civ 6 is a good game with issues.

[Zaarin]

Even the best soundtrack will become a bore eventually.

Jessica Curry's Everybody's Gone to the Rapture soundtrack doesn't. The game is good, but her soundtrack is divine.

 

[Alaindor]

There is nothing wrong on the AI cheating, if as a result the AI is challenging, fun and fair to play.

In fact, the "obsession" of making an AI that plays with the same knowledge a player has, is ridiculous..

I have to disagree here. Having different rules for the AI would make the game not understandable and overly complex. "Cheating" is in no way an acceptable path to patch an incapable AI. But on the other hand, saving / loading is not acceptable either, I never do that, this is plain cheating too.

To me, a strategy game needs to have plain and clear rules, and all players abide by those same rules. I cannot imagine enjoying a game where one team plays soccer (no hands allowed) against another team playing rugby. A plain mess if you ask me.

AI could be improved. The devs are showing us that by simply doing the opposite: every new patch seems to make it worse, either because the newly introduced mechanics are clearly disregarded, either with apparent typos (see the "AI crazy about science" thread), and insufficient playtesting. @Infixo is apparently having some success in improving things with what is made available to modders, so it is possible. Deciding on your goals and pursuing a victory in a consistent way seems to be a key requirement that the AI is not doing, for instance.

 

[Heyesey]

I have to disagree here. Having different rules for the AI would make the game not understandable and overly complex. "Cheating" is in no way an acceptable path to patch an incapable AI.

Much depends on what you count as cheating. The AI is given extra cities, builders and units on higher levels; some call that cheating to make up for lack of challenge, but nobody would consider it "different rules," just a flying start.

 

[Alex Vance]

I've noticed that the more a certain clique of people play a game, the more delusional they get.

I've seen the World of Warcraft, the Total War: Warhammer 2, the Crusader Kings 2-3, the Bannerlord, the Vermintide 2, Dota 2, the Apex Legends, the Red Dead Online, Rainbow Six Siege, Rising Storm Vietnam, Witcher/Cyberpunk 2077, Monster Hunter, and Super Smash Bros, Divinity OS 2, the Assassins Creed communities say their game of choice:

Has the worst AI ever
Has glaring balance issues
Has extremely poor aesthetics
Is riddled with bugs
Developers are incompetent
Game is dead
X is ruining the game
Game used to be great but now sucks
etc etc

When the real issue is the person or small group of like-minded and loud-mouthed people.
Mind you, some of these games won numerous awards and are hailed as some of the best of their genre. Others are personal favorites, but in general I tend to play games that are conventionally considered "good" through "great."
I've noticed that in nearly every case, the number of legitimate issues is absolutely dwarfed by the number of whining, aggressive ultratrolls that have a specific desire that hasn't been met, and since they sunk a huge amount of time and energy into the game that they're entitled to have what they want, or have some kind of "insight" into the state of the game that other people don't have. They are self-proclaimed pros, and truly believe the garbage they spew. Just take a look at Asmongold (WoW youtuber) for a perfect example of the type of person I'm talking about.

I'm not a Civ 6 fanatic. But I love the game, and I don't think that the AI has nearly the amount of issues that some people insist it does, nor do I believe there is one or two glaring flaws in the AI. The problems are minor, and uncommon. I don't think the leaders are nearly are imbalanced as some people think, and I think that the music and general art direction is fine.
I'm also a very experienced gamer who enjoys a wide variety of games.

The most glaring problem with all the above-mentioned games are the people who play them.
That isn't to say any game is flawless, including Civ 6. But some of you are essentially calling Civ 6 a bad game when its literally a great game. And I can pull off a win of Diety ~50% of the time, so I'm not the best player here but I'm not just a newbie playing Settler.

You need to step back, find something else to do, and readjust your expectations and perspective.

Without taking a break, what most people do is invoke the "psychological switcheroo" as I call it: they'll claim that the normal people are the ones in the echo chamber, that the normal people are the ones with the hidden motives and that the vocal minority have exclusive insights and experiences that validate their negative opinions. It's a sickness that can go far beyond video games but can certainly start in a community devoted to one.

 

[oSiyeza]

I have to disagree here. Having different rules for the AI would make the game not understandable and overly complex. "Cheating" is in no way an acceptable path to patch an incapable AI.

Im sorry to tell you. Most of what you think are good AI in videogames, cheat. You just don't know it, because that is what good AIs do, hide their algorithms and pretend to be smart, not actually being smart.

Civ VI AI also cheats, but does it in the most lazy way posible, with flat bonus to stay competitive.

Now you may think, how the AI of civ should cheat? It deppends, this is one possible way. First it should know who is the human player. Why? Because the human player also knows this from the nature of the game. Then it should know roughly where the main forces of the enemy players are or its rough army composition. The additional info the ai could have can be as subtle as being able to know what cities close to its units are unprotected. Why? Because that is an infomation the human player can easily estimate or deduce. But the ai can only through imposibly complex fuzzy logic algorithms.

In other words, either you give the ai the inference power of the human brain to infer what the enemy is doing or you cheat and give the ai the information an human player can deduce.

The first solution is in practice imposible. Thus, when you restrict the ai capacity to only be able to use the information the interface provides directly to the player, and also do not give it complex reasoning deduction and induction capabilities to operate with that information, the ai will be almost by definition, stupid.

Fixs went a step beyond and did not bother to code all the game rules in the ai, much less the logic needed to take advantage of them. But even if it did, the ai of civ VI, was from the start doomed to fail.

Because the type of AI civ has, mostly a behavioral tree based on rules that can only use very limited information to enforce specific behaviors. It can never play with in any resemblance of intelligence the complete game.

And that is why making the AI play with the same rules an information the player has, is stupid in almost all cases. And the truth is, this has been very well known in videogame desig for decades.

Other really stupid mistake fxs made, was made all AIs identical except in really stupid ways. Instead of making some aggressive and expansionistic and prone to start wars, others rely on science.. and so on. They gave them just some minor diplomatic likings and dislikings, and really small differences in the prefference of buildings, starting positions and behavioral thresholds, so small that mean nothing. The other really stupid mistake fixs made was trying to make the AI predictable. This is really really stupid. AIs should never be as predictable as Fxs made them.

Too predictable and too similar from game to game and to each other, too stupid, not having enough information and not even having coded many rules of the game...

This is not incompetence, is negligence. Is designing one of the most important features of the game in the worst posible way. And doing it on purpose.

 

[DizzKneeLand33]

I'm not a Civ 6 fanatic.

But see, we are. It's in the name.

EDIT: Our games have always been great. We are just now working on how to make Civ 6 great. For those of us working on that, it's because we love the game, not because we hate it. People on the WoW boards play a game they hate with no hope for changing it other than through the developers, or in classic it's even worse since there aren't even *supposed* to be changes. We at least have modding, so we *can* make change.

 

[Heyesey]

I've noticed that the more a certain clique of people play a game, the more delusional they get.....

Well-known psychological effect. Only people who love a game greatly, will spend this much time critiquing it and saying how this, that and the other should be better. People who REALLY think "well this is a pile of hot garbage" uninstall it and play something else.

It's never hatred that drives those sort of comments, it's frustration. And you can't be frustrated with a game you don't hugely like.

 

[Bitterman]

Because the type of AI civ has, mostly a behavioral tree based on rules that can only use very limited information to enforce specific behaviors. It can never play with in any resemblance of intelligence the complete game.

Is there any AI in any game that is not a [disguised] behavioral tree? It's an honest question, not rethorical.

It is true that one cannot expect an "AI" (because behavioral trees are not AI's per se I think) to play even remotely close to a human, but they could've been way better than they are without adding bonuses. Something as simple as investing in army if a human player has more army than them and is close to them would do a lot already. Coding a behaviour militaristic template based on which civ the player has also (if the player has a warmonger civ, AI adopt a defense strategy, if player has a scientific one, AI's more prone to go aggressive etc...).

Also what you said about individual coding for every civ. Basic behaviour template for everyone and then a bit of coding for each one individually to enforce their strengths can't be so difficult. I mean, I'm not a game programmer, but I'm a CS and I've seen (and sometimes have done) some stupidly complex coding which wasn't so complex once it was working.

Add some subtle bonuses on top of that and you have an AI that, while possibly still worse than 90% of experienced playerbase, is a lot more competent and fun to play with.

 

[Heyesey]

Is there any AI in any game that is not a [disguised] behavioral tree? It's an honest question, not rethorical..

You can reasonably argue that the human intelligence is merely a behavioural tree, but it's complex beyond our current capability of understand and shows a lot of emergent properties. We can't do that to an AI yet.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Our games have always been great. We are just now working on how to make Civ 6 great. For those of us working on that, it's because we love the game, not because we hate it.

Honest question: Is Civ 6 not considered great only because of it's lack of modding capabilities? If Civ 4 or Civ 5 didn't have stellar mods would they even be consider great games in your opinion?

 

[Bitterman]

You can reasonably argue that the human intelligence is merely a behavioural tree, but it's complex beyond our current capability of understand and shows a lot of emergent properties. We can't do that to an AI yet.

It is not because humans are capable of dynamic information processing to learn from their environment and then adapt. That's a lot more complex than any behavioural tree and is what real AI's do (and one of the reasons those could be really dangerous to us).

 

[PiR]

Honest question: Is Civ 6 not considered great only because of it's lack of modding capabilities? If Civ 4 or Civ 5 didn't have stellar mods would they even be consider great games in your opinion?

Excellent point. 100% agree.

 

[DizzKneeLand33]

Honest question: Is Civ 6 not considered great only because of it's lack of modding capabilities? If Civ 4 or Civ 5 didn't have stellar mods would they even be consider great games in your opinion?

4 was a great game period, with and without mods. 5, well, an archer couldn't move and shoot in the same turn before mods, so I would say no, it was through mods that it achieved greatness.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Well-known psychological effect. Only people who love a game greatly, will spend this much time critiquing it and saying how this, that and the other should be better. People who REALLY think "well this is a pile of hot garbage" uninstall it and play something else.

It's never hatred that drives those sort of comments, it's frustration. And you can't be frustrated with a game you don't hugely like.

People take the time and effort to post criticism and point out flaws in the hope that these issues might get fixed, or encorporated into the next game.

Or a mod

If you truly hated it you’d just play something else

 

[Gedemon]

Honest question: Is Civ 6 not considered great only because of it's lack of modding capabilities? If Civ 4 or Civ 5 didn't have stellar mods would they even be consider great games in your opinion?

"great" is subjective in that case, but I found civ4 great without mods, I've never played one of the major overhaul like RFC or FFH, and could play it without mods at all.

I found civ5 great thanks to the modding capabilities, I needed mods to have fun playing it because I was not liking the new rules and their consequences (1UPT, AI trying to play like an human)

and finally civ6 is extremely frustrating, excellent potential, great stability on release, then stability going down, and modding capabilities staying only at the "potential to be the best ever" stage, finally not allowing modding of the core design unlike civ4 and civ5.

So yes and no, I mean I only consider civ5 great because of its modding capabilities, I consider civ4 great independently of its modding capabilities, and even with better modding capabilities, I would not consider civ6 great because of its current instabilities issues (on modded larger map sizes or with assets-heavy mods)

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

So yes and no, I mean I only consider civ5 great because of it's modding capabilities, I consider civ4 great independently of it's modding capabilities, and even with better modding capabilities, I would not consider civ6 great because of its current instabilities issues (on modded larger map sizes or with assets-heavy mods)

That's what I was wondering.
I've never played Civ 4 but I have played unmodded Civ 5 and found that game to not be as great and fun as Civ 6 is currently.

 

[Heyesey]

It is not because humans are capable of dynamic information processing to learn from their environment and then adapt.

By following a set of rules that process how to do exactly that. It's but one of many emergent properties. If you write down the (incredibly complex) set of rules we're following, you'd have a behaviour tree.

 

[PiR]

I've never played one of the major overhaul like RFC or FFH

By playing them, it's not "great" anymore, it's one level above at least

 

[Kupe Navigator]

4 was a great game period, with and without mods.

Yeah.... with korean leader who looks Chinese AND lives in a palace that is built by a guy who massacred his descendants.

 

[Aristos]

The most glaring problem with all the above-mentioned games are the people who play them.

I agree completely.

Well-known psychological effect. Only people who love a game greatly, will spend this much time critiquing it and saying how this, that and the other should be better. People who REALLY think "well this is a pile of hot garbage" uninstall it and play something else.

It's never hatred that drives those sort of comments, it's frustration. And you can't be frustrated with a game you don't hugely like.

THIS a thousand times. It is so obvious, that it's hard to understand why some people don't understand it.