[GS] CIV VI thoughts from a CIV IV player

Some thoughts on civ vi from a civ iv fanatic. Hopefully some fresh stuff in there that hasn’t been mentioned more than 100 times already .

Overall, I find CIV VI enjoyable and I like trying out the new mechanics after each expansion. However, I can’t see it standing the test of time since it suffers from a well-documented lack of challenge due to the terrible, terrible AI….so much so that I would go as far as calling this a bad civ iteration due to the BAD AI.

A couple of general observations: the decisions one takes in VI generally seem to have smaller impact than the ones in IV. Most of the time I feel it doesn’t really matter what I will choose (e.g. which civic to research, whether I will get the +3 or +2 adjacency for a district etc…). Also, major era changes don’t feel that powerful (renaissance, industrialization etc…). I hardly feel any difference in my empire when hitting those key moments in history.

quick thoughts on some of the major changes in VI compared to IV:

- Placing districts on the map: fine, but is it really such an interesting/impactful decision whether you go for a +2 or +3 adjacency? It feels like a very ‘local’ decision with little impact. Creating a ‘specialist’ or ‘cottage’ city in IV was a lot more fun (and had a lot more impact thanks to the huge multipliers you could apply to a city).

- Placing wonders on the map: fine, but does it really make the game more fun?

- Trade routes: maybe too powerful, and maybe too much time spent on them? Time that could have been spent on more interesting/strategic decisions (most of the time you’re just sorting the trade routes by whatever benefit you want and sending the trader accordingly…where’s the strategy?)

- Policies, border expansion, harbors in non-coastal cities, expendable workers, great works, no transport boats for troops at sea, no anarchy when switching governments, unique bonus per great person, limited strategic resources: all great changes, especially policy cards (one of the few areas where I find the decisions you make can have a big/strategic impact)

- Natural wonders: nice, but, again, do they really matter? Overall another minor mechanic that adds some interest on the map but doesn't really change/affect much

- City states: nice addition (not sure it makes sense from a historic point of view to have so many of them around for so long but at least they make the game more interesting by providing nice bonuses)

- Civic tree: fine, but again most of the time it seems it doesn’t matter what I select as my next civic, I just click on whatever and move on (especially late game)

- City specialists: A traditional and great CIV mechanic is unusable in this iteration.

- No research trading: big change, I think I’m ok with it.

- 1 UPT: very long discussion has already been made about this… Only thing to add is that I miss “preparing for massive war” by switching all major cities to building tanks and stuff (like one would do in IV). In VI you just need to keep upgrading your early units and sprinkle a few extra units here and there to create armies…

- Natural disasters: for me it’s another mechanic that usually has small impact and can be ignored

- CO2 stuff: probably requires another thread to discuss this in depth but I don’t really find the mechanic entertaining (too repetitive/predictable). Btw, didn’t CIV 2 have a mechanism where the sea levels would rise if one used too many nukes?

- waterparks: nice but after a certain point it feels like this is all I’m building

- Victory conditions:

o religion: unplayable (seriously, what were the devs thinking?)

o domination: fine

o science: exhausting (takes too long with the GS changes)

o diplo: I haven’t tried it, doesn’t look that interesting

o culture: incomprehensible, but worth a try as a peaceful option

And a final thought:

For a CIV iteration that puts so much emphasis on the map, it is very disappointing that one cannot even see which tile has a hill and which resource has been improved….

 

A little bit of deserved reply I feel

For science and culture you get a civic that gives +50% to a city if it has a +3 adjacency and +50% if population is 10... huge bonuses based on populating cities and getting that sometimes tricky +3, Quite strategic implementations

A wonder just went into a city before, you could spam 20 wonders in a city=stupid. Now you waste valuable land so should choose wonders of value. Wonders add to cultural victories and give +2 adjacency for theatres that struggle with adjacency, they look nice and you can see what wonders a civ has in a city... yes more fun

Trade routes... if you finish a trade route with an opponent you get +1 diplomatic visibility. You also get other diplomatic visibility modifiers. For every dip vis +1 over an opponent you get +3 combat and can see what they are building/planning better. They are used to make roads so sending one through jungle to an opponent before you attack is a gigantic benefit. Do you send trade routes internal for food and production or externally for gold... enough strategy there one feels.

Yes there is, but you only get anarchy when switching to a government you have tried before, it sort of makes sense, dev choice, potatoes or tomatoes.

Early they can give vital benefits, even later to a degree. They also give era points and XP to scouts.

Maybe you have not played enough. Craftsmanship or foreign trade is often a hard choice early. There are lots of these in the tree. Lots of nuances that take time to discover. Often the choices are around inspirations also, hold off that for 10 turns to get the inspiration that is like producing more culture.

Specialists in science and culture are used a lot by good players. Fat cities also benefit from them a little. You can take the approach a specialist was too strong in other editions and great people are the true specialists, specialists are just that, good at their trade working in the market or bank rather than in the field.

an RV is not at all unplayable, just easy. The real fun with an RV like most things is getting it done faster or in a more enjoyable way

Not at all, many once they realise the tricks know it is the most strategic and challenging VC. You can do it fast using little production if you know how. The diplomatic victory is exhausting though.

One thing that has come to light through a lot of discussion is people do not like to lose. Gaming companies know this and people have even said lately here... the game is too hard, I cannot win, so I am giving up. ... this is similar to computer chess games, once they were too good people stopped playing them. They design civ as an experience as well a challenge to win, they have to please a lot of crowds to get the numbers. Civ now is quite complex with a lot of choices. Yes do the right things and you will win but win you can do. The complexity is likely too much for the AI when you also have to keep turns short and it is not 1 opponent like in a chess game with limited moves and rules, it is typically 7 opponents and many many more choices and move options (a ship being able to move 6-8 tiles for example is a lot of choices for an AI to consider let alone visibility, enemy positions, support/flank and so on)

The game does OK but do not mistake it for a tactical Panzer General type tactics game. It is not that. If they spent the time the AI could be better but when the art/sound team has to be larger than the development team you know the game is made for experience rather than victory. A hell of a lot of people on this forum do not care about the winning, it’s the journey.

 

I think changes to Wonders, Natural Wonders and City States are among the very best new features of CIV VI. Not being able to produce all wonders in one city is a huge plus for me. Having specific tile/district requirements to place wonders is also a huge plus. Natural Wonders coming in different shapes and sizes is fun and some of them have fun and interesting features. Giant's Causeway provides +5 strength for visiting units, for example. On City States you appear to agree. But I would also add that they do make sense from a historical perspective.

The only features i really dislike in CIV VI are the great works theming "mini-game" and the world congress as it is (has potential though).

Also what you said about hills may be true to some extent, I am not sure. Others have mentioned hills before. But I don't personally have a hard time spotting hills and definitely not which resources are upgraded and which are not.

 

Hills are tricky for me to spot, 100% agree. I have to turn on the cogs so I can see... but now they have messed that up with gathering storm so I do get confused sometimes. It’s a small thing. Prefer V’s graphics but that’s a personal thing.
Note OP that I am not a civ VI fanatic, merely a fanatic that has played all iterations that has gone back to V currently as The natural disasters proved too unlucky for my game at times.

 

Which is why the victory condition is exhausting. There's alot of talk on these forums about "you need to know how the game works". I find that to be too true sometimes. If you don't want to drag out a SV you need to "know the tricks". Where's the fun in that? The tricks stay the same so it just leads to repetitive gameplay.

 

It the same in the same way a Dom is always the same
You need the royal society in the way you need artillery.
You need a moon landing but how you get there and execute it varies
But that’s the way you feel so fair enough.

 

thanks for the interesting and informative replies!

On the religious victory: i only tried it once and would like to try it again as religion is something i tend to ignore in most of my CIV VI games. The one time i tried it i was micro managing an endless invasion of a continent with my apostles until i gave up because it was too tedious. Are we saying that there is a way to win without micromanaging apostles?

Also, on a different note: a thought about civ iv after playing vi: iv feels a bit more gamey now due to some abusable mechanics (wiping population being a classic example). I think VI does better in not having mechanisms and semi-fixed strategies that can be abused (unless it has them and i just don't know them )

 

A lot of this stuff has been said 100 times before, but still some interesting points in there anyways. I do think there are some hidden strategies under the covers.
-For district placement, I think a "hidden" strategy in that is whether it's worth replacing a good tile to get a district with a better yield. Getting the magical +3 is huge, both for the era score and for the later bonus if you run the policy cards. But I find sometimes, it's not worth it. For example, I won't always run said policy card, so then it doesn't matter as much. Or if I have to place a holy site next to a natural wonder and give up having 2 faith on the tile to get 2 faith for the holy site, have I actually gained anything?
-With that, with the new disasters, I feel that I might want to rethink some placements, too. My last game, I had a campus next to a volcano, and seemed to always be repairing the campus and buildings. Sure, it was a great early +4 campus for me, but part of me wonders if I should have put it a little away, even if it meant only being a +2 or +3 campus, to prevent having to rebuild it like 4 times in the game. Also would have let me gain some sweet Volcano yields.
-Having Wonders on the map is another nice change I think that makes you treasure your tiles more. But I still do think the game suffers from wonders costing too much for what they give, sometimes. Some of them are wildly useful, others I sometimes feel it's not even worth it to place if the only spot I have for them is a useful tile. For example, in my last game, due to a nice Petra/Nazca city, I had some spectacular yields on a couple tiles. So much so that I could have built Jebal Barkal on a tile and gained 24 faith per turn from it, but didn't think it was worth it because that tile was like a 5 food/5 production/4 faith tile or something like that. Okay, it's nice to have all wonders not be an automatic build, but sometimes you spend all that effort on a wonder and it just gives a kind of marginal gain. Sometimes I feel like a "random wonders" mod, where each game, only 50% of the wonders are available, might make for a more interesting game. I do also think some wonders get a little too specific in tile placement which can make them virtually unbuildable on a map.
-Natural wonders are another case where some of them are awesome and can virtually win you the game (start 3 tiles away from Roraima and it's really hard to lose), while others are basically a waste of tiles (Cliffs of Dover, I'm looking at you, no matter how pretty they are). They don't matter, but they at least add some variety to the map.
-Specialists need work. Sad to have one of the best features of earlier games just be an afterthought.
-And my last point I'll touch on is trade routes. I do think there are some big decisions there, do you stay internal? Go external? Is it worth using it to complete a CS quest? Early on, is there a barb camp en-route that I should maybe plan a different way? But I would also agree that it is a little underwhelming. Especially in the middle or late parts of the game, it's often just "pick the top city on the list" and is just meaningless clicks. I do think also with a lot of the more recent changes, they have become too powerful. I mean, when one trade route to a neighbour is giving 4 food/4 production/35 gold and a handful of other points, the game devolves too much into a "get the most trade routes possible" contest, which spoils it a little. To me that just ruins other parts of the game because maybe there's a beautiful campus spot in a city I want, but I still need to build the commerce hub or harbor first because the trade route is too useful to pass up.

 

A gamey way would be to capture most civs before activating your prophet. When you activate your prophet all cities you own with a holy site magically convert.

You do not have to micromanage, using the right wonder and governor gives you better choice of promotions and more promotions.
The AI RV combat is worse than the others really, let them come to you, wipe them out, which destroys their religion in your cities then clean up... or if early convert half their cities is not hard.

 

I actually won a "conquest" religious victory once. Basically I had my religion going strong, and I don't remember if it was a belief or world congress or something, but what seemed to be happening was that every time I captured a city, it seemed to trigger a wave of religious pressure out from it. So what ended up happening was that I either wiped out every civ, or their last city ended up being in my religion, so when I captured one of Scythia's cities, that converted enough other of her cities that I ended up with the religious win. I mean, I was probably 3 turns away from conquest, but officially it was a religious win.

 

Yeah, another way is conquer and send in the inquisition as you conquer, cheap as chips but bottom line is an RV can be faster than a Dom so why bother.

 

Would have liked to have seen a lot of wonders be in-district building replacements. Dunno why that didn't happen.

Hills being strictly better than flat land is just... I can't say anything nice about that.

Terrible AI, as mentioned, but I don't play single player so that's far less relevant for me.

Religious combat is cancerous. Would far prefer Apostles and Missionaries to use a more Spy-style deployment.

Lack of religious options and balance, plus how bad Holy Sites are.

The fact that the game is built around people who wonder-spam and always go religion.

All that said, districts were a great call. The placement mini-game is something that the vast majority of players enjoy. The problem is that adjacency was not well-developed overall. Commercial Hubs don't get a bonus from Luxuries? Really? And not being able to place ON resources... ew.

I love the policy card system, and the addition of government buildings turned it into a much nicer balance of permanence vs. flexibility. Could be developed a lot further.

Splitting techs and civics - good idea, probably call it mediocre implementation. More techs should have been civics. Trees should give more benefits for each unlock... seriously, Mathematics is so bad.

Overall I'd call the game a medley of memes and otherwise good ideas with poor-to-terrible implementation. Oh, and *the current form of) ranged combat should not be a thing.

 

I agree on everything from the OP. The game isn’t interesting from a strategic point of view as the outcome of choices aren’t game changing. Worst thing is the map is already, and becomes cluttered even more with all the +1% or -1% of stuff on it. Everything seems pointless. From the card system to the boring repetitive music to the silly agenda’s. The leaders are super annoying and only thing I wanna do is eliminate them. The agenda’s are just silly and trigger pointless good or bad relations. Civ 5 is prob one of my most played games. Absolutely love that game. 6 isn’t even on my computer anymore. On paper, civ 6 sounds interesting, though. In reality, it doesn’t work

 

Speaking of RV, I find the conquest and convert game using Spain very entertaining.

 

How good are you at civ6 OP? Can you beat a deity AI?

I struggle on immortal and i certainly cannot say that i:
- dont care what civic i research or beeline towards
- don't find wonder/district placement a nice planning challenge
- dont try to settle a nice location near a natural wonder
- dont care about my trade routes since they synergize so well with policy cards especially AFTER you go either democracy or communism
- dont care about natural disasters when i increase disaster frequency and get obliterated by snowstorms every couple of turns

Those features arent so important on noob difficulties but on higher difficulties these are more than an afterthought. I think you're a wizard if you can beat high difficult AI with frequent disasters while being so indifferent to the strategic choices as you seem to be.

 

I always felt that whenever you plop a wonder, it should make it a district that can only house other legal wonders.

In this way, you can put the Forbidden City and the Eiffel tower on the same tile, for example. There would have to be a max of wonders, of course, but it seems silly on every single level that one wonder takes an entire tile and care never be altered again save razing the city.

 

It was silly when you spammed wonders in a city and it still happens. I’m used to what we have and quite like it, it makes you think about placement, after all wonders are their own district. They also no longer feel so special to me one you have more than 3 in a city.

 

If you want to know how Civ 6 Deity is seen by CIV Deity veterans, here's the recap I wrote for my very first Civ 6 game

Here are some quotes from it:

All in all, our immediate deity neighbors performed very poorly...I probably cannot do justice in words on how much more precision such early wars required on versions like CIV Warlords to simultaneously invest in and support a force stronger than early deity armies, finish before the technological window to their superior medieval units closes at 1000 BC and they insta-upgrade, grab all the fairly expensive "civilian" techs needed to rebound the economy after the conquest, and manage the diplomacy to dissuade opportunistic backstabbers...In Civ VI, after a very unfocused start and poorly grasping the mechanics, I leisurely rolled over not one but two deities

 

Well then we aren't playing the same game. Statistics say that only about 5% of those who bought civ 6 have won on deity so you're not fooling me with your unfocused starts and your poor grasp of the mechanics.
It is one thing to say previous civ ai with stacked armies was much harder to beat, obviously. We all remember that. However i still stand by the points i highlighted in my previous post.

 

I mean, you're talking about a version of the game from 2.5 years ago and you played probably the most OP leader at the time and one that happens to excel at early war. I'm not sure that your conclusions are valid.

Anyway, just a tip for those who have trouble spotting hills (as I do): You can use the new map search feature to find "Hill" and it'll highlight them all for you. I find it very useful when plotting out new city locations.