Anyone else quit playing?

[Dale]

Wow, you still keep on reading this forum. You must still be very interested in the game.

Is there anything wrong with coming here once a week to see if they have fixed the AI?

 

[Countmonte8242]

Never started. Civ V (ok game but didn't feel like Civ and rarely gave me that "1 more turn" feeling) led to me having a wait and see approach with Civ 6. All Civ 6 info at release told me to wait and see, and threads like this will likely just make me skip it altogether. I'm not going to give Firaxis money for ignoring feedback from long-time players. The key issues I have a problem with cannot be fixed in a patch or add-on content. Anybody hoping that the AI miraculously gets good at 1 UPT or that 1 UPT management ceases to be tedious is kidding themselves. Civ games in the past were most fun when you felt DANGER. Almost never felt it in Civ 5, and it seems to be even less present in 6.

I DO think they catered to the masses with this game in this sense: they saw the sales numbers of Civ 5, and so they thought it reasonable to continue on the path that Civ 5 started. I probably will not give the series any more money until it gets off this Civ 5 path catering to the Steam base and brings back the soul of the series. Maybe we never see that game? That's fine, I can always go back and play IV when I feel the need to scratch the Civ itch. I've played so many 1000's of hours of Civ in my life that it's probably not a bad thing for me if they never put out another great Civ game...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

It's an interesting psychological argument, the severity of punishment (wrt. decision and consequence). I mean it's vaguely a part of the whole design process, but obviously psych. feedback is (more and more) important in games design. Is stepping up a particular punishment (or reward) always a good design principle? Or does it mask a weakness in the underlying design?

It could be either without further context (I consider Zelda titles and Dark Souls to both be good games overall), but the point I was making is that Civ 4 is harder because you have more choices that influence the outcome and worse consequences when you choose poorly, just like Dark Souls combat is harder than Zelda's. Civ 4's difficulty doesn't necessarily make a better game by itself, but it does make it more challenging to win.

Do you find CiV's decisions softer because you acclimatised to harder choices in a previous game, or vice versa?

Neither. I find them "softer" because making them is less influential on my perceived likelihood to win the game from a given position.

Civ 5 isn't inherently bad because any one choice might not screw you. The problem is the sheer volume of meaningless (or difficult-to-measure in impact) choices that populate the game between ones that matter, further exacerbated by some of the important choices being frequently obvious or easy to make (you could win the overwhelming majority of high level maps using 4 city tradition and running down the science path. Try finding an analogue for that in Civ 4, or coming up with scenarios where going 4 city tradition could cost you the game outright, such that you can trace that opening as the *particular* reason you lost).

As a result, one of that game's more important, long-term consequence choices (social policies) becomes trivialized. Same deal for 6; with only tiny downside on an additional city, the crushing incentive is district spam optimization, with so few exceptions that your entire expansion model resembles the decision difficulty of whether/when to build a granary in civ 4 (IE almost always, and usually near top priority too). Needless to say, I was not impressed by the granary tradeoff in civ 4, because I'm not impressed by "always or almost always do this". Rote memory isn't strategy :/.

The movement/next build in city/trade route/move again even though you just hit end turn cascade of meaningless bullcrap that you nevertheless have to navigate just to make choices that do matter is easily one of the biggest problems in civ 6. It's *why* I harp on the UI as a problem, but the UI isn't the only aspect leading there. The tuning to make what to build or pursue interesting/meaningful to outcome isn't there either, in part because the cost tradeoffs are out of whack in addition to the tedium aspects. There are too many "make a decision that doesn't matter" or "make a decision that is game-cripplingly obvious" moments.

I can easily envision a game that cuts out most of the tedium crap and has enough small decisions that any one won't lose you a game, but they add up. That'd be a heck of a lot more newbie accessible than what got dumped on us in civ 6, where you need to look to third party sources just to have a chance to learn some of the rules.

 

[Dale]

The problem is the sheer volume of meaningless (or difficult-to-measure in impact) choices that populate the game between ones that matter

So true. Civ5/6 and to some extent Civ4, got so complex it got bogged down in tedious choices, rather than interesting choices.

"A good game is a series of interesting choices." - Sid Meier.

 

[juanpavo]

"A good game is a series of interesting choices." - Sid Meier.

Nice! I would love to be a fly on the wall when Sid plays a game of Civ6.

 

[ThERat]

A good civilization game would also give you a great sense of accomplishment, when for example, you manage to snatch a really important wonder from the AI (for example, the Great library in Civ3, which could make or break an AW game).

Civ6 is a flow of events that are rather meaningless and inconsequential, because first and foremost, the AI will never pose any threat.

 

[PhilBowles]

Dunno if I understood your argument correctly, but if I revisit Civ 4 and easily handle the top difficulties, I will rethink my own arguments against Civ 5 and 6 regarding difficulties.

I've already run an equivalent comparison. It's not a fully accurate one as I'm far less familiar with Civ IV's mechanics after all this time (I used to play on Monarch, as I recall) and all my recent attempts to play at the same level have failed due to an unstoppable stack (incidentally, I've faced equivalent rushes in Civ VI since the last patch, but they have to come within the first 20 turns or so, at latest the first 30, while Civ IV's present a threat much later). Neverthless the furthest I've got into a Civ IV game recently has me down at Noble - mainly to relearn the mechanics rather than because it's an appropriate difficulty, but at least scorewise the AI is close to level-pegging with me and some have overtaken me temporarily (although score in Civ IV is a terrible measure of relative success as I recall). I routinely played Civ V at Immortal, which I probably won less often than I lost, but I could reliably win at Emperor.

As far as I can tell in Civ VI from more limited experience, difficulty is a little lower - pre-patch I won on Emperor with what amounted to a random walk through unfamiliar trees, much the same as in Beyond Earth. Post-patch it's more of a challenge for any kind of peaceful game but still seems reliably winnable at the same level - domination games are an unfair comparison because the AI is utterly incapable to an extent that probably wasn't even true early in Civ V's life, if only because cities could defend themselves better without support.

As I recall the received wisdom during Civ V's life was that at its best Civ V was about a level easier than Civ IV. I suspect even once I've refreshed my Civ IV skills it will be closer to two levels lower. Civ VI is perhaps not as much as a level below Civ V in difficulty at this point (again, exploiting the AI's weakness to go for easy wins aside), although it seems to reward looser gameplay, but it is certainly easier.

 

[Zuizgond]

Civ6 is a flow of events that are rather meaningless and inconsequential, because first and foremost, the AI will never pose any threat.

I think that's the main issue. In civ 4 you must constantly be prepared to be able to defend against a stack of doom with enough collateral damage units and defending units. In civ 6 you just need 3-4 ranged units and you're good to go. Even if the AI attacks you, you can still start producing units after the DoW as AI needs so much turns to surround your city. That's also why I never need those military card slots.

 

[PhilBowles]

I think that's the main issue. In civ 4 you must constantly be prepared to be able to defend against a stack of doom with enough collateral damage units and defending units. In civ 6 you just need 3-4 ranged units and you're good to go. Even if the AI attacks you, you can still start producing units after the DoW as AI needs so much turns to surround your city. That's also why I never need those military card slots.

Always being able to buy units makes life easier as well - given complaints about that system in Civ V I'm not sure why it still exists. Quite possibly if gold-buying was restricted to buildings the game may be a bit more challenging militarily.

Though you'd still have to contend with the AI. I started another of my occasional forays into Civ VI yesterday and rolled an archipelago map. It's outright embarrassing to keep beating the AI because it jumps all its units into the water undefended and, if you have a galley or even an embarked unit nearby, instead of retreating the enemy swarms around it because it apparently hasn't been coded to realise embarked units can't attack. That's not an issue Civ V ever had in my recollection (it would leave units undefended and was reluctant to cross oceans - something Civ VI isn't - but it wouldn't leave units sitting dumbly while being attacked by warships) so I have no idea why anyone would ever have coded it that way.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Always being able to buy units makes life easier as well - given complaints about that system in Civ V I'm not sure why it still exists. Quite possibly if gold-buying was restricted to buildings the game may be a bit more challenging militarily.

Though you'd still have to contend with the AI. I started another of my occasional forays into Civ VI yesterday and rolled an archipelago map. It's outright embarrassing to keep beating the AI because it jumps all its units into the water undefended and, if you have a galley or even an embarked unit nearby, instead of retreating the enemy swarms around it because it apparently hasn't been coded to realise embarked units can't attack. That's not an issue Civ V ever had in my recollection (it would leave units undefended and was reluctant to cross oceans - something Civ VI isn't - but it wouldn't leave units sitting dumbly while being attacked by warships) so I have no idea why anyone would ever have coded it that way.

Production vs move rate coupled with HP bars makes getting caught out in wars less problematic by itself. The 1UPT nature of the game also means you only have to invest a small % of your total production in order to survive militarily, a potentially stark contrast form Civ 4 that gets overlooked (IE need to evaluate how much of your economy to put into military in order to survive).

You'll notice people mention in civ 6 that an early rush is the biggest threat the AI poses; this is precisely because that's the only time in the entire game where the hammer investment required to survive an attack is a decently large proportion of your total production output.

This isn't about gold rushing. Civ 4 had the whip, which was just as crazy as the gold rush if not more so.

 

[PhilBowles]

This isn't about gold rushing. Civ 4 had the whip, which was just as crazy as the gold rush if not more so.

The whip was however restricted to a specific civic (albeit one that remained viable for an unfeasibly long period of the game), and more importantly it wasn't independent of the production system - the unit you whip out has to be in your production queue, and won't appear until the following turn. You can time production in Civ V/VI to produce two units essentially simultaneously - getting the bought unit instantaneously rather than next turn also adds an immediate defence buff even before you're able to use the unit as an attacker, so you're less likely to get caught out - you can magic a defender into existence at any point when you aren't actually besieged.

EDIT: Exacerbating this issue is that in Civ VI particularly gold is essentially a free resource you accumulate incidentally that has no other value.

Granted you do need to build to a somewhat aggressive commerce strategy to earn enough to spam gold purchases, but without any maintenance mechanic (either city-scale as in Civ IV or per-building/road as in Civ V), and with gold easier to come by from tiles and city states compared with BNW, you still get a lot of gold just through general gameplay and nothing else to do with it given the minimal cost of unit maintenance (the only forced gold expenditure).You want commercial hubs and harbors for domestic trade, for instance, and sometimes GM points for amenities - and get free gold from adjacency bonuses or from the buildings you construct to get those points. Right at the start of the game you have a civic that's most useful for earning a quick pantheon that also incidentally boosts gold output. AI civs also seem to fall over themselves to offer you gold for no very obvious reason - a neutral civ will always offer a nominal GPT in open borders trades, for instance.

That's a world away from Civ IV's whip, where the population reduction - while a bonus on average - still came with a cost to production. It's also a step back from BNW, where gold-buying was already abusable even when high net income was impossible as early in the game as it is in Civ VI, tiles didn't produce gold, and gold had uses other than rush-buying and unit upgrades, either in diplomacy (especially for research agreements) or as part of city-state quests.