Game Too Fast

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

Oh, goodness no.

But this is why we have game speeds. Options are good, more options are better.

Game speed is not the issue here, its the way yields snowball out of control in this game past the early game.
Even if you slow down the game to marathon, you will still experience a drastically faster game pace once you get out of the early game.
It's just due to how the game was (probably) balanced around a somewhat linear progression model (that civ 5 loosely tends to follow), whereas civ 6 has yields growing much more exponentially (thereby making everything faster and faster).
If you properly abuse this, you can still get ridiculous production times like 3 turns spent for producing a unit, even on Marathon speed.

 

[iammaxhailme]

I tend to have the opposite problem. Unit building is just too slow compared to the game length. By the time I've put together and army, the upgrades are on the horizon.

It's a balance issue of "how long does it take to make stuff" vs "how fast are you zooming through the cultural/science trees". IMO civ 5 had it right. In civ 6, it feels like it takes forever to make anything... by the time I make my districts, the game's practically over. I feel like I never get to put my plans into action unless I get extremely lucky with something like "having a ton of faith to buy districts with Moshka or do classical age monumenality".

Production costs in Civ6 are lower than in Civ5. I played a few games of them back-to-back. In the starting turns in Civ5 you produce units in 8-15 turns, in Civ6 I'm producing units in 4-8 turns.

I think this is actually true; I build things faster in civ 6 than 5. However, you go through tech/science even MORE faster, so _relative_ to game progress, it takes longer to build things in 6 compared to how it felt in 5.

I should note I play both games on quick 90% of the time.

 

[Gorbles]

Game speed is not the issue here, its the way yields snowball out of control in this game past the early game.
Even if you slow down the game to marathon, you will still experience a drastically faster game pace once you get out of the early game.
It's just due to how the game was (probably) balanced around a somewhat linear progression model (that civ 5 loosely tends to follow), whereas civ 6 has yields growing much more exponentially (thereby making everything faster and faster).
If you properly abuse this, you can still get ridiculous production times like 3 turns spent for producing a unit, even on Marathon speed.

The OP was talking about Era pacing. Doing justice to yields and hammer-based production is a whole other thing (though you can relate hammers to science a bit, VI provides a bunch of ways to scale one but not the other).

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

The OP was talking about Era pacing. Doing justice to yields and hammer-based production is a whole other thing (though you can relate hammers to science a bit, VI provides a bunch of ways to scale one but not the other).

Its not clear to me whether he refers to the player's era or the world era.
Either way, my contribution here is about the player advancing eras too fast.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Its not clear to me whether he refers to the player's era or the world era.
Either way, my contribution here is about the player advancing eras too fast.

Both. Everyone's zooming across the ages, including me

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

Both. Everyone's zooming across the ages, including me

I think world era is fine.
The problem is that I as a player advance far ahead of the world era by the Renaissance, at which point I am frequently in the Modern and closing in on the Atomic era (player era).
Last time I experienced the Atomic era (world age) was probably at least 2-3 years ago, when I was both worse as a player but also played slow on purpose to reach a particular GA atomic era dedication ("wish you were here").
These days my games are usually over in the industrial era (world era), while I am cruising around in the Information era (player era).

 

[Snowygerry]

Hm - likely a conqequence of the player skills improving and the AI getting ever larger boni as you increase difficulty level,

in previous versions of civ the issue was adressed by mods, often by implementing severe "ahead-of-time" penalties.

Changing the game speed to epic or marathon helps a bit, as does adjusting your own play style (do not race out of the gate, give the poor AI a chance to build up and get ahead of you), but that may not be to everyones liking.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

I think the issue is a combination of what @Oberinspektor Derrick said about yields, as well as the bonuses you get from policy cards and Governors and city-states, they add up to give you insane yields that late-game cost weren't originally programmed to work with, so you end up breaking the game immersion-wise.

Civ5 doesn't have policy cards, Governors and city-state bonuses comparable to those from Civ6, so is a more restrained experience unless you go out of your way to exploit mechanics

 

[Snowygerry]

So the obvious solution is to up the cost of the late game techs, IF you research them ahead of (some) historical date, but that was often frowned upon too, for many people getting ahead of the curve is the enjoyment of the game..

Never played C5 btw, went straight from heavily modded C4 to C6

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

So the obvious solution is to up the cost of the late game techs, IF you research them ahead of (some) historical date, but that was often frowned upon too, for many people getting ahead of the curve is the enjoyment of the game..

Never played C5 btw, went straight from heavily modded C4 to C6

Yes, upping the costs of late game techs and civics would help.

But, one big problem here though is that this fix is for an issue that assumes that the player min-maxes these late game mechanics. For players that dont (and the AI), all this would do is set the further back in the late game, and would not be fun for those players.

The best solution would be that firaxis better balances the game for different difficulties, but I haven't seen anything that suggests that they are even thinking about it.
For instance, having a Prince difficulty remain as is, but have Deity include increasing tech/civic/production costs in the later game (globally or just for the player), while giving the Deity AI increasing late game bonuses to keep them afloat (since it fails to play properly, and thus falls behind the player).

 

[civac]

That's how Civ4 works. AI bonuses increase with every era. Tech costs for the HI scale with difficulty.

 

[SemiLazyGamer]

One other symptom of this is that I see entire Eras worth of Great Admirals, Merchants, and Engineers because no one can earn enough Great People.

I can understand 2 getting lost, but I can lose out on every single Medieval Great Merchant or Admirals because no one earned enough GPP to get the first Classical Era one.

 

[Civilopedian]

I feel that the game is very quick on Standard, and in particular Unique Units have very small windows of usage because they cannot keep their abilities when upgraded to a more modern unit. I think Marathon speed is definitely the way to go to maximise the use of units but on the other hand production times are very long and if one loses a settler, has a builder captured, loses population or has a unit killed, the punishment is extreme on that game speed. I feel that Epic speed strikes a pleasant medium.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

I think Marathon speed is definitely the way to go to maximise the use of units but on the other hand production times are very long and if one loses a settler, has a builder captured, loses population or has a unit killed, the punishment is extreme on that game speed.

You could use the Historic Eras mod, it has Marathon-level tech costs while retaining Standard-level production costs.