Change for the sake of change

[Aheadatime]

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.

 

[Evie]

Regarding strategic resources, it's hard to justify calling "Change for the sake of change" the decision to revert back to "One strategic resource is enough" when, in fact, that's the way strategic resource were implemented in both of Civ V's predecessors (III and IV). Seems to me like a pretty clear cut case of the devs looking at Civ V and its two predecessor, deciding they liked (elements of) the earlier implementation better, and reverting back accordingly.

 

[Magil]

Actually roads and strategic resources were both more reverts to an older mechanism that has proven superior for gameplay. Well, roads are weak movement-wise, but I'll take "roadspam" over the annoying maintenance-costing, building-tile-by-tile-using-1UPT system of V's anyday (and there's a mod that buffs roads that I'm using anyway). No, I completely disagree with you for the most part, V's systems were annoying and I'm glad to be rid of them. But the reasons for that have been discussed a lot already

 

[GhostSalsa]

Roads anger me a lot. Gaining an offensive edge from trading with a neighbor (ie deliberately making war-roads with TRs) is such a bad and immersion-breaking mechanic. Imagine being in a fighting game and the first step to punching someone is paying them five dollars. I'm embarrassed on behalf of the game.

And why can't this team zoom out and view the game impact of per-city trade routes in a clear way?? Look devs: When the game design makes all cities "want" a TR ASAP by default, the TR is just functioning as an automated worker that makes roads, the roads are functioning as a + hammer and + food giving city connection instead of the + gold connection in V, with no maintenance trade-off. The first feature already was in V and didn't need to go away! The second feature is obviously too strong! Either feature could have just been implemented directly in the game without saddling us with boring micro!!

But to your main point, I agree, or really what I would say is that there were way too many experimental features in VI. Experimental in that they weren't designed with any game problem or dynamic in mind, but just thrown in, wasting probably a ton of dev time before release (leading to an undercooked product) and way way complicating the task of balancing the game in patch (easier to fix a few broken parts around a core of parts you understand, than to just have a bunch of mysterious nonsense flopping about in a soup).

Other things designed with no design mission:

-The movement rules ("Elite players keep making us feel bad by rushing the AI let's just make the map unexplorable for everyone.")
-Religious victory (Why was anything else needed out of religion? Why did they include it with no cool or fun design in mind for it?)
-Everything about boats (team, you are bad at designing your games' naval aspects, vanilla should have included a proven model and tweaked from there)
-Great people (much better to have done this in expac, after the core game was understood and balanced)

This is all giving them a pass on other broken or un-fun features (amenities, diplomacy, gossip ugh, CB, promotions, etc) because it's easy to see where V still left a lot to be desired.

 

[nzcamel]

Roads anger me a lot. Gaining an offensive edge from trading with a neighbor (ie deliberately making war-roads with TRs) is such a bad and immersion-breaking mechanic. Imagine being in a fighting game and the first step to punching someone is paying them five dollars. I'm embarrassed on behalf of the game.

Good thing Civilization isn't a fighting game then
How is trade routes beating a path into the dirt immersion breaking?? What do you think created the fore runners to roads? Maybe if they didn't call them roads (I mean until Industrial Roads they don't increase your units movements one iota unless they're going over rough terrain; and even then -industrial roads- not even much) you'd be less aggrieved by it?

And why can't this team zoom out and view the game impact of per-city trade routes in a clear way?? Look devs: When the game design makes all cities "want" a TR ASAP by default, the TR is just functioning as an automated worker that makes roads, the roads are functioning as a + hammer and + food giving city connection instead of the + gold connection in V, with no maintenance trade-off. The first feature already was in V and didn't need to go away! The second feature is obviously too strong! Either feature could have just been implemented directly in the game without saddling us with boring micro!!

But your road -once built by the TR- no longer gains you the benefits if your TR is now working elsewhere.

But to your main point, I agree, or really what I would say is that there were way too many experimental features in VI. Experimental in that they weren't designed with any game problem or dynamic in mind, but just thrown in, wasting probably a ton of dev time before release (leading to an undercooked product) and way way complicating the task of balancing the game in patch (easier to fix a few broken parts around a core of parts you understand, than to just have a bunch of mysterious nonsense flopping about in a soup).

I love what they've done. V was a miserable yawn fest.

Other things designed with no design mission:

-The movement rules ("Elite players keep making us feel bad by rushing the AI let's just make the map unexplorable for everyone.")
-Religious victory (Why was anything else needed out of religion? Why did they include it with no cool or fun design in mind for it?)
-Everything about boats (team, you are bad at designing your games' naval aspects, vanilla should have included a proven model and tweaked from there)
-Great people (much better to have done this in expac, after the core game was understood and balanced)

I love the new movement rules. You have little chases all over the place, and it isn't the fastest units that always win

Boats. I think you finally have actually hit something on the head. Having said that...no Civ game has had a proven model here yet (other than offering archipelago's and islands as a map), so I'm not sure what you were expecting them to do. Like I love the introduction of the Harbour...but it has made the naval game even less of a thing. That is a fair critique, and I hope they're looking at ways of dealing with the naval question in the first expansion.

This is all giving them a pass on other broken or un-fun features (amenities, diplomacy, gossip ugh, CB, promotions, etc) because it's easy to see where V still left a lot to be desired.

What's wrong with amenities? Way better than global happiness! And the rest are just fine do. What are your actual complaints about this last list of yours; cos I think they do mostly fine

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Not sure I agree with the first two points but yes the Fog of War is very poorly implemented this time around.

 

[Aheadatime]

Actually roads and strategic resources were both more reverts to an older mechanism that has proven superior for gameplay. Well, roads are weak movement-wise, but I'll take "roadspam" over the annoying maintenance-costing, building-tile-by-tile-using-1UPT system of V's anyday (and there's a mod that buffs roads that I'm using anyway). No, I completely disagree with you for the most part, V's systems were annoying and I'm glad to be rid of them. But the reasons for that have been discussed a lot already

Proven superior? Yuck, that language... What metric are you using? Who has it been proven to? What are you even talking about? Civ5 was Sid's highest-selling and most-played game. So if we're using popularity and profit as metrics, which would be quite wise, then its been proven that Civ5's features were "superior for gameplay". Yeesh. How about we stay away from silly and unproductive language from now on and bring content to the table. I had some pretty solid reasoning listed in the OP regarding pros and cons of the changes, so it'd be productive to respond to those next time.

Regarding strategic resources, it's hard to justify calling "Change for the sake of change" the decision to revert back to "One strategic resource is enough" when, in fact, that's the way strategic resource were implemented in both of Civ V's predecessors (III and IV). Seems to me like a pretty clear cut case of the devs looking at Civ V and its two predecessor, deciding they liked (elements of) the earlier implementation better, and reverting back accordingly.

Yes that is what happened, hence my OP being a response to and weighing the pros and cons of said decision, highlighting that it's mostly cons. As I said to magil, let me know what about my pro/con list you agree/disagree with, so I can see why you think this current version is any better than 5's.

 

[Magil]

Proven superior? Yuck, that language... What metric are you using? Who has it been proven to? What are you even talking about? Civ5 was Sid's highest-selling and most-played game. So if we're using popularity and profit as metrics, which would be quite wise, then its been proven that Civ5's features were "superior for gameplay". Yeesh. How about we stay away from silly and unproductive language from now on and bring content to the table. I had some pretty solid reasoning listed in the OP regarding pros and cons of the changes, so it'd be productive to respond to those next time.

Yes that is what happened, hence my OP being a response to and weighing the pros and cons of said decision, highlighting that it's mostly cons. As I said to magil, let me know what about my pro/con list you agree/disagree with, so I can see why you think this current version is any better than 5's.

Proven because the changes were reverted. Civ V did some things right, but it also did a fair bit wrong, and that's why VI is a different game.

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)

You listed no pros to strategic resources being as they are in VI, yet many of the cons are a silly. Consider that duplicates are still valuable in VI, as you need at least 2 to build a unit without an encampment, and their value as trade fodder is still viable (thus both your first and second points are false). There's nothing preventing a Forge-like building in VI, in fact, I've seen a mod that adds buildings which improve upon resources. That's the real problem with your list of points, they don't make any sense. Some of them are valid, but other times you are just stating things that are rather blatantly untrue. This isn't even disagreement, this is purely objective.

You may have a preference towards having numbers tied to strategic resources allowing you to make a certain number of units, but I saw very little benefit from it in gameplay. You say it's "intuitive", I say it's "fiddly". I didn't see any big benefit to having it. Realism? Let's not even start, that's a slippery slope towards absurdity.

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.

Again, you list no pros. Didn't you say you listed the pros and cons of each decision in your OP?

I'll start with "personalized layout for empire", which is laughable at best. Civ V actively penalizes you for trying anything other than the minimum amount of roads required. "Aesthetically pleasing"? The roads in V looked awful. I'll agree on the point that roads are too weak, but that's more of a general complaint about one of Civilization V/VI's biggest mistakes: one unit per tile. Trying to deal with Civ V's minimal roads combined with 1UPT often led to ridiculous congo lines of workers building roads, and units moving in silly-looking single-file lines towards a destination. The whole thing was nothing short of disaster in my book. Road spam at least lets me move around units more freely.

Now, Trade routes are a problem, but most of that is in the UI end. They're a pain to manage. The fact that they create roads is fine. And "sending a route to/from a satellite city to complete a road system can cost a more valuable internal route is a little silly, because you generally want to use trade routes in your satellites to get them off the ground anyway, so they don't spend 50 turns building a new district. You just send them from the new city to a developed one. Military engineers suck, we agree there, building roads should really not use charges at all. Trade route management in general is a disaster, but being able to build roads without upkeep cost is a net positive in every way. And it will be as long as ridiculous unit traffic jams caused by the 1UPT system exist. Roads at least alleviate that to some degree. And they really need to be everywhere, because it makes movement in your own territory so much less tedious, and rewards you for investment.

See, it's all about being rewarded for investment. I don't feel like Civ V did a very good job in that regard. Roads felt like something you just needed to build because otherwise 1UPT movement was even more of a pain, but you couldn't build as much as you wanted because of the stupid upkeep, so you could only slightly reduce the tedium of moving units. Further investment of worker turns into roads yielded far more penalty than benefit. Civ VI's is frankly only slightly better, but it is better, in at least there's no arbitrary penalty.

Oh, and internal trade routes were better in V too, since food and growth was everything in that game. So that's basically a wash. Except that at least in VI you have more trade routes, which has its upsides and downsides, but an upside is that sending an international trade route doesn't cost you quite as much as it does in V, since you have more of them to send (and food loses usefulness as cities reach their housing caps).

 

[kaspergm]

I mostly agree on subject 1) and 2). I didn't think Civ5 system was perfect, but the new system is possibly worse. The fact that 1 resource is the difference between 0 and infinitely many of a unit is both crazy bad for balance and bizarre in terms of realism. Civ5 already was plagued by Iron deficit starts, but this is even worse in Civ6 I feel. I think a much better solution would have been - what someone modded - that you can always build all units, but that some suffer a combat penalty if you do not have access to the strategic resource (-5 strength for instance).

With regards to roads ... I just hate the new mechanism. I hate that you can't control where you put down the road. I hate that you have to allocate trader units (which, for a good part of the game, you'll only have one of) to useless trade routes just to have the road laid down. I hate that you need to repeat this process to upgrade routes out of your territory. I hate, from an aesthetic and logical pov., how roads are often laid in bizarre patterns that have parallel routes going from the same city because you first send unit to one city and then later to another city. The military engineer is just a bad joke. And I hate how you can't set up a trade route with multi-city points instead of just start/finish, to control the path.

The fog of war ... I'm growing used to it. It looks good, it's not the best for gameplay always, but I can live with it.

 

[Evie]

The bottom line, really, is simple. What pros you list to the old system (and I agree with Magil that most of them are not so much pros as blatant falsehoods) are completely overwhelmed by the one con : bookkeeping. Having to track how much iron you have available to you (and how much of each other strategic resources) does not, in fact, make for a fun game. It makes for a bookkeeping game. This is Civilization, not the rampant insanity of Victoria.

Change for the sake of change may be rad, but realism for the sake of realism is infinitely worse.

 

[kaspergm]

the one con : bookkeeping. Having to track how much iron you have available to you (and how much of each other strategic resources) does not, in fact, make for a fun game.

Ok, for all the bad things that can be said about the Civ5 system - and there are many - this was definitely not a problem in Civ5. The interface was extremely transparent on this area, namely it showed directly the number of unused units of each resource you had available. Thus, at any time, you could always see how many resources you had available. I can't recall a single time where bookkeping was an issue with regards to strategic resources in Civ5.

 

[liv]

What bugs me a bit are the attempts to force the player to play a certain style.
I do not like that is no restart button
no no new seeds
or that you cannot decide the number of city states
or that you are forced to do diplomacy with the limited resources and also the clustering of luxuries.

I like to have choices and it feels like I am given fewer choices. Sure some of these are obvious cheats but I should have to option to do it if I want to

 

[Evie]

Easy bookkeeping is still bookkeeping, forcing you to keep track of additional variables in your decision making. Even if those variable are transparent, that makes the game more complex.

 

[beorn]

I'm still undecided on the strategic resources, although I see your point. Roads, I feel are better in VI. Traveling routes people haven't been traveling much is slow, making the map bigger and water travel more important.

But I am 1000% with you on fog of war. I cannot imagine why oh why they did this. Pure aggravation, no upside. (And if there is a positive aesthetic, it is totally lost on me.) Kind of like, making all the pieces on a chess board look alike, because someone (who presumably doesn't play the game) things it looks good.

 

[kampori]

Easy bookkeeping is still bookkeeping, forcing you to keep track of additional variables in your decision making. Even if those variable are transparent, that makes the game more complex.

Oh come on, this is just silly. One quick glance at the top of the screen showed you exactly how many of each resource you had available. There is absolutely no 'bookkeeping' or 'keeping track' of anything here.

 

[kaspergm]

Easy bookkeeping is still bookkeeping, forcing you to keep track of additional variables in your decision making. Even if those variable are transparent, that makes the game more complex.

Oh come on, this is just silly. One quick glance at the top of the screen showed you exactly how many of each resource you had available. There is absolutely no 'bookkeeping' or 'keeping track' of anything here.

Agree with Kampori, there was no bookkeeping required. If you had the resource, you could build the unit. If you didn't have the resource, you couldn't. If you needed to know how many you had, you looked at top of screen. End of story.

 

[Magil]

I should clarify one thing--when it comes to building roads, I actually mostly agree. I don't have any problem with Traders building roads early on, really, I think that's fine and great. But I imagined the Military Engineer would be much better at actually building roads than it actually turned out to be when they described this system. There needs to be a better way to place roads where you want them in the mid-to-lategame. At least districts/Wonders automatically place roads upon the tile they occupy, which helps.

But I'll take "not-aesthetically-pleasing roadspam" over roads costing maintenance any day of the week, even if the roads themselves are worse at actually helping units move. There is no end to my hatred for the idea of roads costing maintenance.

 

[Aheadatime]

Proven because the changes were reverted. Civ V did some things right, but it also did a fair bit wrong, and that's why VI is a different game.

Er what? The devs deciding on something doesn't 'prove' that it is the best choice. That's the most hollowed out reasoning you could have given me, as you're implying the devs don't make mistakes and know what's best for the game at all times. That's ridiculous.

You listed no pros to strategic resources being as they are in VI

That's because there are none. Let's examine two situations, comparing each game to said situations.

Situation 1 - You want to build swordsmen and you have 1 improved hex of iron in your territory.

Civ 5 - Start building swordsmen immediately from any city you choose.
Civ 6 - Either spend the turns and hammers to build an encampment, or don't build swordsmen. Once you get encampment up, you can only build swordsmen from that city.

Situation 1 Civ5 Benefits;

- Produce swordsmen earlier.
- Produce swordsmen at a faster rate, since you're producing from multiple cities.
- Sell off extra Iron.

Situation 1 Civ6 Benefits;

- Can produce infinite swordsmen.

Civ6's benefit is much less valuable. Having units earlier and produced faster are more practical benefits that feel more rewarding and are used more often. Having infinite swordsmen doesn't matter, as we never build 'infinite' units. You have to consider their usefulness (I think we all agree ranged is the bulk of armies), unit maintenance, and practicality on battlefield (1uPT). Put it this way.. you can build infinite warriors, archers, and spearmen, but you don't. You generally build 2-10 of any given unit.

Situation 2 - You want to build swordsmen and you have 2 improved hexes of iron in your territory.

Civ 5 - Start building swordsmen immediately from any city you choose.
Civ 6 - Start building swordsmen immediately from any city you choose.

Situation 2 Civ 5 Benefits;

- Sell off extra Iron.

Situation 2 Civ6 Benefits;

- Can produce infinite swordsmen.

Again, I've never needed an 'infinite' number of any unit, so that benefit means nothing to me. Selling extra iron, however, is practical to me. Which leads me to this point;

Consider that duplicates are still valuable in VI, as you need at least 2 to build a unit without an encampment, and their value as trade fodder is still viable (thus both your first and second points are false).

This shouldn't even need explaining but here goes. In situation one, you can trade your iron away in Civ5 but cannot in Civ6. In situation two, you can trade your iron away in Civ5, but doing so in Civ6 puts you back in 'situation 1' status, meaning you have to resort to encampments, which is limiting and slow. So let's create a situation 3, where you have 3 hexes of iron in your territory for both Civ5 and Civ6. In Civ6, you have ONE IRON to trade away. That's it. One transaction. In Civ5, you had as many trades as you did individual copies of iron. This matters because it helps you get the best deal for your iron, helps improve relations across multiple civs, and improves your chances at getting multiple copies of luxuries. Having ONE IRON to trade away means only one potential lux, only one potential friend made, only one transaction. It's less rich. It's less diverse. It's less. It's worse. Thus my first and second points are valid.

There's nothing preventing a Forge-like building in VI

Because each hex of iron is 'infinite', there are far fewer hexes of iron.
Because there are fewer hexes of iron, there would be far fewer cities with the forge available to them.
Because there would be far fewer cities with the forge available to them, the building would just essentially be another snowball device, ie. "dude with 3 iron in his early empire also gets access to this rare, specialized building that speeds up his production..?"
Or, you make the building relatively weak, in which case why even include it at all?

The line of issues above stem from the first statement, that each hex of iron is now infinite. The only other thing I could think of would be making more hexes of iron available anyway. Ok, now everybody is back in situation 2 or 3, meaning we're essentially back to Civ5 (producing units without encampment), yet two flaws have arisen;

1. Everyone has infinite swordsmen, therefore iron isn't really a 'strategic' resource anymore.
2. Iron is useless as a trade commodity, since everyone has multiples.

That's the real problem with your list of points, they don't make any sense. Some of them are valid, but other times you are just stating things that are rather blatantly untrue. This isn't even disagreement, this is purely objective.

That's the problem with your responses. They all lack content. You type many words without meaning anything. List which points are blatantly untrue. Define 'objective', since I seem to be perceiving your hollow blabbering as subjectivity.

You may have a preference towards having numbers tied to strategic resources allowing you to make a certain number of units, but I saw very little benefit from it in gameplay. You say it's "intuitive", I say it's "fiddly". I didn't see any big benefit to having it. Realism? Let's not even start, that's a slippery slope towards absurdity.

Well I've done my best to explain the benefits to the number system in great detail. If you are not capable of understanding it, or simply don't want to since it would interfere with your own point of view, than so be it, that's beyond me.

Again, you list no pros.

Sorry. Trade-route-road pros.. no road upkeep cost.

I'll start with "personalized layout for empire", which is laughable at best. Civ V actively penalizes you for trying anything other than the minimum amount of roads required.

Er.. lol. I thought you were going to explain why being able to personalize your road layout wasn't beneficial somehow, or argue with my point that attempting to 'personalize' via specific trade-routes gimps yields. All you did was point out that roads have a maintenance cost in Civ5. So? That doesn't mean you can't personalize your road layout, and it doesn't do anything about the fact that you can't personalize your road layout in Civ6. Be more clear please.

"Aesthetically pleasing"? The roads in V looked awful.

I meant that if you created a pretty little circle around your empire, or a nice 'highway' road right down the middle of a long chain of cities, it was nice to look at. Satisfying that I made such an efficient and pretty little road Which you can't do in Civ6, as the roads are just all over the place in paths that you cannot dictate or improve upon. But the looks are subjective. If you think Civ6's "roads everywhere all the time" aesthetic is nice, then so be it.

I'll agree on the point that roads are too weak, but that's more of a general complaint about one of Civilization V/VI's biggest mistakes: one unit per tile. Trying to deal with Civ V's minimal roads combined with 1UPT often led to ridiculous congo lines of workers building roads, and units moving in silly-looking single-file lines towards a destination. The whole thing was nothing short of disaster in my book. Road spam at least lets me move around units more freely.

So you're saying a few things here.. You agree that roads are too weak and don't provide much movement in Civ6 (which objectively, they don't), yet claim that Civ6's road spam 'at least helps you move around your units more freely'? That's a contradiction. And if you were struggling so bad to build a road network in Civ5 that didn't result in traffic than I can understand why we disagree so strongly lol. "Congo lines of workers building roads and units moving in silly single-files lines" lmao, reminds me of this. Weird that you felt less mobile with Civ5, a game in which you were allowed to road every hex on the map and a game in which roads provided huge buffs to movement. Yet you feel more mobile with Civ6, a game where the roads almost do nothing for movement points and aren't allowed to be customized until mid-game at a rate of 2 hexes per turns wasted on a military engineer

And "sending a route to/from a satellite city to complete a road system can cost a more valuable internal route is a little silly, because you generally want to use trade routes in your satellites to get them off the ground anyway, so they don't spend 50 turns building a new district. You just send them from the new city to a developed one.

What I'm saying is that this choice shouldn't be tied into my road network. The choices should be two separate things. Trade route management and road networking/pathing are two very different thought patterns, and forcing them into one thought pattern creates a coerced ineffectiveness, which is bothersome in a game that's largely based on effectiveness. I want to send a route from city A to city B to help whatever project I'm working on, but must send it from city D to city A if I want to finish my empire's road network. Great, thanks.

Military engineers suck, we agree there, building roads should really not use charges at all. Trade route management in general is a disaster, but being able to build roads without upkeep cost is a net positive in every way. And it will be as long as ridiculous unit traffic jams caused by the 1UPT system exist. Roads at least alleviate that to some degree. And they really need to be everywhere, because it makes movement in your own territory so much less tedious, and rewards you for investment.

Sounds like a great argument in favor of letting workers build roads like in Civ5, just without the maintenance cost.

See, it's all about being rewarded for investment. I don't feel like Civ V did a very good job in that regard. Roads felt like something you just needed to build because otherwise 1UPT movement was even more of a pain, but you couldn't build as much as you wanted because of the stupid upkeep, so you could only slightly reduce the tedium of moving units. Further investment of worker turns into roads yielded far more penalty than benefit. Civ VI's is frankly only slightly better, but it is better, in at least there's no arbitrary penalty.

I still don't get how it's "more of a pain" in Civ5, when you could enter rough terrains/cross rivers with 1 movement point and roads actually provided a dramatic difference in movement. Civ6 provides almost no movement benefit, and the movement costs are much more severe. Everyone generally agrees this is a slower game movement-wise besides you. And spamming the map with ugly, do-nothing roads doesn't do anything to alleviate that.. it's still a slower game, and I argue it's slower because of the road system. Not many Deity/MP players had trouble moving units around in Civ5 with the awesome, customizable, super-impactful roads and great general bombs.

Sending an international trade route doesn't cost you quite as much as it does in V, since you have more of them to send (and food loses usefulness as cities reach their housing caps).

This is true, but doesn't change the fact that, as mentioned earlier, the choices of where/how/when to build roads and which cities to send trade routes to/from should be independent, separate choices.

 

[Aheadatime]

The bottom line, really, is simple. What pros you list to the old system (and I agree with Magil that most of them are not so much pros as blatant falsehoods) are completely overwhelmed by the one con : bookkeeping. Having to track how much iron you have available to you (and how much of each other strategic resources) does not, in fact, make for a fun game. It makes for a bookkeeping game. This is Civilization, not the rampant insanity of Victoria.

Change for the sake of change may be rad, but realism for the sake of realism is infinitely worse.

Explain in detail which pros are falsehoods, and I'll try my best to understand how glancing up a distance of inches is considered bookkeeping.

 

[Gorbles]

Your advantages for Swordsmen in CiV boil down to "I can get this fancy unit faster". This is not an advantage. This is a core tenet of game design wrt. advanced units and Strategic Resource pairing. You prefer the game (in this example, who knows, you might prefer earlier Civ. games better, I don't know) that lets you get Swordsmen faster and at a more rapid rate.

This is a personal preference, and not some objective form of game rating.

Civilisation 6 has attempted to decouple this approach somewhat. I'm not sure I fully agree with the end result but I haven't had much downtime to really go into the theory of the game of late. It makes the use of Strategic Resources well, more Strategic. I don't think they fully realised the frustration (due to burden of invisible knowledge) that this would result in, but to me it's kinda obvious that the new system is, in fact, more Strategic. Do you build an Encampment that allows you to get your Swordsmen (and many other upgraded units) for a reduced Strategic cost, or can you forgoe that choice due to a surplus of available Strategics?

It's dependent on map bias (and I'm not sure if the key Strategics; Iron and Niter, are actually abundant enough overall, across numerous playthroughs), sure. But the system itself? More strategic, without a doubt. CiV suffered from the same issue that Affinity units in Beyond Earth did (though Beyond Earth made these units far more accessible - some would argue too accessible - and the gameplay evolved around that, rather than a lack of said units) in that if you amass enough resources then said units are infinite in their potential number regardless. There's very little risk involved. You just hoard resources that lets you build more units that lets you hoard more resources that lets yo- etc. Civilisation 6 attempts to change this for the better. Early days yet, though.