Civ6 June Update Video

[acluewithout]

Overall, it’s a good patch. But I do think there are some missed opportunities with this patch.

More Unique Religious Units. Religious Units need more diversity. I’m sorry FXS didn’t create a few more Unique RUs linked to beliefs, a bit like the Monk.

Monks. The buff to the Monk belief is good, but Monks also needed a buff. They should work more like the Nihang, because currently it’s almost impossible to keep Monks relevant in the game.

Cathedral. Cathedrals don’t seem to have been buffed, which means they still suck.

Loyalty. How Religion works with Loyalty is one of the best bits of the game. I’m a bit sorry we didn’t get a bit more along those lines, eg loyalty from some Religious buildings and or Policy Cards.

Apocalypse Mode. But sorry this mode didn’t get a slight balance pass. Soothsayers need to be a bit more tactical (eg maybe some promos via tech tree), Apostles or something else could maybe have promotions that do something with disasters (just so it’s not only about Soothsayers) and I’d very much like to see those new Zombies and maybe Aliens in Apocalypse mode as an alt skin for Barbarians!

On a different note, I wonder if the old Work Ethic mechanics might reappear somewhere else, ie +% production from Population.

I’m looking forward to the full patch notes. Looking forward to the next few releases too.

 

[Timothy001]

I hope the balance pass for Maya/Gran Columbia, plus Apocalypse Mode comes in July. They needed the feedback of the community, now they need the time to make changes. Even if it waits till August, I'm sure it will be worth the wait.
It appears they are focusing on Religion, specifically Pantheons with this patch. May the focused on Diplomatic Victory. I'm wondering what will come next month.

 

[topsecret]

I know they announced that they would not be releasing the source code, but this patch and the plans ahead highlight the baffling decision not to release it. Modders such as Gedemon could be solving bugs for them - it happened with Civ4, and it could happen again. They went so far in Civ4 that they invented a whole new modding method (Modular XML) based off a mod.

Releasing the DLL would be so helpful for everyone.

I play on Switch, so it's not even that big of a deal to me, but I think it would improve the life and love of this game. Very thankful for the free updates.

 

[Gedemon]

Man you guys complain a lot about free stuff. I'm thrilled with this update. Religious belief balance pass is awesome.

Definitely, and ultimately it’s free content.

It's not free stuff, I've paid for that game, knowing it would not be good at release (yet it was better than I expected, but it is stagnating since, and even gone worst on some parts) and also knowing that it would take some time to fix it, and I accepted that.

They're still trying to fix it, that's good, because, again, I paid knowing that they would do that and though that if they didn't we'll be able to fix it ourselves.

I'm fine with them taking their time, but as it now appears that I was wrong for the last part, they better continue to do it themselves if they want to keep me as a customer in the future, and I'm afraid that they'll never have enough time to fix it to my taste, with the apparent lack of balance between the available art team resources and the coding team resources dedicated to civ6.

They are going above and beyond what they have ever done for a Civ game in terms of support.

I think all the civ4 player base will disagree with that statement. It had better support, faster.

 

[sonicmyst]

Have we overlooked that they mentioned changes are coming to natural wonders as well?
That is a very welcoming update for me and I hope they do not limit the changes to only Yosemite and Eye of Sahara. I mean, hello, Cliffs of Dover?

 

[clapyourhands]

As someone who wasn't around for Civ IV, can anyone explain to me how Rhye's and Fall evolved from a purely fan-mod to an official game mode? Like logistically, I was curious about the legal and monetary issues that I assumed would be involved in essentially monetizing a fan product. I'm sure Firaxis has legal rights to do what they want with mods, but I would think for PR reasons they wouldn't do anything like that without explicit affirmative consent from the creators.

The reason I ask is because I can't see the DLL thing being anything other than the company worrying mods would interfere with sales of either future Civ VI content or hold people back from purchasing Civ VII by allowing modders to essentially polish Civ VI to supersede it (like Vox Populi). But if they've incorporated fan mods into the official game before, the optimist in me wants to believe it could be a great way to incorporate player feedback and desires without necessarily trying to do everything themselves.

 

[bite]

Have we overlooked that they mentioned changes are coming to natural wonders as well?
That is a very welcoming update for me and I hope they do not limit the changes to only Yosemite and Eye of Sahara. I mean, hello, Cliffs of Dover?

In think that has slipped from the conversation, which is a pity because it will hopefully fix one of the two worst natural wonders in the game .... still giving you a lot side eye Cliffs of Dover

 

[Aurelesk]

Civilization VI feels like it has a lot of potential, and my brain likes the idea of starting a new game. But everytime, I kind of feel frustrated by the cumulation of small details that push me to close my game.

Spoiler :

For example:

• Starting on harsh biome like desert or tundra is synonymous of having a rough start and that you will be left behind. I would love instead the game push you toward a new gameplay style. For example, Tundra could yield Faith and Food and Desert could yield Faith and Gold, and some tile improvement would be avalaible (like Farms, at least near fresh water). The yield will not the best, but now you something to work out now instead to think: "I should restart".
• Tile yields imbalance. Hills are better with no notable disadvantage: the yield is +1. Forest are better with no disadvantage: the yield is +1 and you can chop it for extra Production. Starting on flat featureless terrain shouldn't be synonymous to "my game will starting slow".
• I tend to delay the discovery of strategic ressources. I should be happy to find Horse or Iron, but everytime it prevent me to put a district with powerful adjacency or a wonder. I am more a "builder" player than a "competitive" player, and this is highly frustrating.
• The balance of unit through the game feels kind of weird. The earliest unit seems to have the best ratio power/price and suddenly, in the medieval age, the ratio seems to be the worst. The Combat Strength jumps suddenly, and the price even more. Hardbuilding your unit in the medieval age seems to be the worst time to do it, because they may be really powerful, they need a lot of Production that you don't have (and you didn't unlock the production card yet). In other hand, upgrading your unit with Gold seems like an exploit by how cheap it is, and can be reduced even more with a policy card. For me, it only makes early rushes more effective by beelining key technology and pre-build your army to cheaply upgrade them.
• I do not understand the gamedesign reason linked to the increased cost of district. Well, I do understand it, but why do they increase with my technology / civic level? Why not just link it by the number of the same district in your empire? After all, the cost of settler do not increase with your technology level. If I expand late, I face a double penalty: I have not a lot room left due to other civilizations that already founded cities, but now my new cities will take more time to build the district as well.
• Navigating. Navigating the map is slow. I know it was always like that, but... I feel it worse in Civilization VI. Navigating the trade screen is painful, and you have to quit and return to found out if we already enjoy a luxury ressource though trade / city staten or test the AI considers exchanging gold for luxury. I always have the impression I need to search the information everywhere.
• Growing a city should be rewarding, and not be an Amenity puzzle and wasting a lot of ressource into Housing. It is too bad that the number of city is more important (because you have more district) than the number of tile worked. 2 cities of 10 population
• There is a huge gap between a casual game and a minmaxing game. There is always a gap, but I didn't remember it was that big in Civilization V.
• Huge contraversial: the governement system. It looks great, but it is a lot of micromanaging. Not using it fully is synonymous to wasting a lot of Production for nothing. Why producing naval unit without the +100% card? You either halve the time need or double the number of ship produced. Not doing that way is a waste. And you need to do that all the time. But it is also the opposite: not slotting Rationalism all the time is also a waste.
• And so on. I guess you have a lot of thing to say too.

Civilization VI made me reload a game a few turn earlier so much because missing a single seemingly meaningless action can lead to huge difference. The AI declares war? Reload 1 turn earlier and declare friendship. A missclick leading to a dying scout, that lead to have no visibility to an area, leading to a barbarian outpost appear 4 tiles a way from my city and a barbarian scout instantly spot my city on hill the turn it appeared leading to 6 horsemen pillaging my empire 5 turns later before I could finish training an anticavalry unit that will be ineffective anyway? Reload the save and make the scout survive the turn.

Civilization VI is a game that I love and I "hate" in the same time, like the one-ring. It has so much potential and starting a game fill me with joy. But I stop midgame to play because the build-up of all the small detail are kind of ruining my game, while not having no motivation to complete it. I guess seeing the civilization as AI or civilization's strengths as gamemechanic is kind of an admission that my brain isn't in a mood to roleplay or experience the game, but more in a mood of desconstructing how the game work and searching the most viable strategy.
I guess it is a good thing? Afterall, if the game was bad, nobody would stick around and overthink about it. Because we kind of all know how tough it is to balance it since there is no general consensus on how and what the game should improve and be.

Basicly, the game is like a rough diamond just waiting to be mined. But instead of mining it, I have (maybe) the (false) impression that the team is creating the ring on which the diamond will be set instead.

 

[Gedemon]

As someone who wasn't around for Civ IV, can anyone explain to me how Rhye's and Fall evolved from a purely fan-mod to an official game mode? Like logistically, I was curious about the legal and monetary issues that I assumed would be involved in essentially monetizing a fan product. I'm sure Firaxis has legal rights to do what they want with mods, but I would think for PR reasons they wouldn't do anything like that without explicit affirmative consent from the creators.

The reason I ask is because I can't see the DLL thing being anything other than the company worrying mods would interfere with sales of either future Civ VI content or hold people back from purchasing Civ VII by allowing modders to essentially polish Civ VI to supersede it (like Vox Populi). But if they've incorporated fan mods into the official game before, the optimist in me wants to believe it could be a great way to incorporate player feedback and desires without necessarily trying to do everything themselves.

I have absolutely no ideas if the EULA section about "user created content" would stand in court, but they've included mods (or parts of mods) in civ5 and civ6 too.

 

[topsecret]

As someone who wasn't around for Civ IV, can anyone explain to me how Rhye's and Fall evolved from a purely fan-mod to an official game mode? Like logistically, I was curious about the legal and monetary issues that I assumed would be involved in essentially monetizing a fan product. I'm sure Firaxis has legal rights to do what they want with mods, but I would think for PR reasons they wouldn't do anything like that without explicit affirmative consent from the creators.

The reason I ask is because I can't see the DLL thing being anything other than the company worrying mods would interfere with sales of either future Civ VI content or hold people back from purchasing Civ VII by allowing modders to essentially polish Civ VI to supersede it (like Vox Populi). But if they've incorporated fan mods into the official game before, the optimist in me wants to believe it could be a great way to incorporate player feedback and desires without necessarily trying to do everything themselves.

It was very encouraged by the fans and devs. They asked, but what modder wouldn't want to be included? I know some wouldn't, but many would.

They're already releasing the update - why not get recognized? Civ3 - Civ5 all showed how well it works when the modding community is fully embraced. Everyone wins.

And it's evident that releasing the DLL never stopped people from buying new iterations of Civ. I love Civ4 and mod it regularly, but I still bought 6 (twice, actually: Switch & PC)

 

[_hero_]

So here are all the actual gameplay changes I could find in the video:

Spoiler :

Religious community: Changed from Shrines and Temples provide +1 housing to International Trade Routes provide +1 Gold for every Shrine and Temple in the origin city.
- I'm not sure about this change. +2 gold for an international trade route seems rather lackluster to me. I guess maybe that's better than +2 housing??? The +2 housing was always active, whereas the +2 gold requires you do an international trade route

Work Ethic: Changed from +1% Production for each follower to Holy Sites faith adjacency bonus provides production as well.
- This change I like. While losing one of the only % modifiers in the game is sad, the new version is far more impactful early in the game when it matters and it doesn't punish you if your city has a mix of competing religions in it the way the other one did.

Warrior Monks: Same as before but with the added bonus of Culture bomb adjacent tiles when building a Holy Site.
- Warrior Monks have lost some of their luster with Lahore being added to the game. Even before that, it felt kind of bad taking this belief because often you wouldn't end up using it much. Culture bombs are nice, although not necessarily all that important most of the time. This does give a tactical reason to found a religion though. Culture bombing a neighbor's borders to make invasions easier can be nice.

Sacred Places: "Faithful cities with world wonders will now receive extra science, culture, faith and gold."
- Sounds good on paper. Hard to quantify without seeing the numbers, and is the bonus yield a 1-time thing, or does it stack for each wonder in a city? I don't see this being taken much on high level play due to the wonder requirement, but I can see your typical player who just plays on Prince or King getting great use out of it.

Pagoda: replaced +1 housing with +1 Diplomatic Favor per turn
- This sounds quite strong to me. The same amount of Favor as being Suzerain for the low price of a tier 3 building. I suppose this comes down to how much you value Favor, but the AI still seems to value it quite a bit in trade deals, so I feel this can potentially be used for a significant economic boost in the early game, if you're willing to deal with the hassle of selling favors to the AI. Late game, this just means the owner of Pagoda's will have even more control over the world congress.

Dar-E Merh: Can no longer be pillaged from natural disasters.
- Cool, I guess. Not sure how impactful this will be, but it will be nice to not miss out on the bonus faith as much.

Yosemite and Eye of Sahara buffed
- Yosemite was a 2 tile wonder giving +1 science +1 gold to adjacent tiles (so you'd get 2 tiles that were +2 science +2 gold). Eye of Sahara was 1 production and an additional 1 production 3 science upon entering atomic era. I wonder if they merely doubled the original yields, or if they changed the yields in some other way.

Otherwise, you have UI improvements, exploit fixes, new red death factions. Overall nothing amazing but all seem like positive changes to me. We will have to wait to see what wasn't listed in the video, as the text said "We also took a pass at Religion and adjusted some Beliefs … and even added a few new ones!" They didn't show any new beliefs in the video and the only new one they mentioned was Sacred Places.

 

[AntSou]

Dude, do not confuse consumer choice with consumer focused. Those are two entirely different concepts. Of course I do not have to buy it. Everyone understands that. That is basic stuff. That said, myself and many others ask Firaxis to fix or add <insert item>. They choose more often than not to add/fix things I and many others did not ask for. Hardly customer focus. There is a list bigger than several pages of things people reported or requested. Obviously they cannot get to everything, but there are massively glaring issues that they won't address. 4 years in, it's obvious, they do not care about fixing it. That's their choice. I speak for myself when I say I still like the game, but I refuse to pretend the issues doesn't exist because they do not care about it.

This whole "business used to be consumer focused" is demonstrably false.

Nowadays there's more laws to keep consumers protected as well as means for consumers to keep themselves informed than ever before. This means consumers are also able to better identify shams, communicate and share opinions, use review metrics and a ton of other stuff which would not be possible a mere few decades ago.

Consumers today are highly critical and much more so than before.

You've got palm oil free products, bacon without pork, yogurt without fat, candy without sugar, beer without alcohol, coke without sugar, coke without sugar for people who don't like coke without sugar, chocolate with 30/50/70/98.567% amount of cocoa, coffee without caffeine, all kinds of flavored tea for people who don't actually like tea, home delivery, home delivery on saturday, home delivery on saturday before 10.00am, all day breakfast, small, medium, large, extra large, family size of [insert consumable product here], cheese without lactose, bread without gluten, bread with seeds, bread with seeds without seeds, milk made of anything but milk, seedless olives, seedless grapes, AND A MILLION OTHER THINGS WHICH ONLY EXIST BECAUSE OF CONSUMERS ASKING FOR THEM.

 

[tedhebert]

I haven't tried it, but they did add some AI to Red Death recently. It might be viable as a single-player scenario now.

Really ? how do you mean ? you start a MP game and assign all enemies to AI ? Didn't know you could do that...

 

[Vandlys]

BTW can you guys @firaxis fix the Mayan leader name in the polish version? It s now: Panie Szóste Niebo, and should be Pani Szóste Niebo.
"Panie" in polish is plural. Singular form is "Pani'

They still have "Some stroopwafel" as said by Wilhelmina, which is the exact problem in reverse (it should be Stroopwafels).

I thought this video was fun to an extent, but I would love it if this was the last one they did in this goofy manner. I found it hard to focus on the actual changes (especially because of the many jump cuts in Kat's lines, like cuts -mid sentence-. Editing barbarians...)

The fact that they mentioned a lot of patch notes from May just made it terribly confusing and quite frustrating to watch. Didn't they have enough content otherwise? I mean, if you take out the bloopers and fun bits, and the patch notes from May, do you only have 1:30 left? Is that the reason they put in so much extraneous information? Bit disappointing.

 

[Pfeffersack]

Really ? how do you mean ? you start a MP game and assign all enemies to AI ? Didn't know you could do that...

I think you do it by accessing in over the Hotseat MP option and then only setting one player as human.

 

[LordGek]

Did they ever improve the Solo AI for Red Death or has a modder ever attempted such?

 

[Gedemon]

Did they ever improve the Solo AI for Red Death or has a modder ever attempted such?

they had coded a few things that seem to be related to the Red Death AI in the last patch, even added a new method in Lua (to call a script in the game's core?), but AFAIK tactical AI is still locked for modders.

Maybe with one the next patches...

 

[AntSou]

they had coded a few things that seem to be related to the Red Death AI in the last patch, even added a new method in Lua (to call a script in the game's core?), but AFAIK tactical AI is still locked for modders.

Maybe with one the next patches...

What does this mean? Can access to core game files be made indirectly and piecemeal without actually needing to release any DLL?

 

[Wielki Hegemon]

I would bet money this last pack and the 12 patch is the end of Civ6. They might already be working on Civ7 or will start after the last patches.



Well said. I think the Diplomacy Victory/Agenda system is the worst designed aspects of the game, but the lack of tall gameplay has been a massive complaint from day one. It's almost like everything people did not like in Civ5 or was afraid of (World Congress could be tough on you), difficult to play wide, etc. then they did the opposite for 6. It's so wacky, like why do that? What is wrong with having both styles be viable but with tradeoffs or something? Lady Six Sky, while a good idea, is actually a bad civ in 6, due to poor design that favors wide. They did not even think about how to correctly set up her housing and food to get tall in the first place? There are not enough tiles for districts and wonders because she has to settle so close. Why didn't they add housing to her districts? Trying to play her on Prince or King is so-so. Emperor to Deity is a friggin mess or a nightmare. If you have to take another civ's city that forward settled you, they are almost always outside the "magic ring" to avoid the penalty. Did they even test her on Deity? Doesn't look like it to me. If you use the AI difficulty mod "Real Strategy", on Emperor or higher, forget about it. I had to quit about 3 games using that mod because it was just way too hard to get things right with her.

The lack of synergy in the gameplay mechanics and like one guy in the thread said earlier, about how religious civs did not get any stronger but civs like Austrailia just did with the religion improvements. Do they not realize that production is king in Civ6 (mostly) and not realized that some civs might abuse that? If Maya is supposed to be a tall science based civ, why so wonky and awkward in gameplay? I just don't understand their logic sometimes.

So-so on prince? You can relatively easily win with The Maya on deity
But remember This game is balanced and best scaled on a small maps. In huge Maya can struggle, but to be honest I don't bother XXL maps on Civ. They are unbalanced not only for The Maya.

 

[Bitterman]

I think the reason they don't want to release the dll. is because they know it would hurt their sales in the long run. If they released it, modders would get to work and sooner or later they would have a brand new Vox Populi for Civ VI in the workshop.

This wouldn't only hurt their professional image as designers/programmers, it'd mean that, as has already happen with IV and V, many people would choose to stay when VII is released, since VI would be straight up a better product. Even those who decided to buy VII (many of them on discount), could be eventually disappointed with the direction of the new game and return to the old ones for no coming back, so never buying the subsequent expansions of the new. We have a few examples of this in the forum and are totally understandable to be honest.

On the other hand, Civ is and always has been a game living off the community and its mods. If they neglect that part of their bussiness because they don't see immediate economic benefit, they will eventually lose the support of their customers. There will be others ready to take advantage of this and honestly, if they don't want their game improved, I'll be on the other boat.