18 months later - how is Civ VI?

[Aristos]

"ignore all these reviews over here because of presumably political personal opinions held by me" is not the best advice to give, in my opinion.

You clearly did not read my whole post, or did not understand it. Number 2 in the list covers what you, through a personal attack, claim to be ignored, and I even give it the same weight as what you perceive as "political personal opinions"...

Language is sure not an issue as your location is UK, or is it?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

"ignore all these reviews over here because of presumably political personal opinions held by me" is not the best advice to give, in my opinion.

"Mainstream" media reviews are worse than useless on average. Not only will you get consistently more accurate portrayals by selecting randomly from YouTubers or arbitrarily chosen posters here, you'll get a more clear picture of the game with the very real possibility of a more skillful take on it (not that typical media reviewers set the bar high there, the somewhat infamous Cuphead trash can review is near the bottom of that barrel, but it's not a quality barrel in general).

Why are they worse than players' opinion chosen at random? Active incentive to deceive with a proven track record of both bias (aggregate score averages towards AAA compared to anything done by actual players) and outright actual deception (take Civ 5 vanilla's release reviews, getting > 9 out of 10 while its MP was literally non-functional, with many articles not even mentioning this fact). I don't care if this was an "issue expected to be fixed", giving a game with an advertised feature not even working > 9 out of 10 and not mentioning that or any of the other issues discernible inside 30-60 minutes of play is not *actually* professional, is not a credible representation of the game by any reasonable standard, and if encouraged not to be mentioned is the sort of dishonesty that merits the advice to ignore them.

If the model can't keep up with the demands of giving people a decent picture of the game without deception and with enough ability to understand how to play it, the model is dead.

It's perfectly reasonable to point out that "professional" reviews in the vein of old school magazine article writers or people who only play the game briefly are outdated as a model and can't measure up to a random person more than half my age showing you the game at a decent level of play. That's BEFORE they gave us a reason to actively distrust them. You'd be better off asking my old pair of shoes I should have thrown away already whether Civ 6 is good or not, then tossing them in the air and deciding based on whether after 10 tries they landed more on the right or left side .

His advice to try to offset bias by asking on different forums and think for himself based on the answers he gets is spot on and will vastly outperform "professional" (emphasis for disdain) reviewers because it puts more emphasis on both actual gameplay and his own contextual perspective. Watching a YouTube video of a good player at 2x speed should do the trick too, you can see the actual decisions being made.

Another way to look at it is that YouTubers and random posters with experience here *are* the professional reviewers. In terms of knowledge conveyed and accuracy of the review, they are certainly well ahead of mainstream media reviews. Kind of like if I were paid to give you advice on throwing a football and an actual pro player volunteered the information, you should probably still learn from the pro. I've never thrown the ball professionally or even in college. What I tell you isn't nearly as useful and can't be, even if people give me money to say it.

I hear so many reports of how bad Civ V was at launch but I don't remember that.

MP was literally broken (couldn't finish a game or even progress past a handful of turns with a few players), was never fixed completely (even in BNW 5+ players was a risk to not finish the game), and on release you had problems like "ranged attack = don't attack and instead move towards enemy". Some of this got better.

 

[RealHuhn]

Yeah but how much fun is it when you meet a civ, immediately send them a delegation then the next turn you see the red unhappy face. 99 percent of the time.

Oh come on. On Deity (R&F), I always have like 2-3 alliances by the time they become available. It just depends on your play style and how much you know about diplomacy and warmonger penalties.

CIV6 hides a lot of information from the player and you need to put in some extra time to understand what's going on. Best example is probably how the cost of districts are calculated, a core design element. The casual player only notices that costs go up during the game but there's a lot of hidden mechanisms at work. It's a pretty clever design actually and if you know how it works it adds a whole new set of tactics and build orders for you to try and have fun with. Warmongering penalties are similar. You need to understand them or else you get punished.

I fully understand why this can be frustrating but I kinda like how much there is to learn in CIV6 before you really "get it". It's rewarding to learn something new, even after hundreds of hours.
So yeah, if you play CIV games because you enjoy the challenge to optimize your own gameplay, CIV6 has a lot to offer and can easily compete with CIV4.

Obviously, with only one expansion, stuff like the late game needs some more content. Deity is also way too easy after you survive the first 60 turns. Especially in R&F, the player has too many OP options the AI just cannot compete with. At least, the most OP option, Magnus, is going to be nerfed in the next patch although we don't know how exactly yet.

I personally don't understand how you haven't tried CIV6 yet. Do you feel like it looks too similar to CIV5? It's a very different game.
Besides, it's hard to recommend it to you when you don't really say what you like about CIV in general.

 

[Xur]

"If you know how it works" - that sums up how good civ6 interface / tooltips are. If you see +10 attitude on an AI I think it's fair to assume that it is the actual (positive) attitude. Some people say there's hidden stuff behind that number and you can't trust it. Other people say that is the current +10 you get per turn and that the total sum is hidden. Either way, the UI sucks when you have to guess. I see +10 and think that must be good, and I'm 100% sure that most players not reading CF or reddit assumes this too. To be honest I still dont know what to think - the AI is mental.

 

[Mozzington]

I guess it’s too smart for most of us average joes.

 

[King of Spades]

Lots of good feedback here. Thanks all.

Oh come on. On Deity (R&F), I always have like 2-3 alliances by the time they become available. It just depends on your play style and how much you know about diplomacy and warmonger penalties.

CIV6 hides a lot of information from the player and you need to put in some extra time to understand what's going on. Best example is probably how the cost of districts are calculated, a core design element. The casual player only notices that costs go up during the game but there's a lot of hidden mechanisms at work. It's a pretty clever design actually and if you know how it works it adds a whole new set of tactics and build orders for you to try and have fun with. Warmongering penalties are similar. You need to understand them or else you get punished.

I fully understand why this can be frustrating but I kinda like how much there is to learn in CIV6 before you really "get it". It's rewarding to learn something new, even after hundreds of hours.
So yeah, if you play CIV games because you enjoy the challenge to optimize your own gameplay, CIV6 has a lot to offer and can easily compete with CIV4.

Obviously, with only one expansion, stuff like the late game needs some more content. Deity is also way too easy after you survive the first 60 turns. Especially in R&F, the player has too many OP options the AI just cannot compete with. At least, the most OP option, Magnus, is going to be nerfed in the next patch although we don't know how exactly yet.

I personally don't understand how you haven't tried CIV6 yet. Do you feel like it looks too similar to CIV5? It's a very different game.
Besides, it's hard to recommend it to you when you don't really say what you like about CIV in general.

As I said in my post, I haven’t bought it (yet) because I was burned by Firaxis/2K when Civ V launched. I’m fairly certain that those that waited one year or more before they played that game, appreciate it more than I do. The launch and the first 4-6 months of broken game, really left a sour taste in my mouth. Between my PS4, Switch and 3DS, I have enough games to fill my spare time, so I’m in no rush.

It’s interesting that you like the fact that some mechanics are hidden. Since you ask what I like, that’s something I don’t like at all. To me, this was one of the core problems with Civ V. It didn’t help that the «Civilopedia» gave you some information, but forgot or hid something else.

In Civ IV, all the numbers were there for you to see. That way, «strategy» became the name of the game, not «what are the rules?»

Based on what all have chimed in here, I think I’ll wait a little longer before I pick it up. Thanks all!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

CIV6 hides a lot of information from the player and you need to put in some extra time to understand what's going on. Best example is probably how the cost of districts are calculated, a core design element. The casual player only notices that costs go up during the game but there's a lot of hidden mechanisms at work. It's a pretty clever design actually and if you know how it works it adds a whole new set of tactics and build orders for you to try and have fun with. Warmongering penalties are similar. You need to understand them or else you get punished.

When you "need to understand x or you get punished", yet knowledge of x is not reasonably attainable in a strategy game via any method other than trial and error, that's fake difficulty.

It is not clever design to hide the game rules. Hiding opponent motivation or requiring investment to get increasingly better information is part of strategy. Hiding how war weariness works is garbage. Posters here are more trustworthy for game rules than the game itself or the devs. That shouldn't be possible under good conditions, but it's the reality we have right now.

Don't get me wrong, having a lot to learn is a good thing. Hiding the information behind esoteric BS or forcing players to use a wiki to learn core rules is what is soundly "not good".

Edit: Civ 4 had its share of this nonsense too. It wasn't as pervasive as it is in Civ 6, but you could really get burned by hidden opinion averaging with subjects, the game "thinking you're holding alt when you're not", moving buttons "combat 1 = auto explore", buggy stack selection, and while that game was better with UI clarity, it still wasn't to the standard of a good game in terms of immediately discerning game rules. WW was still something done more on the forum side than in game.

Where Civ 4 absolutely and positively smacks Civ 6 up, down, and center to the point of showing Civ 6 UI as a complete disgrace is in this simple measure:

"How many inputs to I need to accomplish X task or look at Y thing in game". Civ 6 uses well over double the inputs that would be required to accomplish the same stuff across a game if it's UI were made by someone with good post-1996 UI experience. My favorite example is still comparing the interaction with the city lists in Civ 4 vs Civ 6. The difference is a joke...how did the series regress this much in basic end user experience?

 

[Bojevus]

To get back to OP's question:

Civ 6 isn't complete yet, and it's really never fair to compare a game with all its DLC and expansions to one that doesn't yet have those. That said, I'm enjoying it.

The AI isn't particularly good, but frankly, the AI hasn't ever been particularly good from my perspective and I've been playing since Civ 2. The mechanics all interact in interesting ways, and the science/civic trees, city-building mechanics, great people, and trade are all better than 5.

War is still broken and you can steamroll the computer on basically any level barring the highest ones where they can just spam units. That's aggravating, but also not a new problem.

Diplomacy feels pretty good, though I dont understand why some things happen. Giving the computer motivations and preferences does flesh things out a bit.

Overall, I'm not contemplating going back to Civ 5 and I've pretty much always got a game going.

 

[RealHuhn]

When you "need to understand x or you get punished", yet knowledge of x is not reasonably attainable in a strategy game via any method other than trial and error, that's fake difficulty.

It is not clever design to hide the game rules. Hiding opponent motivation or requiring investment to get increasingly better information is part of strategy. Hiding how war weariness works is garbage. Posters here are more trustworthy for game rules than the game itself or the devs. That shouldn't be possible under good conditions, but it's the reality we have right now.

Don't get me wrong, having a lot to learn is a good thing. Hiding the information behind esoteric BS or forcing players to use a wiki to learn core rules is what is soundly "not good".

Hold on a second. I only said that the district cost mechanisms are "clever design".
Because it's connected to so many factors like tech speed, amount of districts built and unlocked, time of placement etc. Experience and knowledge gets rewarded. You have full control over it once you understand how it's calculated. That's why I'm having fun with it. The fact it's hidden doesn't really bother me because I can find the information here and it's fun to go here anyway.

Other information like for example the effect of a policy card before you choose it should be 100% available because that's just annoying that you have to make a rough calculation in your head instead. Luckily there are mods like Better Report Screen to fix some of that.

I feel like people who constantly complain about warmonger penalties are just a bit lazy or aren't interested enough to learn the game rules. They come from CIV5 and expect CIV6 to work exactly the same which just isn't the case. It's fundamentally different.
And it's not like the game hides those negative diplo modifiers from you. They are clearly visible. If you are interested in learning more about it, you need to go to youtube or civfanatics or whatever and discuss it with others. I just don't have a problem with it. Those penalities aren't rocket science. They are simply different from previous civ games.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Hold on a second. I only said that the district cost mechanisms are "clever design".

Fair enough, though again this isn't something immediately nice to discern in game...and that's not okay. It's not something that should be hidden like "why is X AI attacking me". It's a rule.

You have full control over it once you understand how it's calculated.

If this game had a competent UI, you could mouse over the district cost and see a breakdown of how much it costs and why, which would change literally nothing about the mechanic's design strength or functionality but would make the game more accessible. You would also get this for tourism, units being greyed out vs simply not appearing in the menu would be consistent, etc.

Maybe for you it's not a problem, but hiding rules in a strategy is not okay. It's antithetical to actual strategy outright, creating busywork with no upside (you could just come to the forum regardless).

Other information like for example the effect of a policy card before you choose it should be 100% available because that's just annoying that you have to make a rough calculation in your head instead. Luckily there are mods like Better Report Screen to fix some of that.

There's no clear difference between this and district cost scaling.

I feel like people who constantly complain about warmonger penalties are just a bit lazy or aren't interested enough to learn the game rules. They come from CIV5 and expect CIV6 to work exactly the same which just isn't the case. It's fundamentally different.

Not warmonger penalties. War weariness. There is a CRUCIAL difference between them:

1. The former is something that is contingent to competitor agent behavior...in PvP your "warmonger rating" doesn't mean anything, at best you just need to understand how you're perceived by opponents based on whatever information you can scrap up. That's part of the game's incomplete information.
2. The latter is a basic rule that works the same way for everyone in a given situation every time. It's literally no different from a display of how much food a hex yields or combat strength. It's just arbitrarily hidden because reasons so players wanting to learn the game have to jump through hoops to learn about it or see it.

See the difference? It'd be like hiding the tech tree. You could just look that up on the wiki too, but doing so doesn't add anything of value to the game compared to simply including the tree in game for convenience.

It's stuff like #2 that annoys me, and it's all too common. Unfortunately, this isn't just a Firaxis problem, which is why strategy games are a doormat market and I've taken to calling them Firadox sometimes (they share a lot of issues).

 

[Gorbles]

You clearly did not read my whole post, or did not understand it. Number 2 in the list covers what you, through a personal attack, claim to be ignored, and I even give it the same weight as what you perceive as "political personal opinions"...

Language is sure not an issue as your location is UK, or is it?

2. has nothing to do with 4

If you're telling people to flat out ignore things, that isn't mitigated by telling people to gather opinions.

Nothing of what I said was a personal attack, it was by admittance a presumption because there aren't many other reasons for ignoring mainstream gaming sites. But, as below, a tangent. I simply said to do so isn't the best idea.

"Mainstream" media reviews are worse than useless on average. Not only will you get consistently more accurate portrayals by selecting randomly from YouTubers or arbitrarily chosen posters here, you'll get a more clear picture of the game with the very real possibility of a more skillful take on it (not that typical media reviewers set the bar high there, the somewhat infamous Cuphead trash can review is near the bottom of that barrel, but it's not a quality barrel in general).

Why are they worse than players' opinion chosen at random? Active incentive to deceive with a proven track record of both bias (aggregate score averages towards AAA compared to anything done by actual players) and outright actual deception (take Civ 5 vanilla's release reviews, getting > 9 out of 10 while its MP was literally non-functional, with many articles not even mentioning this fact). I don't care if this was an "issue expected to be fixed", giving a game with an advertised feature not even working > 9 out of 10 and not mentioning that or any of the other issues discernible inside 30-60 minutes of play is not *actually* professional, is not a credible representation of the game by any reasonable standard, and if encouraged not to be mentioned is the sort of dishonesty that merits the advice to ignore them.

If the model can't keep up with the demands of giving people a decent picture of the game without deception and with enough ability to understand how to play it, the model is dead.

It's perfectly reasonable to point out that "professional" reviews in the vein of old school magazine article writers or people who only play the game briefly are outdated as a model and can't measure up to a random person more than half my age showing you the game at a decent level of play. That's BEFORE they gave us a reason to actively distrust them. You'd be better off asking my old pair of shoes I should have thrown away already whether Civ 6 is good or not, then tossing them in the air and deciding based on whether after 10 tries they landed more on the right or left side .

His advice to try to offset bias by asking on different forums and think for himself based on the answers he gets is spot on and will vastly outperform "professional" (emphasis for disdain) reviewers because it puts more emphasis on both actual gameplay and his own contextual perspective. Watching a YouTube video of a good player at 2x speed should do the trick too, you can see the actual decisions being made.

Another way to look at it is that YouTubers and random posters with experience here *are* the professional reviewers. In terms of knowledge conveyed and accuracy of the review, they are certainly well ahead of mainstream media reviews. Kind of like if I were paid to give you advice on throwing a football and an actual pro player volunteered the information, you should probably still learn from the pro. I've never thrown the ball professionally or even in college. What I tell you isn't nearly as useful and can't be, even if people give me money to say it.

I'm not here to get into what metrics you personally assign to people playing the game. I'm simply saying ignoring such things is unwise. Gets you into a garden of your own devising; limits the views you come across. This isn't something dramatic or for another subforum, this is talking about video games.

Your presumptions are your own. It's completely tangential to get into such here.

 

[RealHuhn]

@MeInTeam I agree with you. It would be better if the game had more tutorials and tool tips to explain those mechanisms. But that doesn't change the fact that the mechanic itself is fun, at least in my opinion.
Some people get more frustrated by this than others. This thread just had this "I'm frustrated with the game" vibe. I don't think this really helps the OP.

I was talking about warmonger penalties because they are related to diplomacy and this thread has statements like "in 99% of my games, all I see is red unhappy faces". This is simply not true if you follow the rules of the game. These rules should be more accessible, yes but the complaints can definitely go too far. The trend in game development where the player gets treated like a brainless monkey by bombarding him with tool tips and waypoints is way more annoying to be honest.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm not here to get into what metrics you personally assign to people playing the game. I'm simply saying ignoring such things is unwise. Gets you into a garden of your own devising; limits the views you come across. This isn't something dramatic or for another subforum, this is talking about video games.

Initial advice was to ignore "professional" media reviews of games. I gave reasoning for why this advice was sound. If there is valid refutation of that reasoning, it would be useful to see it rather than repeating "simply ignoring proven liars with a clear track record of bias and inferior play to alternative review sources is unwise".

As this is advice for how OP goes about determining whether it's worth getting the game, it's not tangential. I'm supporting to notion that someone should expressly ignore a worse-than-useless source, you're saying otherwise, presumably implying this source has value.

I was talking about warmonger penalties because they are related to diplomacy and this thread has statements like "in 99% of my games, all I see is red unhappy faces". This is simply not true if you follow the rules of the game. These rules should be more accessible, yes but the complaints can definitely go too far.

Even with this, more feedback would be useful to players. In a strategy game it's reasonable to ask that outcomes are determined by player actions. However if the representation does not allow most players to anticipate what will happen via any method other than "trial and error", you have an interaction that is directly undermining the "S" in TBS.

 

[Aristos]

2. has nothing to do with 4

OK, I see what you were trying to say now ("ignore all these reviews over here" points to this forum in my understanding... here -> where we are now, ergo this forum). Hence my answer.

Nevertheless, I stand by my point of ignoring the "pro" gaming reviews, for the reasons Phil stated perfectly well and that do not need any repetition.

 

[Gorbles]

Initial advice was to ignore "professional" media reviews of games. I gave reasoning for why this advice was sound. If there is valid refutation of that reasoning, it would be useful to see it rather than repeating "simply ignoring proven liars with a clear track record of bias and inferior play to alternative review sources is unwise".

As this is advice for how OP goes about determining whether it's worth getting the game, it's not tangential. I'm supporting to notion that someone should expressly ignore a worse-than-useless source, you're saying otherwise, presumably implying this source has value.

A derail about the validity of the industry would be, is what I meant. Beyond that, there isn't much to say apart from our respective viewpoints. You think that ignoring reviews is sound advice, I simply think it isn't. Otherwise we could rattle up a long list of problematic YouTubers (that also work within a monetised system, much like professional reviewers), issues with the validity of Steam Reviews, Curators, etc, and generally be here all year.

It's better to let people make up their own minds, instead of setting them against a vast swathe of reviews because you personally oppose them. As I said, this isn't some debate about politics or the like. There aren't exactly views to avoid (unless they cross over into said other subjects).

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I don't see why politics would be implied. It should be self-evident that those with proven bias + incentive to mislead + history of actually misleading are strike-offs. Rather than this, it might actually be useful to know if steam reviews are on average more or less biased, or which set of sources is most likely to predict the kinds of games a person will ultimately likely.

 

[Eliminator_Sr]

The game is worth buying and I've put a lot of hours into it but it's not a highly polished finished product and I generally have to use mods now to get the most enjoyment out of it. As others have mentioned the AI is very disappointing and there are really no mods that can address it right now since they haven't released proper modding tools yet. The AI simply can't compete, is hopelessly outclassed in combat (your kill ratios will be at least 10:1), and has no ability to pull out a victory with a tech or culture lead even on the highest difficulties. R&F has made this even worse mainly because of chop and overflow abuse issues (though there may a patch to address this). Based on the info in your initial post - I would wait until they at least release better modding capability. I don't have much hope that they will address AI - they haven't done much to date. I will definitely shelve it for awhile and move on to some other games unless the patch makes a major difference.

 

[ZubieMaster]

Oh come on. On Deity (R&F), I always have like 2-3 alliances by the time they become available. It just depends on your play style and how much you know about diplomacy and warmonger penalties. ... CIV6 hides a lot of information from the player and you need to put in some extra time to understand what's going on. ... Warmongering penalties are similar. You need to understand them or else you get punished. ... I fully understand why this can be frustrating but I kinda like how much there is to learn in CIV6 before you really "get it".

I disagree with this perspective. I find most of the posters here are extremely knowledgeable and fully "get it" -- they just don't agree with it.

 

[RealHuhn]

I disagree with this perspective. I find most of the posters here are extremely knowledgeable and fully "get it" -- they just don't agree with it.

Where did I say that this community isn't knowledgable?
It was a reply to one overexaggerated negative comment. Also, you conveniently cut out the part where I specifically mentioned "casual players", not civfanatics ...

Anyway, the OP has made his decision. Can't blame him after reading about all of the frustration here xD

 

[Pietato]

Random Leader has denounced you (They just plain don't like you).

Classy.