Although the mysterious "GH" depot that turned out to be R&F showed up several months before the expansion was announced. There are no such depots right now. I can imagine a DLC getting only a few months of testing, but not an expansion.
My current prediction is a patch in the fall and expansion later next year. I'd love to see some DLC in between, perhaps a map pack and a leader pack, but I don't think we'll get that.
This seems most likely. And the fall patch may actually be really late fall as in December.
I suspect this is pretty accurate. I wish they'd be a bit more transparent about some kind of a plan, but since they're being cagey I suspect it's because the plan is "6 or more months before anything of value will be released" which means they don't want to talk much to prevent hate from fans.
They're in a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" timeframe right now.
Yup. Basically agree.
I’m pretty sure FXS have a clear idea of what the next expansion will look like and have been developing it in parallel with RnF. Reading between the lines, you can sort of guess what it will include and or what they’ve been working on.
- Diplomacy. Ed’s made clear in interviews the last expansion will include a World Congress. Makes sense to leave that to the second expansion - it’s an oft requested feature, and leaving it to last will cause a big splash and drive sales. A lot of systems in RnF seem like stepping stones or beta for various World Congress / Diplomatic systems - Emergencies and Alliances in particular. If they redo Diplomacy, it’s almost inevitable Envoys will get a bit of a rework. I think Ideologies will also make some sort of comeback - RnF introduced “ideological wars”, which suggests to me the team have been thinking about Ideologies.
- IZ and Late Game Buildings. The fact the IZ, it’s buildings, and other tier 3 buildings weren’t touched is quite revealing, particularly given there were so many other balance tweaks in RnF and subsequent patches. Not touching them at all suggests to me either there is a wider plan to overhaul this area or FXS we’re waiting to bed down some other systems before tweaking / revamping this. My (wild) guess is we may get some sort of “power plant” system - between the modular district system and very robust strategic resource system, it wouldn’t be hard to do something cool in this area. Have a look at my signature for some examples. Something around power would also address the slow production late game at the same time.
- Loyalty. I’d be pretty stunned if FXS don’t do more with Loyalty. RnF’s loyalty system feels very like a “base system”. It’s very stable mechanically and very modular - look how easily they added in religion to loyalty. Pretty sure we’ll get something around this.
- Free cities seem very basic at the moment. I can’t beleive they’d leave them as is. Expanding those would also be an easy way to create another layer of antagonists which could help make the late game more fun (a stated goal). If you tweak free cities, I think tweaking barbs and goody huts is sort of logical next step given they get fairly silly / irrelevant late game, but I’m really guessing here (edit: reading this again, I think I’m really speculating on this and or wishful thinking - oh well).
- Governors, Governments and Legacy Cards. Not sure about this really, but I could see these getting tweaked a little. The current system is very basic but also very robust and modular. These could also be tweaked to work with Diplomacy more.
- England. Just an observation. The changes to England - and actually Spain as well - feel like stop gaps. That might be because, frankly, those Civs aren’t on their radar really (which makes me a sad panda). But. It might have been because something is planned in the next expansion that would mean they’d just get revised again anyway. That could be something around tweaking colonialist expansion and or naval game. That’s a real guess though - FXS did sort of buff colonial play (as in, made it more complex) with RnF (loyalty, governors, ancestral hall, certain dedications and era boosts), so it might be there done in this area except for maybe some tweaks.
- Decisions. There’s a chance we may get some sort of decision system like you have in EU IV. Again, very speculative, but it seems like a fairly obvious and easy thing to copy from other games, just like FXS did with Governors. (edit: or not. Might be something they’d want to do in Civ VII, instead of half doing it this time around.)
I don’t know about timing though. Fixing x-plat worries me a little bit. That sounds like something you do when you’re not making changes to the base game for a while. Equally though, they may have put working on more patches on hold precisely so they could sort out x-plat. They wouldn’t have wanted that sort of negative publicity to continue into the next expansion.
There are probably a few factors impacting timing - bandwidth, other projects. And something like the World Congress might take a lot of time to get “right” both in terms of coding and game play. I also don’t see FXS have any need to rush the next expansion. Next year sounds right, with maybe a patch late this year as they gear up. I would think they’d prefer earlier rather than later next year though, otherwise they’ll lose momentum.
There’s a good chance FXS will keep making dlc or mini expansions for Civ after the next expansion. I know that’s not what they’ve done before (edit: and it’s maybe contrary to some things Ed said when they were developing / putting out Vanilla) but it’s just such an easy way to generate more money for very little relative development cost (and I don’t mean that really in a bad way, because I think some smaller or plus sized dlc after the next expansion would be very cool). Indeed, my guess is part of the reason Civ VI is so modular is to allow precisely that.
As for what their other project is and impact on Civ VI. Well, whatever it is, I doubt they’ll lose interest in Civ VI. Civ VI seems to have been very positively received and will do really well once the next expansion is out. You’d want to keep that going. Any other property would have its own team - although they might move people about closer to launch, particularly if they decided to release a new game in between RnF and the next Civ VI expansion. I’m not too fussed either way. The next expansion will be great, and either we get it early next year, or we get something else great, with Civ VI expansion after that. Good result either way.
I’m actually fairly doubtful we’ll get another Beyond Earth type game. Why build a game around one alien planet, when there are games allowing you to control entire alien empires? I could be wrong about that, but BE was such a flop, and not just because of “execution”
IMO, that I find it hard to see they’d go back to that well. That said, space empire games seem very well covered, so would doing that sort of game be any smarter? And surely anything more historical would be better bolted onto Civ VI. I mean, sure, you could make a Colonization game, but why not just make that an expansion for Civ?
So, a totally new property? But using existing properties has been FXS model to now, and that always feels safer.
I don’t know. It’s just impossible to guess what new property they’re working on. I wish them luck whatever it is.
(BTW FXS. I know I say this every few weeks. But fix England. Seriously. Just do it. Next Patch. Next Expansion. Exclusive Fix England DLC. Reward for supporting Ed’s new Kickstarter Project “Catan: X-Com v Art of War - The Renaissance Era (exclusive Star Wars edition)”. Whatever. Just fix them. If you don’t fix them, how will we get
@Victoria back onto this forum!?!)
tldr: we’ll get another expansion; it’ll be awesome; probably early next year with a patch late this year, or maybe later next year if another property comes out before then; no idea what the other property is; I’m still salty about England.
