Appreciation Thread: Civilization VI

[alpexplorer]

As I've given Civ VI more hours, I'm starting to realize that I cannot go back to earlier iterations of the game. I prefer deity-level play, always play huge maps and maximum AI players (more action this way). I also like playing at epic, even marathon, speeds. Here are some things that I appreciate about VI:

1. Districts. This factor alone makes it impossible for me to go back to Civ II through Civ V (never played Civ I). That all buildings cannot be stacked in a single city center tile revolutionized my play and makes more sense to me. Incredibly, it took this many iterations of the game for this to work out.

2. Tile Use. I find that I spend more time making tile improvement/usage decisions. A misplaced wonder could mean that I lose adjacency bonuses for the remainder of the game. A pillaged district could mean that I spend the next 50 turns rebuilding it. In all honesty, did I ever care about barbarians/the AI pillaging my tiles? Not until VI. Tiles, and the improvement thereupon, have never been as important to me.

3. City Personality. Closely related to the district concept, I enjoy that not every city has the same buildings. I realize that certain districts can be considered necessary in every city, but I enjoy building my cities differently--some a production powerhouse with the Ruhr Valley, some a river/coastal/commerical gold mine, some a cultural bomb, etc...

4. 1 UPT (to an extent). No, I don't like units getting all jumbled together at a bypass or religious units being on the overlay as military units, but the lack of mobility in general has caused me to be careful with how I cycle my units and place my units. If a unit goes too far and gets too close to a city during combat, the chances of the unit dying are greater. I have to consider unit movement more carefully.

5. Cultural Policy. I really like the cards.

6. Barbarians. To some they are annoying, but I quite enjoy the aggressiveness. Imagine if the AI was as aggressive as the barbarians--my, that would be something.

The more I play this game as a civilization-building game, the more I enjoy it. I usually don't find much joy in getting a as-fast-as-possible victory. One of my favorite games was when I had to manage 100+ cities at the end. Just a personal thing.

What are some of the good changes you enjoy with Civ VI?

 

[gfeier]

It encourages deeper, longer-range planning. This makes the game more immersive for me.

 

[ferretbacon]

To add to what you said about Wonders needing to be placed on tiles, I also appreciate that they have placement requirements. I think this helps to create a more balanced spread of Wonders across the map rather than all of them being hoarded by one or two powerhouse Civs. Certain Wonders will be snagged by underdog Civs simply because they're one of the few to have the proper placement conditions met.

I enjoy the way roads are built as well. It was tedious to build them with workers and I disliked how road systems were largely self contained within empires, which is not realistic. By using the trade units to build roads, it feels more organic and makes the various empires feel connected.

Oh, and splitting the tech tree is a great development. It lessens the "science is king" constant and allows cultural Civs to still make progress. The Eurekas and Inspirations encourage active play and reward you for playing smart.

Just thought of City-States... love how they have more identity by conferring a unique ability to their suzerain. Though it makes me wonder what will happen to ones like Lisbon or Amsterdam when they're inevitably phased out for the Portuguese and Dutch.

 

[Adored]

Makes me appreciate Civs 1-4 even more.

 

[TruthfulCake]

Nice list. I agree with a lot of your points. I also believe that 1UPT needs a little tweaking to provide the civilian class and religious units a separate, neutral layer on tiles so that they are not impeded by their own kind or by the troops of other civilizations coming in on open borders. I enjoy the careful movement and positioning too. As for the policy cards, it is a great system that unfortunately lacks personality. They should definitely integrate it with ideologies, as right now it seems too flexible to make long-term policy planning necessary.

Also, barbarians are vicious this game, and I like it, but they really should tone down the advanced units that they get. Horsemen before turn 20 is not fun.

I would like to add a couple of other things that I really appreciate in the game, especially compared to the similar Civ V BNW:

7. Espionage. It is so much more engaging than in Civ V, and the variety of actions the spies can perform is also dependent on the opponent's district placement, allowing for a lot of variety each game. I also try to build my districts in such a way that makes the most vulnerable ones defensible with one counterspy, although it may not always be optimal.

8. Great People. They are now limited, and there are three ways to recruit them now. Each of them also has a different function, unlike the "park 15 Great Scientists until late game and pop their brains in succession" strat back in BNW.

9. The new movement rules. It has grown on me, and it makes movement less exploit-y now, since now you have to plan your maneuvers in advances. In previous iterations, your units can do anything they want with 0.5 movement points left.

10. The finite builder charges. More realistic, more impactful, and less brain-dead.

11. The fact that nukes are no longer stationed units. I cannot stress how important this is for maintaining a real threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, as you used to be able to nuke the counternuke in the target city to oblivion in BNW. Now all you need is a nuclear submarine lurking around for the counter strike.

 

[janboruta]

I think it's a very good game on its own, best launch of a Civ title in a decade or more, and a good base for future expansions. It has given me much rejoicing, although so far I've only put around 100 hours into it (Skyrim and Fallout have been distracting me very often). It has flaws and limitations, but so far nothing that would be a game-breaker to me. It runs fine, the gameplay is reasonably satisfying and the presentation has surprised me. I was much more skeptical of the art style before I played the game itself.

Looking forward to patches and new civilizations. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but I am not disappointed in Civ VI.

(there is a possibility I just have low standards - as most of the critic folk would probably accuse me of - but I find it useless to lose time for unnecessary criticism; I'd much rather spend that time looking for positives and just simply enjoying the game for what it is. There's so much more to life than dwelling on a game's flaws)

 

[Rup]

When Civilization 5 came out , after the first few weeks I spent most of my time in Civilization 4 .
When Civilization 6 came out , after that I couldn't go back to 5 or 4 .
Totally agreed with you on most of your points .

Exclusive features because of which I couldn't go back to previous titles are
:- Districts . <3
:- Governments / Policies . <3
:- City States Suzerein Bonuses .
:- Limited Unit Stacking maintaining 1 UPT
:- Visual and the Art Style (Even though I wrote it last but actually it is the primary reason for me to get HYPED by the very first screenshot . I do have a GTX 1080 AMP extreme , 6700K oced 4.4Ghz , 32GB DDR4 GSKILL 3200 Mhz build and a PS4 Base model and an X1 Base model and a N3DSXL and even a 2TXP build in my office as I am a game programmer and embeded System programmer .So No I am not a smartphone gamer and I have first hand experience of how good a AAA game can look . Being active in game development even though I am not a graphics designer , I very much was in for Stylish art style for this game. )

Being said these I don't think that the game is even close to being perfect Civilization game .
I have a lot of issues with this game but I don't think any of those is complicated enough to not be patched .But his thread is not for those discussions

PS: I do understand if someone hate this Art Style but I freaking love it . And the day night cycle is beautiful <3

 

[alpexplorer]

Just thought of City-States... love how they have more identity by conferring a unique ability to their suzerain. Though it makes me wonder what will happen to ones like Lisbon or Amsterdam when they're inevitably phased out for the Portuguese and Dutch.

I can't believe I forgot about city-states. You are absolutely right. Before VI, I would annihilate every, single city-state. To me, their bonuses simply did not justify, let alone merit, their existence. However, with VI, I actually need that extra amenity from Zanzibar to stay "happy" or the extra housing from Mohenjo-Daro or the extra regional bonus range from Toronto, just to name a few. For once, the city states mattered.

 

[ferretbacon]

I can't believe I forgot about city-states. You are absolutely right. Before VI, I would annihilate every, single city-state. To me, their bonuses simply did not justify, let alone merit, their existence. However, with VI, I actually need that extra amenity from Zanzibar to stay "happy" or the extra housing from Mohenjo-Daro or the extra regional bonus range from Toronto, just to name a few. For once, the city states mattered.

I know what you mean. I've fought bitter wars defending a choice city-state. I've even gone to war to destroy a civilization that's constantly fighting me for suzerain of a city-state I need.

 

[ShakaKhan]

1.) Two tech trees. It is a bit of a cop-out that they function with the exact same mechanic but use a different yield for progression (beakers or culture) but it is nice to have a civ game where there isn't one single be-all, end-all yield to maximize and dominate the game in any fashion you desire if you can run away with that yield (although production kind of fits that now...)

2.) Pillaging. Finally, there's a point to this. In previous games, you could do this but there was almost no point, you could gain 1/50th the gold necessary to buy a unit. When units started healing from pillaging, it was an additional use but still used only to assist in traditional wars. Now a war of attrition is quite beneficial, especially in the context of an opponent starting to run away with infrastructure and you can't quite take their cities, or can't invest the resources to do so. For those who haven't played with this game element yet, I recommend it, you can gain quite respectable boosts to research and culture progression, as well as pick up decent amounts of faith and, of course, gold while doing so.

 

[nzcamel]

Well said all of you.
As a fan of IV, I'll begrudgingly give V it's due - it improved a few things; while back peddling on others.
In doing so it introduced a lot of mundane turns where there was no significant decision to make.

VI has brought back decision making in spades! There are few turns where you aren't presented with interesting choices.

As it does not have the less nuanced combat system of IV, VI may never surpass it in terms of a compete game for SP.
There's the current challenge for the Devs. They've hit gold with pretty much everything else, and taken our immersive experience of playing Civ to new levels

 

[PYITE]

Chocolate Banana Jungles

 

[Leyrann]

Well said all of you.
As a fan of IV, I'll begrudgingly give V it's due - it improved a few things; while back peddling on others.
In doing so it introduced a lot of mundane turns where there was no significant decision to make.

VI has brought back decision making in spades! There are few turns where you aren't presented with interesting choices.

As it does not have the less nuanced combat system of IV, VI may never surpass it in terms of a compete game for SP.
There's the current challenge for the Devs. They've hit gold with pretty much everything else, and taken our immersive experience of playing Civ to new levels

I don't see how a more nuanced combat system is a bad thing...

I, for one, really prefer the combat system of V and VI over IV. I mean, IV is certainly a good game (and certainly better than V, too), but the combat is just "build several units of every type and stand on a hills/forest tile". In V and VI winning or losing isn't decided by a roll of the dice, but instead by who has his units in better spots. If, in IV, I put a swordsman on a tile with 3 archers next to it, and those 3 archers all attack him, that swordsman might just win (I'm not even talking about strength here btw, just need an example). In V or VI however, if you put a swordsman on a tile with 3 archers next to it, all that's gonna happen is that he takes a lot of damage, then charges one of the 3 archers and kills them, to then get shot down by the other two. Which is kiiiiiinda more how it works in real life if slow troops try to fight archers.

 

[nzcamel]

I don't see how a more nuanced combat system is a bad thing...

It is and it isn't. Set aside discussions about strategy level games vs tactical level games; and 1UPT is more engaging and immersive than the stacks were. Throwing archers and catapults into combat against enemies in IV always felt off.
Where it falls over is the ability of AI to comprehend the tactics given the sheer amount of variables. Hence why I referred to SP rather than MP in terms of a complete game. Of course this complaint isn't new; and no doubt improvements are still to come. Beach n co have done an amazing job thus far and have shown a willingness to throw convention out of the window. I don't think they would've stuck with 1UPT if they thought there was a better way.

 

[alpexplorer]

10. The finite builder charges. More realistic, more impactful, and less brain-dead.

I definitely agree with you on this one. Not only are the builder charges finite, but the builder cost escalates with time, too. Makes builders more valuable.

Another point related to this is that for the early-mid game, I no longer choose to improve every single workable tile. I have to choose which tiles to improve, which tiles not to improve, which cities to improve, and which cities not to improve. City development must be prioritized now.