Age pacing qualitative survey

[Acken]

Hi. I'm wondering what was the community experience regarding the pace of each age.
To give a few pointers I am wondering what was the community experience for each age:
Did it feel too fast or too slow to reach the end ? (Note that Marathon is buggy so doesnt count)
Did you make use of techs and civics at the end of the tree ? To achieve it, did you focus on science and/or culture ?
Did the Ai in that age feel challenging or completely left behind ?
How many legacy paths were you able to fully complete ?

If you played with non standard speed and non standard age length please mention it

 

[pokiehl]

Standard game speed with the Age length set to long feels really good.

 

[Leucarum]

The pacing for antiquity and exploration has felt mostly ok for me. With exploration, the economic legacy path can take a bit longer than the others, as it has more bottlenecks. I've tried long and standard and think I like the more competitive standard version.

Modern is where I'm finding the pacing is really off. How quickly are people ending the game? For culture in particular (hegemony is not hard to reach), you can end the game insanely fast. In my first game when I was feeling things out it took a while, but honestly now, I'm almost finding that the modern era civs might as well be blank, as it's just a race to end the game and you barely use many of their unique features!

 

[Rob Airdrie]

I took advice from the forum after initially trying marathon and took epic with long ages. It feels great for me, antiquity ended pretty much when most of the civs had got close to the end. Only 18% through exploration after 60 turns so I'm happy!

 

[Giskler]

Having played a few games now, I feel like even with setting the age length to long the ages end too soon. As with Civ 6, the culture victory is too easy and makes the game end too soon, and the science victory is such a massive slog that I proably won't finish it many times.

 

[Acken]

Standard game speed with the Age length set to long feels really good.

What about tech and civics ? Did you feel they were worth getting and using or ignored for the most part ?

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Having played a few games now

How the heck have people played multiple games already - I've played 20 hours since Thursday and am still on my first game (normal speed with extended ages).

 

[Giskler]

How the heck have people played multiple games already - I've played 20 hours since Thursday and am still on my first game (normal speed with extended ages).

48.7 hours played and I'm on my 6th full 3 age playthrough

 

[Manpanzee]

Just wrote a long post mostly on this subject in the first impressions thread.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

48.7 hours played and I'm on my 6th full 3 age playthrough

Just finished my first game in 21.7 hours!

 

[Acken]

Just wrote a long post mostly on this subject in the first impressions thread.

Seems a lot of people are reporting that going for culture in modern can lead to a very short game.
Overall would you say Antiquity and Exploration were long enough ? Did you feel reaching late era tech/civics worth it ?

 

[Ebon-Hawke-]

I took advice from the forum after initially trying marathon and took epic with long ages. It feels great for me, antiquity ended pretty much when most of the civs had got close to the end. Only 18% through exploration after 60 turns so I'm happy!

Ding ding. This is the winner. That being said I'd love marathon to work! But epic with long ages definitely feels like I get everything in I want and have long enough as each civ. People complain about the rail reading, but with longer age length you can take a more general approach.

Some other advice for you, try playing on just continents not continents plus! The wider oceans means you are pretty much guaranteed a medieval third or half the age unless you get (un?)lucky with a spot both continents on close together. This does make economic in exploration unfeasible as the lack of islands results in almost no treasure resource spawns in my experience.

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

I found in the two games I played so far that Exploration seems to go the fastest, and possible to finish it under 100 turns.

 

[StargazingDog]

How the heck have people played multiple games already - I've played 20 hours since Thursday and am still on my first game (normal speed with extended ages).

Quick speed, maybe? I'm the same as you. I'm only on my second game and I've put in almost 30 hours.

 

[Manpanzee]

Overall would you say Antiquity and Exploration were long enough ? Did you feel reaching late era tech/civics worth it ?

I thought the first two eras were at a decent length. Presumably they’ll get shorter with experience, but they’d have to get quite a lot shorter before I’d consider that a problem in itself. Bigger concern would be if skilled players can ultimately blast through future tech/civic fast enough to invalidate the more flavorful age objectives.

I didn’t feel like late era techs/civics ever stopped being relevant, since many of them give bonuses directly related to age objectives. Relics and codices are obvious examples. Another: I felt that the late Exploration age effects boosting tile yields were relevant for hitting the 40-yield scientific objectives, even if I didn’t much care what the yields actually were by that point. It’s true that a lot of what I’m thinking about are ostensibly secondary bonuses, not the “meat” of the techs, though.

 

[King of Prussia]

Of the 2 full play throughs i have done so far, i prefer the longer ages. With that said, the setting feels pretty useless in the modern age. I dont think any of the victory conditions are effected by the setting. If you arent spam buying explorers from the very start, you are not going to win a culture victory.(or denying the others it) If you play it right, and beeline the 2 techs for it its an easy win. The AI is very aggressive with this win condition. If we had the option to turn off certain victory conditions, i would turn this one off.

 

[Taefin]

I enjoyed the standard length for the first immortal game, as it felt like the right depth into each age for me. But I suspect finding the right combo of ai bonuses and era length to create that pacing in a challenging game will take a while.

I suspect that end of era buildings are actually more helpful than it seems, since they get the next era snowballing faster.

 

[Albertan Civfanatic]

On Standard I'm going pretty good. But my playstyle is always to play slow so I can enjoy the game to its fullest, so I will probably play on slow speeds in the future.

 

[infiniterocks]

Modern age feels kind of short compared to the other ages. I hope there's a DLC that adds newer tech and units to the modern age, like special forces infantry units (that can paradrop), drones, mobile rocket launchers, cruise missiles, attack and transport helicopters, hypersonic missiles, stealth fighters and bombers. I don't know why dams are missing from the game to stop flooding, as well as energy infrastructure.

 

[mv10]

I spent around 20 hours on my first game.

The Ancient era felt like a true civ experience as I took a militaristic approach with Augustus. Learning some of the new mechanics (and the obligatory trying to find info that wasn't there) slowed me down somewhat. By the end, I felt that I had enough time to set up my empire, had made a few conquests but would say taking the entire continent would have been challenging in the time I had - which seems balanced. I also put a lot of effort into the economic legacy and managed to secure a golden age.

The exploration era also seemed well paced. I found the treasure fleet mechanic a good incentive to head over to the new continent. In this particular game, the AI was late to head over so there wasn't much competition there until much later, by which time I had monopolised most of the treasure fleet resources. I was playing on a lower difficulty than usual here so perhaps would be different if that was increased. I also got an economic golden age as well as a militaristic/expansionist one through the legacy system.

The modern age was over really quick by comparison. I was focused on trying to secure it as quickly as possible, and realised that the cultural victory was the easiest to get, so went for that. Even with some competition from the other civs, I was able to secure more artifacts than necessary by pumping out explorers. Then I built the world fair and won.

I'd say something felt a bit off during the modern age. I had neglected culture throughout the entire game, but was able to win a culture victory more easily than any other. I understand that perhaps they are trying to keep all victories achievable for anyone, but I would have preferred to have previous ages be more impactful on victory conditions than they actually were. I hope this final era is something that is developed further to make it less gamey, and to have longer, more important actions/considerations leading to victory conditions.