BTW, before continuing this "ideal player" fabrication is disingenuous and I won't give it time of day. The player is literally anybody who sits in front of the screen. Someone might like dog food, but that doesn't make it anything else. It's still dog food.
Ok, but why ignore the reality of 2 million players?
Games can have terrible, sub-average systems and still sell a decent number of copies. Unless you LIKE the EA comparison? Madden sells a lot too. The competition profiles aren't dissimilar, either.
I think that can be a good thing.
Rules are not the same thing as "random variables". What the AI does is not a rule. How much yield you get for making a decision is a rule. How much a tech costs is a rule. How much WW you get for an action is a rule. The distinction between these things should be obvious.
I'm not talking about a game forcing choices with incomplete information, I'm talking about a strategy game hiding the rules to the game (even including details of victory conditions). It is impossible to hold a coherent position that the removal of information on how to play a strategy game is good for said strategy title.
I don't need to know Gandhi's ibuildunitprob equivalent in civ 6. It is a joke to obscure the precise details interconnecting tourism output and cultural victories. That's the distinction I'm making.
That didn't parse. Did you mean "minute" as in tiny, or as in 60 seconds?
To clarify, I mean that 100% identical actions during turns in civ 6 can easily take 120 seconds instead of 10 seconds. Per turn. On rote, mundane inputs alone.
You are comparing Civ 4, a completed toy world, with something far more complex
No, telling your 20 cities to build something is not "more complex" in civ 6. Civ 6 is just objectively worse at it because it pays no mind to how a player might give cities instructions efficiently. Civ 4 tried, and in this particular facet of UI it is objectively far superior.
Haha. All but conspiratorial crapola!
Nono, take it as a disrespectful (to Firaxis' choices in civ 5 and civ 6 UI) nod to their unwillingness to invest resources into actually keeping the #inputs manageable, such that they let their titles get so bloated with mundane inputs that even Paradox outclasses them. No conspiracy necessary, this is a straight-up call-out. The modders are better and everyone knows it, apparently even Firaxis. They COULD show me I'm wrong.
If the last 5 years are anything to go by, they won't.
Firstly, the game maintains a huge following, with a big majority seemingly
unconcerned with UI problems that you and a minority see as egregiously awful.
If that's their stance on this matter, I wish them failure so that someone better takes the mantle in TBS. The genre could use it probably. I love civ, but I hate that it's devolved in basic gameplay. Comparing it to EA used to be a joke, but the joke now is that I legitimately can.
Are you a UI dev? (c.f. "To a cobbler there's nothing like leather." - Tolstoy.)
You want to make a serious case the UI isn't core to gameplay experience? Try taking it out and watch what happens.
Same here, Except that I don't "respect" any abstract concepts, like standards or
markets.
??? Standards/market aren't abstract. We can measure both. Right now, the TBS genre market is willing to buy dog food, the developers provide dog food, and don't have much obvious incentive to do better than dog food. Maybe there's 10 million sold instead of say 2 million, but there's no way to know.
Until legit competition does this much better, we won't know.
(The bit where you entered the minds of Firaxis devs and uncovered their hidden
motives was funny though.)
I didn't. See above. However, I feel similarly about anyone who's okay with an example of something like civ 6 city list + ability to interact with it vs civ 4's version. Why would a decade newer game actively downgrade that? No idea. They probably don't have an idea either, but that's just a guess.
Moderator Action: @TheMeInTeam, @Ferocitus, @Takfloyd
It's time to drop this debate, which is 98% off-topic for this thread. If any of you wants to open a new thread to debate (again) the shortcomings of the Civ VI UI, feel free to do so, but no more in this thread. -- Browd 
