Bye for now, Civ 6 - It was nice getting to know you

Okay, you're probably right about that, since Meier apparently wasn't involved much in IV for instance. Nevertheless do V and VI feel soulless to me, and the release of these fall together with the disconnection of Meiers name to the series. To presuppose a direct connection, which I didn't intend, might indeed be unfair. My experience on itself of V and VI however is authentic and not unfair.

 

Meier had no involvement at all in Civ IV that I'm aware of - he was peripherally involved in Civ II but since then has just run the company. The only more recent Civ games he's been heavily involved with were the Civilization Revolution games; those tend to be anathema to Civ IV's most diehard fans (who have been known to compare Civ V to them disparagingly), so I suspect heavier involvement from Sid would not take a form Civ IV diehards would like. Sid Meier is responsible for a computer-based board game that had about 20 generic unit types and fewer buildings; his name is not a hallmark of a complex simulation. Let alone historical accuracy - we have Sid to thank for the notion that the Aztecs and the Zulu were among the 12 most deserving civilisations for inclusion in the game, and for adding Gandhi as the leader of India.

Civ IV took a somewhat different approach from both the previous and subsequent Civ games; Civ V and Civ VI are arguably more faithful to the original games. The differences between Civ IV and Civ V have been debated to death, but whichever side you fall on Sid Meier is entirely irrelevant to the discussion.

I also don't think recycling the Civ IV vs. Civ V arguments for Civ VI shed any real light on the new game's problems. I cooled on Civ V somewhat after BNW, as some of the changes made the late game in particular too repetitive and dulled the differences between AI personalities, but I probably ended up playing it more than Civ IV and I liked the design intent behind many of the systems. I was even pigeonholed by the Civ IV diehards here as an active defender of Civ V.

Despite that I've struggled to get involved in Civ VI and despite trying to will myself to complete games and return to lapsed sessions, I've still completed only about two full games and have amassed perhaps 50 hours since release. AIs lack personality, AI combat is weaker than it was even in earlier versions of Civ V (despite the claims of the anti-1UPT crowd it was actually fairly capable in the final version), none of the victory conditions seem engaging and with a very shallow late game the bucket-filling of culture and science victories is just tedious.

Firaxis made a mistake in bowing to pressure not to remove features from the base game and the result is a game stuffed full of features few of which seem well-implemented. The changes to city states are terrible, the religious interface is unuseable and that entire victory condition a bad idea, diplomacy doesn't work and allows little meaningful interaction (never mind that the absurdly arbitrary agendas supported by often improbable AI complaints do a lot to hurt immersion), and where districts could have been a good idea the more I play with them the more they just feel like busywork with little purpose other than adding production time to the first building in any district type - there's little in the way of meaningful tradeoffs as you always have space for all the districts you want and the choices aren't well-balanced. The government system is the biggest advance, but the civics tree doesn't feel well-implemented and too few of the options are relevant. And where they tried to improve 1UPT implementation they ended up with more busywork - the need to turn later game units into corps and armies - and ignored the most glaring genuine problems: the inability for civilian units to stack and the ranged unit system.

 

My second game now where I the game crashes during AI turn. I give up.

 

As I recall, that approach was "carefully design the game to avoid the problems that plagued its predecessors", one I wish they had kept to.

 

To me, civilization needs careful balance of features with 'less is more'. Civ 6 is loaded with features, but few are immersive or engaging. Just look at the entire religion aspect of civ6. Horribly done. I thought the way it was implemented in civ4 was pretty smart.

 

Civ IV's religion system always seemed one of its weakest points - it was tied to the tech tree forcing particular tech progression if you wanted to rush religion, the "got to get them all" nature of cumulative religions in a city was strategically shallow, and the only meaningful way to play it was to build the appropriate holy building then spam missionaries across the map - but I'd certainly prefer it to Civ VI's as it now stands. Civ V took a good middle ground - religious bonuses were helpful, but while for the most part they were similar to the Civ VI bonuses (and in a number of cases identical) they weren't forced in your face - religion was a strategy you could pursue or ignore depending on whether it suited your starting position and/or civ. You didn't need to constantly watch it because left unchecked it would lead to an AI victory, nor did you have the silly religious combat system. And while some religious tenets rewarded converting everyone else, that was just one potential way to use it.

Civ V's system needed tweaks, but didn't need to be made a bigger part of the game let alone a victory condition encouraging missionary spam. and with a terrible interface (to the point that when playing Civ VI with random civs, I'd reroll any religious civ). And such tweaks as it needed - such as implementation of multiple religions in a city - weren't made anyway.

 

I cannot comment much about civ5 as 1upt and global happiness 'destroyed' the game for me. i didn't ever look back. it might have good parts which i am simply unaware of.

 

I'm a new participant on the forum and missed that debate. Probably V didn't frustrate me enough to register for expressing complaints. But thus you may find me reiterating some arguments here and there, since for me they are new.

That you taught me. I just noticed that the disconnection of Meiers name to the series coincided with a new turn taken at V. I didn't mean to postulate a causal relation, though perhaps it sounded like that.

Sorry to read about that. I as a Civ IV fanatic would never do that, purposely.

Due to lack of versatility on how to play the game I don't experience VI at all as full featured. But perhaps I need to discriminate between those two.

To me city states have always been terrible. In V at least I could leave them out of the game. If in a next update I would be able to ditch them I would probably give VI a new chance.

Fair remarks. I still struggle however how to assess the 1upt systems. My only issue here is that for me the transporters worked much better than the embark system. But I guess that has been a IV vs V discussion already...

 

Yes, it did come across that way, but there's no real coincidence of timing - his name's still on the games and he hasn't been meaningfully involved since long before Civ IV. I'd also argue that it's less correct that Civ V took a 'new turn' (although certain key elements like 1UPT did) than that Civ IV was an anomaly for the series as a whole - it was the only entry without a linear tech tree, the first with customisable government types, the first to introduce Great People (and, less significantly, unit promotions), the only one with a random events system (although Civs I and II had a civil war system that as I recall was semi-random), the only one before Civ VI to have a second management resource (i.e. health as well as happiness), and as I recall it added additional eras, it had far more numerous improvement options than other entries, it was the first to treat religion as a separate game system, the second to include strategic and luxury resources ... among other changes.

In short it was far more detailed (in my opinion, in some ways to its detriment) than the previous and subsequent games alike, but as it was one of the most popular instalments and Civs I and II are both now very old and not available on modern machines, there are a lot of Civ players whose first experience was with Civ IV and for whom that's what the series is about. One of the things I found refreshing about Civ V was the board game simplicity (mechanically - make no mistake, strategically it was more complex by far than Civs I through III) that recalled Civs I and II (as I'd never become heavily invested in subsequent versions). Civ V always felt to me more in the spirit of the series than Civ IV ever did.

I mean simply in terms of actual game systems - including those like culture which largely duplicate other game systems. I found Civ V's evolution more satisfactory - starting with a clean slate and building up.

Civ V had a troubled relationship with city-states - they started out badly, were improved substantially by Gods & Kings, and possibly even in BNW ... but at the same time the way civs interacted with them got worse. They were at one point relevant 'game pieces' that could sometimes assist in battle and that would be fought over between civs (either militarily or diplomatically). I had one memorable game where my pursuit towards diplomatic victory was unassailable in terms of AIs gaining influence ... and several AIs ganged up to actively try and invade my city states to steal them from me.

Unfortunately diplomatic victory was implemented best in G&K and BNW took a step back, city-state AI became more passive over time, and they ended up being less interesting. And there were persistent, not unjustified, complaints about gold-buying CSes being too easy, while the BNW changes to resource quests meant that the player already ahead in science etc. was the one getting the CS bonuses that kept them even further ahead.

Instead of fixing these relatively minor issues Civ VI has completely gutted the influence system - no longer can espionage be used to influence city-states dynamically and envoys can never be lost, only gained. So there isn't any of the interaction or counterplay that justified their existence in Civ V - on top of which the bonuses are far greater than they were in that game and the unique bonuses per CS aren't 'play the map' so much as free rewards for getting lucky starts.

Transports were an issue that needed a fix. Instant embarkation, especially with 1UPT, was almost certainly not the correct fix. Transports were irritating production make-work for the player and unmanageable by the AI, which was notoriously incapable of launching overseas invasions. I would say that embarkation is ultimately a better system in my view, but it's definitely not 'job done' and added further AI problems with its tendency to embark while in range of attack (arguably another issue with the ranged combat system more than the embarkation one).

 

Civ2 had a non-linear tech tree and civ1 had random events.

 

Health existed in previous games, just with much less granularity: e.g. in Civ II, your cities simply won't grow past 12 if you haven't researched sanitation and built a sewer system.

I'm surprised you didn't mention Civ 4's maintenance system; IMO, that was by far the most strategically relevant change.

 

Even in civ1 a city without an aquaduct wouldn't grow beyond 10 population.

 

...and in Civ III you needed to build by a river or have an aqueduct to grow past 6 and a hospital to grow past 12. Not exactly the same as 4 though -- each city had it's own health issues and bonuses from health resources were also applied, so Civ 4 really is different in that respect from the others.

Oh, and don't forget troops dying in the jungles in Civ 3 lol....

 

I don't think that happened?

 

While health was intended to replace the aqueduct system I don't see the aqueducts as really a management resource in the same way - they didn't require active management, just building a set structure at population point X. I see it as a more substantial change than replacing corruption with maintenance although both changes fed into the difference in Civ IV design philosophy - older Civ games had the same 'build it and leave it' approach as Civ V while Civ IV wanted to demand active management.

This was actually one of my persistent issues with Civ IV. Active management is a desirable approach, but instead of building a game that could usefully provide meaningful strategic options Civ IV just forced active management into systems designed to be static. The result was busywork rather than strategy - you were still told by the game to implement health management at population point X, a holdover from the previous system, just as you were told to manage expansion at city number X. This was exacerbated by having very limited options available to do either; as health in particular was local this mandated doing exactly the same thing in every city every time it reached a certain threshold. I think that's why I see it as bigger change than maintenance over corruption - maintenance only asked you to move the slider a bit or change the rate of expansion every so often.

 

Incidentally, I liked that in Civ IV I could turn off random events. I sure don't miss them in V or VI, they're terrible. I remember in I/II/III you couldn't really turn them off and they were just annoying. I'll be perfectly happy if they never return, but if they do, they'd better be a toggle.

It did. Civ III would randomly damage/kill units in jungle, and you could randomly lose population from jungle too iirc.

 

Might you be thinking of the plague? I played Civilization III for a year or two, and I have never seen jungles damaging units moving through them...?

 

Civilization III Complete manual, page 83:

Page 60:

 

Um, this was a game on prince:

Spoiler :

 

Health could be managed indirectly (by increasing food yields), and also globally by civics and resources.