[GS] Civilization VI: Gathering Storm - Antarctic Late Summer Game Update (April 2019)

He's a climate change denier who's mad that his favorite leader (Victoria) isn't very powerful in this game. He's been cranky about it for a while now. Too bad, because he used to contribute lots of good information.

 

Those are some great changes. Now if they'd just give us a way to toggle map pins on/off, I'd be a happy camper.

 

Well, i'm also unhappy about Norway/no custom civ option. And as a physicist i would also like to throw every politician into jail who abuses climate predictions for political campaigns.

 

It's not really the one leader per se that isn't very powerful in the game. I think the issue is that coastal strategies have never really been all that optimal in Civ6 yet it's been fun to try and overcome the disadvantage from time to time. But seeing yet an additional slap into the face of what SHOULD be a solid way to play eventually just gets old.

It's almost as if they are determined to not have coastal-based civs be desirable. There are myriad (simple!) steps they could take yet patch after patch and instead of getting better they get worse lol.

 

The ONLY thing that keeps me from moving on to another game due to the frustrations of the extensive coastal flooding in this climate hysterical game is that the designers at least give us players a heads-up on which tiles will flood so we don't build on them. At least we got that going for us!

 

Regardless of whether or not they are ignorant about climate change, that doesn't inherently make them wrong about the fact that coastal cities are garbo and Victoria is a joke civ. They are. It's possible for someone to be a bad person, or wrong about some things, while still being right about some other unrelated thing.

Maritime civs, and England most of all, are garbage. Whatever level of anger is required to change that, from whatever sort of people are able to muster it, is apparently necessary.

 

But this has pretty much always been a problem in Civ, though. It's not like VI is the first game to make coastal cities less productive than their inland counterparts. All of this hyperbolic "slap in the face" talk is nonsense. If hurricanes are too destructive, then they can be rebalanced. If inland cities have it too easy, then floods, etc. can be rebalanced. There's no anti-coast, anti-England, or whatever agenda.

 

The inherent value of coastal cities in VI, much like V, is better and (IIRC) maybe longer trade. Perhaps the difference is under-powered and doesn't make up for the costs (much of which exists in real life as well), but it definitely exists. At most, it's not well balanced.

And I want to push back against the hate on Victoria's England just a tad. While it's not very powerful, it's definitely quite thematic and playable, and pushes you towards a certain form of roleplaying gameplay (which is fun, and good!)- even if weak. It's also a benefit, regardless of whether or not it's a negligible benefit. This hasn't always been true (I like to point to V's Iroquois, whom were also fun thematically, but often legitimately worse than a generic civ) of weaker civs.

 

Design of civ vi is not kind to maritime&coastal civs.
Unfortunately the district design demands more land tiles to work since those provide enough yields. Unless you have suzerain of auckland ( very situational ) , take the panteon for fishing boats ( still only a bonus for 1 or 2 tiles usually in a city ) or somehow manage to come to the very late game for windmills&seasteds where most players never go ( either due to lack of interest in late game or game being already decided or simply it takes 10 times longer per turn than the first few ages ).
What firaxis and the devs have tried AFTER the vanilla game was to give the few maritime civs some love by giving them unique mechanics&abilities to offset those blatant disadvantage. Indonesia ( got an overpowered UI ), Maori ( arguably the most interesting design in CIV VI ) , Dido ( settlers and going wide is always a prerequisite for alternative strategies ) and now Norway ( nice pillaging for early game snowballing ) . For England however they simply put an alternative leader that does only work well for culture ( which doesnt work at all with seadogs and military engineers ) and culture only.
Victoria England and the abilities stayed uninteresting and quite frankly extremely situational ( need luck to find a near continent and the ability to keep cities there despite loyalty and apparent aggresive expansion by AI ) . It does force you to play a certain way and only 1 way.
I hope the devs will rethink and give another look to Victoria England. For the Empire where the sun never sets , the empire that started the industrial age and the empire that dominated all the seas&shores for centuries .
There should be something more than a weak raiding sea unit ( why not a unique skill giving a bonus to all british ships through all ages ) ,
some charge bonuses for military engineers ( why not an extra ability that other engineers dont have like destroy/weaken walls per charge? )
and also 3rd tier buildings are a waste of resources anyway ( why not give the workshops and factories bonuses? ) .
There simply is not the excitement there to play this civ unless you want to play it the only way possible.

 

If it bothers people that much they can always just install the cheat panel mod and give themselves free flood barriers when the ocean levels start rising.
Doesn't help with Tornadoes etc. but it's better than nothing.

 

I don't know, my Phoenicia game went quite well. Though not all my cities were coastal since you don't need to be on the coast to build a Cothon. Making lots of money isn't a bad thing.

Oh and my Eleanor England game is currently my 2nd highest score in my HOF right now.

 

Some achievements were just updated. 2 were spelling corrections.

Take On Me was renamed to Literally Playable.

 

I think there are several way to improve the maritime civs:

- make more significant the Eureka moment for sailing due to have a costal city: without a coastal city the research for sailing should take way more turns;
- create new Eureka moments related to research and civics, linking them to have already a second and a third coastal city, infrastructures, boats etc;
- increase ocean tile production when they belong to a coastal city;
- buff Norway, England with bonuses which can make them though opponents when they are managed by AI.

 

Coastal civs are grossly underpowered and coastal starts are suicide. The GW mechanics are nonsensical and biased against the ALREADY WEAKEST start in the game.

If the game designers wanted to make climate change and industrialism penalties, they should really have focused on local or regional issues that were VERY evident in the correct timeframes, like acid rain (which was a serious, documented problem in southern California in the 70s and 80s), ozone depletion (which could have turned plains to desert above heavy industry areas), pollution causing health issues in cities AND REGIONS since Civ6 has region and "tile range" mechanics, etc.

Instead we got "civs on the other size of the world built cavalry. Your coastal cities drown. So sad. Luckily your inland neighbors, who built on the tundra and desert hills, are much smarter than you. Why did you ever build where the rivers meet the seas you silly people?"

 

You wouldn't need to buff coastal cities themselves, but buffing the water yield

-allow Fishing boats on all coastal tiles (all water tiles in one of the postindustrial eras)
-give Fishing boats a bonus (food and or gold) for being adjacent to City Center or a District

(buffing Eurekas more from coastal cities/maritime emphasis and buffing the Water trade route yield (perhaps a nice chunk of gold wherever a trade unit embarks/disembarks..if it is one of your cities/harbors you get the gold)


Global warming provides an interesting gameplay situation because
1. its global (like ozone)... local pollution (acid rain/smog) might be sort of interesting, but it doesn't have the interesting diplomatic aspect

2. it requires significant trade offs (unlike ozone depletion...for that we just had to phase out one class of specific industrial chemicals for an ever so slightly less efficient group) eliminating/reducing/avoiding global warming requires Major costs

The problem is that its costs fall on coastal terrain, which is already disadvantaged.
Instead coastal starts should be made the absolute best.... so that when global warming comes around it does major damage to your best territory (similar to reality). (and should also include significant desertification inland..targeting desert farms first)
[and make desert farms without fresh water require power just to be mean]

 

Allow fishing improvements
Allow trade routes from harbors to stack with commercial hubs (so coastal cities get 2 trade routes)
Make trade routes over water significantly more valuable
Make flood barriers less expensive and earlier in the tech tree

 

The simple buffs for Maritime civs include the following:

Make Fishing Boats better

Make Fisheries a tech unlock instead of a governor unlock (seriously, Firaxis...)

Make sea resources more abundant

Allow more resources to spawn in reefs

Actually have reasonable production cost scaling so that it's not absurdly difficult to get the buildings that make coastal times good.

Edit: I forgot the super-obvious "Can we have more housing???" fix.

 

That said, England's Free Inquiry is actually insane and the civ is perfectly viable. It's just really linear play. While I enjoy the increase in unique abilities in civ 6 vs in 5, I would really have liked to have more options that are picked after game start, instead of before. Or the start customization of Beyond Earth, which was one of the best parts of the game.

 

Coastal cities were more powerful in Civ 5 because trade provided them with massive advantages. A Sea trade route, be it internal or international, would have DOUBLE the yields of a regular one.

Civ 6's Coastal cities aren't as crappy as you guys make them out to be. They are weaker but not impossible to manage. They could certainly use a buff though, but most coastal oriented civs (Phoenicia, Indonesia and now, Norway) can definitely hold their own.

 

I have not followed this thread entirely but I hope @Victoria has not really quit. I learned a great deal from his guides and posts. I guess we already lost @Civ6Trader at some point in the past as I have not seen him post in a long time, but his videos were so incredibly helpful.

I have to agree that coastal starts are weak already and the increased flooding seems like it will just make them worse - between lower housing and water tiles being so much worse on average than land tiles I would not be too happy if I preferred England (though personally I like to just experiment with different Civ each game).

It is somewhat good to hear they at least partially fixed pillaging, but it sounds like you will still get a too much science/culture from district pillaging and can still abuse the existing pillage/capture/flip/repair exploit for huge amounts of golf. I wish they reverted to the original 25 non-scaling faith/science/culture system which was totally fine.

My biggest anticipated complaint is the Firaxis seems to be dead set against fixing Goddess of the Harvest, which is way, way better than all of the other pantheons combined as @LilyLancer has said before. It would be perfectly competitive if Goddess of the Harvest gave 20 faith per chop, but getting 100 or more is way too strong and even more broken with Monumentality. Are you really ever going to want 1 faith per turn from quarries over this? What's that going to be, maybe 1000 faith over the whole game? You can get 2000 from one Builder with Goddess of the Harvest and a few Crabs. It sucks to have one pantheon by so much better than the others that they are never even worth considering. This adds too much random luck as to whether you pop faith or a relic from a hut and get this or not.

Personally, I almost feel like quitting until there is a GOTM mod that fixes some of the most ridiculously broken stuff. Maybe in a year or so.... It is a shame because the game is so beautifully made and the things that are wrong seem so, so, so easy to fix! I'll accept the brain dead AI as it is legit difficult for a game this complex but fixing Goddess would take literally a single line of code?