Anyone else find the Civilopedia to be kinda garbage?

Yep, it's way less informative and in multiple instances flat-out wrong. It's also much less functional. It doesn't even have working links!

This is an afterthought, but the historical entries are also much less detailed and much less accurate than in past Civilopedias. They're often poorly written, too.
 
Does it? I don't see it that way.
As I said the intro is wistful, poetic but nothing wrong with that

That is far from my complaint. Verbose and eloquent writing pleases me. This is neither, it's sixth grade """poetry""". Any actual poet would palm his face upon reading it.

@Takfloyd still waiting for examples instead of another rant.

Is Firaxis paying you to be here and spew nonsense? Is that what your "Supporter" tag means?

I listed multiple examples, and everyone else seems to agree with my assertions. How about you stop covering your eyes and ears and pretending there is no problem?
 
I wouldn't say that the historical entries are poorly written. Just in a more casual tone. Personally I prefer my facts delivered with a little more serenity, but I can see how the writing style fits with the cartoony graphics and over the top animations of the leaders.
 
That is far from my complaint. Verbose and eloquent writing pleases me. This is neither, it's sixth grade """poetry""". Any actual poet would palm his face upon reading it.
Well it was the only thing you mentioned specifically in the op.

several other posters actually sort of agreed with you and listed examples of peoblematic quotes used but all of them have fairly muted posts and did not necessarily agree with your tone. Let's keep it about pointing out the actual flaws instead of flaming people, quibbling over style and posting rants.
 
I wouldn't say that the historical entries are poorly written. Just in a more casual tone. Personally I prefer my facts delivered with a little more serenity, but I can see how the writing style fits with the cartoony graphics and over the top animations of the leaders.

The writer of those entries... loves ellipses... a whole lot. I find that really annoying. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

But yeah, the tone is unquestionably not encyclopedic, and if I were writing a Civilopedia, that's what I would have gone for.
 
But I have noticed that one of the stated goals of Civ VI was to make sure that the game provides the player with better, clearer, easier-to-get-at information than Civ V. And boy are there some huge gaps on that score.

Just to name a few:
  • You can't see when your city borders will grow from culture, nor can you see which tile you will get.
  • You can't see more than 3 yield types on a tile (the rest are just not shown).
  • Many of the techs and civics in the game have affects that you can only see in the tooltips/civilopedia

What do you mean by that second point? In the image below, you can see that a tile yield can show all 5.

Spoiler :
tile_yields_5.PNG
 
Well it was the only thing you mentioned specifically in the op.

several other posters actually sort of agreed with you and listed examples of peoblematic quotes used but all of them have fairly muted posts and did not necessarily agree with your tone. Let's keep it about pointing out the actual flaws instead of flaming people, quibbling over style and posting rants.

If that's what you call getting dismantled in an argument, suit yourself.

Here's another thread I just noticed on the front page about the exact same issues: http://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/anyone-else-find-the-civilopedia-to-be-kinda-garbage.603749/
 
The writer of those entries... loves ellipses... a whole lot. I find that really annoying. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

But yeah, the tone is unquestionably not encyclopedic, and if I were writing a Civilopedia, that's what I would have gone for.

Perhaps they felt an in-game Wikipedia would just be... an in-game Wikipedia. :)

I agree with you but I imagine they felt the need to imprint their own style into this -pedia.
 
Yeah, it needs work.

My biggest peeve though is there is no back-button... If there is I have yet to find it. Why Firaxis?
 
Imo it has been written the day before the release by a stagist coming from another planet.
 
To this day I miss Civ II's Civilopedia, and the full entries that came up when researching a tech. The move to quotes alone was a mistake however good the quotes in my view (though Civ IV at least retained a lot of background information in the associated tech pages) - it's not something I ever liked about Alpha Centauri, the apparent inspiration for that approach, though in that case mostly because there was no description of the techs beyond the quote.

Civ VI's introduction is excruciating, especially the generic starting 'beasts of the Stone Age' rubbish before the badly-written leader intros that say far less about the leader or the civ than Civ V's managed in equivalent space. While the quotes are rather unfairly maligned (there remain many from classical figures - the American comedians appear to be in the minority - and the focus on the terrible, terrible Kilamanjaro piece glosses over the more general advance of having Natural Wonder quotes at all, most of them with the appropriate tone and an appropriate author), there's a higher density of duds than there ought to be. Some of the quotes in past Civ games were pretty uninspired ('it's the wheel. Let's have some text that mentions a wheel' - "Put your shoulder to the wheel" in Civ IV is no better than Civ VI's effort, Nimoy or no Nimoy, and at least the Civ VI version better reflects the idea of inventing the thing. Civ V alone had a good quote even if it was one that had nothing to do with the concept of inventing the wheel) and sometimes misplaced ("Rock Island Line" is not a bad thing to quote, it's just a bad thing to quote when researching Railroad in a Civ game), but few have been actively bad in the way Civ VI's worst are. Okay, Alpha Centauri had some dreadful crap, but going back to it I found there's less than I remembered - my perception was skewed, as that of Civ VI's detractors are by the Kilamanjaro quote, by one or two spectacularly bad pieces.
 
The historical entries are almost entirely lifted from Wikipedia, which is disappointing.
 
I'm sorry, but the opening bit is just the worst. It makes no sense at all. Not even kind of.

And, I'd rather the writers focus on getting the game mechanics into the Civilopedia before they spend time fixing up the fluff. I like fluff, but game mechanics are pretty important. Just look at how many confuse players post here every day about culture, religion, amenities, and all of the other poorly documented mechanics.
 
It's rather terribly explained and it doesn't help one bit.

For example, I still haven't made a National Park, I'm missing something obviously

This one I figured out on my own through just messing around with good old trial and error.

The national park needs to be a diamond shape of tiles:
./\
/\/\
\/\/
.\/

my ascii arts sucks but you get the idea. I also discovered that you can use builders to remove improvements to help facilitate placement. Also, all 4 tiles need to be owned by the same city, so you can swap tiles between cities if need be.
 
I'm sorry, but the opening bit is just the worst. It makes no sense at all. Not even kind of.

And, I'd rather the writers focus on getting the game mechanics into the Civilopedia before they spend time fixing up the fluff. I like fluff, but game mechanics are pretty important. Just look at how many confuse players post here every day about culture, religion, amenities, and all of the other poorly documented mechanics.

They do need to fix the civilopedia's functionality, but the fluff is actually pretty important - it's what you're going to be exposed to every session when playing, long after learning the rules, and the entire conceit of Civilization is its historical window-dressing. Beyond Earth isn't functionally much worse than any other recent Civ game, it just lost Civ's flavour without replacing it with anything very substantial. And it is far worse-regarded than the Civ games as a consequence, almost as though people realise - with the cosmetics taken away - they're playing a game that's fundamentally almost 30 years old that, when you get right down to it, is pretty shallow mechanically and strategically. The biggest mistake Civ designers can make (and did make with Beyond Earth) is to dismiss the flavour as being peripheral to the game - it's the driving force that gets and keeps players hooked.
 
Last edited:
Yeah, sometimes it's useful, but a lot of the bigger picture rules are just nowhere to be found. A definite lack of transparency on some features/systems, and the civilopedia didn't help in many cases.
 
To this day I miss Civ II's Civilopedia, and the full entries that came up when researching a tech. The move to quotes alone was a mistake however good the quotes in my view (though Civ IV at least retained a lot of background information in the associated tech pages) - it's not something I ever liked about Alpha Centauri, the apparent inspiration for that approach, though in that case mostly because there was no description of the techs beyond the quote.

Civ VI's introduction is excruciating, especially the generic starting 'beasts of the Stone Age' rubbish before the badly-written leader intros that say far less about the leader or the civ than Civ V's managed in equivalent space. While the quotes are rather unfairly maligned (there remain many from classical figures - the American comedians appear to be in the minority - and the focus on the terrible, terrible Kilamanjaro piece glosses over the more general advance of having Natural Wonder quotes at all, most of them with the appropriate tone and an appropriate author), there's a higher density of duds than there ought to be. Some of the quotes in past Civ games were pretty uninspired ('it's the wheel. Let's have some text that mentions a wheel' - "Put your shoulder to the wheel" in Civ IV is no better than Civ VI's effort, Nimoy or no Nimoy, and at least the Civ VI version better reflects the idea of inventing the thing. Civ V alone had a good quote even if it was one that had nothing to do with the concept of inventing the wheel) and sometimes misplaced ("Rock Island Line" is not a bad thing to quote, it's just a bad thing to quote when researching Railroad in a Civ game), but few have been actively bad in the way Civ VI's worst are. Okay, Alpha Centauri had some dreadful crap, but going back to it I found there's less than I remembered - my perception was skewed, as that of Civ VI's detractors are by the Kilamanjaro quote, by one or two spectacularly bad pieces.

I think you make good points here.

Another weird thing about Civ VI's tech quotes, I think, is just how negative most of them are. In past Civ games, Civil Service would always get a negative quote (because making fun of bureaucracy is easy, I guess), and sometimes lategame military techs like Rifling and Nuclear Fission would get quotes emphasizing how dangerous and destructive this technology is. But most of the quotes were positive.

But in Civ VI, it feels like a huge number of tech quotes for all kinds of techs are denigrating whatever was researched. The tech quote for Early Empire is about the fall of the Roman Empire. The tech quote for Military Tradition is about how if men make wars according to rules, they will fail. The quote for Mysticism is explaining why Mysticism is a failed idea. The quote for Recorded History is about how history is this artificial concoction with little truth value. The tech quote for Engineering makes fun of engineers. The tech quote for Mass Media is a joke about how newspapers misinform people. Heck, even the quote for Mining gives the advice to "quit digging." I could go on--there are many many more examples. I think this is weird. Shouldn't you feel like you're discovering valuable things? Shouldn't tech quotes give a sense of progress and accomplishment?
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom