Best elements of Civ 6 that should be retained

[AntSou]

Turning the question around to emphasise the best elements of Civ 6 and what most likely should be kept going forward (including minor changes to that system) I'll start:

- City States. I think we're close approaching a "if it ain't broken don't fix it" level in regards to City States. They are an improvement over Civ 5's design and the general idea that each City State should have its own unique ability is very good. (the generic bonuses etc and diplomatic interactions might ofcourse change depending on the diplomacy system in Civ 7). There's also no need to get rid of them.

Minor Changes:
- More dynamic development of City States as we saw in Barbarians Mode. The whole Barbarian Camp/Village system could do with a rework, but not the City States themselves;
- More City States that grant unique units. In fact, this should be the standard design for military city states imo.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Districts - An excellent addition to the game, really enjoyable.

Minor changes - I would like to see the L1 building as part of the initial build.

 

[bbbt]

Hmm, I have a few:

Variety of ways to win Culture Victory - I love that CV has many sources of tourism - you can go appeal based routes (RIP pre-Nerf Persia), Great Works, Rock Bands, etc.
Minor Changes - Better balance to those elements of the CV, and I'd like more of that element to the rest of the victory conditions. Science got a little bit with R&F. Religious seems like just dialing up passive spread and giving more variety there could help. Domination has gone backward from BTS unfortunately.

Relics - I like the addition of relics, and generally love the graphics etc for Relics, Artifacts, Great Works in general, adds a lot of atmosphere

Great People - Same reasons as City States - I like having specific great people with specific abilities

Play the Map - District placement puzzles, appeal, wonder placement requirements, these were great map-based mini games
Minor Changes - do more with appeal. A little better balance re: district placement and the map, so starts are more balanced.

Game Modes - Not the specific ones, but the concept in general. I like the ability to turn and off and mix and match features. I like the variety - some adding new game mechanics (ie industry and corporations), some giving alternate versions of existing mechanics (ie science/civic tree shuffle, dramamtic ages), some giving fantasy elements
Minor Changes- Better integration with other elements of the game, better balance

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

City States - Keep City State unique bonuses, but improve the Envoy system a little bit, I think we lost a bit of features going to 6 (Pledge to Protect, Bullying, etc).

Districts - Keep, adjust with buildings not being tied (I always felt that if a city lacks good adjacency I never build them, which means some cities won't have that many things to build).

Great People - I love the idea of unique abilities for Great People, but I hate how it's implemented to some extent, largely with unbalance with high number of players, the competition can cause a lot of issues.

Barbarian Clans - I think adds a new fresh way, and I think if it's designed from the get go it could be a really fun feature to play around with in early game.

 

[Babarigo]

Districts - Probably the only reason why I also play this game in addition to Civ 4. I'd still like Firaxis to add some extra adjacencies, like for instance with JNR's mods which add adjacency to commercial district from industries to give an example. I really hope this one is kept because most of my enjoyment in this game comes from optimizing yields. If they remove it, I fear it will just be like Civ 5, whose changes from Civ 4 were in my opinion almost all bad and I abandoned that game quite fast.

Civic Tree - The only thing I liked from Civ 5 was that culture was important. In Civ 4, besides for the cultural victory, it wasn't that important for most cities. Civ 6 system combines the adaptability of Civ 4 with the addition of culture being useful from Civ 5. I would definitely keep the system and see how it can be improved.

City Sates - I like the system, although it suffers from the lack of options in diplomacy like not being able to ask somebody to cease their war with a city state, but that's for another thread.

Trade routes - Keep their number based on buildings, not the Civ 5 way which I found terrible. I think though that having trade routes build roads isn't very good. I just played a game where two cities would have never been connected by road. The trade routes went by water all the time and I had to do it manually expending about 7 military engineer charges

 

[Leucarum]

I'd kind of like to see them keep (or more likely iterate on) loyalty, assuming they get the base AI to interact with it better. I think we forget just how dumb the AI was with forward settling in vanilla. This was such a quality of life feature.

 

[bbbt]

Barbarian Clans - I think adds a new fresh way, and I think if it's designed from the get go it could be a really fun feature to play around with in early game.

Strong second on this. I'd like to see it be the norm for Civ 7, with barb clans developing into free states/city states/possibly joining your empire, and a lot more ways of influencing (loyalty, culture, trade routes, religion). Potentially even combine barb camps and 'goodie huts'.

 

[GIO888]

The best thing about Nzinga Mbande is she looks like Jesse Eisenberg.

Once said, you can't unsee it!

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Regarding city-states I agree with the OP. I'd also like each one to get their own static diplomacy screen. For example, La Venta could have a background of colossal heads.

Barbarian clans is a good idea that can go even further and incorporate tribal villages. These "tribes" can be hostile, neutral, or friendly and they all eventually have a chance to turn into a city-state.

Monopolies and Corporations should also be retained but done a bit differently. I would like each type of luxury resource to have it's own unique corporation bonus. Products would provide amenities/happiness when placed in cities at least, and back down on tourism.

I'd like to keep the district system too. I think early game to avoid massive spreading of cities most districts should only be able to be built next to the city center. There should also be mutually exclusive buildings for most districts so not every single district, or city, should look the same. Some commercial hubs could have a caravanserai to add more trade capacity instead of a market, that adds straight gold, for example.

Named Great People with unique abilities are also great ideas. I'd love to go further and give Great Prophets the same treatment. Have them have unique abilities plus being able to found a religion. I also think Great Writers and Great Musicians should have more roles than just putting Great works into slots. Great Musicians could take over the role of Rock Bands. When they finally retire that is when they can make their Great Work.

 

[Krajzen]

One thing which I think is vastly better in civ6 when compared with civ5 is its design philosophy of civilisations unique features. In civ5 playable factions very often had extremely narrow unique abilities, which I have always suspected of not being very "statistically significant" at all. Very often you played essentially vanilla generic civs for most of your sessions, with unique abilities only coming to use sporadically. Civ6 had a wonderful idea to actually give its factions wide abilities, encompassing many spheres and often changing how you develop in general, so you don't have the misery of a ton of civ5 factions essentially having almost zero bonuses outside warfare. In civ6 you get unique infrastructure which actually changes how your cities are organized, while in civ5 almost all unique buildings were extremely boring "replaces generic building but +5 to blue points" which doesn't change how you actually play in any way. Factional unique stuff only feels really great when it significantly changes how you play the game and interact with its systems, instead of providing background yield pat on the back.

The entire Civ6 approach to city states and barbarian clans should be kept, built upon and integrated into organically changing minor factions. So that each barbarian tribe is a minor faction with minor diplomacy, identity, behavioral patterns, multiple possible interactions, barbarians turning into city states, fighting each other, invading your civ, joining your civ, migrating etc. And I'd love to see the option for city states being capable of turning into major civilizations (either as token pseudo - civs or simply assuming some random civilization not present on map generation).

Unique great people are very cool (although I'm slightly worried about their very limited amount in comparision with the neverending supply of generic ones)

Climate change and environmental disasters should be kept as well, maybe modified a bit

Trade routes should be kept at all cost but expanded and given more depth, they basically haven't changed at all since 2013.

Districts should IMO be only kept of devs figure out how to deal with their horrible lategame micromanagement. Managing each tile and district is great in the early game and meaningless misery halfway through.

 

[civviefan]

For me Loyalty works like a charm. I don’t see scope for any improvement unless governors go (not a fan of them beyond their loyalty bonus). I am puzzled by those who find it challenging to keep cities due to loyalty. Maybe the civilopedia should include a clearer entry and list of loyalty boosters?

 

[AntSou]

In civ5 playable factions very often had extremely narrow unique abilities, which I have always suspected of not being very "statistically significant" at all. Very often you played essentially vanilla generic civs for most of your sessions, with unique abilities only coming to use sporadically.

I agree. Civ 5's design feels like it stands half way between the simplicity of Civ 4's Leader Traits / Civs' Starting Techs and Civ 6's more unique designs.

Having gone back to both Civ 4 and Civ 5 (in the form of unciv on mobile), I can appreciate the unique gameplay styles that many leaders/civs in Civ 6 offer. However, some design's in Civ 6 are more cumbersome and inelegant than they need be, imo.

 

[pokiehl]

For me Loyalty works like a charm. I don’t see scope for any improvement unless governors go (not a fan of them beyond their loyalty bonus). I am puzzled by those who find it challenging to keep cities due to loyalty. Maybe the civilopedia should include a clearer entry and list of loyalty boosters?

You don’t think they can do any better with Loyalty??

It is very binary: you either have full loyalty and zero issues, or you’re losing loyalty quickly and your city has a good chance of rebelling. I’d rather have the current Loyalty than nothing, but it doesn’t feel challenging or engaging to me at all.

The nuance just isn’t there. Ideally there would be more ways to interact with Loyalty and cities wouldn’t just be pulled to 100 or 0 like magnets.

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

You don’t think they can do any better with Loyalty??

It is very binary: you either have full loyalty and zero issues, or you’re losing loyalty quickly and your city has a good chance of rebelling. I’d rather have the current Loyalty than nothing, but it doesn’t feel challenging or engaging to me at all.

The nuance just isn’t there. Ideally there would be more ways to interact with Loyalty and cities wouldn’t just be pulled to 100 or 0 like magnets.

I think it's time to bring back Culture Levels and have them effect Loyalty.

I can see people's complaints, your Culture level needs to have some sort of impact on how fast a city flips.

 

[kaspergm]

Many good things in Civ6 I would like to keep with adjustments. Some selections:

Districts: Great addition to the game. Change suggestions: Needs to go away from flat adjacency bonus and work towards a system that links bonuses with buildings and specialists.

Great People: I love the individual great people. Change suggestions: Maybe a system where you can hire a great person from the pool on a first-come-first-served basis, instead of the current system, where sometimes a "bad" great person comes up first, and you have to wait for an AI to recruit them before the good ones show up. Also perhaps limit to one of each type pr. era pr. player? On the other hand, maybe it will end up being to repetitive that way, that you will always pick the same great person, so maybe that would be boring.

Improvement adjacencies: It may not be optimal, but I love my carpet of farms giving 9 or 10 food. Change suggestions: Having actual "food" and "production" cities that allocate food to other cities in the empire, instead of food magically appearing out of nowhere when creating trade routes. Also adjacencies for production improvements could be better.

Loyalty: I agree with others, I love that there is some sort of mechanism to control settling, but the current system is not optimal. Change suggestions: Happiness and military presence should be A LOT more important to loyalty, adjacent foreign population a lot less relevant. Also I agree some sort of culture level and overall national culture/tech strength should be taken into account. Also, I really liked how in Humankind, in later eras you could build "advanced settlers" (colonists, etc.) that have their cities start with 2, 3 or even 4 population, which helps a lot with the dire of settling new cities in late game.

Religion: Unlike some, I overall like the Civ6 religion system, although I agree religious combat was tiresome and boring. Suggested changes: Let go of the idea of a limited number of religions. Instead introduce the concept of state religion. If majority of citizens follow a religion, having another religion as state religion should cause unhappiness. Also secularization should be a thing.

 

[aieeegrunt]

This is a difficult question to answer because Civ6 had a lot of great concepts with incredibly bad execution

I feel like the only innovations that don’t need a rework are builder charges, city states, and Barbarian Clans.

I also like the art and map style. I feel like the dreaded CARTOON thing ages a LOT better than attempts at “realism”

I went back and played some Civ4 and the graphics made me hurl.

I'd kind of like to see them keep (or more likely iterate on) loyalty, assuming they get the base AI to interact with it better. I think we forget just how dumb the AI was with forward settling in vanilla. This was such a quality of life feature.

Forward Settling is 110% a YOU problem. That tells me you are land greedy with your settling and leave lots of gaps for the AI to exploit

Live by the forward settle. Die by the forward settle

You don’t think they can do any better with Loyalty??

It is very binary: you either have full loyalty and zero issues, or you’re losing loyalty quickly and your city has a good chance of rebelling. I’d rather have the current Loyalty than nothing, but it doesn’t feel challenging or engaging to me at all.

The nuance just isn’t there. Ideally there would be more ways to interact with Loyalty and cities wouldn’t just be pulled to 100 or 0 like magnets.

It’s terrible. The game improves dramatically when you mod it out, especially because it’s yet another feature the AI is hopeless at managing

We already had a mechanism that dealt with this, the way culture worked with borders being pushed back and cities eventually flipping.

Not only did Loyalty fix what wasn’t broken, it also broke things in the process.

 

[Codeword Iroquois]

This is when I pipe in and say that (after approximately two weeks of playing civ vi and years of civ v), I actually prefer vi's hands-off approach to roads somewhat (I found micro-managing roads in civ v to be kinda tedious, and like a nice, interconnected empire that the infrastructure cost kinda drove one away from), although I would prefer still having the ability to use builders to construct roads- just offering more ways for transport to develop.

 

[aieeegrunt]

This is when I pipe in and say that (after approximately two weeks of playing civ vi and years of civ v), I actually prefer vi's hands-off approach to roads somewhat (I found micro-managing roads in civ v to be kinda tedious, and like a nice, interconnected empire that the infrastructure cost kinda drove one away from), although I would prefer still having the ability to use builders to construct roads- just offering more ways for transport to develop.

Having builders auto create roads in any tile they enter neatly solves this problem

 

[Leucarum]

Forward Settling is 110% a YOU problem. That tells me you are land greedy with your settling and leave lots of gaps for the AI to exploit

Live by the forward settle. Die by the forward settle

I value that this forum is generally a very civil place, so the tone of this post was disappointing.

The point was that back in vanilla the AI had a habit of forward settling points it couldn't hold, giving the players free real estate. This problem could blur into a "the AI sucks" issue, and loyalty didn't fix things entirely, but it definitely isn't a player skill problem.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I value that this forum is generally a very civil place, so the tone of this post was disappointing.

The point was that back in vanilla the AI had a habit of forward settling points it couldn't hold, giving the players free real estate. This problem could blur into a "the AI sucks" issue, and loyalty didn't fix things entirely, but it definitely isn't a player skill problem.

I apologize for the tone

The point stands that if you have issues with the AI settling “inside” you this goes back to being too spread out

The AI not being able to defend it’s territory is a general problem with how bad the AI is, and applies to all of their cities, not just forward settled ones.