Hello, I'm new around here, and I hope that this thread technically falls into the category of Civ VI, even though it's me expressing dissatisfaction with it. I'm not particularly good at being brief, so I'll put a tl;dr at the bottom for anyone who wants to give quick advice, with my full explanation and exact question that I'm asking below.
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I've played Civ VI for a couple hundred hours now and simply no longer feel that there's anything left to really explore, which is a shame because there are still dozens of civilizations left to play as, along with lots of features and interactions that I have yet to fully experience. How, then, can it be that there's nothing left to do? The problem in a nutshell is quite simple: I don't feel that the (single-player) game has enough depth for someone who's attained at least a decent understanding of how to play and can comfortably win on at least immortal difficulty (which I can, but I haven't given deity a proper go because I don't suspect it actually fixes the fundamental issues I'm going to talk about below).
I'll cut right to the chase: I don't feel as if the AI understands the game it's playing. Rather, playing the game feels a bit like how I suspect playing one of my favorite board games with my 8 year old sister would go: if I explained the basics of the game to her, and gave her a ton of starting resources, there might be a "game" in the sense of me needing to overcome her starting advantage, but once I do so, the game is over. Choices no longer matter at that point. It doesn't matter:
The Gathering Storm expansion and extra game modes unfortunately make the situation worse rather than more interesting, in my opinion. While I like a lot of the changes that the expansion makes, including tweaks to existing features that just make a lot more sense (for example: city-state bonuses that scale more reasonably, strategic resource stockpiling, and the lumber mill giving +2 production by default rather than +1, which, while it is a massive jump in production, does at least make those appropriately competitive with mines), a lot of the more substantial changes either add a) extreme annoyance (the ridiculousness that is the world congress and loyalty, and yes I know there are ways around loyalty problems -- that isn't my point) or b) bonuses that the player knows how to use and abuse (insane things like Pingala+Grants+Oracle, or Sinbad generating thousands of gold in the early-mid game), but which the AI has no understanding of, thereby making the game even easier than it already is.
Now, believe it or not, I'm not listing all these things to bash on the game needlessly. The reason I'm explaining all this is so that you have some baseline idea as to what it is I want from a Civilization-style game, based on my experience with Civ VI. I'll also go ahead and clarify what exactly it is I want now.
What I want from a Civilization-style game is a story. Not every type of game I play has to be heavy on story, but in a game like Civilization, where there are so many choices and things to think about, I want good choices to pay off and bad choices to not, and the story to be composed of those good and bad choices in a kind of harmony. To be clear, early-game Civ VI on immortal+ difficulty has a story -- I'm talking the first 100 turns or so on epic speed -- because there are so many things you want and you are very far behind the AI. But that story ends once you see that the game is won, which generally happens when you've either conquered several cities that you know you can retain, or built up your empire to be resilient to any invasion (the latter of which doesn't take much effort). The AI is exceedingly passive -- in my last game, I had no walls, one archer, one warrior, and a multitude of cities, but I just knew the AI wasn't really a threat to them, even when I saw their heavy chariots waltzing through my lands. Why play defensively when walls are unlikely to ever be necessary and your enemy can simply be conquered on a whim, and if, worse comes to worst, I can just insta-buy some new units with the ridiculous amounts of money I'm being handed for luxury resources? In a game where the optimal strategy is so obvious (wait for the point where a ruthless steamroll of your enemy is possible, and in the meantime play a tiny amount of defence when necessary), and where the other players of that game don't seem to understand that that's the optimal strategy, making them both extremely docile and also uninterested in actively preventing you from getting too far ahead -- even through something as simple as the creation of a defensive pact or trying to keep their units a bit more up to date -- there's really no story element at all, it's just your own personal sandbox.
One thing that's particularly crucial to me is to have warfare that is engaging, because you get a lot of interesting story from a good war. In Civ VI, there are no good wars, in my experience so far. For a fun war to even be possible in Civ VI, based on my current experience, it would need to happen very early on, because from the medieval era onwards the AI is generally completely hopeless against the player, who has built up infrastructure and the capability to build and maintain a diversified military. But early on, there's also very little satisfaction, because you know that with every city you take, you're greatly increasing your own power, and thereby shortening the game's lifespan. What I really want is to have a game where wars inevitably happen throughout history; you may start some of them, you may get sucked into others, and for still others you may be content to simply watch, but in any case there's some direct competition happening between civilizations almost constantly, and these wars lead to meaningful shifts in the game's power balance (rather than two AIs suiciding their units on their enemy's walls until they both get tired and stop). I want to see interesting peace treaties, defensive blocs, proxy wars, world wars, tense diplomacy, culture wars, religious wars (real ones, not just the AI suiciding their apostles one by one), border disputes, raiding and pillaging and sacking. I want playing proper defence to have some value: the construction of walls and fortifications, and eventually trenches, bunkers, and military bases. I want modern wars in the late game where you can truly sense the rules of the game have changed as bombers and battleships run rampant. I want to have a reason to keep pushing my technological advantage beyond the industrial era, rather than "just pick the tech that also happens to give me a production boost somewhere, because none of this matters anyway." But most importantly of all, I want the AI to actually understand what it's doing. How to get the most value out of each unit each turn, even if it's as simple as "use spearman on horse, use warrior on archer." When to retreat with and protect its weakened units, and when to give chase to the enemy. When and how to use siege units (probably not by sending forward two trebuchets against a line of field cannons, for example). When it needs help, badly -- get units into city centers or onto defensible terrain, call on an ally, build walls, build new units as fast as possible, but most of all don't just continue to sit there and allow your entire army to die. I don't need (or want) an AI that is super-optimized and can always beat me, I just need it to be competent enough to wage a war that isn't over in 5 turns due to woeful incompetence.
With all of that said (and thank you if you have read this far), my question is as follows: what Civ game, with what kind of setup, and what set of mods, and potentially even set of self-imposed restrictions if the AI needs a bit of help, would you recommend to try and best satisfy my wishes? I am being fully honest when I say that if the answer, hypothetically, were Civ I, I would be more than willing to play it. I really don't care about how old the game is or how dated the graphics are -- a good game that can tell a good story, and which has a competent enough AI for which you don't know the optimal strategy to beat (on high difficulty) after just one or two playthroughs, would be priceless. I've heard good things about both Civ IV: BtS and Civ V with Vox Populi, but I have also heard good things about Civ I-III. I would also like to know if there is any possible way to rescue Civ VI -- is there anything out there to give the late game even a semblance of depth? I've been using Real Strategy, which I feel is helping the AI to build walls at least, but they still suicide units all the time.
Thanks for reading, and sorry for the post length -- just wanted to make it very clear what my question is.
-- tl;dr:
After playing a reasonable amount of Civ VI on immortal difficulty, I feel that it does not have the depth necessary for the game to tell a good story or be all that satisfying to play through to completion. I would like to explore other options (i.e., other Civ games and their associated mods) that may do a better job of this. Specifically, I want the game to be capable of producing good stories (what that means exactly is somewhat subjective, but basically, there should be depth, meaningful decision-making, and a game state that changes in a unique and interesting way over time), and I want the AI to be competent at the game, especially when it comes to direct warfare. Ideally, there should be few ways to really abuse the AI to win. The AI should be good enough to keep you honest throughout the game and force you to build up a proper military with proper defenses. I would also love it if there were some element of diplomacy (diplomacy technically exists in Civ VI, but feels too random to be interesting).
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I've played Civ VI for a couple hundred hours now and simply no longer feel that there's anything left to really explore, which is a shame because there are still dozens of civilizations left to play as, along with lots of features and interactions that I have yet to fully experience. How, then, can it be that there's nothing left to do? The problem in a nutshell is quite simple: I don't feel that the (single-player) game has enough depth for someone who's attained at least a decent understanding of how to play and can comfortably win on at least immortal difficulty (which I can, but I haven't given deity a proper go because I don't suspect it actually fixes the fundamental issues I'm going to talk about below).
I'll cut right to the chase: I don't feel as if the AI understands the game it's playing. Rather, playing the game feels a bit like how I suspect playing one of my favorite board games with my 8 year old sister would go: if I explained the basics of the game to her, and gave her a ton of starting resources, there might be a "game" in the sense of me needing to overcome her starting advantage, but once I do so, the game is over. Choices no longer matter at that point. It doesn't matter:
- Which unit type I'm most in need of to conduct warfare the most efficiently, because I could also simply wait to outperform my opponents in science, train a handful of advanced units (it barely matters what type), and then wipe the board.
- Where I place my districts, because as long as I use very basic principles (campus/holy site near mountains, commercial hub near river, other districts wherever they'll get some bonuses, or on a bad tile if they aren't getting any), I'm going to be fine, because a point will always arrive where I begin to rocket past everyone with stackable bonuses multiplying each other and going haywire (example being: the AI, which does not seem to understand the value of being suzerain of many city-states, does not prevent me from becoming suzerain of 4-5 or even more, which I can often do quite easily with good civic management and the use of the policies that give you 2 envoys instead of 1; then when I get the card that gives +5% science/culture per suzerainty, now I'm going up 20-25%+ culture/science in one turn),
- Which wonders to pick. In the early game there is a real choice because the AI starts so far ahead of you that you have to really, really want a wonder to be willing to take the risk of working on it for many turns and potentially have someone else finish it first; I like this, although I dislike how some early wonders are basically impossible to get unless you make a beeline straight for them (e.g. Pyramids). In the late game, though, I can have pretty much every single wonder I want. In my last game as China, on immortal, I had built 12 wonders by the time the game ended in the modern era, and only lost one to another civ (Big Ben, which I started on late and started building even though it was basically irrelevant to my win condition, because why not).
- How to obtain strategic resources. I'm fairly confident I could literally give the AI a monopoly on all the coal and oil and I'd still be able to win a domination game if I wanted to.
- When to build a navy. Hint: I don't need a navy. I'll just build a few ships for some tech boosts, then they'll sit around for the rest of the game and do nothing, unless I declare war and use them to wipe the enemy's obsolescent fleet and help besiege some coastal cities.
- Where my traders should go. Hint: Just go to the city with the best yields. No thinking required.
- And so on...
The Gathering Storm expansion and extra game modes unfortunately make the situation worse rather than more interesting, in my opinion. While I like a lot of the changes that the expansion makes, including tweaks to existing features that just make a lot more sense (for example: city-state bonuses that scale more reasonably, strategic resource stockpiling, and the lumber mill giving +2 production by default rather than +1, which, while it is a massive jump in production, does at least make those appropriately competitive with mines), a lot of the more substantial changes either add a) extreme annoyance (the ridiculousness that is the world congress and loyalty, and yes I know there are ways around loyalty problems -- that isn't my point) or b) bonuses that the player knows how to use and abuse (insane things like Pingala+Grants+Oracle, or Sinbad generating thousands of gold in the early-mid game), but which the AI has no understanding of, thereby making the game even easier than it already is.
Now, believe it or not, I'm not listing all these things to bash on the game needlessly. The reason I'm explaining all this is so that you have some baseline idea as to what it is I want from a Civilization-style game, based on my experience with Civ VI. I'll also go ahead and clarify what exactly it is I want now.
What I want from a Civilization-style game is a story. Not every type of game I play has to be heavy on story, but in a game like Civilization, where there are so many choices and things to think about, I want good choices to pay off and bad choices to not, and the story to be composed of those good and bad choices in a kind of harmony. To be clear, early-game Civ VI on immortal+ difficulty has a story -- I'm talking the first 100 turns or so on epic speed -- because there are so many things you want and you are very far behind the AI. But that story ends once you see that the game is won, which generally happens when you've either conquered several cities that you know you can retain, or built up your empire to be resilient to any invasion (the latter of which doesn't take much effort). The AI is exceedingly passive -- in my last game, I had no walls, one archer, one warrior, and a multitude of cities, but I just knew the AI wasn't really a threat to them, even when I saw their heavy chariots waltzing through my lands. Why play defensively when walls are unlikely to ever be necessary and your enemy can simply be conquered on a whim, and if, worse comes to worst, I can just insta-buy some new units with the ridiculous amounts of money I'm being handed for luxury resources? In a game where the optimal strategy is so obvious (wait for the point where a ruthless steamroll of your enemy is possible, and in the meantime play a tiny amount of defence when necessary), and where the other players of that game don't seem to understand that that's the optimal strategy, making them both extremely docile and also uninterested in actively preventing you from getting too far ahead -- even through something as simple as the creation of a defensive pact or trying to keep their units a bit more up to date -- there's really no story element at all, it's just your own personal sandbox.
One thing that's particularly crucial to me is to have warfare that is engaging, because you get a lot of interesting story from a good war. In Civ VI, there are no good wars, in my experience so far. For a fun war to even be possible in Civ VI, based on my current experience, it would need to happen very early on, because from the medieval era onwards the AI is generally completely hopeless against the player, who has built up infrastructure and the capability to build and maintain a diversified military. But early on, there's also very little satisfaction, because you know that with every city you take, you're greatly increasing your own power, and thereby shortening the game's lifespan. What I really want is to have a game where wars inevitably happen throughout history; you may start some of them, you may get sucked into others, and for still others you may be content to simply watch, but in any case there's some direct competition happening between civilizations almost constantly, and these wars lead to meaningful shifts in the game's power balance (rather than two AIs suiciding their units on their enemy's walls until they both get tired and stop). I want to see interesting peace treaties, defensive blocs, proxy wars, world wars, tense diplomacy, culture wars, religious wars (real ones, not just the AI suiciding their apostles one by one), border disputes, raiding and pillaging and sacking. I want playing proper defence to have some value: the construction of walls and fortifications, and eventually trenches, bunkers, and military bases. I want modern wars in the late game where you can truly sense the rules of the game have changed as bombers and battleships run rampant. I want to have a reason to keep pushing my technological advantage beyond the industrial era, rather than "just pick the tech that also happens to give me a production boost somewhere, because none of this matters anyway." But most importantly of all, I want the AI to actually understand what it's doing. How to get the most value out of each unit each turn, even if it's as simple as "use spearman on horse, use warrior on archer." When to retreat with and protect its weakened units, and when to give chase to the enemy. When and how to use siege units (probably not by sending forward two trebuchets against a line of field cannons, for example). When it needs help, badly -- get units into city centers or onto defensible terrain, call on an ally, build walls, build new units as fast as possible, but most of all don't just continue to sit there and allow your entire army to die. I don't need (or want) an AI that is super-optimized and can always beat me, I just need it to be competent enough to wage a war that isn't over in 5 turns due to woeful incompetence.
With all of that said (and thank you if you have read this far), my question is as follows: what Civ game, with what kind of setup, and what set of mods, and potentially even set of self-imposed restrictions if the AI needs a bit of help, would you recommend to try and best satisfy my wishes? I am being fully honest when I say that if the answer, hypothetically, were Civ I, I would be more than willing to play it. I really don't care about how old the game is or how dated the graphics are -- a good game that can tell a good story, and which has a competent enough AI for which you don't know the optimal strategy to beat (on high difficulty) after just one or two playthroughs, would be priceless. I've heard good things about both Civ IV: BtS and Civ V with Vox Populi, but I have also heard good things about Civ I-III. I would also like to know if there is any possible way to rescue Civ VI -- is there anything out there to give the late game even a semblance of depth? I've been using Real Strategy, which I feel is helping the AI to build walls at least, but they still suicide units all the time.
Thanks for reading, and sorry for the post length -- just wanted to make it very clear what my question is.
-- tl;dr:
After playing a reasonable amount of Civ VI on immortal difficulty, I feel that it does not have the depth necessary for the game to tell a good story or be all that satisfying to play through to completion. I would like to explore other options (i.e., other Civ games and their associated mods) that may do a better job of this. Specifically, I want the game to be capable of producing good stories (what that means exactly is somewhat subjective, but basically, there should be depth, meaningful decision-making, and a game state that changes in a unique and interesting way over time), and I want the AI to be competent at the game, especially when it comes to direct warfare. Ideally, there should be few ways to really abuse the AI to win. The AI should be good enough to keep you honest throughout the game and force you to build up a proper military with proper defenses. I would also love it if there were some element of diplomacy (diplomacy technically exists in Civ VI, but feels too random to be interesting).
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