eduhum
Aahh the gold old days...
It feels strange to be back home in this forum after so many years. Anyways.
I don't like at all how the game looks. The suburban sprawl aesthetics kills most hype i had. I'll explain why but first i'd like to compare the negative with the positive, so here are imo the coolest things i've seen in the reveal:
-Diplomacy has been probably finally fixed for good. This aspect of the game will be a less surreal experience than any other previous game in the saga.
-Eliminating workers was a great call.
-Grouping marching armies is an ingenious solution that lets 1 unit per tile still exist but with less micro.
-The visuals and art style have been appraised by most people, being a correct mix between civ5 and civ6. Still colorful but not as goofy. It looks very sanitized in general, like most cultural productions nowadays.
As for leaders being swappable with civs, imho it's the consequence of wanting to avoid polemics in the community in respect to which leader should represent each civ; and also gender issues. The current system permits more freedom in creating new and unconventional leaders.
I'm open to the eras mechanic. However, mixing prehistory, classical era and middle ages into one era is a mistake. There should have been 4 eras in total (antiquity, castle, exploration and modern) instead of 3.
My biggest dissapointment, however, is in the decision to go in the direction of humankind, when they should have done the opposite. There are a handful of problems with this gameplay that consists in carpeting the visible map with city tiles.
1: The game loses scope, grandeur, epicness. You're not looking at vast expanses of jungles and mountains with a few small cities in between, like in civ4. You end up looking at houses most of the time.
2: The rural-urban divide is blurred and not visible enough. An ideal map aesthetic would display a ratio of 10 farms/towns per 1 city tile and a ratio of 2 nature tiles vs 1 civilized tile (for most of the early game at least).
3: It seems as the dev team, and many people, living in urban or suburban areas, and american urban spaces, tend to miss out on how truly big proportions and distances are on rural areas vs urban areas. The true allure and vibeset from a game like civilization should resemble much more like a landscape of hundreds of mini tiles creating plateaus, hills, river basins, with many small rivers. The current aesthetic is that of a flatland with single big mountains randomly plonking our of the ground, and a few rivers traversing the land in a bland and directionless fashion.
4: In general the game looks too boardgamey. My hope is that civ6's districts would be considered a one-time gimmick and that 1 tile per city would return (at least until the industrial revolution), but the dev team has doubled down on the multi-tile idea, proposing adjacency bonuses puzzle games that many people do not have the patience to pursue. On the other hand, the aesthetic of tiny towns over big landscapes like in rome total war or other TW games (and most advanced in the game Nobunaga's ambition) feels much more mysterious and immersive than the current aesthetic, which looks as i said is too boardgamey, in my opinion.
5: Giant looking sprawl cities deny indirectly the opportunity for sub-agents to appear. If you take a 7x7 grid and make it a single city with multiple suburbs instead of a 1 tile city and 48 tiles of more rural gameplay elements visually spaced out, you miss the opportunity of creating provincial cities and towns, tribal lands, vassals, castles, subfactions that can rebel, and many other avenues of gameplay direction. In civ7, the world map scenario will feature places like Madrid extending over half the peninsula, or London over all of the british isle, which will probably looks pretty ridiculous and uninspiring.
6: The current game is actually less gameplay capable than other previous games, namely civ4, which remains unsurpassed. Civ4 was one the last big games to thrive before the steam era, and had an giant, trendsetting mod community at a time where steam workshop didn't exist. The vanilla game's giant map was a 12080 tileset, but with the help of some mods, you could make 240160 iirc tilesets that gave you extremely epic maps that could encompass over 500-1000 cities in total (with 18 civs maximum) depending on the map style. This kind of epic horizontal gameplay is not incentivized anymore with the gameplay focus being on city management. Even if there are no direct caps or disincentives to play wide like in Civ5, the level of visual prominence and gameplay elements for each city will focus gameplay on urban issues, not on a more empire wide holistic experience of management.
I hope that Civ8 fixes this when it releases in 2031 /s
I don't like at all how the game looks. The suburban sprawl aesthetics kills most hype i had. I'll explain why but first i'd like to compare the negative with the positive, so here are imo the coolest things i've seen in the reveal:
-Diplomacy has been probably finally fixed for good. This aspect of the game will be a less surreal experience than any other previous game in the saga.
-Eliminating workers was a great call.
-Grouping marching armies is an ingenious solution that lets 1 unit per tile still exist but with less micro.
-The visuals and art style have been appraised by most people, being a correct mix between civ5 and civ6. Still colorful but not as goofy. It looks very sanitized in general, like most cultural productions nowadays.
As for leaders being swappable with civs, imho it's the consequence of wanting to avoid polemics in the community in respect to which leader should represent each civ; and also gender issues. The current system permits more freedom in creating new and unconventional leaders.
I'm open to the eras mechanic. However, mixing prehistory, classical era and middle ages into one era is a mistake. There should have been 4 eras in total (antiquity, castle, exploration and modern) instead of 3.
My biggest dissapointment, however, is in the decision to go in the direction of humankind, when they should have done the opposite. There are a handful of problems with this gameplay that consists in carpeting the visible map with city tiles.
1: The game loses scope, grandeur, epicness. You're not looking at vast expanses of jungles and mountains with a few small cities in between, like in civ4. You end up looking at houses most of the time.
2: The rural-urban divide is blurred and not visible enough. An ideal map aesthetic would display a ratio of 10 farms/towns per 1 city tile and a ratio of 2 nature tiles vs 1 civilized tile (for most of the early game at least).
3: It seems as the dev team, and many people, living in urban or suburban areas, and american urban spaces, tend to miss out on how truly big proportions and distances are on rural areas vs urban areas. The true allure and vibeset from a game like civilization should resemble much more like a landscape of hundreds of mini tiles creating plateaus, hills, river basins, with many small rivers. The current aesthetic is that of a flatland with single big mountains randomly plonking our of the ground, and a few rivers traversing the land in a bland and directionless fashion.
4: In general the game looks too boardgamey. My hope is that civ6's districts would be considered a one-time gimmick and that 1 tile per city would return (at least until the industrial revolution), but the dev team has doubled down on the multi-tile idea, proposing adjacency bonuses puzzle games that many people do not have the patience to pursue. On the other hand, the aesthetic of tiny towns over big landscapes like in rome total war or other TW games (and most advanced in the game Nobunaga's ambition) feels much more mysterious and immersive than the current aesthetic, which looks as i said is too boardgamey, in my opinion.
5: Giant looking sprawl cities deny indirectly the opportunity for sub-agents to appear. If you take a 7x7 grid and make it a single city with multiple suburbs instead of a 1 tile city and 48 tiles of more rural gameplay elements visually spaced out, you miss the opportunity of creating provincial cities and towns, tribal lands, vassals, castles, subfactions that can rebel, and many other avenues of gameplay direction. In civ7, the world map scenario will feature places like Madrid extending over half the peninsula, or London over all of the british isle, which will probably looks pretty ridiculous and uninspiring.
6: The current game is actually less gameplay capable than other previous games, namely civ4, which remains unsurpassed. Civ4 was one the last big games to thrive before the steam era, and had an giant, trendsetting mod community at a time where steam workshop didn't exist. The vanilla game's giant map was a 12080 tileset, but with the help of some mods, you could make 240160 iirc tilesets that gave you extremely epic maps that could encompass over 500-1000 cities in total (with 18 civs maximum) depending on the map style. This kind of epic horizontal gameplay is not incentivized anymore with the gameplay focus being on city management. Even if there are no direct caps or disincentives to play wide like in Civ5, the level of visual prominence and gameplay elements for each city will focus gameplay on urban issues, not on a more empire wide holistic experience of management.
I hope that Civ8 fixes this when it releases in 2031 /s
