[GS] Civ V v Civ VI: how is this still a thing?

[tiamats4esgares]

The religion is so annoying in Civ VI. I don't care if 2 other civs are fighting over the religion of my cities, especially if neither one even lets me build a building with faith. I have to watch the fights EVERY turn and it's both boring and exhausting. One of the major flaws of VI I forgot to mention.

 

[criZp]

You... you ARE playing with fast movement and fast combat, right??

 

[ShakaKhan]

Erm...as someone who has spent a large amount of time actually playing both games we are comparing here, I disagree. Civ V and VI may look similar on the surface, but they sure play quite differently. I also don't agree with the assertion that almost all mechanics from Civ V have been included and improved. Off the top of my head, I can list a number of things I liked better in Civ V. In no particular order:

• Religion
• The World Congress
• Social Policies
• Ideologies
• Tall cities actually producing much more than small ones
• Diplomacy
• Interaction between systems (cultural dominance actually affects other systems, for example)
• The visual style
• Roads and railroads, both how you make them and what they do
• Terrain improvement being better than chopping

That is not to say that everybody will agree with me on these, but you are incorrect in asserting that everything is simply improved in Civ VI. These things work differently, and people will have different preferences. I am also not saying that I necessarily like V more than VI at this point...it was true in the beginning, but after the last expansion, I'm having a harder time deciding. These are some examples of things I like more in Civ VI:

• The overall design of the different civs
• Great people
• Wide playstyle being viable (although they went too far in this direction)
• City state variety
• Governments
• More involved city planning

I have played both games for about 2000 hours, according to Steam.

Agree and disagree. Also as one who has spent a great deal of time with both games and one who flips between the two now, I'd agree with the assessment that "many of the elements are borrowed from civ5 and just improved on" isn't at all accurate. Agree that I have some preferences of the old version over the new. And yes, things like social policies to government cards, and permanent bonuses against temporary ones that can be slotted in and out... how great people function... these and others are not the same thing and don't play the same. Agree with all that.

But although they play different, they still serve the same role in the game. Great people may do different things now, but they still fill the same role-playing element of that part of the civilization even if we're now utilizing them differently. We now have an apple instead of an orange, but it still fills the fruit portion of this meal.

For me, the real difference between the two games and what makes me choose this one over the other today, and as this came up in multiple of your bullets so maybe you agree, is tall vs. wide play. Now I don't want to bring up the multiple-era forum civil war of tall vs. wide in Civ5, but the fact is between having buildings (libraries/public schools) add additional points for every 2 pop points in a city, along with the other buildings (universities/research labs) providing a percentage bonus instead of a flat bonus, and that percentage bonus applies to the per-pop bonus of the other two buildings, these mean that using your limited happiness points to support fewer, taller cities is more efficient than having more but shorter cities. That combined with the high cost of expansion in Civ5, both towards the hit on your happiness pool coupled with increased tech cost based on number of cities, further adds to the efficiency of being fewer and taller instead of wider and shorter. And the list goes on - ease of satisfying conditions for powerful national wonders, smaller border area to defend, and so on... So not saying that wide isn't possible or that it's bad in CIv5, just that tall and narrow is DEFINITELY a viable approach. Civ6, however, where each city can only have one of each type of district and there's only so much you can do with each one, and the cumulative output of each specialty district for its corresponding victory condition greatly effects your progress towards that victory condition, means that having more of that type of district greatly increases the total output of the districts of that type. So not to say that tall/narrow isn't an option in Civ6, just that having a whoooole lotta size 4 cities is VERY viable.

And along with each of those playstyles comes different ways you have to manage them. So to sum it up, if I want to play a game and only have to micromanage a number of cities that I can count on one hand, I play civ5. If I want to play (and role-play) controlling a vast empire that stretches from sea to sea, producing huge quantities of all yields, and at the cost of having a micromanagement nightmare or simply allowing the game to automanage that element for me, I play civ6.

 

[KayAU]

I do generally agree on tall versus wide, and I like tall for much the same reasons that you do. Here's the thing: the early game in civ is brilliant. You are making plans and decisions which are interesting and important, you have a limited number of distractions and turns progress quickly. The problem is when you reach the late game, and you are managing a large number of cities, making the same kinds of decisions you were in the early game, only there are a lot more of them, and they each barely matter. I find this very, very boring. In Civ 5, I could mitigate it by going tall, which would leave me with a lot less late game micromanagement. It also helped that Civ 5 provided me with some other things to focus on in the late game, such as managing ideology, cooperative projects, and the world congress. I have seen the complaint that you would often just be hitting "End Turn" over and over, but really, I prefer having turns with nothing to do to having turns with a bunch of chores to do.

Having said that, I do agree with many who feel that the mechanisms for tall play in Civ 5 were imperfect, too rigid, and penalizing expansion way more than it should. The pendulum swung back way too far in the opposite direction with Civ 6, though.

 

[iammaxhailme]

Unpopular opinion: I think wide in civ 5 balances tall vs wide better than 6. Wide isn't optimal in 5, but it can work. Tall in 6 just sucks and 6 really pushes you to spam as many crappy cities as you can.

 

[criZp]

they are not supposed to be balanced. you are supposed to be doing both, building up your established cities while also settling new lands. I don't understand why people think you're only allowed to do one of the two.

 

[universecreep]

There will always be comparisons. Civ III was similar to IV but VI expanded the gameplay a lot.

Civ VI is similar to V and built upon those concepts. I personally prefer V as I feel the gameplay is better refined and pretty much every concept I find enjoyable. In VI, I'm not a fan of how religion or the world congress work. They were more enjoyable in V.

That being said, some will prefer VI. Not a big deal.

 

[ShakaKhan]

Unpopular opinion: I think wide in civ 5 balances tall vs wide better than 6. Wide isn't optimal in 5, but it can work. Tall in 6 just sucks and 6 really pushes you to spam as many crappy cities as you can.

I don't think this opinion is unpopular, in fact I more than partially agree with it. As for tall in civ6 sucks, I agree and think there's a pretty obvious solution based on another problem that we already have with the game mechanics: 2nd and 3rd (and I propose additionally 4th) tier buildings. The first tier buildings are cheap and cost effective. They double the GPP output of that district (1 becomes 2,) And if map-luck doesn't give you a premium spot for good adjacency bonus to the district, the building provides at least a solid flat per turn generation (looking at you, theater squares.) Some also unlock additional powerful game elements, most notably first tier CH and HB buildings giving an additional TR slot. And yes, while I'm generalizing "districts," I'm talking mostly about the campus, CH, and HB. 2nd, and especially 3rd tier buildings, come later (and respectively MUCH later) so there's fewer turns for returns on the investment of having them, and they don't add much of a bonus other than a flat +5/+7 to the yield. Third tier buildings aren't even supplemented with CS or GP bonuses. And they're so expensive with less time to get returns on them. And there's less of a percentage increase in the GPP generation (where a library in a campus increases from 1 to 2, doubling it, a university brings it from 2 to 3, so only a 50% increase.) So as it stands, the cost of making 2nd and 3rd tier buildings isn't as good of an investment as the cost of settling another city and getting a campus and library in it.

Instead, I propose that the 2nd tier building should be something that greatly increases the city's capacity for population, something along the lines of needing one amenity for 3 pop instead of 2 for one type of district's 2nd tier building (campus or theater square, but mutually exclusive) while a different district's 2nd tier building (CH or HB or IZ, but again mutually exclusive) allow 1 housing to support 1.5 citizens. These second tier buildings should remain as expensive as they are, so that a tall narrow empire can justify the expense of the three or four of them needed to have one in every city and really cash in on how much taller the cities can get, but a wide and short empire can't justify having them in all cities. Additionally, perhaps the 2nd tier building provides a slight modifier to the adjacency bonus of the district so that the wider empire may want to invest in the one or two of them that have that optimal placement and disregard them elsewhere.

And 3rd tier buildings should give a per-citizen (or 1 for every 2, or 1 for every 3, whatever works best for balance) bonus to the district's primary yield.This could really bring the balance of tall vs. wide.

Finally, a 4th tier building provides a percentage modifier to the city's output of that respective yield, including tile bonuses, the adjacency bonus, the flat bonus of the 1st tier building. the enhancement on the adjacency bonus from 2nd tier building, and the per-citizen bonus of the 3rd tier building.

If this were the case, you have the option of either having a tall/narrow empire that's easily defensible that turtles until it can unlock and cash in in a huge way on having very few but very advanced districts, or you could have a wider and shorter empire that can't benefit from these high per-pop and percentage bonuses, but doesn't need to due to the vast accumulation of nickel-and-diming from egregious amounts of lowly developed districts. Now you can go tall, or you could go wide, or as we at the forums do, find the ultimate sweet spot inbetween.

 

[MrRadar]

Unpopular opinion: I think wide in civ 5 balances tall vs wide better than 6. Wide isn't optimal in 5, but it can work. Tall in 6 just sucks and 6 really pushes you to spam as many crappy cities as you can.

Civ5 BNW does no such balance, the "balance" lever is jacked all the way up to the "tall" mark and is as good as jammed into that position. Wide can work in 5? Maybe it can. On an exceptionally good day. But it will cost you ten times the effort to achieve roughly the same that you could do anyway, but with just ~4 cities in the same situation, so why even bother.

To rephrase your following thought, expansion in Civ5 just sucks, and Civ5 really pushes you to be as lazy as possible. Minimal effort is the best way to play in almost every situation. Even if there's plenty of free land, you're strongly discouraged from expansion. Civ5 has Terra map script. But it is completely pointless. At the time when you discover New World, there's next to no reason to go and settle there, because you'll be shooting yourself in both feet by doing so.

I'm glad that Civ6 allows you to expand freely again, and I do not want to see any of that Civ5 style artificial punishment for expansion returning.

That being said, I do agree that there's plenty of room to rethink how districts, and first of all, higher tier buildings work in Civ 6.
Why not to make universities and science labs to have zone effect and raise science per pop rather than giving just flat science? Pingala's Researcher promotion could then allow stacking of overlapping zones, like Magnus for industry. Something similar with banks and stock exchanges and Reyna, but this would also involve a shakeup of how gold is generated in the game. 2nd tier buildings could also have smaller effect zone - 3-4 tiles.

 

[Equilin]

Civ5 BNW does no such balance, the "balance" lever is jacked all the way up to the "tall" mark and is as good as jammed into that position. Wide can work in 5? Maybe it can. On an exceptionally good day. But it will cost you ten times the effort to achieve roughly the same that you could do anyway, but with just ~4 cities in the same situation, so why even bother.

To rephrase your following thought, expansion in Civ5 just sucks, and Civ5 really pushes you to be as lazy as possible. Minimal effort is the best way to play in almost every situation. Even if there's plenty of free land, you're strongly discouraged from expansion.

I'm glad that Civ6 allows you to expand freely again, and I do not want to see any of that Civ5 style artificial punishment for expansion returning.

You clearly haven't played Civ5 enough to unbox strategies lol. The only real limiting factor to expansion in 5 is happiness, as you can get more science/culture than what you are penalized for in their respective fields. With enough happiness 10 city is almost always better than 7 than 4.

 

[acluewithout]

... I have some preferences of the old version over the new. And yes, things like social policies to government cards...

This quote want the focus of your post, so apologies if I’m taking things out of context. But I don’t think Civ 6’s Civics Tree / Govs / Policies are actually a new or swapped out version of Civ 5’s Social Policies.

Yes, there’s some similarities, like they both run off culture yields and share certain names. But Civ 5’s Policies were a levelling up Mechanic - almost like character classes in an RPG. Civ 6’s Civics Tree is fundamentally an expansion of the tech tree, and Govs and Policies are an actual government system.

Indeed, I think one of the weaknesses in Civ 5’s rules is that it really didn’t have any system for representing governments because of the decision to focus only on the Social Policy system.

I think the Civ 6 equivalent of Social Policies is more like Governors, but of course these are limited to City Wide effects rather than Empire Wide.

The problem is when you reach the late game, and you are managing a large number of cities, making the same kinds of decisions you were in the early game, only there are a lot more of them, and they each barely matter. I find this very, very boring. [1] In Civ 5, I could mitigate it by going tall, which would leave me with a lot less late game micromanagement. It also helped that [2] Civ 5 provided me with some other things to focus on in the late game, such as managing ideology, cooperative projects, and the world congress. I have seen the complaint that you would often just be hitting "End Turn" over and over, but really, I prefer having turns with nothing to do to having turns with a bunch of chores to do.

I think [1] is over stated, particularly now we have production queues. With Civ 6, you can basically have just four awesome do everything Cities. If you also have lots of extra Cities, you really only need one or two districts in them, and you can then just focus them on projects and forget about them. There really doesn’t need to be that much micro late game, unless you’re playing super efficiently (in which case, keep moving Magnus and Chop Chop Chop! ... or whatever the meta is now.)

Point [2] is spot on, and when combined with the passivity of the AI is really really boring. The late game is better, but there is definitely something missing still.

 

[ShakaKhan]

This quote want the focus of your post, so apologies if I’m taking things out of context. But I don’t think Civ 6’s Civics Tree / Govs / Policies are actually a new or swapped out version of Civ 5’s Social Policies.

That's pretty much it - out of context. Was saying that they're different in application but serve the same purpose in role-playing perspective - they're what you're government is doing for you. We're debating the same side of the coin. po-tay-to/po-tah-to

 

[_ViKinG_]

The religion layer is annoying in vi. Can't se anything. The whole religion system is boring anyway

 

[acluewithout]

...Was saying that they're different in application but serve the same purpose in role-playing perspective - they're what you're government is doing for you. ...

Yes, but I’m saying they are both different in application and different from a roleplaying perspective.

To me, Social Policies represent more the development of your empire’s culture, with each policy representing something like long term “cultural traits” or maybe “social institutions”. Civ 6’s Governments and Policies represent more your current government and what its current policy objectives are.

Social Policies are permanent choices because you really can’t change established cultural traits (or not easily). In contrast, Governments and Policies can be changed, because they only ever represent what you’re doing right now.

Put another way, I don’t think Civ 5 actually has a system (mechanical or roleplaying) that really represents governments and policies, and I think that is a real weakness of the game. Civ 6 does of course have a real government and policy system, but also has some mechanics that sort of represent long term cultural traits, eg Governors, Gov Plaza and buildings, and Civics tree sort of (particularly some leaf techs), but only very weakly.

Personally, I think what Civ 6 is missing is a better system for representing the acquisition of long term cultural traits and which gives you the feeling of “leveling up” your empire. (Indeed, you can see Humankind is also trying to include mechanics like this with its option to choose different cultures each Era.) I think a Mechanic like that, perhaps even modelled on Civ 5’s Social Policies, would get players more invested in the late game because their Civ would feel more like their own.

 

[zenmaster]

Civ5 BNW does no such balance, the "balance" lever is jacked all the way up to the "tall" mark and is as good as jammed into that position. Wide can work in 5? Maybe it can. On an exceptionally good day. But it will cost you ten times the effort to achieve roughly the same that you could do anyway, but with just ~4 cities in the same situation, so why even bother.

To rephrase your following thought, expansion in Civ5 just sucks, and Civ5 really pushes you to be as lazy as possible. Minimal effort is the best way to play in almost every situation. Even if there's plenty of free land, you're strongly discouraged from expansion. Civ5 has Terra map script. But it is completely pointless. At the time when you discover New World, there's next to no reason to go and settle there, because you'll be shooting yourself in both feet by doing so.

I'm glad that Civ6 allows you to expand freely again, and I do not want to see any of that Civ5 style artificial punishment for expansion returning.

That being said, I do agree that there's plenty of room to rethink how districts, and first of all, higher tier buildings work in Civ 6.
Why not to make universities and science labs to have zone effect and raise science per pop rather than giving just flat science? Pingala's Researcher promotion could then allow stacking of overlapping zones, like Magnus for industry. Something similar with banks and stock exchanges and Reyna, but this would also involve a shakeup of how gold is generated in the game. 2nd tier buildings could also have smaller effect zone - 3-4 tiles.

As another poster mentioned, the above take is totally untrue if you have much experience with Civ 5. The 4 city tall strategy gets beaten easily by wider strategies many times. Going wide has lots of advantages in Civ 5 and the best Hall of Fame games these days involve going as wide as possible. There are creative ways to get there too- getting city-state alliances, and/or happiness religious beliefs, and/or social policies, and/or trading/extorting luxuries with the AI civs. Difficulty levels have real gameplay differences and allow you to find your sweet spot. Every game is different and makes you adjust to the current world-state if you are playing wisely.

 

[James_Champagne]

Recently I've been playing Civ V for the first time in awhile (Civ V was actually my introduction to the Civ series and I used to play it a lot, but once I started getting into VI I kind of lost a bit of interest in V).

Granted there are things I do like in V a lot: I like having more direct control when it comes to making roads. I like those screens that would pop up every now and then giving top ten lists of who was leading in such & such category. I REALLY love the demographics screen that pops up when you hit F9, and wish that Civ Vi hadn't done away with that (I like seeing, for example, just exactly what the total population of my civilization is). I also like the dramatic-looking art screens that pop up whenever your civ enters a new age.

But it seems a bit simplistic and overtly streamlined to me now, not just in game play mechanics but also presentation: in terms of music alone Civ VI seems vastly superior, and I find myself enjoying the graphic style of the map in Civ VI more, though of course, this is just a matter of taste and I can see why some would prefer the more Art Deco style of V (for the record, though I think Civ VI has better music as a whole, I think V has a superior title screen song). There's a lot of stuff VI has that I find myself missing as I play V, such as how if your civ is the first to find a desert, river, ocean or mountain range, it gets to assign a name to it: that might seem like a minor detail to some but to me it's big. The cities in VI seem to have more of a feel as well, and I like how the World Wonders now get their own tiles rather than just a tiny graphic on the city tiles that V had... again, this might not seem like a big deal, but it can add to the atmosphere: I remember one game I was playing once where I was at war with Japan and I was invading one of their cities and a big battle took place on a tile holding the Coliseum, which Japan had built: you can picture such a battle more dramatically in your mind's eye as it's unfolding and this gave it a bit of scope, I suppose.

Also, Civ V has some elements that irritate me, such as the global happiness mechanic (thank god THAT was done away with)... and I know a lot of people like to moan about the dumb AI in Civ VI but playing V again makes it seem like a MENSA candidate. Seriously I've been seeing so many stupid and totally pointless wars that the AI is waging in the game of V I'm playing now, it's mind-boggling. And some of their actions just make no sense. Like I was neighbors with Egypt and pretty much left them alone, but they kept stupidly declaring wars on me for no good reason, despite the fact I would often trade with them, help them out in other matters, and so on. At one point I even liberated one of their cities from the Chinese. Naturally, they declared war on me yet again a few turns later, despite this and the fact my army vastly outnumbered theirs. That's when I decided to just say screw it and wipe them off the map.

 

[Victoria]

Just lately I have been seeing a lot more intelligence from the AI. Sure silly mistakes can be made but the AI is now starting to point out that I make them too.
AI targeting has become less simplistic and even the barbs can be quite wily.

 

[Sostratus]

I played a lot of civ4, but only just started to really master it when civ5 came out. I liked civ5 a lot. I think civ6 is a lot better as a whole product. The only game mechanical things I really miss are:
1) You really had to be careful because you could easily grow beyond your ability to support such an empire (either through pop growth or settling.)
2) Gold was scarce and this created problems to solve. (Trade routes, unit upkeep.)
These are more to the flavor of balance and designer intention rather than actual shortcomings of design.
And as a point of personal preference, I liked the more filled out trees of unit upgrades, even though some of the timings weren't quite right (like longswordsmen or great war infantry.)
But if you compare the same civ in both games, the civ6 versions often just blow 5's out of the water. Inca and germany both have the same driving concepts between 5 and 6 but I cannot praise the ingenuity of the civ6 designs enough.

 

[Disgustipated]

Just lately I have been seeing a lot more intelligence from the AI.

Just yesterday I could not goad the AI into a narrow channel between mountains, they were the ones trying to goad me, and I had to back off. I ended up having to find a long way around the mountains since their 2 crosswbowman were too much for me to endure the fire and then take them out. Maybe it was because I was on the offense trying to take cities, but the AI just would not follow me through that pass. This map has been a huge challenge for me in my Chandragupta game. I ended up having to back off the Mapuche because of narrow mountain passes when I saw their Malon raiders show up.

 

[agonistes]

The difference is in V they actually hid there negative agenda through pretending to be your friend (when they were actively thinking of backstabbing you). In VI, if they have a smiley face but won't accept friendship it's just because you haven't accrued enough points yet for the "DiplomaticStateTransition" to take place and has nothing to do with trying to fool the human.

If they continue to not accept, they are debating a future attack.

A nice first step in fixing diplomacy would be removing the relationship transparency, and making it possible for the ai to dow if they are declared friends.