require that you perform quite diverse tasks, and since they give you half the tech, it is probably often worth grabbing them. Also, many tech boosts require that you have reached a certain point in the civics tree, so if you go all out science and neglect culture, you end up paying double for later techs. If this is done in a good way, so that there are still many possible progression paths through the tech tree, it can be interesting. But it might also be that especially the early game quickly falls into a pattern of always teching stuff in the same order.

I get the feeling the AI won't be able to handle 1UPT. They've also significantly changed the zone of control rules to make warfare more interesting, but I fear these changes will give humans an even bigger advantage, since they allow quite a lot of tactical tricks. It appears they are trying to balance easy warfare with other penalties, such as massive diplomatic penalties and (possibly eternal) extra unhappiness in conquered cities. That is bad.

Great Scientists mostly give you eureka boosts to random technologies. This is absolutely horrible. You will be picking up most boosts in any case, so if you want to use a GS for a slingshot, you have to roll the dice and either get basically nothing, or if you are lucky you get the boosts that you need. To make sure a GS benefits you, you have to unlock all the boosts you are about to unlock for the era before you trigger the GS, which means no fast slingshots. The option to go for lucky slingshots will be especially bad for HoF or GOTM games.

I like the idea of spreading out cities, limited wonder spamming and limited numbers of districts. We'll have to wait and see how it turns out in practice.
 
I care about depth.

Lots of complex(=complicated) games with tons of rules actually turn out to be embarrassingly shallow once you learn them.

But I really do hope Civ6 ends up being a great game.
 
Even if the game is more complex, it doesn't mean it will be for fun. Lots of things could turn out to be pointless fluff that are only skin deep. I'd like to be wrong of course, but who knows what will happen.

Even if the game is impressively deep and complex, 1UPT is still a huge deal, especially if it doesn't work properly. I will be reading a LOT of reports from players here and waiting for a sale before I even considering buying this game.

At the moment, it's a solid "I'd rather stick with Civ IV" feeling from me.

Regards.
 
the early game quickly falls into a pattern of always teching stuff in the same order.
The early tech path in civ 5 was 90% the same for every game. Pottery (granary + shrine), animal husbandry (reveal horses), mining, bronze working (reveal iron) and calendar (happiness).

I get the feeling the AI won't be able to handle 1UPT.
You're not the only one. The civ 6 AI seems to be very passive with their units during war. I haven't seen a decent (counter) attack. I really like most of civ 6 so far except the combat AI.
I dislike (=hate) civ 5 so much that I'm willing to take the risk of buying civ 6 as soon as I've composed a new pc.

massive diplomatic penalties and (possibly eternal) extra unhappiness in conquered cities.
War-weariness as in civ 3 is back. (see the last developers 'let's play Rome and Kongo')

Great Scientists mostly give you eureka boosts to random technologies.
I'm not sure if this is true. From my understanding every great person has unique ablities and the specific great persons (scientist, general, etc.) are visible when assigning points towards them.
 
I'm not sure if this is true. From my understanding every great person has unique ablities and the specific great persons (scientist, general, etc.) are visible when assigning points towards them.
There are plenty of lists of known great people around. Some Great Scientists boost your buildings, but those that can be used for bulbing mainly trigger random Eureka moments. The only one targeting a specific tech gives you the Eureka for Math and one random classical or medieval tech. If you use him for Math, it is very likely the random Eureka is something you would have got anyway before researching the relevant tech.

Then there's one guy who gives 250 science for each adjacent mountain, which seems to be way more powerful than those random Eurekas.
 
There are plenty of lists of known great people around. Some Great Scientists boost your buildings, but those that can be used for bulbing mainly trigger random Eureka moments. The only one targeting a specific tech gives you the Eureka for Math and one random classical or medieval tech. If you use him for Math, it is very likely the random Eureka is something you would have got anyway before researching the relevant tech.

Then there's one guy who gives 250 science for each adjacent mountain, which seems to be way more powerful than those random Eurekas.

So there's no strategy as to how you use your great person? It's just a random die roll to see what effect you get?

I can see it being a little hard to have any sort of strategy in this situation when you're just subject to the whims of the RNG.
 
So there's no strategy as to how you use your great person? It's just a random die roll to see what effect you get?
I suppose the main strategy will be to choose which GP you pick. It is known that you can choose to skip a GP, but it is not yet known how this works in practice. Nor is it known if the different GP appear in random order, how many there will be for each era and so on. The whole system with everyone competing for the same, mostly era specific, GP also seems a bit weird, as you can easily be several eras ahead of the AI on the lower levels. Nobody knows yet how these situations are handled.
 
Most of what you mention isn't complexity but clutter to fill up the game - a necessity for Civilization V, as the build speed of everything had to be slowed down because of one unit per tile, so nothing much happens.
 
My first thought:

Fat chance.

We'll see if more develop later.
 
It all depends on how well they've managed to balance everything. It appears their goal is to reward players who manage to focus on many different aspects of the game. The Eureka boosts require that you perform quite diverse tasks, and since they give you half the tech, it is probably often worth grabbing them. Also, many tech boosts require that you have reached a certain point in the civics tree, so if you go all out science and neglect culture, you end up paying double for later techs. If this is done in a good way, so that there are still many possible progression paths through the tech tree, it can be interesting. But it might also be that especially the early game quickly falls into a pattern of always teching stuff in the same order.

We must admit that you can also play Civ4 with pre-determined tech path and consistently win on Deity, especially the most hated (for me) Cuir-rush route or Lib-route. I mean, there aren't many variations in practice.
I can see that in Civ6 boosts are, indeed, making you want go and do everything at once and there always are huge opportunity costs associated to unfocused play. I would say that this is good by design. You can tweak it forever, of course but it would pass Concept Design Review in my line of work
.


I get the feeling the AI won't be able to handle 1UPT. They've also significantly changed the zone of control rules to make warfare more interesting, but I fear these changes will give humans an even bigger advantage, since they allow quite a lot of tactical tricks. It appears they are trying to balance easy warfare with other penalties, such as massive diplomatic penalties and (possibly eternal) extra unhappiness in conquered cities. That is bad.

I can't add much to this. You are breaking this down to what I fear will be the case in the new game. But in Civ4 AI is stupid with its movement too. It is only that you can clutter much more power into an SoD and make use of Deity bonuses and that is why Deity AI can prove to be challenging in practice. If they make flanking bonuses higher for the AI, the fight could be more challenging. I just want to say that I never found Civ4 AI fights smart either.

Great Scientists mostly give you eureka boosts to random technologies. This is absolutely horrible. You will be picking up most boosts in any case, so if you want to use a GS for a slingshot, you have to roll the dice and either get basically nothing, or if you are lucky you get the boosts that you need. To make sure a GS benefits you, you have to unlock all the boosts you are about to unlock for the era before you trigger the GS, which means no fast slingshots. The option to go for lucky slingshots will be especially bad for HoF or GOTM games.

I wasn't aware of this. This is plain bad. We can only shout and hope they will constraint randomness to much more acceptable level. Maybe we must accept there are no more bulbs as they were. I always found Civ4 bulbs a bit OP. On the other hand in Civ6, you can buy Great People and limit the random factor which one you'll get. I hope there will be a viable strategy around Great People.



I like the idea of spreading out cities, limited wonder spamming and limited numbers of districts. We'll have to wait and see how it turns out in practice.

I care about depth.

Lots of complex(=complicated) games with tons of rules actually turn out to be embarrassingly shallow once you learn them.

But I really do hope Civ6 ends up being a great game.

Gaming always converges to the optimum after a while. I am a powergamer and will probably play Civ6 at max level. What I only wish for is that it takes me at least 20 games to get there. In Civ5, I didn't actually understand how anything works and was still able to easily recognize the winning path for Military and Space victory. Never lost a game and then I got back to Civ4 and got my sorry a** kicked some 30 times in a row. :D
In that process, I realized I needed some help and found and joined Civfanatics :love:
I want Civ6 to be that complex that I need to learn from others too.



I suppose the main strategy will be to choose which GP you pick. It is known that you can choose to skip a GP, but it is not yet known how this works in practice. Nor is it known if the different GP appear in random order, how many there will be for each era and so on. The whole system with everyone competing for the same, mostly era specific, GP also seems a bit weird, as you can easily be several eras ahead of the AI on the lower levels. Nobody knows yet how these situations are handled.

Sounds interesting. I see a lot of choices in this game.

Most of what you mention isn't complexity but clutter to fill up the game - a necessity for Civilization V, as the build speed of everything had to be slowed down because of one unit per tile, so nothing much happens.

Well isn't it a good thing to do something to alleviate 1UPT? Yeah, 1UPT is that bad that you need to make whole game around it to make it work. :D


Guys, FYI, I am playing devil's advocate here. It is better for discussion.:)
 
We must admit that you can also play Civ4 with pre-determined tech path and consistently win on Deity, especially the most hated (for me) Cuir-rush route or Lib-route. I mean, there aren't many variations in practice.
Well, yes, you can. Cuir rush is probably the most consistent way to win standard sized maps, but it's not necessarily the fastest. In Civ IV there are a lot of options to explore and sometimes the standard path is not at all the best. For example last SGOTM was won by the team that never researched Civil Service (game required Railroads).

In VI, once the easy path to grab the most Eurekas is discovered, it might be a bit harder to work out other viable strategies, especially slingshots that don't allow you to get the Eurekas in time. Either you pay double for the techs, or rely on those GS lotteries... However, I don't mind if it's harder to work out alternative strategies, as long as it is possible. :)
 
Cuir rush is probably the most consistent way to win standard sized maps, but it's not necessarily the fastest. In Civ IV there are a lot of options to explore and sometimes the standard path is not at all the best. For example last SGOTM was won by the team that never researched Civil Service (game required Railroads).

While Civ 4 had their own balance issues, most of them were long addressed in fan made mods, that introduce more complex tech tree, better unit balance, new unit types etc etc etc.
Considering what Civ 4 fans have already produce for Civ (and I am making my own mod too) - Civ 6 would have to be A LOT BETTER than all of that to get any of my attention.
 
Gaming always converges to the optimum after a while. I am a powergamer and will probably play Civ6 at max level. What I only wish for is that it takes me at least 20 games to get there.[/COLOR]

For me it all depends on why it takes 20 games to get there. A lot of games really falls apart once you've learned the rules. The game might give the impression of being a deep strategy game in the first few sessions because it overwhelms you with a ton of rules that take a lot of time to learn. That's not a good game in my opinion.

For me that's the worst type of games. Not only do they steal my money, they waste my time too.

Learning the rules should be trivial. The game should not be trivial once you've learned the rules.
 
I hope it's not like his older brother, civ5, it's like ubisoft take care to make a civ
what we need is a, Civilization 4 remastered.
I'm throwing money at the screen, pls sid
 
I hope it's not like his older brother, civ5, it's like ubisoft take care to make a civ
what we need is a, Civilization 4 remastered.
I'm throwing money at the screen, pls sid

rise of mankind mod is pretty much civ4 remastered. 3.19 is just the same old predictable <snip> and linear strategies.

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The city growth mechanism seems also pretty complex which is surprising. I was sure days of complicated math games were over.
 
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