[NFP] Is Civ 6 doomed?

[Askia Muhammad]

Is Civ 6 doomed? Is it already a Lost Cause?

We’ve all been hoping that it will get better and will become the game we want it to be (of course that’s entirely subjective).

I’m starting to think that Civ 6 can’t be salvaged and I think the Devs believe this too. Given we’re coming into the 5th year of Civ 6, I’d say development on Civ 7 has begun.

I personally think Civ 7 will be the Diablo 4 of Civ. It will try to return to the more ‘natural less cartoony’ style of Civ 5 whilst introducing deeper mechanics.

I hope I’m wrong but it feels like Civ 6 is nearing the end of its cycle.

These are the things that I think Civ 6 did better than Civ 5:

Civ design (in terms of mechanical complexity and differentiation)
Art and color (I’d rather play Civ 4 than Civ 5 graphically)
Districts

Things I think Civ 5 did better:

World Congress
Feeling Immersive
More diplomatic options

The issue I have with late game, I think, is that the AI care so much about grievances that they dont want to become a warmonger anymore regardless of the diplomacy modifiers. This makes the late game lacking in conflict and at that point it only becomes a race for who fills the bucket faster.

This. Very much this. It would be nice if the AI could actually pose a threat militarily too but I’ll settle for any war actually occurring after the renaissance era

 

[acluewithout]

Frankly, while I still think Civ 6 is the better game overall, if Civ 5 had Districts and limited Unit Stacking then I’d be playing Civ 5 just because it seems more complete and balanced overall.

I really hope Civ 6 gets across the last few yards. It’s a good game, and has had four years of development. It would be a huge pity if NFP basically ends up as “that’s it” for Civ 6.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

I think doomed is a bit harsh.

I enjoy civ 6 a lot, but it's becoming pretty clear that my ideal vision of the game and the devs' vision are wildly different. Civ 6 seems to be suffering from too many features, many of which are poorly balanced and honestly are kind of just a waste of time if trying to win effeciently.

I think this can also be viewed as a very good thing actually.
Yes, most of the features are not grade A material.
I do think this it is a good thing see that Firaxis is actively experimenting with stuff to see what sticks and what doesn't..
The alternative would be the route of one of the major AAA game companies, who shun innovation like the plague in order to milk a franchise dead with micro transactions and loot boxes.

Personally I used to love Blizzard games (like half the internet), but as of now I'm not buying a single title of their games ever again.
There's a company that will happily milk a franchise to death, and who really hasn't come up with anything innovative over the last 10 years.
Repeat the same old content, introduce cash shops and microtransactions for most of their games, throw some nice graphics on top, and there's Blizzard 2020 for you.

Now I know you can't compare these two companies directly, and I know that civ is a franchise that they want to keep alive.
That being said, I'm happy to at least see Firaxis try to come up with new stuff, even if it doesn't always work out too well.

 

[fantsu]

Doomed?
I dont get it. It has sold A LOT.
The problems in civ VI are the same than on V, and IV: AI and late game (IV did the late game a bit better).

 

[Imaus]

This is a bit of a side note, but I wonder how many here have tried out Vox Populi for Civ V? I love Civ V unmodded, but Vox Populi just knocks it out of the park. For one thing, it makes the game fresh again by adding a bunch of content, rebalancing everything, and introducing new mechanics (such as corporations and resource monopolies). It also does away with the things people seem to find the most objectionable in Civ V, such as "4 city tall" (although tall remains very viable) and global happiness. You now have local happiness and unhappiness which depends on a bunch of factors, such as literacy, entertainment, isolation, crowdedness, and so on. All pantheons, beliefs and social policies are redesigned and rebalanced to where they are pretty much all good and viable. Most important, however, is perhaps the fact that the AI is vastly superior to the unmodded game. Even at Prince difficulty, the AI does a pretty good job of keeping up, and can fight wars effectively.

I'm itching to buy the full pack on steam, so maybe I'll try it with VP then....

 

[Uberfrog]

It is no more doomed than Civ 5 was (and people were saying that was doomed as soon as it was released).

Civ 6 is not perfect, but remains a lot of fun. It’s the only Civ game I have played for the last several years. It is clearly still very popular on Steam.

In five years it will be remembered like every other Civ game. Some people will hate it, others will love it, most people will probably just be playing Civ 7.

This all said I do hope they open it up more for modders, as Vox Populi has clearly helped Civ 5’s long term reputation.

 

[kaspergm]

This is a bit of a side note, but I wonder how many here have tried out Vox Populi for Civ V? I love Civ V unmodded, but Vox Populi just knocks it out of the park. For one thing, it makes the game fresh again by adding a bunch of content, rebalancing everything, and introducing new mechanics (such as corporations and resource monopolies). It also does away with the things people seem to find the most objectionable in Civ V, such as "4 city tall" (although tall remains very viable) and global happiness. You now have local happiness and unhappiness which depends on a bunch of factors, such as literacy, entertainment, isolation, crowdedness, and so on. All pantheons, beliefs and social policies are redesigned and rebalanced to where they are pretty much all good and viable. Most important, however, is perhaps the fact that the AI is vastly superior to the unmodded game. Even at Prince difficulty, the AI does a pretty good job of keeping up, and can fight wars effectively.

Well I tried to go back to Civ5 recently, because I agree very much with your general assessment of Civ6. However I must admit I had a hard time really enjoying it, I did feel some central elements from 6 like districts were missing, so I have to give 6 credit for that. Also I found some of the Vox Populi elements a bit confusing and (worse) that they conflicted with the personal mods and changes I used to use when playing Civ5 back in the day, so I ended up going back to 6 for now at least. I do hope Civ 7 will manage to find a balance point between the two iterations.

 

[KayAU]

Well I tried to go back to Civ5 recently, because I agree very much with your general assessment of Civ6. However I must admit I had a hard time really enjoying it, I did feel some central elements from 6 like districts were missing, so I have to give 6 credit for that. Also I found some of the Vox Populi elements a bit confusing and (worse) that they conflicted with the personal mods and changes I used to use when playing Civ5 back in the day, so I ended up going back to 6 for now at least. I do hope Civ 7 will manage to find a balance point between the two iterations.

It is almost like an entirely new game, so I can understand the initial confusion, I had that as well. However, I started out at a lower difficulty with an open mind, and found it well worth the learning curve. I can't really play Civ 6 at all at the moment. I tried starting out a new game as Pericles, as I hadn't played Greece in a long time. I got a really interesting map and everything was going well, but...I can't play beyond the early exploration phase before being overwhelmed by indifference and boredom anymore.

 

[criZp]

This is a bit of a side note, but I wonder how many here have tried out Vox Populi for Civ V? I love Civ V unmodded, but Vox Populi just knocks it out of the park. For one thing, it makes the game fresh again by adding a bunch of content, rebalancing everything, and introducing new mechanics (such as corporations and resource monopolies). It also does away with the things people seem to find the most objectionable in Civ V, such as "4 city tall" (although tall remains very viable) and global happiness. You now have local happiness and unhappiness which depends on a bunch of factors, such as literacy, entertainment, isolation, crowdedness, and so on. All pantheons, beliefs and social policies are redesigned and rebalanced to where they are pretty much all good and viable. Most important, however, is perhaps the fact that the AI is vastly superior to the unmodded game. Even at Prince difficulty, the AI does a pretty good job of keeping up, and can fight wars effectively.

The new happiness system is in fact what got me off VP. Unhappiness from this and that just kept popping up and the formulas were way too over-complicated.

 

[Vargas1]

I have not played any Civ games other Civ VI, so have no basis to compare against prior games. I will say that I love the game and have sunk more hours into it this year than any game I can think of in my adult life (I just got it earlier this year on Switch, and played in stages - so started with vanilla, then got the expansions and played some with just R&F, then added in GS).

Echoing what others have said, the biggest issue for me is the late game. I've probably played only about 10 games all the way through to victory (spanning vanilla, R&F, and GS), but have probably another 50 that I've played into Renaissance and early Industrial, at which point I realized I would almost certainly eventually win and didn't want to spend hours just clicking through to get to that point.

As I see it, there are three main AI issues that make the late game not very fun. The first is a lack of focus on a particular victory condition - civs who should be going for a cultural victory will sell off Great Works; civs going for domination won't declare war; civs going for science victory stop building campuses. The second, which is related, is a failure by the AI to adapt to current circumstances - given that the game is ultimately a competition, there needs to be more recognition by the AI of when a civ is pulling ahead of the others or driving towards victory. If one civ is pulling ahead, the others should be working together (at least in part) to pull it back. Instead, the AI just keeps on trading, allying, whatever, even as you cruise to victory. The third piece, also related, is the refusal to go to war. If you're on the verge of victory - you've launched a couple of space projects and are rolling towards the final one - they should throw everything they have at stopping you. If you're culturally dominant over half the civs in the game, they should stop converting each other back and forth and start trying to pillage your tourism improvements.

As it is, once you survive the early portions and start building towards your victory path, you either just click your way through with little challenge or you play it more like SimCity where you just do things because they're fun and interesting. I still enjoy that enough, but there's only so many times you can build every post-Industrial wonder and make a paradise in the tundra before it gets old.

 

[EgonSpengler]

"Doomed" is hyperbole, but I can't call Civ VI a complete success, even though I continue to play it. It's half a great game.

The game is way too front loaded for me - all the planning, exploration, interesting military situations, and most of the interesting decisions all happen in the beginning, and then the rest of the many hours of gameplay becomes an efficiency simulator that was interesting for the first dozen or so games... but has become a total slog now.

This is it for me, too. I don't think I've finished a game in 3 years.

It is a little frustrating that they continue to add stuff to the half they've already gotten right instead of radically redesigning the half that isn't compelling; I really don't any need more civs or leaders, but sure, I'll take 'em if they want to keep giving them to me. But hey, I'm sure this [stuff] ain't easy, and at this stage, 4 years on, a radical redesign of the second half of the game might not be worth the effort.

 

[Victoria]

Doomed... we are all doomed. doooooomed!
There are those that like marmite and those that do not.
The bugs are annoying but not surprising as they are in all software, even the big companies.
Having to cater to many audiences puts off purists, not surprising.
I have adapted. It is fine for me now, loving it, warts and all. It has become a cuddly old chewed bunny rabbit, looking worn, but I love it. I just rip off the additional buttons my mother sews on it for me (friggin vampires)
I'm with @EgonSpengler as in finishing few games but its the journey that counts.

 

[racha]

Short answer: no.
Long answer: No, not at all.

Silly answer: It's bigly doomed. Many people are saying it's the most tremendously doomed game in, perhaps, the history of gaming. Not a lot of people know this, but Allan Alcorn was very sad about it when he invented pong, because he saw that Cagarustus would doom Civ 6 decades before it was made. We'll see what happens.

 

[Larsenex]

I loved IV and V. My biggest gripe with V is it hits the 32 bit memory wall late game on the largest maps. Suddenly the game freezes or crashes simply because it ran out of memory.
Some of my favorite games were in both IV and V but ended on that wall and I had to restart.
Not so much of that now with VI.
If I could get IV with hexes and the late future units of beyond the sword, with a 64bit engine and the diplomacy of V, districts of VI and the ai modification brought about in Vox Pouli, I think we would have an all time supreme game, well at least for me.

My favorite games are ones where I get longer wars from modern into future with also diplomacy and playing ai off each other while I warmonger another. ....good times.

 

[_hero_]

Currently 15th on Steamcharts and that doesn't count however many console players there are. Civ VI is fine. It's not a perfect game but its appeal is pretty standard for a Civilization game. It's not perfect and some of the flaws will never go away, but relative to other civ games and other 4x games, Civ VI is a quality game.

Some people are just way too negative and unrealistic in their expectations.

 

[glider1]

I take the definition of "doomed" to mean that Civ6 will not continue to evolve which I agree with which is very sad because every time that happens the new version has to re-invent the wheel and we have to wait years for it to mature again. I'd argue that Firaxis would have made more money by evolving the same civ game engine code over many years than what it does now which is to build from scratch, hack it, abandon it and start again which is very costly development wise.

 

[GenyaArikado]

I love Civ6, it gave us Cleo, it gave us Tamar, it gave us Cat, it gave Ellie... but lately I've been thinking it's hot mess given that devs don't seem to want actually polish the thing.

I think that the "less cartoony" thing is quite deliverate blindness considering Civ3 and 4 graphics

 

[Kimurae]

Hmm, I'm not sure why but it seems to me V and VI especially that the AI is oriented towards acting like a player, a spoiled brat player that throws tantrums when it does not get its way and keeps pinging/poking you with inane crap I never care about.

After playing crusader kings, at least the diplomacy AI there seems to feel like there are a lot of selfish agents waiting for a chance to screw you over (and possibly screw your spouse). So, its very feasible for FXS to build an AI that can at least have engaging wants/needs, given 16 civs are significantly less than all the barons and what-not in a CK game.

Maybe combat could be fixed by having fewer units and more upgrades and tech that just adds more bonuses to existing units. Beyond Earth did that.

Or conversely don't have AI Civs act like players, but like AI agents, similar to barbarians, they grow/expand/war/trade based on agent code and don't follow the same rules as the player. (Who is looking at an AI simulation that reminds you of why you don't play board games with family?).

 

[DogeEnricoDandolo]

I rolled my eyes at any threads with overdramatic titles and I wondered if I should read something that I knew would be infuriating, then I saw your response and it was definitely worth the time.

If a game is doomed then still somehow comes out on top of the franchise, all subsequent games should strive to reach that doom.

 

[DJ_Tanner]

It is no more doomed than Civ 5 was (and people were saying that was doomed as soon as it was released).

Civ 6 is not perfect, but remains a lot of fun. It’s the only Civ game I have played for the last several years. It is clearly still very popular on Steam.

In five years it will be remembered like every other Civ game. Some people will hate it, others will love it, most people will probably just be playing Civ 7.

This all said I do hope they open it up more for modders, as Vox Populi has clearly helped Civ 5’s long term reputation.

Well to be fair, at release Civ V was pretty doomed. It took a complete change in leadership and a massive rework to some core systems to get things back on track.

However, this has also literally been a comment about every single entry in the series. II was a masterpiece and III never lived up to the expectations, IV never engaged people like III, V lacked the depth of IV, etc, etc. The series continues to get better in each iteration, if it wasn't there wouldn't be so many people that move along with the series. Of course so items get lost in the shuffle and everyone is going to miss out on something they loved (personally I hate not having Eco WC), but VI appears close to the end of its dev cycle, so in that regard I guess it is "doomed" in that it will be coming to an end, but the gameplay is fantastic and (like almost everything FXS puts out) well worth the price of admission.