[GS] Civfanatics Gathering Storm Reviews
- Thread starter DWilson
- Start date
Jarms48
Prince
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2016
- Messages
- 358
What I like:
- World Congress making a return: Though they could have given a better explanation on how it works. I still don’t know how or if I can declare emergencies.
- Climate Change is also back: I love this, but I have numerous issues with it.
- Canals and Tunnels. They’re very situational but their implementation is appreciated.
- Additional Civs are always welcome.
What I don’t like:
- Game balance: Many civilisations still need their abilities tweaked, at least in my opinion.
- Climate Change doesn’t have enough bite: This will be a long one. I would really like to see some additional levels added to climate change.
- World Congress making a return: Though they could have given a better explanation on how it works. I still don’t know how or if I can declare emergencies.
- Climate Change is also back: I love this, but I have numerous issues with it.
- Canals and Tunnels. They’re very situational but their implementation is appreciated.
- Additional Civs are always welcome.
What I don’t like:
- Game balance: Many civilisations still need their abilities tweaked, at least in my opinion.
- Climate Change doesn’t have enough bite: This will be a long one. I would really like to see some additional levels added to climate change.
- I would increase the duration of the first few levels of climate change. Then let it rapidly increase in intensity from there. Once you pass the point of no return it should be about minimising the impact of climate change not preventing it.
- More sea level rises up to 100% ice lost.
- Desertification where grassland/plains tiles adjacent to desert have a chance to become desert.
- Snow tiles to turn into tundra.
- Tundra tiles turn into grassland/plains depending on what it’s adjacent to.
- Coast tiles turning into ocean tiles as the sea level rises.
- Forest/Rainforest fires. Which could be extinguished by units, otherwise you lose the forest/rainforest.
- Floodplains reverting to standard tiles.
- Rivers potentially drying up.
- The addition of earthquakes, we have continents so we can have fault lines.
- The addition of Tsunamis, we have the ability to flood or submerge tiles.
- More sea level rises up to 100% ice lost.
- Desertification where grassland/plains tiles adjacent to desert have a chance to become desert.
- Snow tiles to turn into tundra.
- Tundra tiles turn into grassland/plains depending on what it’s adjacent to.
- Coast tiles turning into ocean tiles as the sea level rises.
- Forest/Rainforest fires. Which could be extinguished by units, otherwise you lose the forest/rainforest.
- Floodplains reverting to standard tiles.
- Rivers potentially drying up.
- The addition of earthquakes, we have continents so we can have fault lines.
- The addition of Tsunamis, we have the ability to flood or submerge tiles.
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7 (rounded up from 6.5) I really like the expansion. Many good ideas but it will take some work to balance and refine the new mechanics. For example climate change: It happens too fast; at the same time it has not enough influence on the game. There's no upside to going green. (And if you've got military units it's impossible anyway.)
Some other major things that need attention:
- The progression through the tech tree is way too fast.
- Religious combat is still the most ridiculous and annoying thing. I'd like to see the system re-worked.
Some other major things that need attention:
- The progression through the tech tree is way too fast.
- Religious combat is still the most ridiculous and annoying thing. I'd like to see the system re-worked.
jozef57
Warlord
i am not a revieuw guy, and a did say negative things about previous civ versions except 4 lol,, but i really love this game rf is great, ofcourse the diplomatic game needs a bit of work, and i would love a more civ 4 style unit promotion system more specialistic, miss maries but okt hey where cool with transorts, but for the rest,, i am loving it to bits, can not stop playing a game i love got even more emersing,, must cook now cant wait to go on playing pfff
This is a long one, sorry. But I figure if you're still reading this thread you're at least interested. It covers pretty much all that I'm thinking about Civ 6 and what's next for the series after completing two games of GS.
With the Gathering Storm expansion, Firaxis Games have fixed a number of issues I’ve had with Sid Meier’s Civilization VI. They’ve also added a suite of great new features that help bring its colourful world of miniature cities, wonders and armies even more to life. Yet, some of its new additions fail to have the impact they should if they are to shake up a game series that is at risk of becoming stale.
Civ, and the sixth instalment in particular, is a game that feels increasingly under pressure to perform two opposing roles. On one hand, the series sells the fantasy of taking your people from the dawn of agriculture, through pyramids and temples to castles and colonies, all the way to industrialisation and the space race. It’s a powerful fantasy, so powerful that the player excuses its necessary abstractions: the immortal leaders and the armies of colossi duking it out over miniature cities. One the other hand, there is the enjoyment of those abstractions themselves. The gameified systems and the race to victory that needs to be a compelling experience in its own right. Civilization is a game that seeks to simulate history, up until the point that a winner is declared.
This is a contradiction that has become more problematic than ever with the current game and its expansions.Thanks to lead designer Ed Beach, Civ 6 proudly wears its boardgame inspirations on its sleeve, I think to the game’s benefit. Gameplay features I was initially sceptical of work well, such as the specialised districts, policy cards and governors. I struggle to imagine the game without them. It’s very satisfying to plan out your civ’s priorities, and maximise its outputs. Rise & Fall and Gathering Storm, like boardgame expansions, pile in new and interesting features that augment the core experience. Yet even the original box groaned under the weight of features its predecessor had to wait for two expansions to fulfil. Civ lacks the elegant simplicity I think a satisfying strategy game needs to make the pursuit of victory engaging and competitive. It simply tries to do too much. It’s breadth of scope is impressive, and makes for a richly detailed virtual world. But I pity any newcomer to the franchise, picking up the eventual Complete Edition, who has to grapple with so many systems, so many currencies at once.
Fortunately, I am no newcomer, and can enjoy what Gathering Storm has to offer. Gathering Storm offers enough novelty right out of the gates. As soon as you take your first look at the map, volcanoes and floodplains stare ominously back at you. Dormant calderas may look peaceful for the moment, but soon enough they threaten to erupt, destroying your tile improvements and threatening your people. Do not despair, however—their impact is not such a catastrophe as to drive you to frustration. Vesuvius is now there to discover, but any Pompeii built on its slopes has, at most, to worry about the loss of a few farms and a fraction of its population. And while the volcanoes (and floods, and storms) certainly take away, they also give back in the form of improved tile yields. Overall, the natural disasters work almost perfectly. Enough impact that you need to plan ahead, and spend a few turns repairing the damage, but not enough to set you drastically off-course. I recommend that you play with disasters at the maximum intensity, to keep them a relevant nuisance throughout the game.
The new cast of civilisations to play are great. Inspired choices like the Māori, who start the game as settlers at sea, and the Incan Empire, who turn impassable mountains into early highways invite new approaches to playing the map, a key design goal which Civ 6 has undeniably made happen. The Ottomans are a military powerhouse, Phoenicia excel at settling coastlines, and Mali gets filthy rich off its goldmines. Every one of the new leaders looks gorgeous, their lively animations and distinct personalities almost making up for their incessant demands for your hard-earned artifacts and strategic resources. Also brilliant is the new soundtrack. Geoff Knorr and Roland Rizzo have composed a remarkable set of tunes, changing through the eras, to listen to while you grow your civilisation. Rise & Fall introduced some memorable vocal pieces and I’m pleased to say this has continued in Gathering Storm. The standout track is a Māori haka, featuring the dance group Te Tini a Māui.
A core gameplay mechanic that has been substantially improved is the new strategic resource system. Where previously one or two copies of horses or nitre were enough for you to produce endless cavalry and gunpowder units, now these resources contribute to a finite stockpile. This makes their lack feel more scarce, and having multiple copies is now more valuable, allowing you to equip your armies faster or profit by selling the excess to other civilisations. Having a number of iron mines allows you to rapidly mobilise swordsmen or knights to crush your enemies. A wealth of coal lets you support numerous coal-fired power stations that turn your empire into a production powerhouse. The latter also feeds into the new power generation system. From the Industrial Era onwards, you can boost your cities’ outputs by constructing coal, oil or nuclear power stations, as well as a number of renewables. The production boost is noticeable, and makes the dawn of industrialisation feel much more potent than it has in Civ 6 prior to this. However, the late game still suffers from a poorly-balanced scaling of production costs. Even with your factories running at full capacity, modern buildings such as stock exchanges and research labs feel prohibitively expensive. Not only do they take a frustratingly long time to build, the numbers simply don’t add up. Why waste so much production on a building that even when powered provides less gold than a single trade route? It is disappointing to see such fundamental balance issues survive and even be worsened in the third year of the game’s development. Beyond a SimCity-like desire to fill your districts with buildings, there is simply no good reason to invest in this infrastructure when top-level strategies such as resource harvesting, and now pillaging your enemy’s lands, yield so much more.
Of course, the emissions from all this industry feed directly into what is perhaps the most prominent feature of this expansion: climate change. This does, however, turn out to be a bit of a damp squib. Things like coastal flooding and increasingly severe hurricanes as the planet’s collected civilisations belch greenhouse gases into the virtual atmosphere sound interesting on paper. In practice climate change both progresses too quickly with even a modest amount of industrialisation, and also doesn’t have a severe enough impact to discourage this sort of play. The problem is compounded by the game forewarning you which tiles will be flooded from the beginning of the game. It is trivial to avoid putting important infrastructure on coastal lowlands to avoid them being swallowed by the sea in two thousand years’ time. Another issue is that everyone (at least, everyone on the coast) suffers the effects of sea level rise, regardless of their own carbon emissions. It makes no sense to avoid CO2 emissions and thus delay your industrialisation, setting you back and leaving the only solution to the crisis—building coastal defences—out of reach. Ultimately, the best move is to build your coal plants, flood the coast, and then either ignore the flooding completely or deal with it later.
Another addition that falls slightly flat is the World Congress, reintroduced from Civ 5. Initially, what put me off was the bizarre voting system. During each session, all the nations vote on a random selection of proposals, each of which has opposing A and B sides. For instance, the handy Urban Development Treaty can either A) double, or B) prohibit entirely, the production of buildings in a particular district, which is also for the nations to decide. In effect, every resolution is a confusing mix of voting for both the outcome and its target simultaneously. Yet in practice this at least means that every session brings a definite outcome, even if it’s one you don’t like, forcing you to adapt your strategy for the next era of the game. Where the new World Congress really fails is in the return of the diplomatic victory condition. Leaving aside how this is ever going to be satisfying in what is at heart a competitive strategy game, the implementation is slow and frustrating. A handful of victory points are available for supporting other civilisations through natural disasters, winning international competitions, or reaching milestones in the technology or civics trees. For the bulk of your points, you are reliant on the outcomes of a number of voting sessions, banking your diplomatic favour (a new currency) to try to drown out your rivals, who will naturally be voting for themselves. The sessions are 30 turns apart, regardless of how late you are in the game, and you need to assemble 10 points to win. This makes pursuing a diplomatic victory a drawn out process and a single lost vote is a frustrating setback. When you reach 7 or 8 victory points, the AI civs will form a coalition to vote against you, and extracting those final points from an election is similar to getting blood from a stone. Other victory types are much quicker to pursue, and are less reliant on the occurrence of randomised events or competitions.
New additions to the science and culture victories are disappointing. Players seeking to win the space race now have an extra rocket to launch, to accommodate the new Future Era, and have to wait for their starship to reach the Alpha Centauri system. This unnecessary 50-turn process can be expedited substantially by completing further construction projects in your city’s spaceports, and the overall experience differs little to how it was previously. The new era itself gives you powerful tools, from giant robots to new government types, that speed you along to your desired victory without any really exciting ideas. For the culture victory, which before was rather passive, the new rock band units are a fun and potentially powerful way to actively boost your tourism output (or sabotage a rival’s) in the late game. However, the tourism mechanic remains opaque and confusing‚ and it’s often hard to gauge exactly how much your performers are doing to help you win.
None of the new or altered victory conditions in Civ 6 have managed to decisively shake the issue of increasing boredom as the player approaches an uncontested win. Regardless of which victory you choose to pursue, the last portion of the game invariably involves clicking next turn until whichever counter reaches its target. Perhaps because the concept of victory will necessarily seem arbitrary in a game that aims to retrace human development through the ages. The diplomatic victory is simply the most jarring illustration of the conflict between Civ as a historical sandbox, and Civ as a strategy game. A decent number of players want to fulfil the fantasy of being a peacemaker, even if such a feat is simply impossible when playing against a human opponent. Even more players want a vastly improved AI, even if it would mean a simplification of the game’s systems, and an overhaul of game balance so that optimal play does not conform to a few core strategies (as it does now).
So, as a Civ Fanatic, I am torn. Civ 6 is a beautiful, enjoyable game. It's too easy, largely thanks to an AI that struggles to keep up, but with the full feature sets of Rise & Fall and Gathering Storm there are interesting decisions to be made, and a lot of gorgeous countryside to cover with cities. While other fans may gravitate back to Civ 4 or 5, it still holds my attention. Part of me wants another expansion, and not just for the hunt for clues before it launches. I want to see my favourite civs, like the Maya or Ethiopia, return. I want to see exploration and colonisation fleshed out. But I realise this probably shouldn’t happen. What Civ needs is not new features, as pleasant as they are (for the most part). It needs a radical new approach to design that creates an elegant core experience that is free from the weight of too much baggage and feature-creep. One where the only viable victory type in multiplayer is not simply conquest. Where there are no buildings that are never worth building. Where there are not four different diplomatic currencies to keep track of. If Civ 7 is to feel fresh, it can’t be afraid to slaughter a few sacred cows and go back to basics.
With the Gathering Storm expansion, Firaxis Games have fixed a number of issues I’ve had with Sid Meier’s Civilization VI. They’ve also added a suite of great new features that help bring its colourful world of miniature cities, wonders and armies even more to life. Yet, some of its new additions fail to have the impact they should if they are to shake up a game series that is at risk of becoming stale.
Civ, and the sixth instalment in particular, is a game that feels increasingly under pressure to perform two opposing roles. On one hand, the series sells the fantasy of taking your people from the dawn of agriculture, through pyramids and temples to castles and colonies, all the way to industrialisation and the space race. It’s a powerful fantasy, so powerful that the player excuses its necessary abstractions: the immortal leaders and the armies of colossi duking it out over miniature cities. One the other hand, there is the enjoyment of those abstractions themselves. The gameified systems and the race to victory that needs to be a compelling experience in its own right. Civilization is a game that seeks to simulate history, up until the point that a winner is declared.
This is a contradiction that has become more problematic than ever with the current game and its expansions.Thanks to lead designer Ed Beach, Civ 6 proudly wears its boardgame inspirations on its sleeve, I think to the game’s benefit. Gameplay features I was initially sceptical of work well, such as the specialised districts, policy cards and governors. I struggle to imagine the game without them. It’s very satisfying to plan out your civ’s priorities, and maximise its outputs. Rise & Fall and Gathering Storm, like boardgame expansions, pile in new and interesting features that augment the core experience. Yet even the original box groaned under the weight of features its predecessor had to wait for two expansions to fulfil. Civ lacks the elegant simplicity I think a satisfying strategy game needs to make the pursuit of victory engaging and competitive. It simply tries to do too much. It’s breadth of scope is impressive, and makes for a richly detailed virtual world. But I pity any newcomer to the franchise, picking up the eventual Complete Edition, who has to grapple with so many systems, so many currencies at once.
Fortunately, I am no newcomer, and can enjoy what Gathering Storm has to offer. Gathering Storm offers enough novelty right out of the gates. As soon as you take your first look at the map, volcanoes and floodplains stare ominously back at you. Dormant calderas may look peaceful for the moment, but soon enough they threaten to erupt, destroying your tile improvements and threatening your people. Do not despair, however—their impact is not such a catastrophe as to drive you to frustration. Vesuvius is now there to discover, but any Pompeii built on its slopes has, at most, to worry about the loss of a few farms and a fraction of its population. And while the volcanoes (and floods, and storms) certainly take away, they also give back in the form of improved tile yields. Overall, the natural disasters work almost perfectly. Enough impact that you need to plan ahead, and spend a few turns repairing the damage, but not enough to set you drastically off-course. I recommend that you play with disasters at the maximum intensity, to keep them a relevant nuisance throughout the game.
The new cast of civilisations to play are great. Inspired choices like the Māori, who start the game as settlers at sea, and the Incan Empire, who turn impassable mountains into early highways invite new approaches to playing the map, a key design goal which Civ 6 has undeniably made happen. The Ottomans are a military powerhouse, Phoenicia excel at settling coastlines, and Mali gets filthy rich off its goldmines. Every one of the new leaders looks gorgeous, their lively animations and distinct personalities almost making up for their incessant demands for your hard-earned artifacts and strategic resources. Also brilliant is the new soundtrack. Geoff Knorr and Roland Rizzo have composed a remarkable set of tunes, changing through the eras, to listen to while you grow your civilisation. Rise & Fall introduced some memorable vocal pieces and I’m pleased to say this has continued in Gathering Storm. The standout track is a Māori haka, featuring the dance group Te Tini a Māui.
A core gameplay mechanic that has been substantially improved is the new strategic resource system. Where previously one or two copies of horses or nitre were enough for you to produce endless cavalry and gunpowder units, now these resources contribute to a finite stockpile. This makes their lack feel more scarce, and having multiple copies is now more valuable, allowing you to equip your armies faster or profit by selling the excess to other civilisations. Having a number of iron mines allows you to rapidly mobilise swordsmen or knights to crush your enemies. A wealth of coal lets you support numerous coal-fired power stations that turn your empire into a production powerhouse. The latter also feeds into the new power generation system. From the Industrial Era onwards, you can boost your cities’ outputs by constructing coal, oil or nuclear power stations, as well as a number of renewables. The production boost is noticeable, and makes the dawn of industrialisation feel much more potent than it has in Civ 6 prior to this. However, the late game still suffers from a poorly-balanced scaling of production costs. Even with your factories running at full capacity, modern buildings such as stock exchanges and research labs feel prohibitively expensive. Not only do they take a frustratingly long time to build, the numbers simply don’t add up. Why waste so much production on a building that even when powered provides less gold than a single trade route? It is disappointing to see such fundamental balance issues survive and even be worsened in the third year of the game’s development. Beyond a SimCity-like desire to fill your districts with buildings, there is simply no good reason to invest in this infrastructure when top-level strategies such as resource harvesting, and now pillaging your enemy’s lands, yield so much more.
Of course, the emissions from all this industry feed directly into what is perhaps the most prominent feature of this expansion: climate change. This does, however, turn out to be a bit of a damp squib. Things like coastal flooding and increasingly severe hurricanes as the planet’s collected civilisations belch greenhouse gases into the virtual atmosphere sound interesting on paper. In practice climate change both progresses too quickly with even a modest amount of industrialisation, and also doesn’t have a severe enough impact to discourage this sort of play. The problem is compounded by the game forewarning you which tiles will be flooded from the beginning of the game. It is trivial to avoid putting important infrastructure on coastal lowlands to avoid them being swallowed by the sea in two thousand years’ time. Another issue is that everyone (at least, everyone on the coast) suffers the effects of sea level rise, regardless of their own carbon emissions. It makes no sense to avoid CO2 emissions and thus delay your industrialisation, setting you back and leaving the only solution to the crisis—building coastal defences—out of reach. Ultimately, the best move is to build your coal plants, flood the coast, and then either ignore the flooding completely or deal with it later.
Another addition that falls slightly flat is the World Congress, reintroduced from Civ 5. Initially, what put me off was the bizarre voting system. During each session, all the nations vote on a random selection of proposals, each of which has opposing A and B sides. For instance, the handy Urban Development Treaty can either A) double, or B) prohibit entirely, the production of buildings in a particular district, which is also for the nations to decide. In effect, every resolution is a confusing mix of voting for both the outcome and its target simultaneously. Yet in practice this at least means that every session brings a definite outcome, even if it’s one you don’t like, forcing you to adapt your strategy for the next era of the game. Where the new World Congress really fails is in the return of the diplomatic victory condition. Leaving aside how this is ever going to be satisfying in what is at heart a competitive strategy game, the implementation is slow and frustrating. A handful of victory points are available for supporting other civilisations through natural disasters, winning international competitions, or reaching milestones in the technology or civics trees. For the bulk of your points, you are reliant on the outcomes of a number of voting sessions, banking your diplomatic favour (a new currency) to try to drown out your rivals, who will naturally be voting for themselves. The sessions are 30 turns apart, regardless of how late you are in the game, and you need to assemble 10 points to win. This makes pursuing a diplomatic victory a drawn out process and a single lost vote is a frustrating setback. When you reach 7 or 8 victory points, the AI civs will form a coalition to vote against you, and extracting those final points from an election is similar to getting blood from a stone. Other victory types are much quicker to pursue, and are less reliant on the occurrence of randomised events or competitions.
New additions to the science and culture victories are disappointing. Players seeking to win the space race now have an extra rocket to launch, to accommodate the new Future Era, and have to wait for their starship to reach the Alpha Centauri system. This unnecessary 50-turn process can be expedited substantially by completing further construction projects in your city’s spaceports, and the overall experience differs little to how it was previously. The new era itself gives you powerful tools, from giant robots to new government types, that speed you along to your desired victory without any really exciting ideas. For the culture victory, which before was rather passive, the new rock band units are a fun and potentially powerful way to actively boost your tourism output (or sabotage a rival’s) in the late game. However, the tourism mechanic remains opaque and confusing‚ and it’s often hard to gauge exactly how much your performers are doing to help you win.
None of the new or altered victory conditions in Civ 6 have managed to decisively shake the issue of increasing boredom as the player approaches an uncontested win. Regardless of which victory you choose to pursue, the last portion of the game invariably involves clicking next turn until whichever counter reaches its target. Perhaps because the concept of victory will necessarily seem arbitrary in a game that aims to retrace human development through the ages. The diplomatic victory is simply the most jarring illustration of the conflict between Civ as a historical sandbox, and Civ as a strategy game. A decent number of players want to fulfil the fantasy of being a peacemaker, even if such a feat is simply impossible when playing against a human opponent. Even more players want a vastly improved AI, even if it would mean a simplification of the game’s systems, and an overhaul of game balance so that optimal play does not conform to a few core strategies (as it does now).
So, as a Civ Fanatic, I am torn. Civ 6 is a beautiful, enjoyable game. It's too easy, largely thanks to an AI that struggles to keep up, but with the full feature sets of Rise & Fall and Gathering Storm there are interesting decisions to be made, and a lot of gorgeous countryside to cover with cities. While other fans may gravitate back to Civ 4 or 5, it still holds my attention. Part of me wants another expansion, and not just for the hunt for clues before it launches. I want to see my favourite civs, like the Maya or Ethiopia, return. I want to see exploration and colonisation fleshed out. But I realise this probably shouldn’t happen. What Civ needs is not new features, as pleasant as they are (for the most part). It needs a radical new approach to design that creates an elegant core experience that is free from the weight of too much baggage and feature-creep. One where the only viable victory type in multiplayer is not simply conquest. Where there are no buildings that are never worth building. Where there are not four different diplomatic currencies to keep track of. If Civ 7 is to feel fresh, it can’t be afraid to slaughter a few sacred cows and go back to basics.
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Trav'ling Canuck
Deity
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2018
- Messages
- 2,959
megabearsfan
Prince
My feelings are very mixed. I put up a full review on my blog (as usual), so feel free to check that out: http://www.megabearsfan.net/post/20...VI-Gathering-Storm-expansion-game-review.aspx
In summary, I'm underwhelmed by the new headline features. I like that Global Warming is in the game, and that the game takes it seriously. But I don't feel like it's as dire a threat as it should be. It doesn't count as a "lose state", so you can win the game with any victory, regardless of how unbearably hot the world becomes. I would also have rather seen systematic climate changes over the course of the entire games. Things akin to the "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period", which would alter the map slightly and cycle back and forth every 1000 in-game years or so, melting ice caps, re-freezing ice caps, expanding and shrinking deserts and rainforests, causing animal migrations, raising and lowering sea levels, maybe even opening up the occasional land bridge here or there, etc.
I play mostly in single-player, so I don't mind the randomness of the disasters as much as competitive MPers probably do. That being said, I feel like the river flooding and volcanoes are the best disaster systems in the game because of how they have a predictable risk/reward strategy associated with them, rather than just being completely random.
I like that the World Congress is back, but I don't like how random and un-purposeful it feels. I think the Diplo Favor currency is an improvement over Civ V's Congress, but I thought Civ V handles the Congress better overall by having the changing leadership, and allowing the leader civ to set the Congress's agenda. I really like that Emergencies were rolled into the Congress. That's a nice change!
All that being said, I feel like all the subtle smaller changes really add up to steal the show in GS. I love the new strategic resource system (even though I have a few complaints regarding which units cost what resources -- Knights should cost 10 iron and 10 horses IMO). Trade and diplomacy feels much more active and dynamic with the Diplo Favor and strategic resource trading. I'm even finding myself building Spearmen and Pikes (of all things) due to limitations of iron and horse availability, and have even had 2 games in which Pikemen dominated the game in the medieval era! I lost one of those wars because I didn't bother to build Spearmen/Pikemen, and my opponent did. I'm not making that mistake again.
Disasters mean that harvesting resources isn't always optimal, because you can lose pop in a city or have infrastructure damaged by a disaster, and then won't have the resource available to harvest again. So I'm much more cautious about harvesting now than I ever was before, and the decision feels much more meaningful.
River flooding has made it so that I'm not always building my city centers on the river tile. The extra food from floods makes farms on those tiles feel much more valuable (esp in Feudalism clusters). This means that I'm actually settling one tile off the rivers and building Aqueducts to mountains or lakes instead. I'm also building more Encampments, including building more in my inner cities, since they are useful as more than just an extra set of walls on my border towns.
Building coalitions via alliances and suzerains actually feels more viable and valuable due to the new Diplo Favor. Sill no co-op / shared victory though ...
Oh, and the new civs are all great! I love how the Moari and Mali have abilities that actually change the way you play the game, and I love how so many of the civs have abilities that play well off of each other. Also, I want to put Kupe in every game, so that I can listen to his soundtrack (along with Cree, Scotland, and England).
For me, the game is like a C++. If the World Congress or climate mechanics had worked even just a little bit better, it'd be an easy B, and maybe even an A if the A.I. were dramatically better and I could actually get a challenge from playing on King instead of Emperor.
In summary, I'm underwhelmed by the new headline features. I like that Global Warming is in the game, and that the game takes it seriously. But I don't feel like it's as dire a threat as it should be. It doesn't count as a "lose state", so you can win the game with any victory, regardless of how unbearably hot the world becomes. I would also have rather seen systematic climate changes over the course of the entire games. Things akin to the "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period", which would alter the map slightly and cycle back and forth every 1000 in-game years or so, melting ice caps, re-freezing ice caps, expanding and shrinking deserts and rainforests, causing animal migrations, raising and lowering sea levels, maybe even opening up the occasional land bridge here or there, etc.
I play mostly in single-player, so I don't mind the randomness of the disasters as much as competitive MPers probably do. That being said, I feel like the river flooding and volcanoes are the best disaster systems in the game because of how they have a predictable risk/reward strategy associated with them, rather than just being completely random.
I like that the World Congress is back, but I don't like how random and un-purposeful it feels. I think the Diplo Favor currency is an improvement over Civ V's Congress, but I thought Civ V handles the Congress better overall by having the changing leadership, and allowing the leader civ to set the Congress's agenda. I really like that Emergencies were rolled into the Congress. That's a nice change!
All that being said, I feel like all the subtle smaller changes really add up to steal the show in GS. I love the new strategic resource system (even though I have a few complaints regarding which units cost what resources -- Knights should cost 10 iron and 10 horses IMO). Trade and diplomacy feels much more active and dynamic with the Diplo Favor and strategic resource trading. I'm even finding myself building Spearmen and Pikes (of all things) due to limitations of iron and horse availability, and have even had 2 games in which Pikemen dominated the game in the medieval era! I lost one of those wars because I didn't bother to build Spearmen/Pikemen, and my opponent did. I'm not making that mistake again.
Disasters mean that harvesting resources isn't always optimal, because you can lose pop in a city or have infrastructure damaged by a disaster, and then won't have the resource available to harvest again. So I'm much more cautious about harvesting now than I ever was before, and the decision feels much more meaningful.
River flooding has made it so that I'm not always building my city centers on the river tile. The extra food from floods makes farms on those tiles feel much more valuable (esp in Feudalism clusters). This means that I'm actually settling one tile off the rivers and building Aqueducts to mountains or lakes instead. I'm also building more Encampments, including building more in my inner cities, since they are useful as more than just an extra set of walls on my border towns.
Building coalitions via alliances and suzerains actually feels more viable and valuable due to the new Diplo Favor. Sill no co-op / shared victory though ...
Oh, and the new civs are all great! I love how the Moari and Mali have abilities that actually change the way you play the game, and I love how so many of the civs have abilities that play well off of each other. Also, I want to put Kupe in every game, so that I can listen to his soundtrack (along with Cree, Scotland, and England).
For me, the game is like a C++. If the World Congress or climate mechanics had worked even just a little bit better, it'd be an easy B, and maybe even an A if the A.I. were dramatically better and I could actually get a challenge from playing on King instead of Emperor.
Ferocitus
Deity
Upgraded my vote from 1 to 5 now that Ynamp Giant Terra maps with 24 civs and 30CS works reasonably well.
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