April 2021 Update - Patch Notes Discussion

[Linklite]

So my conquistador can upgrade into a line infantry, but my conquistador with a religious unit has more strength than a line infantry. I guess I'm not upgrading then. I know a lot of people asked for an in between unit, but I'm not sure one was really needed.

I like the idea of more units, but they inevitably cause crowding. I already felt it was a bit crowded at times. I'll be interested to see how the meta works out.

 

[Pietato]

The additional units were supposed to be in conjunction with the game being slowed down...

 

[mrwho]

If it wasn't labeled "good", would you argue 3 out of 5 is good?

Completely irrelevant question. It was labeled good.

 

[Disgustipated]

I saw a reddit post saying Spains "free builder for cities on other continents" also applies when you capture one. Not sure if that's intended behavior, but it does represent colonialism well...

I'm also getting one when a city loyalty flips to me. I think I've gotten 2 or 3 this way. Can't complain.

 

[Pietato]

I'm also getting one when a city loyalty flips to me. I think I've gotten 2 or 3 this way. Can't complain.

Victoria in the house.

 

[Leucarum]

I agree 100% with this.

I think this whole debate had been poisoned by Civ V - to me tall is sticking at 8-10 cities - the 4 city meta needs to be banished forever, that's not tall it's more like a slightly more powerful City State!!

It also feels extremely weird to force yourself down that route for me. It's not like you can't win with 8ish cities in civ6 either so it's not like tall is impossible.

They need to do a balance patch for the balance patch.

The balance patches are expanding to meet the needs of the expanding balance patches

 

[iammaxhailme]

I'm also getting one when a city loyalty flips to me. I think I've gotten 2 or 3 this way. Can't complain.

From the same city multiple times?

 

[Linklite]

From the same city multiple times?

I daresay he meant different cities. Still, could be an exploit...

 

[Pfeffersack]

I daresay he meant different cities. Still, could be an exploit...

Reminds me of the situation where Byzanthium gained units from conquering EDs, which then get removed by a patch shortly after.

 

[iammaxhailme]

Reminds me of the situation where Byzanthium gained units from conquering EDs, which then get removed by a patch shortly after.

Yep, that's why I asked. I was thinking of just putting a city really far away and harvesting workers every time it loyalty flips by re-capturing it. Probably more trouble than it's worth...

 

[Linklite]

Reminds me of the situation where Byzanthium gained units from conquering EDs, which then get removed by a patch shortly after.

Well, thinking about it now, the worker thing probably isn't effective. You probably need at least 10 turns after you lose the city to flip it back, in which time you could just build the builder and have the yields in the mean time too. With Byzantium, it would only be one or two turns and you get a heavy cavalry, so it was a lot more worth it.

 

[Vargas1]

Trade route bonus needs to scale, and they need to treat flood plains like Brazil treats rain forests.

This is more or less exactly my thinking. It makes no sense to have an appeal-boosting UI with a civ that is incentivized to settle low-appeal areas (flood plains). Have flood plains for Egypt give +1 appeal (or at least be neutral) snd that would go a long way.

And yes, the trade route bonus is nice early, but ends up losing power later in the game. Having it scale upwards at least once in Ren/ Industrial would make sense.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Yes, they could have done things differently, I liked to have the choice of saving the seeds with the config. Is it possible now ?

AFAIK.. partially.
Although the seeds just vanish (into empty fields) upon re-loading a saved configuration file.

 

[João III]

Completely irrelevant question. It was labeled good.

It's relevant because that's not true, the full label was "3-Good". As in, 3 out of 5. lol, it takes some real mental gymnastics to argue 3 out of 5 is good.

Imagine the poll was labeled:
5-Perfect
4-Excellent
3-Better than very good
2-Very good
1-Good
So you'd say 1 out of 5 is good, just because it says it's good? Look up "response bias"

Also:

Yeah I probably should have made the "good" option OK or something.

 

[nzcamel]

Take your Time Ultimate - Slower Research Trees

Find this mod in the steam workshop and you will be happy. You can customize a lot of things - the speed of technology, civics, great people, ages, adjust the course of the game as it suits you best, rein in its frenzied pace.

I have it, and like it, and the flexibility it gives you is great. But anyone using it does need to pay attention to how their first few games run under it. If nothing else you will need to set the era score different to the other multipliers from memory. I need to get back into using it to say for sure.

 

[Futumch]

I'm also getting one when a city loyalty flips to me. I think I've gotten 2 or 3 this way. Can't complain.

I've had them from capturing free cities. I think it's just location dependent, as long as the city is not on the same continent as your capital.

 

[Mtgkuvalda]

I have it, and like it, and the flexibility it gives you is great. But anyone using it does need to pay attention to how their first few games run under it. If nothing else you will need to set the era score different to the other multipliers from memory. I need to get back into using it to say for sure.

Yes, in this fashion, you need to understand proportions, experiment with it. But in the end, you can even achieve that the game progress roughly corresponds to the real timeline, without spaceports in the 16th century.

 

[CromulentRomulan]

I made the poll because there were what seemed to be a small number of very vocal people in here who were totally slating the patch, it seems only 3% agree with that view..

I felt the need to directly reply to this as some other posters who numbered among the dissenting voices did. I followed this thread pretty closely on patch launch day. There was maybe one poster who was excessively and histrionically slating the patch. The rest, me included, were putting forward reasonable complaints and we were getting shouted down and responded to hold our corner. I think most of the people who were criticising the patch before this thread was locked are actually closer to the 29% or more who voted 'Disappointing'.

I voted disappointed on the poll. My reasoning for feeling disappointed is that the reworks to Mapuche, Spain and Canada buoyed my hope that some Civs which I have only played once would receive attention that would freshen them up and make them more viable. The impression I'm left with on reading the notes is that no discernible logic or rationale as to who was buffed and why they received the buffs they received is evident. I'm also disappointed that they decided that changing spawn biases and where a unique unit appears (or upgrade from or into) merited hyping as a balance change.

My disappointment was not related to other posters observations on this possibly being the final update but those remarks made me consider my evaluation of the update further. I definitely wouldn't call it poor but I agree with all those arguments RE how bad this patch will appear if it is the last substantial update. I think anyone who is appraising this patch in the expectation that there will be another season pass or more paid content of some sort isn't really honestly evaluating this patch. If they actually intend to make changes to some of the Civs that have been mentioned as needing attention why wait? Most of those Civs (india, egypt, kongo, poland, maybe scotland) have been in need of attention for quite some time. None of those Civs fit the mould of 'standard vanilla-ish Civ' that is useful to retain for people learning the game. Egypt is playable with disaster intensity on 4, Scotland with abundant resources but the other three are in the same camp as Spain and Mapuche as having kits that do not synergise

I'm not swayed that some of the welcomed changes in this patch, such as the changes to the leader pools and similar, are commendable as they again strike me as the sort of thing that should have been obvious to include on initial release of the feature had it even been playtested just a tiny bit.

As a sort of final underscoring of my sense that there hasn't been a coherent overview guiding this patch and what Firaxis hoped it would accomplish I'll say that I'm intrigued by the cultural domination changes. These changes weren't previewed at all, in video or dev stream. I'm not convinced that they can be utilised in anything other than 'win more' fashion due to the way that Civ is unbalanced towards snowballing. But they are easily the most interesting changes and were the 'meta' of the game different could be adjudged shadow buffs to several Civs (Black Queen and Elenour France, Egypt, Kongo [were there an easier way for them to reliably acquire relics or had they not had their Great Writer economy taken from them])

 

[DWilson]

I am pretty sure response bias was misused above. Naming the 3 of 5 response 'good' is more likely to get people happy with it to choose that. This competes with the more common sense that it should have to be 4-5 to be considered positive that seems to be popular in posts saying 3-5 shouldn't count as positive. Were it labeled okay, average, or neutral it seems likely it would have lost some happy voters and gained some displeased (but not overly so) voters.

So, it's fair to say that you can't count all 3 - Good votes as positive, it's also wrong to assume the skew is making the numbers higher when likely it is making them lower. Unfortunately, it makes the data very hard to interpret. I would say the best option, at a guess, is to assume that at least a portion (maybe a large one, but it is unclear) of those 3 - Good votes are positive, while the rest are mainly neutral (there's a fair shot of very mild negatives in this scenario, but significantly less likely than positives due to the positive appelation).

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I am pretty sure response bias was misused above. Naming the 3 of 5 response 'good' is more likely to get people happy with it to choose that. This competes with the more common sense that it should have to be 4-5 to be considered positive that seems to be popular in posts saying 3-5 shouldn't count as positive. Were I labeled okay, average, or neutral it seems likely it would have lost some happy voters and gained some displeased (but not overly so) voters.

So, it's fair to say that you can't count all 3 - Good votes as positive, it's also wrong to assume the skew is making the numbers higher when likely it is making them lower. Unfortunately, it makes the data very hard to interpret. I would say the best option, at a guess, is to assume that at least a portion (maybe a large one, but it is unclear) of those 3 - Good votes are positive, while the rest are mainly neutral (there's a fair shot of very mild negatives in this scenario, but significantly less likely than positives due to the positive appelation).

Considering there is no neutral or average option I would agree with you that with "good" being right in the middle as not being overly excited or overly disappointed, which is exactly why that's why I voted for it.