Civ VI Civs - Failing in Uniqueness

[bdp612]

This has become a hot topic as new Civs are revealed for the R&F expansion, but it has been an issue for me since the initial release. I have always felt that this collection of Civs is lacking in unique approaches to game play / unique advantages. Lacking in...flavor.

(Disclaimer: my views on Civ design might be more extreme than most. Excited to see who agrees / disagrees and why.)

There are some big, awesome exceptions in my eyes. Australia, Indonesia, Arabia. Civs that encourage different approaches, that give you an advantage that other Civs don't have (ideally, in my opinion, this advantage should not be specific to just one win type).

The problem is that for every Indonesia there are like three Americas (zzzz). What happened to my Inca, who could dance freely along the hills with no movement penalties? And Isabella, whose entire advantage was dependent on the luck of finding a wonder? I want extreme differences between each Civ, even if they aren't perfectly balanced. I would play as America if each one of its government card slots were converted to a wildcard for the whole game. I would play as Egypt if they had an insane, non-era based wonder production boost (as it once was), granting me a real shot at certain wonders even on Deity. I even miss the Iroquois' weird ability from Civ V to connect cities via forest tiles! I had fun trying to make them work even though they were baaaad. Right now there are just way too many Civs that I don't want to play as.

The key word, if I'm remembering my game design principles, is asynchronous game play, and though this could cause balance issues among the Civs, I think you could adjust for this by giving Civs some unique disadvantages as well (when appropriate).

Firaxis said recently that they are not afraid to go back and make changes to past Civs, and that got me excited -- that we might end up with a higher percentage of fun Civs. Alas, the changes are just small tweaks, and the new Civs are falling into the same patterns. I think we are all a little tired of adjacency bonuses, unique units with combat bonuses (but that don't do anything actually unique), and cassus belli advantages which require us to depend on or exploit a currently weird diplomacy system. I see so much more potential.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts. Maybe I'll make a mod someday.

P.S. Firaxis, I love you.

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

I've yet to see objective evidence that Firaxis can provide consistently unique gameplay or faction balance, least of all both

I play this game occasionally for the feel, for the thrill of carving out an early civilisation, but I’ve learned not to expect more than a macro-builder game with a worldly flavour. Interaction is not their forte

 

[criZp]

What I don't get is people wanting civs that give them an easy time on deity difficulty. Like, the whole point of that difficulty is for the game to be as challenging as possible. But no, "I want to spam wonders on that difficulty too"...

My problem with the civ 6 civs is that too many focus on faith generation, which I don't give a damn about becasue religion play involves way too much micro managing.

 

[Phrozen]

Scotland certainly looks to have a unique style of game play. Looking at amenities to boost your production and science rather than just have amenities be something that you have to have to keep your cities growing.

 

[Wingednosering]

I was considering starting the same thread. There's been a lot of discussion about the design of the new R&F civs and how fun or boring the designs are.

I personally liked the CivV method better (a few really big bonuses that changed up gameplay). We need to remember though, that there were a TON of civs in that game and we usually only remember a few. A lot of them were pretty unremarkable, especially in the vanilla version.

Civ VI seems to opt for tons of small bonuses that often fall into stat increases over unique abilities. Ten small number boosts is worse than 3 really interesting ones to me. What I'm noticing in VI is that each civ has at least one cool bonus, but usually the one interesting one is accompanied by three boring ones. Or the new 'cool' ability suddenly becomes a game mechanic for everybody.

Dutch: Polders are cool. The rest is boring.
Mongols: Espionage combat bonuses seemed really cool...then it turned out it wasn't unique at all.
Korea: Seowon is super strong in the early game. It has an adjancency mini-game tied to it. Awesome. The rest of the civ is lackluster.


The Cree and Scottish actually look really well designed to me. Scotland still suffers from one crap bonus though (LUA).

The whole 'X turns of Y after specific war declaration' needs to stop. These are situational, abusable and nobody actually likes them. I don't know why so many of these boosts are happening.

 

[Lord Lakely]

On the other end of the spectrum, this expansion brought us 7 new leaders to the franchise and four new civilizations altogether.

The abilities are kind of insipid though.

 

[Morningcalm]

Too much of the game has been occupied with giving civs slight resource bonuses under very specific circumstances. While I whined at length about Civ V civs being too many one-trick ponies, I feel Civ VI goes the other way.

Who among you can off the top of your head name any civ's full bonuses including stats (other than Greece)?

Civs need to play with unique mechanics more instead of copying each other's "+X if next to a bonus resource" improvement stuff, or the numerous slightly different casus belli bonuses (Cyrus, Robert the Bruce, Chandragupta), or culture bombs (Poland, Australia, Khmer).

 

[bbbt]

Civ 5 had maybe 10 unique gameplay Civs, the rest of them were basically stat boosters. Civ 4 was of course explicitly just some stat boosters set out iin different combos.

And 6 now has two unique abilities for each civ (leader plus civ) plus unique abilities for each CS plus unique abilities for each great person, so they have a lot more options to generate and the combinations leads theoretically to more unique play throughs overall. And the more uniques, the harder it is to balance (though with moddable multiplayer that's more easily taken care of)

So while I don't disagree in theory - I'd love bespoke abilities per civ and less repetition of the same mechanics - I can see why they've been a little more limited in practice with the leader/civ bonuses (though I would agree some of the modders have come up with some cool -if frequently OP - approaches)

 

[bdp612]

What I don't get is people wanting civs that give them an easy time on deity difficulty. Like, the whole point of that difficulty is for the game to be as challenging as possible. But no, "I want to spam wonders on that difficulty too"...

Well I'm just talking about one idea for one Civ. I bring up Deity (and play on Deity) because I want the game to be challenging, but my interesting choices become limited as a result, and many of the current Civ boosts are too modest to affect my choices in fun ways. I'm advocating for play styles to feel different, not for the game to feel easier.

Great points being brought up by many about the differences with Civ V. I use examples from Civ V to highlight what I want but it's true -- V had a lot of boring Civs too.

As Morningcalm states, one thing that I think is limiting Firaxis' Civ design is that they don't touch enough unique mechanics. They all kind of feel like different balances on the same things. They could play more with eras -- give France a unique Napoleonic age. Unique governors would be fantastic too, and a way to get other Civ-specific historical icons into the game. Any other ideas?

 

[clapyourhands]

Something that I think might be interesting would be a Civilization mod that introduced a balance philosophy like that of Brawl Minus. The concept was to take a game with many unique characters, like Super Smash Bros Brawl, of unfortunately varying power and usefulness, and make each of them so disgustingly broken and overpowered that they would individually eclipse every other character on the roster. Except if every character is so broken it's laughable, then suddenly they're all on a similar playing field, except with very distinct mechanics because of all the things you can do with the extra strength to fulfill gameplay fantasies with. While Minus takes the concept to the extreme, I think a moderate version could prove to be useful. If each civilization ability was on average twice as strong as it is now, it would give more room to try new things. Say if Egypt had an absolutely ludicrous wonder bonus that's much stronger than its current one, every other civ now has more "room" for improvement to do something more unique on top of what it does now.

 

[bdp612]

Something that I think might be interesting would be a Civilization mod that introduced a balance philosophy like that of Brawl Minus. The concept was to take a game with many unique characters, like Super Smash Bros Brawl, of unfortunately varying power and usefulness, and make each of them so disgustingly broken and overpowered that they would individually eclipse every other character on the roster. Except if every character is so broken it's laughable, then suddenly they're all on a similar playing field, except with very distinct mechanics because of all the things you can do with the extra strength to fulfill gameplay fantasies with. While Minus takes the concept to the extreme, I think a moderate version could prove to be useful. If each civilization ability was on average twice as strong as it is now, it would give more room to try new things. Say if Egypt had an absolutely ludicrous wonder bonus that's much stronger than its current one, every other civ now has more "room" for improvement to do something more unique on top of what it does now.

YES, this is a fun and succinct way of describing what I'm talking about. In my view, not to the extreme of like, no one should even try to build a wonder if Egypt is in the game. But personally I'm comfortable with them having a clear advantage as long as my Civ has a unique and fun advantage too.

 

[Jewelrunna]

There are now too many Civs that have leader abilities that revolve around war declaration. Also the influx of Civs that have culture bombs is pretty annoying. It was fine when Australia & Poland were the only two, but now with the Khmer and the Netherlands, that niche is getting way too widespread to be interesting. (I'll let the Cree slide on this one because the way they get territory is actually unique & more interesting than just "build thing, get land.")

 

[UWHabs]

It's always the challenge of making civs unique enough to stand out, but yet have them not be super-OP. I do think there's a room for more civs like Kongo, who are essentially locked out of a victory completely, but have other bonuses instead. And I definitely don't mind having at least a couple civs that may be much less strong than others, but just leads to a fun or unique playstyle. The great example of that was civ5 spain - if you get lucky and find that early wonder, then it can just be loony playing them with stupid awesome tiles. But most games, their bonus wasn't a difference maker. The closest we might get to that is playing a Russia game and finding a Tundra national wonder close by. Getting a +11 holy site down before turn 20 is pretty awesome.

But overall, I do think they've done a pretty good job overall at giving each civ enough unique pieces that they do play differently. For example, I certainly play a different game when playing as Germany vs when playing as the Khmer or anyone else. No, it's not necessarily way over the top, but I do think that most civs play differently enough from the "base game" to be unique.

 

[Anno]

It's been awhile since I've played vanilla Civ 5, so maybe I'm just misremembering, but I think Civs in 6 play more uniquely on average. You just don't have the highs of something like Venice, yet. Though having a Civ that's locked out of an entire victory condition has to be close in its own way.

An entire game full of super varying playstyles will always have to rely on long-term modding communities. Let's just hope that the requisite tools are released, and sooner rather than later.

 

[j51]

The designers needed to take more from Endless Legend than just districts.

 

[drubell]

I think one of the problems here is an oversaturation of abilities that a lot of the civs have as their UA in Civ 6.

Whereas in Civ 5 where a UA could be one simple thing (Egypt gets 20% bonus on Wonder construction), in Civ 6 there's so much darn abilities packed on every leader. Russia has extra science/culture from trade routes, but ONLY internationally and also it's +1 of those yields per every 3 techs, also you get a lot of extra land on settling, ALSO you get +1 faith and +1 production on your land, BUT only if it has tundra. Almost every leader's UA has this long list of unique abilities that not only makes it incredibly difficult for the player to remember them all, but when the designers keep pumping in more and more abilities, eventually they're just going to throw up their hands and just add existing bonuses from other civs to the new civs.

By doing this, the designers have run creatively bankrupt (how many more "culture bomb by doing X" or "100% production in first 10 turns of war because of X" do we need?). They could just not throw in these existing bonuses, but then the players would complain that the civ is weak compared to vanilla civs. So we just keep adding more and more complex and repetitive bonuses to UA and it's just messy.

 

[Decimus1]

I completely agree! Id rather want all civs to have very unique abilites that offers different types of playstyles. Even if they are all overpowered in their own way. I really enjoy playing civs like kongo, arabia, greece and germany among a couple of others. I know this isnt the suggestions forum but just as an example the roman ability could be Glory of Rome: roman capitol doesnt have a population cap for amount of districts. Constructs buildings and districts faster (like +20%). This would make me build a super city which would also be a trade center because it has many districts. Even if it probably would be abit OP

 

[Karpius]

Personally, I would prefer Firaxis not beef up any unique abilities any more than they are. Historically, when you get beyond the culture, civilizations did not differ so much from each other that they had unique secrets and abilities that could not be learned by other civilizations. Anything that worked was eventually adopted and adapted by someone else. Obsolescence followed the same pattern.

Leader personalities are quite a different thing and open up a number of different agendas, but it should not automatically beef up abilities.

 

[Jewelrunna]

It's been awhile since I've played vanilla Civ 5, so maybe I'm just misremembering, but I think Civs in 6 play more uniquely on average. You just don't have the highs of something like Venice, yet. Though having a Civ that's locked out of an entire victory condition has to be close in its own way.

An entire game full of super varying playstyles will always have to rely on long-term modding communities. Let's just hope that the requisite tools are released, and sooner rather than later.

Yeah, Civ VI's uniques are definitely more diversified and game-impacting than V's. However, I think the concern here is that despite the massive amount of room that the new mechanics give Firaxis to make some really interesting & unique Civs, they feel relatively homogeneous to what they potentially could be.

 

[Disgustipated]

no one should even try to build a wonder if Egypt is in the game

Not really the type of game I would like. Especially if Egypt is on the other side of the map.