Best elements of Civ 6 that should be retained

[AntSou]

@Ezerin I had no idea it was that bad in vanilla. I've never seen it to such a degree in GS.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

Fair. I think I missed to clarify the Point I was making with that, which is, that since Loyalty, for me, doesn't solve the AI settling behavior, although has some nice Features (I love how it improves Conquest for example - its best perk if you ask me) it isn't the best mechanic in what it was meant to do (Revolutions, Cultural Influence, Stability...etc.),

The thing I would like to see with loyalty is having it being largely dependent on culture, mostly for balance reasons.
One big weakness with culture in civ 6, is that it's treated like a parallel course of victory compared to science, yet it has glaring weaknesses which become apparent when you compare it to science.

Science has the big advantage of serving two purposes at the same time, that of both propelling you towards a science victory, but also allowing you to weaponize science by getting higher tech units that you can use to murder your opposition if you need to.
Cultural playstyles currently have no real way of weaponizing culture.
Corps/armies arrive too late to make an early difference, and the military policy cards (or governments) are for the most part just straight up much weaker than just upgrading your current units to the latest tech.
For instance, you can in principle ignore culture completely and just focusing science.
It's not the optimal way to play, but it's perfectly doable, and it leaves you with the means necessary to stomp your neighbour when you need/want to.
Cultural playstyles cannot do that however.
A player that focuses solely on on culture (especially in multiplayer games) just risks getting DOWed and stomped, thereby losing both tourism modifiers for his victory condition, as well as opening himself up to having all this theatre squares and tourism/appeal improvements getting pillaged, not to mention just dying outright to superior forces.
If culture could weaponize that culture in terms of greater bonuses to loyalty (and negative loyalty/straight combat bonuses to a culturally inferior neighbour), that would possibly make a peaceful cultural playstyle have other benefits than just getting civics faster and pump out tourism, as it currently does.

 

[UWHabs]

I don't think any testing is needed, we can just google some stuff on subject.

Spoiler forward settling in vanila Civ6 :

I haven't seen anything like this since R&F, I think only possible way to being forward settled like this now is by your cultural ally.

Spoiler typical forvard settling by AI in GS :

Still annoying, especially in combination with awful choice of settling spot, but difference is huge.


For me it certainly was a big improvement to the game. I wouldn't mind some rebalancing and tweaks, like maybe with Colonialism we would receive effect that halve all loyalty pressure from civilizations 2 eras behind, but I don't think any complete rework is required.

Yeah, the "bad" decisions in the current game are way different than the "bad" decisions before loyalty was a thing, where you would routinely get those situations where if there was an open tile that an AI settler could reach, they would settle it.

Loyalty is IMO one of the better elements of civ 6 that I definitely hope is mostly retained going forward. Some tweaks, sure - I would love to see you gain 0 positive loyalty from captured cities until decades after they are ceded to you. It's still too often the case that if you are conquering a civ rapidly enough (ie. taking the next city every turn or two), you rarely have to concern yourselves with loyalty. It's kind of crazy that capturing a size 15 capital will suddenly make all your nearby captured cities like you again. But the basics of the mechanism are great - it's a good balance in that you can counter it depending on your actions, but if you want to settle a negative loyalty city, you need to allocate it a governor and/or use some policy slots to counter it.

To me, loyalty and districts/wonders on the map are the biggest pieces to retain in civ 6. Districts also to me have the huge benefit where even if the game is too "easy", managing district placement is kind of like solving a puzzle, so even in a game where I know I am going to win out, it's still a fun mini-game. There's things I'd change about them, but it makes for a richer map when you have to make some decisions on where campuses go, when to opt for a theatre square, etc...

 

[iammaxhailme]

I like how almost every civ in 6 has at least some bonuses that aren't related to just conquering/warfare. In civ 5, if you like to play peacefully, that basically makes half the roster almost useless.

 

[Zaarin]

I like how almost every civ in 6 has at least some bonuses that aren't related to just conquering/warfare. In civ 5, if you like to play peacefully, that basically makes half the roster almost useless.

There are still a few of those in Civ6--I've never been much inspired to play Macedon, Zulu, or Mongolia, for instance--but Civ6 civs are indeed, for the most part, much more nuanced. As a peaceful player, I absolutely love the Aztecs, for instance.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

I didn't play Civ 5 so these might be hold-over:

Dividing the map up into Continents. Makes exploring the map just a little more fun. It would be nice to have optional continental borders like civ borders.

Districts and improvements built on a Coast, Lake, or Ocean tile.

Strategic Resources and Resource stockpiles. The implementation needs improvement but the concept is a good one.
- Resource Stockpiles should be for all types of Resources. Luxuries and bonus as well.
- Trading should happen as part of trade routes. Including a "black market price" to acquire resources from unwilling civs. (I would like a lot of the game tied to trades routes...)
- Strategics should all be base 10, not 10 horses and 1 coal. Make sure unit build, upgrade, and support requirements make sense before releasing the game...

 

[Zaarin]

Dividing the map up into Continents. Makes exploring the map just a little more fun. It would be nice to have optional continental borders like civ borders.

In Civ5 the different continents actually had subtly different textures. I hope they bring that back. Maybe with a little less subtlety as I played for a long time before I noticed it.

 

[bbbt]

I agree in essence, but I feel that they messed up great works compared to civ 5.
...
The old great works system was so much better, even if civ 6 added a ton of great new ways to get tourism too, as you say.

Oh yeah I agree completely. I didn't want to get too waylaid and just went with my comment "Better balance to those elements of the CV" but I'd want great works and wonders for that matter to be more significant sources of tourism.

I agree I preferred the Civ 5 theming, being able to theme wonders. I feel adding another variable (ie era for artifacts, type of art) to the theming for Civ 6 makes it a little too muchsnd preferred Civ 5's approach.

I also dislike how rock bands function and prefer that they functioned more like Civ 5 great musicians - ie giving X turns of your current tourism instead of having inherent RNG based tourism.

 

[Beaver79]

Tech/Civic shuffle. That one tiny option increased the replay-ability for me by a lot and made end game more fun for me as well. You might get political philosophy 3 techs in or 9 techs in. You have to plan your strategy around it, not just do the same cookie cutter things every game.

 

[aieeegrunt]

The thing I would like to see with loyalty is having it being largely dependent on culture, mostly for balance reasons.
One big weakness with culture in civ 6, is that it's treated like a parallel course of victory compared to science, yet it has glaring weaknesses which become apparent when you compare it to science.

Science has the big advantage of serving two purposes at the same time, that of both propelling you towards a science victory, but also allowing you to weaponize science by getting higher tech units that you can use to murder your opposition if you need to.
Cultural playstyles currently have no real way of weaponizing culture.
Corps/armies arrive too late to make an early difference, and the military policy cards (or governments) are for the most part just straight up much weaker than just upgrading your current units to the latest tech.
For instance, you can in principle ignore culture completely and just focusing science.
It's not the optimal way to play, but it's perfectly doable, and it leaves you with the means necessary to stomp your neighbour when you need/want to.
Cultural playstyles cannot do that however.
A player that focuses solely on on culture (especially in multiplayer games) just risks getting DOWed and stomped, thereby losing both tourism modifiers for his victory condition, as well as opening himself up to having all this theatre squares and tourism/appeal improvements getting pillaged, not to mention just dying outright to superior forces.
If culture could weaponize that culture in terms of greater bonuses to loyalty (and negative loyalty/straight combat bonuses to a culturally inferior neighbour), that would possibly make a peaceful cultural playstyle have other benefits than just getting civics faster and pump out tourism, as it currently does.

Loyalty fixed a “problem” that didn’t need fixing, because culture flipping and pushing back tile borders did that job in previous civ titles. It also made culture important.

Having it based largely around population size is a terrible mechanic.

I never had the issues people had with fragmented settling in vanilla because I wasn’t land greedy and didn’t leave holes

Live by the forward settle, die by it

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

Loyalty fixed a “problem” that didn’t need fixing, because culture flipping and pushing back tile borders did that job in previous civ titles. It also made culture important.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that population size should determine loyalty, I just want culture/tourism to pressure and threaten to flip nearby "culturally weak" cities.
Culture needs to have the possibility to be weaponized, because atm its just too one-dimensional, which becomes very evident in multiplayer games where it just cant stand properly on its own two legs.

 

[Codeword Iroquois]

In Civ5 the different continents actually had subtly different textures. I hope they bring that back. Maybe with a little less subtlety as I played for a long time before I noticed it.

Played for three years and never noticed it.

 

[Zaarin]

Played for three years and never noticed it.

It's very subtle.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

Pins. After they expanded the types of pins to match a mod.
- They also need to add in the mod that shows you adjacencies when placing (if they keep adj). Also Tie in pins in with little "recommended" that shows up in the build menu or tie it in with the build queue.

Leader Head drop down menu.

 

[Krajzen]

I’d rather have the current Loyalty than nothing, but it doesn’t feel challenging or engaging to me at all.

I'd rather have nothing than Loyalty, or even other mediocre system rather than Loyalty, as it
1) Infuriates me so much I disable it with mods
2) Cripples AI even more, making it even more incapable of military conquest (hence static boring worlds)
3) Makes Portugese/Phoenician like colonial lifestyle impossible
4) Doesn't depict or model anything from history in any sensible way
5) Doesn't interact with almost any of the game systems, nor posesses any nuance or depth
6) Doesn't in any way help to solve the snowballing exponential growth problem, in fact it makes it even worse because the more cities player has the multiplicatively stronger in loyalty he is, which is exactly backwards!

The problem of "insane AI enclave bordergore forward settling" can be solved in a hundred different ways, from crude bandaids ("tell AI to never...") through other more sensible mechanics to reworking how maps, borders or city founding works. It doesn't require a solution which introduces an entirely new class of problems on its own.

Loyalty is second contender on my list of the most fundamentally broken mechanical concepts of civ6 that no practical fix can improve, next to agendas; the idea itself is terrible, as its alleged improvements either don't work or bring the cost of new terrible problems.

 

[Zaarin]

4) Doesn't depict or model anything from history in any sensible way

I'd like to say that sometimes a small settlement on the border of a much larger population will culturally assimilate to their neighbors, but while that's sometimes true too many counterexamples leap to mind (small European colonies on the fringe of the Native American world, Phoenician Iberia, Magna Graecia, Ionia, and other Greek colonies, etc.), forcing me to concede the point. Makes me want Civ4's culture mechanics back, and also makes me hope for the culture/ethnicity mechanic that I and a number of others here have been championing for some time.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I'd rather have nothing than Loyalty, or even other mediocre system rather than Loyalty, as it
1) Infuriates me so much I disable it with mods
2) Cripples AI even more, making it even more incapable of military conquest (hence static boring worlds)
3) Makes Portugese/Phoenician like colonial lifestyle impossible
4) Doesn't depict or model anything from history in any sensible way
5) Doesn't interact with almost any of the game systems, nor posesses any nuance or depth
6) Doesn't in any way help to solve the snowballing exponential growth problem, in fact it makes it even worse because the more cities player has the multiplicatively stronger in loyalty he is, which is exactly backwards!

The problem of "insane AI enclave bordergore forward settling" can be solved in a hundred different ways, from crude bandaids ("tell AI to never...") through other more sensible mechanics to reworking how maps, borders or city founding works. It doesn't require a solution which introduces an entirely new class of problems on its own.

Loyalty is second contender on my list of the most fundamentally broken mechanical concepts of civ6 that no practical fix can improve, next to agendas; the idea itself is terrible, as its alleged improvements either don't work or bring the cost of new terrible problems.

Absolutly. The “Customization 6” mod is a God Send because it allows me to remove Loyalty, World Congress, Rock Bands, GDR’s, Gold/Dark ages, and all the other broken nonsense dragging this game down

 

[Leucarum]

It's fascinating how polarizing loyalty is. We simultaneously have players claiming it doesn't matter and can be circumvented: versus players claiming it completely blocks gameplay styles. Players who argue it makes the AI behave (relatively) more rationally versus players who argue it constrains it.

I agree that the current implementation lacks nuance, and that tying in other factors to loyalty pressure (e g. Culture) would have the potential to expand on how it can be interacted with. The biggest flaw as it stands is that there are too few options to affect it, probably Elaenor is the only "loyalty matters" civ they have succeeded in making.

I'm definitely in the camp that loves how loyalty made the game play though. I'm not really as concerned by historical accuracy as some players (civ isn't the right game for that kind of detail IMO). I like the spheres of influence it creates, the speedbump it places on conquest while giving you options to circumvent it - albeit requiring some commitment. For a straightforward mechanic it does a lot!

 

[aieeegrunt]

It's fascinating how polarizing loyalty is. We simultaneously have players claiming it doesn't matter and can be circumvented: versus players claiming it completely blocks gameplay styles. Players who argue it makes the AI behave (relatively) more rationally versus players who argue it constrains it.

I agree that the current implementation lacks nuance, and that tying in other factors to loyalty pressure (e g. Culture) would have the potential to expand on how it can be interacted with. The biggest flaw as it stands is that there are too few options to affect it, probably Elaenor is the only "loyalty matters" civ they have succeeded in making.

I'm definitely in the camp that loves how loyalty made the game play though. I'm not really as concerned by historical accuracy as some players (civ isn't the right game for that kind of detail IMO). I like the spheres of influence it creates, the speedbump it places on conquest while giving you options to circumvent it - albeit requiring some commitment. For a straightforward mechanic it does a lot!

Like most of the things added after the basic game, Loyalty cripples the AI.

On that basis alone it should be scrapped

It’s a completely unneccessary added complication; there is basically nothing it does that the previous games version of this mechanic, culture flipping, doesnt do better

And we lost tile flipping for some dumb reason.

 

[Leucarum]

Like most of the things added after the basic game, Loyalty cripples the AI.

On that basis alone it should be scrapped

Your mileage my vary here I guess. The Civ AI has never been particularly smart, but i found it was noticeable how much worse it did when I went back to playing a version of civ without loyalty.

It’s a completely unneccessary added complication; there is basically nothing it does that the previous games version of this mechanic, culture flipping, doesnt do better

And we lost tile flipping for some dumb reason.

I like the idea of incorporating culture into the loyalty system, it makes sense and would be a nice extension.

Just my guess, but I suspect culture bombs/tile flipping are relatively rare in civ6 because of the addition of districts. Firaxis seemingly decided decide that districts couldn't be flipped, so you produce some weird/counterintuitive results when city tiles change hands.