Aheadatime
Prince
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2009
- Messages
- 325
Feels like some of the mechanics that were present in Civ5 were solid and didn't need any changing/upgrading, yet were changed for the sake of it. I haven't been taking notes, so I can only comment on the three that are on my mind atm; how strategic resources are calculated, how roads work, and the FoW.
Strategic resources were pretty straight forward. You found a resource-rich plot of land, mined it, and received x amount of it, so '10' iron meant 10 swordsmen. This was good because it;
- Made duplicate hexes of strategics valuable.
- Enriched trade options.
- Required more strategics be placed on map, which
~ Made possible interesting buildings such as Forge.
~ Made hexes more interesting (better yields, more significance in taking cities)
Now it's different. You only need one hex of strategics in order to build infinite items from said strategic, which strips away all of the above points. Requiring 2 of a strategic to build from a city also makes no sense whatsoever from a gameplay perspective or a realism perspective.
Realism - If I have a blacksmith making swords, him being stationed in a military-only area won't make his swords require less raw material, and if I've tamed horses on a pasture, why can't I begin training horsemen without first gathering way more horses?
Gameplay - The guy with the good start (multiple horses) gets to snowball said start by saving hammers on encampments and getting an earlier (no time wasted on encampment) and more potent (encampment hammers put into units) rush going. The guy with the meh start has to invest in an encampment, making the meh start even slower. This also takes a tile away from him, which could have been a diamond/triangle farm formation, district adjacency, or wonder in the future. Just totally unintuitive.
Roads are also an issue. In Civ5, workers created roads. The benefits were;
- Personalized road layout for empire, which
~ Was aesthetically pleasing.
~ Allowed more efficient movement between cities.
- Quicker troop movement on both offense and defense.
- Custom roads for things like feeding troops to an allied Civ or CS.
- Fair and logical tradeoff in the form of upkeep cost.
And that's all gone now. I argue that trade-route-roads are flat out worse than worker-roads. They remove all of the above points, and trying to remedy any of them results in an awful tradeoff.
- Sending a route to future-enemy for a road costs an internal route, which is food, production, etc.
- Sending a route to/from a satellite city to complete a road system can cost a more valuable internal route.
- Military engineers cost way too much for 2 road hexes, come too late in game.
- Cannot determine the pathing for a trade-route-road.
- Cannot prevent a trade-route-road from occuring.
Complete downgrade to me. And to top it off, the movement on roads has been heavily nerfed as well. Coupled with the new movement point costs, and we have much slower movement around the map.
The FoW is a bitter topic for me. Glance at this thread here to see a direct side-by-side of Civ5 and Civ6's FoW. Huge reduction in clarity and readability, for the sake of an arbitrary and subjective 'improvement' on aesthetics. Aesthetics to me mean absolutely nothing if they get in the way of gameplay clarity, and I personally found the aesthetics of Civ5 to be beautiful enough as-is. The new fog messes everything up for me.
- Harder to tell which areas are valuable/high-priority expands.
- Harder to tell which areas are valuable/high-priority cities to capture from enemy.
- Harder to tell which areas are particularly difficult to traverse/attack into.
- Harder to tell, at a glance, resource distribution.
- Unwelcome feeling of being isolated (subjective).
And to make matters worse, the fog now bleeds into the mini-map, so all areas you don't currently have vision of are just this irrelevant, hard-to-decipher grayish mess. Complete downgrade in terms of clarity and functionality compared to Civ5.
Strategic resources were pretty straight forward. You found a resource-rich plot of land, mined it, and received x amount of it, so '10' iron meant 10 swordsmen. This was good because it;
- Made duplicate hexes of strategics valuable.
- Enriched trade options.
- Required more strategics be placed on map, which
~ Made possible interesting buildings such as Forge.
~ Made hexes more interesting (better yields, more significance in taking cities)
Now it's different. You only need one hex of strategics in order to build infinite items from said strategic, which strips away all of the above points. Requiring 2 of a strategic to build from a city also makes no sense whatsoever from a gameplay perspective or a realism perspective.
Realism - If I have a blacksmith making swords, him being stationed in a military-only area won't make his swords require less raw material, and if I've tamed horses on a pasture, why can't I begin training horsemen without first gathering way more horses?
Gameplay - The guy with the good start (multiple horses) gets to snowball said start by saving hammers on encampments and getting an earlier (no time wasted on encampment) and more potent (encampment hammers put into units) rush going. The guy with the meh start has to invest in an encampment, making the meh start even slower. This also takes a tile away from him, which could have been a diamond/triangle farm formation, district adjacency, or wonder in the future. Just totally unintuitive.
Roads are also an issue. In Civ5, workers created roads. The benefits were;
- Personalized road layout for empire, which
~ Was aesthetically pleasing.
~ Allowed more efficient movement between cities.
- Quicker troop movement on both offense and defense.
- Custom roads for things like feeding troops to an allied Civ or CS.
- Fair and logical tradeoff in the form of upkeep cost.
And that's all gone now. I argue that trade-route-roads are flat out worse than worker-roads. They remove all of the above points, and trying to remedy any of them results in an awful tradeoff.
- Sending a route to future-enemy for a road costs an internal route, which is food, production, etc.
- Sending a route to/from a satellite city to complete a road system can cost a more valuable internal route.
- Military engineers cost way too much for 2 road hexes, come too late in game.
- Cannot determine the pathing for a trade-route-road.
- Cannot prevent a trade-route-road from occuring.
Complete downgrade to me. And to top it off, the movement on roads has been heavily nerfed as well. Coupled with the new movement point costs, and we have much slower movement around the map.
The FoW is a bitter topic for me. Glance at this thread here to see a direct side-by-side of Civ5 and Civ6's FoW. Huge reduction in clarity and readability, for the sake of an arbitrary and subjective 'improvement' on aesthetics. Aesthetics to me mean absolutely nothing if they get in the way of gameplay clarity, and I personally found the aesthetics of Civ5 to be beautiful enough as-is. The new fog messes everything up for me.
- Harder to tell which areas are valuable/high-priority expands.
- Harder to tell which areas are valuable/high-priority cities to capture from enemy.
- Harder to tell which areas are particularly difficult to traverse/attack into.
- Harder to tell, at a glance, resource distribution.
- Unwelcome feeling of being isolated (subjective).
And to make matters worse, the fog now bleeds into the mini-map, so all areas you don't currently have vision of are just this irrelevant, hard-to-decipher grayish mess. Complete downgrade in terms of clarity and functionality compared to Civ5.