Civ5 vs Civ6 - what each of those games did better?

Civ V > Civ VI

• War, specifically AI agression, challenge due to conflict and late game challenge and war.
• Diplomacy, in Civ VI feels too static and enemy civs feel too pasive. Was not all that great in V, but was better. Also V had more diplomatic options allowing you to give units, keeping vasals...
  
• Management, the lack of ideologies, reliance on doing everything with yield bonusses instead of meaningful choices, and the lack of options to keep puppet cities really hurt Civ VI. Both do bad regarding giving the player wide vs tall, but I prefer V over-restrictive aproach over the samey pointless city grind and repetition of VI.
• Religion, everything in VI aproach could have worked in theory but sucks in practise, religious combat is terrible, the charges based system is atrocious and turns the system into a grind, religion interacts poorly with other systems, the lighning animations are inmersion ruining, and the auto religious lenses make my eyes bleed.
  
• WC, pointless, boring, inconsecuential, with no meaninful resolutions, terrible system, despite emergencies being a great idea. Last patch made it even worse as you cannot interact with the WC system at all for the entire game if you dared to take/ flip more than one enemy capital.

Civ VI > Civ V

• Map and city planning.
• More meaningful civ variety.
• Climate. While far from perfect fundamentally due to the overreliance on a repetitive lackluster repair mechanic and hand holding in negative effects, the addition of this in VI is fantastic.
• Grievances, a major step forward in Civ VI that still requires some nuance and polish.
• Loyality, fantastic system in VI, that also has not fullfilled its full potential.

Those are the major things for me, however there is a small lot of things in minor systems like city defense, rock bands, Wonder building where Civ VI is a remarkable improvement. And some others, like spionage, wonder effects, where V wins in my opinion, despite being both implementations a bit disapointing.

Overall, i feel a big dissapointment, Civ VI was destined to be an incredible game. It has so many cool ideas, and however it also unlearned so many things... The game fell short for inexplicable reasons... Idk, It may still be better than V, but it should have been so much more...

 

One tiny thing Civ V does better than VI is that mini map shows mountains.

Oh speaking of this, end of game map evolution movie is great in V and still doesn't exist for VI.

 

This can't be said enough. I recently reinstalled Civ V for a couple games and it looks better, sounds better and (especially with the right balance mods) is a much more satisfying experience in general. Civ VI looked wrong from the word go and it set the stage for a lot of other bad decisions. Making builders instantaneous was a huge mistake that ripples through the entire game. The chopping/harvesting mechanics are boring and feel wrong in a way that sucks life out of the game.The religion and faith mechanics in VI are terrible; I'd rather the game ignore religion all together than have religious combat. It makes no sense to use faith as a currency that can buy just about anything including military units and.... ROCK BANDS?!?! WITH FAITH?!?! What could they possibly have been thinking? Civ V is a beautiful game. Civ VI might end up souring me on the franchise.

 

Meh. That's highly subjective.
In Civ6's late game, the land is filled with districts and all kinds of tile improvements that are much more diverse than what we had in Civ5. We can see much more clearly the advancement through time just by looking at the map.

I feel like people attribute more gravitas to civ5 just because of the design for the leader and the darker colours of the map. But that's really not enough to qualify as "gravitas".

 

It's not just "design"... its that the VI version has made the leaders downright comical... Just look at all the stereotypical quotes when they send you delegations for example: Teddy brings apple pies, Catherine bring baguettes and Robert brings haggis... they must've brought A LOT of food to give the same 25 gold value as things such as silks from China or gold from Mali...

 

Quite unlike, "Would you be interested in a trade agreement with England?"

 

Civ6:
- districts and wonders moved to map tiles. I just love it, even though it's hard to tell things apart without proper mods. Late-game map looks like a pile of puke. still, i hope this approach will remain in future civs
- religious combat and religious diversity. while a bit overwhelming and requiring excessive micromanagement on high difficulties, it's very enjoyable. would be much better with ai that doesn't eat so much glue

Civ5:
literally everything else from game balance and AI (yes, that abysmal AI was 10x better), to graphics and general dynamics of gameplay. latest patches and dlcs are ruining the last shreds of balance, and new game modes, exciting for the first hour, are too complicated for the pathetic AI, and way too exploity for human players.
two elements have murdered civ6 for me:
- limited movement and total destruction of tactical game before industrial era, and total incapability of military ai after this moment. if a human player survives initial unit spam by ai, the game wins itself. ai is incapable of the most basic development or military actions. if the initial swarm fails, ai is helpless
- "more strategic gameplay", or, translating from marketingish to English, elimination of strategic elements. strategy games must contain some number crunching. in civ6, policy changes are a guessing game. there's no preview or any real possibility to evaluate your choices. it's either instinct or saving and loading all the time. luxury resources serve mostly as embellishment on the map. proper management of happiness is barely possible. same goes for pretty much everything else. growth, influence, religion - player reacts in critical moments instead of planing properly. most of the time, it's drifting in a general direction, while in civ5, the game was like driving an f1 bolid that reacts to the slightest shift of the steering wheel.

I don't know whether the game was dumbed down so drastically in order to attract younger players who are nowadays not used to thinking too much while playing games, or was the ai failing so horribly from the start, that devs decided to simplify the game just to make sure that ai could at least fake some actions. 2 settlers at start used to create insurmountable odds. Now, AI is helpless with 3 settlers and simply sad multiplayers to all gains. It's like playing chess with your opponent having 30 pawns on the board.

 

Personally I think VI is the better game of the 2, but one of the things I really miss from V is how there was some variation on the terrain textures between different continents. It felt quite nice to build Caravels and go out to explore in V just to see those sort of changes and in a way it felt a bit more like I was running into lands unfamiliar and mysterious from where I was coming from. It's something I doubt we will see by the of VI's development cycle, but it is quite weird since the continent separation with VI is quite clear, I mean there's even a lens view for it, so I'm not so sure why this sort of thing was not implemented in VI.

 

It's a tiny nice touch when you get a delegation from another Civ, that only happens with about 1/2 - 2/3rd's of the Civs you meet each game.
Yes, Civ V had gravita's; and yes VI's cartoony style has taken away from that somewhat; but it is still a beautiful game.

On a similar note; do you all remember the early leader designs that were revealed some months after launch of vanilla? They were more half way in between V's ultra real leaders; and VI's cartoony caricatures. I would hope we get something like them in VII. I don't mind any of the styles per say; though I certainly want AI etc to get more resources than art; and I suspect the ultra real leaders and backgrounds in V were resource sinks.

Yeah, that would be another nice touch; though it is odd that Asian mountains have no snow... I mean hullo!? lol Of course we see a bit of a repeat in this in VI where there are desert mountains that are snowless. I'd rather they call them summer mountains myself; because I'm pretty sure a high mountain range in a dessert will get snow in winter just like any other!

Of course VI has added nice little touches like this that we hadn't seen before - from the obvious day-night cycle, through to smaller details like the shadows of the clouds passing over. Or even how when you explore, as you first see a mountain, it's shape starts rising up out of the map distorting any image (dragons, ships etc) or line that was filling in the unknown space, before finally fleshing out into the coloured mountain. I love seeing that every single time it happens

 

How about the graphic design of the menus and the selection of quotes overall? At least Civ V didn’t have plastic blue menus, plastic unit icons, and had no quotes about air conditioning causing the fall of the Roman Empire (and that’s just one of the many awful quotes in Civ VI)....As for the music, I think Civ V’s dynamic war and peace music led more dynamicism to the game and lent it more gravitas as well. Also the lack of vampire units (though they are admittedly fun in Civ VI).

 

Things Civ 6 does better:
- Districts and wonders on map: Probably the best thing in Civ 6, huge impact on game planning and variation between games.
- Separate technology and civics tree: Makes culture more distinct and relevant.
- Individual great people: Really a great system. Adds variation between games (although great writers and great musicians suffer from lack of attention).
- Individual city states: Same as above.
- Loyalty: While not perfect, still a step towards more meaningful empires.

Things Civ 5 did better:
- Everything after renaissance era ...
- World Congress. Civ 6 version is nothing short of a disaster.
- Policy Trees: I don't like the policy card system, it's tedious and offers very little variation between games due to certain card and card types being much better.
- Ideologies: This really lifted late game. Civ 6 urgently needs something like that.
- Happiness system: Civ 6 happiness has way too little impact and rarely influences your tactical choices.
- Diplomacy and diplomatic AI.
- Tactical AI?

 

I don't get the black menu's good, blue menu's bad mentality. Were I to chose, I probably did prefer the Art Deco menu of 5 to 6's more popping style; but I don't think either is that superior to the other. The menu backgrounds in 6 (and I wish I could chose which I saw instead of being left with Gathering Storms) have been beautiful! I especially loved the vanilla one with the old styely map moving across your screen.
Yes, there are a few awful quotes in Civ 6 including the one about air conditioning. There are also many many lovely quotes that have me pause and absorb them every time I hear them. And when I get one I like it's doubly special as sometimes you hear the other quote.
Vampire units are an optional extra. Both games have the GDR which are almost as silly.

 

Civilization 4, arguably the most beloved installment in the franchise was even more cartoonish than Civ 6 is. Catherine would slap you if you offered her a bad deal. Pacal would have a temper tantrum if he hated you. An angry Gilgamesh would lunge at you, and literally grab you by the neck if you said something he disliked. Julius Caesar would offer you some homemade salad upon meeting you. This extended itself to units. Longbowmen would literally beat you up with MMA moves in melee combat. AND even the music! Pacal's elephant farts! Hammurabi's hyperaggro trombone clarion thundering over his triump march theme. Ragnar's Viking Rap! Roosevelt's ancient theme of incoherent crab clicking! William's modern carnival theme! De Gaulle's and Napoleon's Marseillaise played on a xylophone no less.

6 just goes back to the previous aesthetic because many people HATED how serious and selfimportant Civ 5 looked and doesn't even go half as far as 4 did. The only real issue is that hills are really, REALLY invisible in 6, making improvements impossible without having the yield overlay switched on.

Personally I like the change. Civ never took itself too seriously as a game and I like the more easy-going, self-deprecating approach. Civ 6 got a thousand problems but aesthetics ain't one of them.

 

Also, as Catherine, Ragnar would be called Rooterlord. I don't understand how that happened but it happened.

 

Civ V’s menus weren’t just black—they had images with way more colors than those of Civ VI, which had muted blue and white plastic themes all the way throughout.

I don’t think Civ VI’s quotes stand favorably compared to Civ V’s. Of course, both have some silly quotes (this is fine in concept even if Civ VI’s collection of “bad joke” quotes is legion). But what undermines gravitas in Civ VI’s quotes especially is that Civ VI’s quotes also include overly negative and cynical quotes that criticize the very tech or civic the quote is for. Heck, there’s even a mod, Proverbium, that replaces hundreds of Civ VI’s quotes specifically to lend it more “gravitas”. Civ V’s quotes overall had more gravitas, fitting the overall more serious treatment of history in that game entry.

Also, the music for the main menu never changes in Civ VI regardless of what expansion you have. Rather than showing us historical themes or transitions across expansions, we have a slight variation on the main menu imagery with a sun and waves and so on with Gathering Storm but that’s it. (We don’t even have the Civilopedia available from the main menu in Civ VI yet, and we passed the two expansions mark and then some.)

Vampires might be an optional extra, but they’re nonetheless part of the game as a whole, and have already been criticized as silly (and worse) on these forums, on Facebook, and elsewhere. As I said, I don’t personally mind them, but I do think they undermine gravitas somewhat as well and would arguably have been better in a specialized scenario or just been replaced with something that had a historical basis (like Templars or other crusading orders with castles).

And then there are the plasticky looking unit icons. I definitely preferred the Art Deco Civ V unit icons to whatever Civ VI’s units are meant to represent (toys?)

 

Yeah, I loved his animations

And I 100% agree with this! In a version of the game in which map reading is more important than ever and deliberately so; why do half the time I have to go to strategic view to tell if that's a hill or not! Especially when it has foliage on it!

I haven't played V in aggges, so I will defer to your statement; but I still don't think VI's menu screens are that much more blue than V's are black. Those are well n truly the dominant colours in both schemes.

I have agreed there are a few clangers in VI. The PT Barnum one is especially egregious, and you can hear it in Bean's voice as he is bored half to death reading one of the most obvious statements ever made But it's not the end of the world. Not to mention much of that will be subjective. Some people think the Monty Python ones shouldn't be in there; but I love them

Yes, agreed on the Civilopedia; but again, that isn't the end of the world either. You can find most the information you're looking for at sites like this and Civilization Wiki without even being in the game at all.
I suspect re the music they remember the backlash from IV when Warlords replaced the magnificent Baba yetu with some much more plain muted tune. By the time BTS was released they allowed people (rightly) to select between those two and BTS's choral type music. I'm going to guess that 90% of players went back to Baba Yetu, and so with this they have decided to just have
Sogno di Volare, as that would be easily almost as popular. I'd rather (as I said) be able to revert back to the vanilla screen behind the menu's. Still, we only spend a small amount of time in the menu's...so

And? Gravita's isn't everything. Civ has, as @Lord Lakely said, traditionally been quite flippant. Which I always like when the game got serious - there was always a silly undercurrent. Having other leaders rage at you all game long over doing the same stuff they're doing does get tiresome. Having a wink and nudge in there can make a world of difference.
I did like the smaller units from V that were more in scale with the cities etc. I think that was a good development. I get that VI wanted to make it easy for people to see how many charges units had; and possibly also felt that it was easier to see unit strength represented in fewer units. I don't think they're right on the latter; and would also like to see a return to more scale appropriate size units. Hell, at least it's not as bad as Humankind on that level where you have both small animals and large animals; and small people and large people! That...it's just plain weird!

 

You don't need to take my word for it. Just Google "Civ V main menus" or "Civ V Gods and Kings menu" or "Civ V Brave New World Menu" and compare them with the Civ VI menus. The Civ VI menus throughout all expansions notably use blue and white not just for the menus themselves (New Game, Load Game, etc), but for the backdrop images and animations. Civ V used a range of colors from gold to blue, brown, and so on--still a unified color scheme, but nowhere near as plasticky as Civ VI's.

I will point out too that there are more clangers in Civ VI as you put it, IMO, than in prior Civ entries. I think that's disappointing. While I was excited for Sean Bean to be the narrator, I think Sean Bean didn't deliver on the Monty Python ones as well, and frankly quotes with more gravitas and less cynicism would have suited his peaceful voice (I liked his work in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion more, but then, he had somewhat better material to work with there IMO.)

No critique of a game needs to say a flaw is "the end of the world" to be a valid criticism. And it would be handier to have the Civilopedia accessible from the main menu. After all, for some new Civ fans, they may very well be interested on who is who among the interesting leaders in Civ VI, and/or want to read stuff on the mechanics of the game from the main menu right before launching into a new game.

Sure, we don't spend too much time on the menus (though I will point out ahead of each gameplay session we have to encounter them). But they are a significant part of a gameplay experience given that first impressions last, and also given that many Steam owners of the game likely haven't even played more than a few minutes of Civ (somewhere on these forums there was a thread about the percentage of Steam users who ever won a Civ game--it was lower than even I expected).

Re: the Civ IV Warlords music, I disagree that it was a "much more plain muted theme" and don't recall any backlash. I quite liked the Al Nadda musical theme of Warlords, and I think it was a rich, catchy banger of a tune, even if not as magnificent as Baba Yetu. But at least we have the choice in Civ IV--as you mentioned, you can switch menu themes and menu music in Civ IV, so that's a non-issue. In Civ VI you have the "choice" of one main menu theme and that's it. Even if more people would have preferred Sogno di Volare as the main menu theme, how can Firaxis (or anyone) know, without giving us other options to compare?

For those interested, the Civ IV Al Nadda Warlords theme is here (it's a love song that sounds like a war song):



Frankly, the lack of musical menu options in Civ VI throughout expansions is just another example of the kind of obvious cost-cutting that Civ VI introduced to the Civ series (another example of this is the replacement of animated leader backgrounds with smudged paintings bearing dolorously muted colors, and the use of cutscenes for most leader interactions, rather than having real-time voiced over leader interaction). While it's not necessarily something that would kill the game, it undercuts excitement at an expansion when one sees less new material in the music and art department, even if visible just on the main menu.

Heck, Civ V even had different music for each scenario loading screen (for example, Messe Notre Dame for the Medieval World scenario).

I never said that gravitas is "everything". Critiquing the lack of gravitas in Civ VI need not be accompanied by evidence that 'gravitas is everything' to be valid. Moreover, I only bother with such criticisms because I love the Civ series and, like any rabid fan, I always want it to be the best it can be. Right now, Civ VI is a disappointment in the gravitas department for sure.

Civ has been traditionally flippant in select areas, and not in others (Civ IV for example had quotes with far more gravitas, a dangerously intelligent set of AIs that could fight wars properly, and complex diplomatic systems that make the World Congress look like a dumbed-down joke). A silly undercurrent is fine at times as long as it doesn't undermine the magnificence of human accomplishment that Civ (as an aspirational what-if historical game) is all about.

What gravitas there is in Civ VI (not much) is undermined by the casual cheap jokes and cynicism of Civ VI quotes, the smudged and muted leader backgrounds, the repeated and one-sided agendas (Civ IV's leaders had far more depth, as they had a gradiant of preferences on anything from trade willingness to the length of wars they would normally tolerate).

And there were missed opportunities, not just to have better menus, less toy-like unit icons, or suchlike, but to have more cool "new era" screens (like those of Civ V, accompanied by appropriate sounds, quotes, etc.--in Civ VI, they launch right into the bonuses and there are no historic quotes).

 

why is there so much emphases on "gravitas?" Since when was seriousness a measurement of how good a game is?
It is just a different style.
Civ 5 has "seriousness" tone like historical documentary while civ has more causal tone like history youtube.
Are you saying history can only be treated seriously without any jokes and fun? What are you puritans?

 

Why is “jokes and fun” in any way more important than gravitas for a game with a historical backdrop? Firaxis has publicly cited history being full of inspiring stories and wanting to allude to humanity’s greatest moments. With Civ VI, we can see that these previously stated goals are undermined not by the mere existence of “jokes and fun” (which no one objects to existing in Civ games), but by cynical, overly negative quotes with terrible jokes in them, and an overall feeling that many things about Civ VI are the way they are to cut costs (cutting leader animations mostly down to cutscenes, leader backgrounds with smudged paintings, few, if any, changes in the main menu graphics and no change in the music). And as we all know, there was a fair bit of disappointment with Civ VI’s cartoony graphical style from the get-go (see Facebook, YouTube, and general public commentary pre-launch). Those things undermine gravitas, not the existence of humor generally (as alluded to earlier, humor done badly is bad, but it only really undermines gravitas if treated with cynicism and negativity as shown in many Civ VI quotes).

People like history to feel epic rather than childish. That’s been true of historical movies generally, and it’s little different as games go (consider, for example, the success of series like Age of Empires).

Also, quite a lot of YouTube history, like the very popular Kings and Generals channel, is hardly “casual”. They use music to play up the epic turns of history and are specific and analytical when it comes to historical details.

Also, I nowhere said that “seriousness a measurement of how good a game is.” Rather, gravitas is something Civ VI does worse than Civ V, and for a historically-themed game, Civ VI’s approach to history is underwhelming in several areas. I hardly think pointing that out makes me “puritan”.

 

Oh you have problems with Monty Python? What about Overly Sarcastic productions? they use language and tone that can be seen as childish?
Like I said it is just a change in style and YMMV on that- just like looking at 2D animation films like Beauty and Beast and 3D animation films like Toy Story.
Some people may like those "childish" things. Who are you to say it is bad?