CBP players, what do you think about Civ VI so far?

[infidel88]

Looks like the first wave of bug fixes and balance changes are out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/5dk0ro/civilization_vi_fall_2016_update_now_live/

There's a few important changes, but it's still missing a lot of stuff.

• Units may no longer be deleted when they are damaged.
  
  
• Deleting a unit no longer provides gold.
  
  I was wondering why AI is looking like this and now I understand. There are hatful of coders working on couple of issues completely without any communication whatsover. And then we get this :|

 

[Fierro]

They fixed many issues but not those that I wanted the most (Trade Routes UI, incorrect displaying of last built item in city, deleting previous pin's text when I add too much of them on map). On the other hand plenty of tweaks were made and this is good. But I still won't launch game because it's too early imo.

Btw patch name "Fall Update" really makes me concerned. Firaxis will release only 1 major patch each quarter (Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall)?

 

[Degenx2]

Btw patch name "Fall Update" really makes me concerned. Firaxis will release only 1 major patch each quarter (Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall)?

Yep, that's got me worried too. With all the problems at launch they should be aiming for a patch every week or two while they fix them. If VP can manage it I'm sure Firaxis can.

 

[Legedi]

This is exactly how civ 5 worked at release. A big patch around every three months I think. don't expect another bug one for a while.

 

[Funak]

This is exactly how civ 5 worked at release. A big patch around every three months I think. don't expect another bug one for a while.

Are you sure about that? The only thing I remember are fallpatches, never seen a spring-patch, winter-patch or a summer-patch.

 

[Morgawr]

I was optimistic and started a new Civ 6 game post patch. Yes some bugs are fixed but the AI is still light years away from putting up a decent fight, making the game way too easy and not fun. I then went back to Civ 5 VP. In my first game I was beaten severely by the AI - after a month break I had forgotten how good the AI is in combat! Seriously, I like Civ 6 but needs MAJOR work to bring its AI up to par with this mod. If the AI can learn how to fight, the game has so much potential. Until then I am sticking to Civ 5 VP.

 

[Cosmic Fox]

I am one of those old time civ players since 1995, I bought civ 2 for my son, He played it beat it and said next. I bought him expansions, all of them including the fantasy pack. He didn't want it, I sat down and thought I will try it.

Okay speeding forward, I loved Civ 4, best modding bar none in my opinion you can do literally anything you desire. A ton of hotkeys a real advanced game and then the guys who made Revolution on the consoles made Civ5. Supposedly these guys grew up on civ?!?! I am here to say they didn't grow up on civ, that was a dumb down version of the beloved civ series. Modding was less, no hot keys, animals were removed, etc. I was disappointed to say the least, but I did play 500-600 hrs MP was great.

Civ 6 new approach is refreshing as can be. I don't like the bugs and issues, like Diplomacy issues, I love how they did the diplomacy but certain things could have been done better and other things don't seem to work as intended.

Overall I love the districts, the new way of terrain design, the coves and inlets, the cliffs and the beautiful waves crashing in on the beach spectacular.

The game play needs serious help, the AI seems to quit and do stupid things all to often.

Sorry for the mixed up order of my likes and dislikes, I didn't give this post a lot of thought just threw up on my keyboard.

 

[Guynemer]

I think the districts are fantastic. Not perfect, could use some tweaking, maybe increase the population requirements for them and such, but a really interesting and positive change for the franchise, as is placing wonders on the map itself.

The AI, obviously, needs some work (the agenda system, while interesting in theory, handicaps the game in practice, IMO), and the balancing isn't there yet. Thinking about what Gazebo could do to with it, in collaboration with others, makes me salivate.

 

[Galbias]

From watching some gameplay of the patch it looks mostly the same, honestly.

Slightly off topic but I have a friend who swears Civ 4 is the best thing ever so I'm probably going to pick that up while it's on sale too. Any particularly notable mods for it?

 

[Txurce]

From watching some gameplay of the patch it looks mostly the same, honestly.

Slightly off topic but I have a friend who swears Civ 4 is the best thing ever so I'm probably going to pick that up while it's on sale too. Any particularly notable mods for it?

I didn't read any mention of increasing AI aggressiveness, so I figured the patch failed to make the game even somewhat competitive.

I never played Civ 4 -- just criticized its stacks of doom vs Civ 5's 1upt. I'll be curious about your opinion as to how it compares to VP.

 

[Stalker0]

I never played Civ 4 -- just criticized its stacks of doom vs Civ 5's 1upt. I'll be curious about your opinion as to how it compares to VP.

I still think Civ 4's economic model is the best one to date. I liked how building worked, expansion was well regulated but not in a harsh way. I liked its happiness and health system better than Civ 5 and 6's. Cottages created a wonderful sense of progression over time (late game you saw your city as a true city in teh middle of subburbs), and it also made pillaging worth it. I would go on pillaging wars because they were nice and effective.

However Military Wise, I'll take 1 UPT any day. I hated fighting in Civ 4, absolutely hated it, but enjoy it in Civ 5/6. That say, I agree with people that 1 UPT is much worse to code for the AI, Civ 4's model had a much more competitive military AI. VP has done wonders on Civ 5's ability to handle it, but its still not on par as Civ 4's....because military in that game was more about production and "brute worse" which an AI with bonuses can naturally win at.

Also.....getting away from transports and letting units embark on their own was genius.

 

[merill]

Slightly off topic but I have a friend who swears Civ 4 is the best thing ever so I'm probably going to pick that up while it's on sale too. Any particularly notable mods for it?

Try the scenarios in BtS, some are mods.
- final frontier
- Rhye's and fall of civilization (and associated modmods)
- fall from heaven (after that one, try the II)
-...
I didn't tried (yet) the other bigs one like caveman2cosmos.

 

[Kierkegaard]

BUG, BAT and BULL:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/civ4-bts-unaltered-gameplay-bug-bat-and-bull.268/

It's somewhat the predecessor of the Community Patch Projects in a way.

 

[Txurce]

I liked how building worked, expansion was well regulated but not in a harsh way. I liked its happiness and health system better than Civ 5 and 6's. Cottages created a wonderful sense of progression over time (late game you saw your city as a true city in teh middle of subburbs), and it also made pillaging worth it.

If you have the time, could you explain why building, expansion, happiness and health all worked better?

 

[Morgawr]

Civ 6 has great happiness (amenity) and health (housing) systems IMO. Building system is good but will be better with some cost tweaking (district costs), and of course the best part is their placement on the map. Expansion system is also good but needs some tweaking. (Settlers/builders)

So I think in terms of good "systems" civ 6 has the best but where it current fails miserably is the AI. Which is why in time it'll be a the best game ever but at the moment barely playable especially for experienced players.

 

[Txurce]

Civ 6 has great happiness (amenity) and health (housing) systems IMO. Building system is good but will be better with some cost tweaking (district costs), and of course the best part is their placement on the map. Expansion system is also good but needs some tweaking. (Settlers/builders)

So I think in terms of good "systems" civ 6 has the best but where it current fails miserably is the AI. Which is why in time it'll be a the best game ever but at the moment barely playable especially for experienced players.

That's what I thought before they ever released it: conceptually and from a platform basis, it has the most potential. But just how horrible the AI is makes me worry not about the devs' skills, but their intentions. They may well have decided that 1) there are a lot of crap players who have a tough enough time on King, and 2) there are better players who like the idea of kicking the AI's ass on Deity. As for everybody else... they can mod the game.

 

[Stalker0]

If you have the time, could you explain why building, expansion, happiness and health all worked better?

Sure. In Civ 4, a new city had a maintenance penalty, effectively a gold cost associated to each new city you built. Every city's cost got higher and higher.

In the game, you had sliders that converted your "coins" into science, culture, and gold. In the beginning of the game you could get your slider as high on science as you could. However, you had to drop that slider (and shift to gold) to keep up with the gold cost if you were expanding.

This created a natural cap to expansion early in the game.

However, where this difference lies is that the gold cost was a static number, not a permanent percentage penalty. That meant that once you had built up your gold infrastructure well enough you could raise your science slider back up...or could continue to expand. It slowed down the pace of expansion but never took away the desire to do so, no matter your victory condition. In Civ 5, the science and culture permanent percentage penalties create scenarios where expanding will not help you no matter how you develop. In Civ 4 this wasn't the case.

On the Tall side, Civ 4 had a lot more big percentage bonuses. Buildings were often stronger than they are in Civ 5, and many of them would combine a few bonuses in some cases. For example, the library would increase science, but also added a little culture too. So this made Tall play attractive, big cities could generate BIG bonuses. However,happiness was a strong cap to this. In Civ 4, happiness was city specific. Once your city grew to a certain point, each new citizen would be unhappy and would not work. Effectively your pop growth was nullified! However, each new happy countered one unhappy....allowing you to unlock the power of those tall bonuses. A unique luxury resource provided +1 happiness to ALL of your cities, it was a big deal! So trading for luxuries was a much bigger deal than it is in Civ 5.

Health was a "soft happiness", and was meant to model both the health issues in big cities as well as pollution. Unhealth just reduced your food, so it slowed growth but didn't stop it. The mechanic worked well, but honestly was of secondary importance, and I think taking it out made sense to a certain point.


So overall, I felt that Civ 4 gave you this powerful bonuses to play with, but it took work to unlock them to their full potential. You were constantly pushing against this invisible forces holding back your development, but as you broke through them you were greatly rewarded. Civ 5's model never felt as integrated and generated the same excitement as Civ 4's. Civ 5 has a lot of improvements over Civ 4...but honestly if I could have most of the subsystems of 5 but go back to Civ 4's economic model it would be the best of both worlds to me.

 

[Txurce]

Sure. In Civ 4, a new city had a maintenance penalty, effectively a gold cost associated to each new city you built. Every city's cost got higher and higher.

In the game, you had sliders that converted your "coins" into science, culture, and gold. In the beginning of the game you could get your slider as high on science as you could. However, you had to drop that slider (and shift to gold) to keep up with the gold cost if you were expanding.

This created a natural cap to expansion early in the game.

However, where this difference lies is that the gold cost was a static number, not a permanent percentage penalty. That meant that once you had built up your gold infrastructure well enough you could raise your science slider back up...or could continue to expand. It slowed down the pace of expansion but never took away the desire to do so, no matter your victory condition. In Civ 5, the science and culture permanent percentage penalties create scenarios where expanding will not help you no matter how you develop. In Civ 4 this wasn't the case.

On the Tall side, Civ 4 had a lot more big percentage bonuses. Buildings were often stronger than they are in Civ 5, and many of them would combine a few bonuses in some cases. For example, the library would increase science, but also added a little culture too. So this made Tall play attractive, big cities could generate BIG bonuses. However,happiness was a strong cap to this. In Civ 4, happiness was city specific. Once your city grew to a certain point, each new citizen would be unhappy and would not work. Effectively your pop growth was nullified! However, each new happy countered one unhappy....allowing you to unlock the power of those tall bonuses. A unique luxury resource provided +1 happiness to ALL of your cities, it was a big deal! So trading for luxuries was a much bigger deal than it is in Civ 5.

Health was a "soft happiness", and was meant to model both the health issues in big cities as well as pollution. Unhealth just reduced your food, so it slowed growth but didn't stop it. The mechanic worked well, but honestly was of secondary importance, and I think taking it out made sense to a certain point.

So overall, I felt that Civ 4 gave you this powerful bonuses to play with, but it took work to unlock them to their full potential. You were constantly pushing against this invisible forces holding back your development, but as you broke through them you were greatly rewarded. Civ 5's model never felt as integrated and generated the same excitement as Civ 4's. Civ 5 has a lot of improvements over Civ 4...but honestly if I could have most of the subsystems of 5 but go back to Civ 4's economic model it would be the best of both worlds to me.

Thanks for the comprehensive overview. A lot of what you wrote also applied to Civ 3. The gold/science slider strikes me as a much more simplistic mechanic than what Civ 5 provides (which is why earlier Civs were all about tech). But you're mainly talking about city growth, with focus on two areas: expansion and happiness.

I see how significant expansion hurts culture (but not science or a DV) for the human in Civ 5, although I also notice that the Civ 5 AI does just fine in culture while still expanding like crazy. You can get around this by not annexing, but with regard to a CV, I can see how Civ 4 gives you more options as to how to go about it. (Although culture means something different in the two games -- arguably another place where one can prefer one version over the other.)

With regard to individual city growth: don't big cities generate equivalent big bonuses in Civ 5? Isn't that how you win a culture victory, or hang in there in a Tradition science game? I recall the unhappy workers in larger Civ 3 cities, just as I do the effect of corruption based on distance from the capital (or was that an earlier Civ?). That never made any sense to me from a RL perspective -- it just seemed like a mechanic. I prefer the unhappiness generated by specialists, for example. But in both games, players can solve the unhappiness problems.

My one-game-removed opinions aside, do you see any way to generate equivalent effects in VP?

 

[Stalker0]

With regard to individual city growth: don't big cities generate equivalent big bonuses in Civ 5? Isn't that how you win a culture victory, or hang in there in a Tradition science game?
My one-game-removed opinions aside, do you see any way to generate equivalent effects in VP?

To your last question....no, to me it would take a major rewrite....and ultimately would be a different game. VP has made the best version of Civ 5, but rewritting the core economic tenets would make it something else. At the beginning of the project maybe it could have been explored...but as Gazebo said the major parts of the project are done, and I agree with that. Its time to tune and tweak but the time for big rewrites I think is done. Its time to move on.

To your question on Tall Cities, hehe its not even close! Percentage Bonuses were much more frequent in Civ 4 compared to Civ 5, and VP has made it even less. In VP, the majority of bonuses are flat, static bonus...and many of them are generated from specialists as opposed to worker yields. Now...that model has its own advantages, one of the things Gazebo has cited is a smoother scaling into the late ages, and I think that's a valid argument to be made. However, the consequence is that cities become more equivalent.

Imagine two cities: A and B. A gets a 50% bonus to gold, B gets 0%. If you could add a new building that gave +4 gold....where would you want to put it? City A of course, you get more value. Take that one step further, if you choose where to put your workers, would you want to grow a pop in A and work a gold mine, or do it in B? Again, the answer is A. Further, the stronger the percentage difference, the more you would tend to choose A over B.

In Civ 4, percentage bonuses were common, so with planning you could make a capital city that carried a 100% magnifier to science compared to another city (honestly I'm likely underestimating it here, but my memory is not strong enough to go higher). So growing that capital was a big deal! And therefore, happiness was a big deal. In Civ 5 VP, you are talking 10% magnifiers, maybe 20% at best in the capital until very late game. Therefore, centralizing in your capital is not as big a deal. Honestly....the biggest multiplier was actually in tourism with the National Visitor Center, which basically doubled the bonus of tourism in your capital. That's was one of the reasons why I argued so strongly for it to be changed, as it went so starkly against the flat model that everywhere else in VP had been pushed.


One more point, since you mentioned culture victory and tradition science victory. Its not that Civ 5 gets "big bonuses" for Tall cities in the same way that Civ 4 did...its there is no bonus for more cities towards these victory types. For example, culture takes a big penalty in Civ 5 when you get more cities...past a certain point you gain policies slower than a small civ does.

When considering tourism, tourism is primarily generated through:
1) Specific GP (Artists, Musicians, Writers) which are primarily generated through guilds only buildable 3 times. So large or small...your empire can only generate these so quickly.

2) Trade Routes: Again big or small, you can only have a max number of trade routes.

3) Archaeologist Great Works: You could argue this is an advantage for wide as they have a hammer advantage to build more archeologists. There is truth to that, but its a short window, and I found tall civs that dedicate to archaelogists briefly can still do just fine. Honestly this is more of a science fight (getting to it first) than a hammer one.

4) Late game culture generation and great works through the hotel, airport, national visitor center, and stadium if I recall. These tend to reward focusing of culture buildings and centralization of great works (especially with the National Visitor Center....though much less now with the recent patch), which again favors "Tall".

5) Chanceries: This is new X factor. Now that chanceries can generate tourism, that gives Wide a bit more to work with.

6) The tourism multipliers: The most important one here is the "I have a smaller civ than you do". There is a built in advantage for smaller civs going culture victory baked right in, and its not a trivial bonus at all.

7) Aesthetics Tree: Some really strong tourism bonuses here, and small civs that gain policies quicker can get through this tree faster.

So small civs have the same tourism benefits as large civs....and even have a few key advantages. This is why small civs often go culture victory.

For science, the same thing occurs. Because of the permanent science penalty for new cities, new cities stop generating net science bonuses, and actually are often science drains. People have argued that this balanced by the fact that more cities can generate more great scientists...whose yields are based on total science output. I think it helps, but in my experience small civs are better at science than large ones. However I don't think the difference is as great as tourism is for small civs, so I think science is reasonably balanced with a tilt towards small (which is fine, I think its fine for small civs to have an edge here). Large civs have bonuses in hammers and gold, which is why they excel at diplomatic and military victories, which is perfectly fine.

 

[Txurce]

One more point, since you mentioned culture victory and tradition science victory. Its not that Civ 5 gets "big bonuses" for Tall cities in the same way that Civ 4 did...its there is no bonus for more cities towards these victory types. For example, culture takes a big penalty in Civ 5 when you get more cities...past a certain point you gain policies slower than a small civ does.

Yeah, maybe I wasn't clear enough -- I do see how Civ 5 steers you toward a smaller empire when pursuing a CV.

For science, the same thing occurs. Because of the permanent science penalty for new cities, new cities stop generating net science bonuses, and actually are often science drains. People have argued that this balanced by the fact that more cities can generate more great scientists...whose yields are based on total science output. I think it helps, but in my experience small civs are better at science than large ones. However I don't think the difference is as great as tourism is for small civs, so I think science is reasonably balanced with a tilt towards small (which is fine, I think its fine for small civs to have an edge here). Large civs have bonuses in hammers and gold, which is why they excel at diplomatic and military victories, which is perfectly fine.

I didn't know this... although it makes me feel better about keeping my civs in the 4-10 range.

Thanks again. I really appreciate your helpfulness.