civfanatic4sure
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2025
- Messages
- 58
Just completed my first game; played pretty slow and meticulously to soak it all up. Here are the details and how it went, AMA.
PC: Intel i9-13900HX, GeForce RTX4080
Version/Graphic Settings: DX12 / 4K Resolution / Max Settings
Game Settings: Deity, Standard Size, Terra Incognita Map, No mementos used all game
Leader/Civ: Tecumseh | Mississippian >> Shawnee >> Mughal
Result: Economic Win T80
First just want to say, I cannot understand anyone giving this game a bad review. As an early release v1, it's pretty damn good w/r/t bugs and issues. I 100% had fun and enjoyed the playthrough end to end.
Positives:
- The world looks beautiful; all the detail on the map is A+ and the music was great throughout
- Narrative choices were awesome and ALL the narratives were immersive (as someone who loves that stuff)
- No matter how far ahead (and I got WAY ahead in the Exploration era -- golden Economic, Science, and Culture) the new age start had me worried I might lose
- The macro strategic level decisions felt important all the way through, and even though it tapered off by age, there were still sometimes 10+ turn plan in advance decisions that had to be made for optimal outcomes
- The sheer amount of mechanics that exist made it feel like there were so many contextual choices to make that mattered -- time will tell if they really are choices or if super clear ways of playing are more optimal
- Combat mechanics w/ Commanders felt good
- The tech and civic trees were not just paths you eventually got all of.. there were clear strategic paths for your aims while other branches in the trees could be ignored (and sometimes not possible to even reach)
- The additional civic trees in each era (your civ specific trees, theology tree, ideology tree) forced tradeoffs, which I loved
- I was worried that not having "fast unit movement" would drive me nuts, but you could immediately start moving more units while the previous one was animating, so it did not slow down gameplay AND it looked awesome
- The city vs town mechanic was amazing -- it may have been the most interesting choice through the game and I started to love it more as the game went on to subsequent ages
- Influence as a yield was super versatile and added great flavor to the playthrough
- Resources were fun to engage with and were meaningfully impactful to the game, e.g. moving Marble around to the city you're building a wonder in for the stacking % production to wonders; this also made trade targets strategic and interesting
- At first I hated that random civs were dropping settlements in the middle of other civs with no connection at all to their cities... until I realized just that, there is no connection to their other cities and they are sort of useless which felt more realistic than I thought it would
- Related to that, if you have a town that ends up not connected to anything it becomes essentially worthless since the primary value of specialty towns is sending food to connected cities, and upgrading a town into a city that's not being fed from a connected town severely limits its impact
- AI is so much improved from civ6 on Deity.. I have high hopes we will end up with a somewhat competitive single player at some point, whether it's through patches or mods
>> Himiko was actually very strategic in blocking my treasure fleets by prioritizing growth to sea tiles I needed to pass through, not allowing open borders, and even blocking open tiles with ships
>> I thought at one point in Antiquity that I could grab a valuable adjacent city from Isabella and she EASILY repelled me and I barely got my Army Commander out
Negatives/Issues:
- 2 crashes; one during the Antiquity to Exploration age transition, and the other when I loaded a saved game after taking a break (both after the patch they released)
- The map gen was a big oof -- see two areas of hard straight lines that looked so unnatural; one side of a string of islands and the bottom of the other major continent (screenshots below)
- City projects in the yields screen show up with backend language, e.g. LOC_CITY_YIELD_435 or something to that effect
- Game got annoyingly jittery in modern era when clicking on a merchant specifically; I think because it has to load up a whole lens on the screen to show available trade destinations
- The text must be incorrect regarding how connected cities/towns work. I had a fishing town on an island landmass that was still considered part of the same mainland continent, but it DID NOT send its food to my coastal city on the same continent... which the tooltip says it should. So it must be that it not only has to be the same continent and coastal but also the same landmass of that continent OR not separated by deep sea...
- Hover popups are sticky to the first thing you hover, e.g. I hover over a tile and it says "Build Over X Building" and then I hover to a tile next to it and it says the same "Build Over X Building" again, when that building is not on the new tile being hovered
- Similarly, I found that when selecting a city and doing an action, then selecting another city for a growth event or placing a building/improvement, the popup showing that city's yields were from the city I was on before -- this had me super confused for a bit as I wasn't getting the right yield change from dropping a purchased building or improvement. Deselecting the city and reselecting fixed it.
- The ageless buildings from previous ages were not correctly showing the yields they would add in future ages -- I am 95% sure I tested it and those buildings continued to give all their yields, e.g. Granary gives +1 Food to Farms and let's say in Antiquity the tooltip said building it would give you +5 Food (+1 from Granary plus +4 from farms in the settlement), then in Exploration in the same settlement with no changes the tooltip would say that same Granary would only give you +1 Food when it actually still gave +5 Food. Would appreciate if anyone can confirm.
- You can't see what your options are for trading destinations without first building a Merchant.. which resulted in me buying a Merchant with nowhere to go a few times
- It seemed like my Army Commander lost its bonus movement from the Maneuver promotion after Antiquity
- Placing a building/improvement on top of an existing one shows you the yields the new building/improvement will provide BUT does not show you what you're losing from what you build over. The buildings from prior ages do lose potency, but in some cases you DO NOT want to build over them because they provide a specialty yield, e.g. there are only a few buildings that provide Influence and they do carry that over to subsequent ages (confirmed in city yields detail) and a few times early on I overbuilt them and lost Influence which I would not have done if the tooltip was clear about what I was losing in addition to what I was gaining. Showing net change of yields in the tooltip vs just the gross new yields would solve that very simply. I wasted A LOT of time checking city yield screens to see what I would be losing every time I was going to overbuild..
- Resource management in the end game when going for economic win condition became super tedious because once you hit the points you need to unlock the World Banker you don't need factory resources anymore and some of them give useless yields for your current strategy... in one city I had 8 of one factory resource and had to manually click each one and then scroll to an open slot in the inventory to move it over and over... would be great to be able to right click a slotted resource and have it dump to inventory instead
Here are some screenshots w/ yields:
Turn 2
End Antiquity:
End Exploration:
End Modern:
PC: Intel i9-13900HX, GeForce RTX4080
Version/Graphic Settings: DX12 / 4K Resolution / Max Settings
Game Settings: Deity, Standard Size, Terra Incognita Map, No mementos used all game
Leader/Civ: Tecumseh | Mississippian >> Shawnee >> Mughal
Result: Economic Win T80
First just want to say, I cannot understand anyone giving this game a bad review. As an early release v1, it's pretty damn good w/r/t bugs and issues. I 100% had fun and enjoyed the playthrough end to end.
Positives:
- The world looks beautiful; all the detail on the map is A+ and the music was great throughout
- Narrative choices were awesome and ALL the narratives were immersive (as someone who loves that stuff)
- No matter how far ahead (and I got WAY ahead in the Exploration era -- golden Economic, Science, and Culture) the new age start had me worried I might lose
- The macro strategic level decisions felt important all the way through, and even though it tapered off by age, there were still sometimes 10+ turn plan in advance decisions that had to be made for optimal outcomes
- The sheer amount of mechanics that exist made it feel like there were so many contextual choices to make that mattered -- time will tell if they really are choices or if super clear ways of playing are more optimal
- Combat mechanics w/ Commanders felt good
- The tech and civic trees were not just paths you eventually got all of.. there were clear strategic paths for your aims while other branches in the trees could be ignored (and sometimes not possible to even reach)
- The additional civic trees in each era (your civ specific trees, theology tree, ideology tree) forced tradeoffs, which I loved
- I was worried that not having "fast unit movement" would drive me nuts, but you could immediately start moving more units while the previous one was animating, so it did not slow down gameplay AND it looked awesome
- The city vs town mechanic was amazing -- it may have been the most interesting choice through the game and I started to love it more as the game went on to subsequent ages
- Influence as a yield was super versatile and added great flavor to the playthrough
- Resources were fun to engage with and were meaningfully impactful to the game, e.g. moving Marble around to the city you're building a wonder in for the stacking % production to wonders; this also made trade targets strategic and interesting
- At first I hated that random civs were dropping settlements in the middle of other civs with no connection at all to their cities... until I realized just that, there is no connection to their other cities and they are sort of useless which felt more realistic than I thought it would
- Related to that, if you have a town that ends up not connected to anything it becomes essentially worthless since the primary value of specialty towns is sending food to connected cities, and upgrading a town into a city that's not being fed from a connected town severely limits its impact
- AI is so much improved from civ6 on Deity.. I have high hopes we will end up with a somewhat competitive single player at some point, whether it's through patches or mods
>> Himiko was actually very strategic in blocking my treasure fleets by prioritizing growth to sea tiles I needed to pass through, not allowing open borders, and even blocking open tiles with ships
>> I thought at one point in Antiquity that I could grab a valuable adjacent city from Isabella and she EASILY repelled me and I barely got my Army Commander out
Negatives/Issues:
- 2 crashes; one during the Antiquity to Exploration age transition, and the other when I loaded a saved game after taking a break (both after the patch they released)
- The map gen was a big oof -- see two areas of hard straight lines that looked so unnatural; one side of a string of islands and the bottom of the other major continent (screenshots below)
- City projects in the yields screen show up with backend language, e.g. LOC_CITY_YIELD_435 or something to that effect
- Game got annoyingly jittery in modern era when clicking on a merchant specifically; I think because it has to load up a whole lens on the screen to show available trade destinations
- The text must be incorrect regarding how connected cities/towns work. I had a fishing town on an island landmass that was still considered part of the same mainland continent, but it DID NOT send its food to my coastal city on the same continent... which the tooltip says it should. So it must be that it not only has to be the same continent and coastal but also the same landmass of that continent OR not separated by deep sea...
- Hover popups are sticky to the first thing you hover, e.g. I hover over a tile and it says "Build Over X Building" and then I hover to a tile next to it and it says the same "Build Over X Building" again, when that building is not on the new tile being hovered
- Similarly, I found that when selecting a city and doing an action, then selecting another city for a growth event or placing a building/improvement, the popup showing that city's yields were from the city I was on before -- this had me super confused for a bit as I wasn't getting the right yield change from dropping a purchased building or improvement. Deselecting the city and reselecting fixed it.
- The ageless buildings from previous ages were not correctly showing the yields they would add in future ages -- I am 95% sure I tested it and those buildings continued to give all their yields, e.g. Granary gives +1 Food to Farms and let's say in Antiquity the tooltip said building it would give you +5 Food (+1 from Granary plus +4 from farms in the settlement), then in Exploration in the same settlement with no changes the tooltip would say that same Granary would only give you +1 Food when it actually still gave +5 Food. Would appreciate if anyone can confirm.
- You can't see what your options are for trading destinations without first building a Merchant.. which resulted in me buying a Merchant with nowhere to go a few times
- It seemed like my Army Commander lost its bonus movement from the Maneuver promotion after Antiquity
- Placing a building/improvement on top of an existing one shows you the yields the new building/improvement will provide BUT does not show you what you're losing from what you build over. The buildings from prior ages do lose potency, but in some cases you DO NOT want to build over them because they provide a specialty yield, e.g. there are only a few buildings that provide Influence and they do carry that over to subsequent ages (confirmed in city yields detail) and a few times early on I overbuilt them and lost Influence which I would not have done if the tooltip was clear about what I was losing in addition to what I was gaining. Showing net change of yields in the tooltip vs just the gross new yields would solve that very simply. I wasted A LOT of time checking city yield screens to see what I would be losing every time I was going to overbuild..
- Resource management in the end game when going for economic win condition became super tedious because once you hit the points you need to unlock the World Banker you don't need factory resources anymore and some of them give useless yields for your current strategy... in one city I had 8 of one factory resource and had to manually click each one and then scroll to an open slot in the inventory to move it over and over... would be great to be able to right click a slotted resource and have it dump to inventory instead
Here are some screenshots w/ yields:
Turn 2
End Antiquity:
End Exploration:
End Modern:
