[CiVI] Let the speculation begin!

[HorseshoeHermit]

More static battles please. This is what it is to have the strategic layer of battle, sorry to say. Even if the map gets larger, it's still a clog without stacks.

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Tryin' to think of anything at all to base some speculation on. Nothing comes to mind as an offhand comment about 1upt or hexes. As typical, any dev we get on camera is perfectly tightlipped. Civ BE having both ought to count as something.

 

[Sclb]

Pretty sure it wont focus on MP. The reason is most CiV games take extremely long time (several hours to days) to complete and few players will stay for an MP session until the end. There isn't an obvious way to fill the gaps other than AI, which itself is another problem.

 

[Valanarch]

Personally I hope that they will bring back multiple leaders, return to having spies as units rather than as features, make social policies a web with the first level of every branch unlocked but with additional levels unlockable only when you reach the next era, multi-tile cities, require units to have supply lines, and replace the simplistic combat system with having two armies (which would be composed of multiple units in the same tile) clashing on a large map determined by the tile's terrain.

 

[Ninakoru]

Pretty sure it wont focus on MP. The reason is most CiV games take extremely long time (several hours to days) to complete and few players will stay for an MP session until the end. There isn't an obvious way to fill the gaps other than AI, which itself is another problem.

It's all speculation, but I mind you they're here for the money, and MP gives the best results.

As I said earlier, a good multiplayer game core doesn't necessarily hinder the single player experience.

On the other side, they could just keep the same game core they are dragging since Civ 4 I believe, save much money on development efforts and play on the safe side, just update unit models, the graphics engine, a few candies and go to the harvest!!

Now that I give it a second thought, we are used to see these days how the companies just play on the safe side, or/and they deliver games in alpha state, doing their testing and quality work on a live environment and real users ^^

 

[Acken]

MP gives the best results in games where there is a large audience for its style. 4-6 hours asymmetric games hardly fit the bill.
I'm all for them to try to give us a better MP experience but thinking it will be a focus of Civ6 sounds delusional to me.

Or it would require a massive shift of how these games are played which is more than risky for a sequel and would be better done in a spin-off.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Pretty sure it wont focus on MP. The reason is most CiV games take extremely long time (several hours to days) to complete and few players will stay for an MP session until the end.

Agreed. A key to good MP is short games that players can finish in 1-2 hours. Therefore, I think the best way for civ6 to handle MP is to have special scenarios that are just for MP. For example, you could have a WW2 scenario. Players could pick sides and play the scenario, have fun, and win the scenario in a couple hours. If civ6 was released with a good amount of MP scenarios to give lots of variety, plus the ability for modders to create their own MP scenarios, I think that could really make MP viable.

In terms of SP, my biggest wish list for civ6 is better combat. I want to see a limited stacks model that borrows some from 1upt to make operational warfare more interesting. I also want to see more interaction between the player and their population. For example, have different cities prefer a certain social policy where they can revolt even if you have an opposite SP. I'd like to see things like revolts, revolutions, civil wars.

 

[KevinLandwaster]

Agreed. A key to good MP is short games that players can finish in 1-2 hours. Therefore, I think the best way for civ6 to handle MP is to have special scenarios that are just for MP. For example, you could have a WW2 scenario. Players could pick sides and play the scenario, have fun, and win the scenario in a couple hours. If civ6 was released with a good amount of MP scenarios to give lots of variety, plus the ability for modders to create their own MP scenarios, I think that could really make MP viable.

In terms of SP, my biggest wish list for civ6 is better combat. I want to see a limited stacks model that borrows some from 1upt to make operational warfare more interesting. I also want to see more interaction between the player and their population. For example, have different cities prefer a certain social policy where they can revolt even if you have an opposite SP. I'd like to see things like revolts, revolutions, civil wars.

You may already know this, but if your happiness falls below -20 your people will revolt and cities will defect and join one of the AIs. This actually happened to me once.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

You may already know this, but if your happiness falls below -20 your people will revolt and cities will defect and join one of the AIs. This actually happened to me once.

Oh I know that. I am just talking about a deeper system where individual cities can react separately to specific things like social policies instead of just global happiness.

 

[KevinLandwaster]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this: People want better combat, but people that play this game probably like it for the non-combat facets. If you want a combat simulation, you would probably play the total war series of games, or for turn-based, maybe something like might and magic. The unique thing about this game is all the facets of society and how the empire evolves from ancient times to the near future era. The Civilization games simulate empire building and world politics more thoroughly than any other game (that I know of). To make a better Civilization game, the art of building a military and waging war should be done the same way as developing other facets of the empire. For example, in some cases it may be more realistic to build such a great military that you could intimidate one of your rivals and he would back down before the fighting even begins. Politics and diplomacy are just as important as battle tactics. I think the Civilization franchise should play to its strengths.

 

[Hakan-i Cihan]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this: People want better combat, but people that play this game probably like it for the non-combat facets.

I think that most people asking for better combat, ask this because of the poor AI which cannot handle the current system properly. As they dont expect the AI would become much better, they ask for better combat which the AI can handle better.


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[kamex]

I hope they overhaul the religion system, so you can found more than one like you could in Civ 4. Ghandi's intro speech even says India founded at least three in real life. No way to do that in Civ 5. Although, still better system than Civ 4 where its just a tech race that the human can't win on high difficulties.

Yet again we might not see it at all until the second expansion pack. I'll be really annoyed if thats the case though.

 

[beetle]

Just to be selfish, I would ask for more speculation and less wish making. There are several many threads of the later type.

 

[crawf0rd]

Just to be selfish, I would ask for more speculation and less wish making. There are several many threads of the later type.

Besides Brad Wardell saying Civ VI is coming and the reporting of a couple articles on clickbaity websites, we don't have anything to speculate on unfortunately.

 

[duckstab]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this: People want better combat, but people that play this game probably like it for the non-combat facets. If you want a combat simulation, you would probably play the total war series of games, or for turn-based, maybe something like might and magic. The unique thing about this game is all the facets of society and how the empire evolves from ancient times to the near future era. The Civilization games simulate empire building and world politics more thoroughly than any other game (that I know of).

Exactly. Jon Shafer took a lot of flack over 1UPT when Civ5 first came out. To some extent the criticisms of this decision were valid, coming eventually even from Jon himself. But the fact is, he was responding to a desire from the Civ community for more realistic and interesting tactical combat than the old SoD could provide.

I fundamentally disagree with this basic desire for better combat to begin with. To me, a Civ6 that provided more engaging mechanics requiring intelligent tradeoffs around things like city specialization, research, expansion, religion, espionage, and diplomacy, would be much more interesting than a game that took a step backward in any of those areas in favor of more/better combat. In the end, no version of Civ is going to provide as compelling a tactical experience as any game that specializes in that aspect.

However, if, for the sake of argument, one buys the premise that richer military tactics improves the game, then to me the only real long-term solution is to move battles off to a separate tactical map. In addition to providing a handle on the map crowding and late-game micromanagement issues with 1UPT, it would give Firaxis an opportunity to build a viable tactical combat module in isolation from an enormous random strategic map. A tactical map would have to have some variability, but I have to believe it's easier to program an AI to fight well on a smaller map with more well-defined objectives.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Just to be selfish, I would ask for more speculation and less wish making. There are several many threads of the later type.

Ok.

Based on previous civ games, I expect civ6 to have the following:
- New graphics. That is virtually a given.
- One "radical" new feature. Speculating, I do think it is possible that they will implement a tactical battle map.
- Lots of tweaks to other features. And, I think it is possible that they will implement some things from Beyond Earth. For example, I think it is very possible that they will add the horizontal and vertical kicker bonuses from BE's virtues to civ6's social policies. And they may add the idea of cities starting as outposts and becoming cities after x turns. They may even add the orbital layer for the late game when the player gets satellites.

 

[meatpardle]

Outposts would be welcome, I didn't like the orbital layer though.

I would not be surprised at all if the pushed MP or some kind of connectivity feature. It seems to be the way things are going nowadays (not like the good old days, etc.).

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Outposts would be welcome, I didn't like the orbital layer though.

I am sure there are improvements that could be made. But some type of orbital layer would be a very logical addition to civ6.

 

[KevinLandwaster]

Another questions is, did the developers make the game they wanted to make already, but now they are just making new iterations to pander to the consumer? Or, are they still dreaming about an ultimate vision of what Civilization could be? Do they see it as a combat game, or as an empire-building simulation at its heart?

An observation about the mechanics of this game: the way it is designed, the player is taking on different roles depending on what he is doing. When moving a scout around ,the player is the explorer; When founding a new religion, the player is a prophet; when establishing social policies, the player is a head-of-state; when fighting a battle, the player is a general; etc. etc.

An interesting question is: What would a game be like if everything that happened was implemented from the perspective of the king? For example, he would tell the explorer to map out the surrounding region, or go find a new continent, then a year or two later, he would have a portion of the map revealed that would vary with the orders he gave to the explorer. In the military realm, he would decide the composition of the military, discover the troop movements of the enemy, and send armies or legions to wage war at various locations. There would be less micromanagement of individual units, but more gameplay surrounding other aspects of the military and political espionage. etc.

 

[Luckystrike77]

Civ6 will use a totally new 64 bit engine based on the new Oxide engine specialized for strategy games.

http://www.oxidegames.com/nitrous/

 

[MadDjinn]

The emphasis being on MP versus the emphasis being on SP, as KevinL explicitly speculated.


Because MP was so poorly implemented with V that they are facing litigation. Had they not offered the feature, there would not be those lawsuits! On the Apple side of things, there is the “Campaign Edition” which is distinguished by (1) never being on sale, and (2) not supporting MP. If that little experiment was financially rewarding, we might see more of that in VI.

ah well, I'd be happy for the balanced point --- SP and MP treated equally wrt game design and features.


lawsuits? which lawsuits? links or it didn't happen.

Aspyr handled the Mac side for Civ V. 2K and Firaxis probably didn't control their offerings. Plus, the main reason the 'campaign edition' lacked MP was because it was a Mac Store offering -- which is not steam compatible. The Mac STEAM side offering has MP and is cross platform compatible. No attempt was made to make a PC side no-MP version.

Civ6 will use a totally new 64 bit engine based on the new Oxide engine specialized for strategy games.

http://www.oxidegames.com/nitrous/

yeah, no. They've got their own engine that they can just change as needed for their games, no need to toss that all out in the hopes that the Oxide engine actually works.