Civilization VII - Features at launch: speculation and discussion

[Xur]

firaxis doesnt want to use "un-fun" catch up or alliance against player type mechanics in civ game.

They could learn a thing or two from Rimworld. Difficulty scales up and down with your wealth, and that is exactly why it is fun. It has ups and downs.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

The biggest issue there is Civ usually lacks any sort of anti-snowball mechanics. Once you start winning, especially militarily, it becomes a runaway feedback loop. Taking cities means you have more power and your opponent has less which means you can take

I agree they will not put any anti-snowball or catch up mechanics in the game a start. But the fact that the most scientifically advanced civs can just start surprise wars and lobbing nukes breaks the immersion for me.

 

[aieeegrunt]

firaxis doesnt want to use "un-fun" catch up or alliance against player type mechanics in civ game.

This is what having difficutly levels is for.

They could learn a thing or two from Rimworld. Difficulty scales up and down with your wealth, and that is exactly why it is fun. It has ups and downs.

People look down on Rubberbanding mechanics, but they are simple *and they work*

I have a rubberbanding mod as part of my lineup for Civ6 that spawns units for the AI if you outmatch rhem too much, and it certainly helps with the snowball conquest effect. My immersion for it is that striking deep into the heartland of a nation will inspire a “For The Motherland” desperation effect.

I agree they will not put any anti-snowball or catch up mechanics in the game a start. But the fact that the most scientifically advanced civs can just start surprise wars and lobbing nukes breaks the immersion for me.

Honestly never gotten that far in a Civ6 game, because usually around the time I discover oil either I or one of the AI has a commanding enough lead there is no point in dragging it out.

 

[Kaan Boztepe]

This is what having difficutly levels is for.

it really doesnt matter what difficulty level you are playing , the game is over once you start taking cities or out science/culture the AI in whatever win condition you want to use. the AI is not really an AI afterall , it cannot formulate a strategy to beat your approach or tries to ally itself with other AIs in game. the game is only fun until that exact moment when you know you have won and now only need to go through the motions and endgame buttons to get the you win screen which might be another 50 turns or you can start a new game and firaxis keeps wondering why so many people dont finish a game or they might think their AI is too good that people keep losing and restarting , so they have to make it less capable.

 

[Naokaukodem]

it really doesnt matter what difficulty level you are playing , the game is over once you start taking cities or out science/culture the AI in whatever win condition you want to use. the AI is not really an AI afterall , it cannot formulate a strategy to beat your approach or tries to ally itself with other AIs in game. the game is only fun until that exact moment when you know you have won and now only need to go through the motions and endgame buttons to get the you win screen which might be another 50 turns or you can start a new game and firaxis keeps wondering why so many people dont finish a game or they might think their AI is too good that people keep losing and restarting , so they have to make it less capable.

It does, at least for me. In Deity, I always ended up to look anxiously to the science victory panel, and even sometimes started to grow the levels late. Not even talking about the early AI rushes or this despicable world warning thing when you capture one single city. (that's why I razed them all in my last (king) game : no city = no emergency for a city) For info, last game I abandonned was because I got somehow a great merchant increasing my trade routes by 1 but had nowhere to spend it. Those are the little things that make me abandon games, and they are countless in Civ6. Basically one for each game I try.

 

[UWHabs]

I'd like to jump in and mention that I completely disagree with the many people who say they want simpler, more standard traits on civs...

The magic of Civilization are twofold, for me... The "Just another turn" feel and more importantly, the replayability of the game.

Replayability, for ME, comes mainly from the different flavors that can be added from one civ to another. I've played and won with every civ and leader, and then have gone on to play at least another 20/30 modded civs. And it's what keeps me playing after over 3500h of play... NOT boring challenges

The problem comes NOT from the many configurable attributes that can be used to define each civ... It comes from not being ingenious enough to make the differences significant, and going for traits that are just plain stupid
like those related to being DOWed for example.

Diminish these options that make each civ flavorful, and what you'll get is yet another nice little game that after 5 or 6 games I wont feel like playing again...

SO... Keep the complexity and flavour in civ creation, FXS, please ;-)

I'm definitely a person who likes to go random civ and just go in whatever direction a civilizations ability takes me in. Like it's nice to have an incentive to go in a certain direction at the start of the game. As much as I loved civ II, I played almost exclusively scenarios with workaround uniques (Unresearchable tech given to a faction at the start) since base game you're kind of just playing with a city list and city sprites that are regional.

That said I still prefer one elegant ability. Especially with so many mechanics in the game. I think there's enough scope to rewrite abilities into 2 maybe 3 sentences at most.

The closest I could see to 'no ability' would be if era advancement relied upon building specific national wonders (example - Age of Empires 4) or getting civ specific great people over the course of the game.

I think you can still have simple but powerful. Like to me, I feel like without looking it up, you should be able to basically list all parts of a civ ability. Greece is a good example of a civ whose civ bonus and abilities are easy to list - civ ability is a straight bonus WC slot, and leader bonuses are just culture for city-states or kills. Plain and simple, but still solid. The Maori obviously have their "start in the water" ability which is the biggest part of their setup. But that also adds in starting with a few techs and the ability to cross oceans. But they also have the unimproved Woods bonus. And not harvesting resources. And extra food on fishing boats. And fishing boats give a culture bomb. And no Great Writers. And they get some extra bonuses for their first city too. And did I mention that they get extra movement and combat bonuses in water for embarked units?

I mean, on the one hand, I love how they play basically a completely different game than anyone else. But there's just so much going on with them. They could very easily drop all the nonsense about Great Writers from their ability and the Marae and probably drop the whole fishing boat stuff as well, and they'd still be interesting enough.

I think adjacency bonuses are another spot where the bonuses just kept creeping in. Even as someone with tons of hours in the game, I still basically rely on the advanced map tacks to fully plan out my district structure to get the best bonuses I can. There's not that many, but even I have to take a step back to remind myself that quarries get a full bonus to industrial zones, but mines only get 1/2, and always having to sort of round in my head to think if replacing a quarry or a mine with another district will actually impact the adjacency, or not. Even something as simple as changing the IZ adjacency to be like "+1 per adjacent mine, quarry, lumber mill, or district. +2 per dam or aqueduct" would just simplify things for users to not have to do nearly as much mental arithmetic and just turn it into a simple counting exercise with a few special cases.

 

[Sherlock]

I want barbarians to be more than just 'none' or 'way too many'.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Games are not defined by "features", they are defined by concepts. Civ5 was about 1 tile per unit and Tall viability. Civ6 was putting "play the land" to maximum and finally getting city specialization. From where, they try different things, usually expanding the set of options with things like switchable policies and such.

Honestly, I have no idea what will be the focus of Civ7 and without it, going down to features doesn't make a lot of sense. I could guess what with modern technology the focus could be on modifying landscape. Civ6 already had a bite of it with channels, tunnels, ice melting and shore flooding. But there's much more things available in this area, including early effects of civilization on climate.

 

[reddishrecue]

Almost anything might be a surprise to me. I just can't wait what civilization 7 will have.

 

[reddishrecue]

Games are not defined by "features", they are defined by concepts. Civ5 was about 1 tile per unit and Tall viability. Civ6 was putting "play the land" to maximum and finally getting city specialization. From where, they try different things, usually expanding the set of options with things like switchable policies and such.

Honestly, I have no idea what will be the focus of Civ7 and without it, going down to features doesn't make a lot of sense. I could guess what with modern technology the focus could be on modifying landscape. Civ6 already had a bite of it with channels, tunnels, ice melting and shore flooding. But there's much more things available in this area, including early effects of civilization on climate.

Actually constantly expanding for land until there's no more was in earlier civs too and popping in a wonder or two after awhile. Some civs didn't have tall or wide features like 5 did though you're right but it depends on many things how tall vs wide can come up.

 

[Hawke9]

The one thing I'm really hoping for is options for managing a huge empire and a large amount of cities, like automatic city management, puppet cities, and a vassalage system. I love conquering the world but I don't like having to select something to produce for 20+ cities per turn.

 

[aieeegrunt]

The one thing I'm really hoping for is options for managing a huge empire and a large amount of cities, like automatic city management, puppet cities, and a vassalage system. I love conquering the world but I don't like having to select something to produce for 20+ cities per turn.

I imagine that this would be or at the top of the list for many people, myself included

Civ5’s puppet system was perfect

Personally I would take it one step further and have a mechanic where a city you didn’t found can only be a puppet.

 

[civac]

That seems a little unreasonable on time scales of Civ. Some population/ethnicity mechanic that makes foreign cities unruly/more expensive is enough (should decay with time). Having the option to leave a city as a puppet as in Civ5 would be a boon for many players I guess, but it would require the option of giving them general priorities like basic development, making units and so forth.

 

[vorlon_mi]

I imagine that this would be or at the top of the list for many people, myself included

Civ5’s puppet system was perfect

Personally I would take it one step further and have a mechanic where a city you didn’t found can only be a puppet.

I don't remember enough about Civ5's puppets to answer this question: what would they produce? What factors did the puppet government use to decide? Annexing a city in Civ5 was easy enough; one needed to spend some production to build a courthouse to make it a full-fledged part of your empire.

In BERT, making a city a puppet would begin with a few turns of non-production, followed by only buildings. Never units (civilian or military) and never wonders. Annexing a city was also easy, with a larger cost. The city would have negative healt for N turns (scaled with population) and more turns of non-production (also scaled with population).

Based on the limitations of what a puppet city can/cannot produce, I would NOT like a game mechanic where cities that I did not found can *only* be a puppet. Using the Civ6 radio buttons for a city (emphasize production/food/science and so on) would not be sufficient for me to have conquered cities be part of my empire.

Under the Civ4 vasselage system, you could direct your vassal leader which techs to research and do trade deals with them. The cities would all build what the AI vassal leader decided, but your vassals would follow you into war, make peace when you make peace, and an attack on them would bring you into the war.

 

[UWHabs]

I imagine that this would be or at the top of the list for many people, myself included

Civ5’s puppet system was perfect

Personally I would take it one step further and have a mechanic where a city you didn’t found can only be a puppet.

The build queue gets you part of the way to a puppet, and would probably be 75% of the way there if they just let you queue up multiple buildings in a district. But absent that, even just a simple system where you click a box for a city, and it follows a pre-set build order, like:
1. repair anything that needs fixing
2. Build a district if available and defined (tie in with the map tacks, so if a slot opens up it will pop down the next district and start building it in the pinned location)
3. Build buildings, from cheapest to most expensive
4. if none of that is available, then run a project

I mean, obviously if I control myself, sometimes I want the buildings to come in a different order, especially when a new tech opens up. But a simple automation like that would probably get you most of the way there. Then maybe if you could change later era terrain improvements to a system where you can simply buy them rather than manually move a builder around to them, it would probably save a couple hours of late-game tedium.

 

[Moriboe]

To continue on the topic of builder tedium in the post above: I'd like them to get rid of builders altogether.

If you want to improve/harvest a tile, to be optimal you need to plan ahead when and where to build how many builders, taking into account a potential policy cards reshuffle and maybe a governor, decide where to spend their precious charges, rinse and repeat. In previous iterations this wasn't as bad as workers didn't expire, you could queue commands (Civ 4) and automate them so at least they'd auto-repair improvements.

Why not directly improve/harvest a tile from the city screen? That's where you make the core decisions. In the rival Call to Power series, you could use a slider to funnel production into a "public works" resource, offering global charges to place improvements. In terms of Civ 6, this could be a city project, being modified by the same policy/governor effects if need be, but cutting out all the tedious builder management at least. What would be lost in terms of depth? The risk of having a worker captured is not much different from having tiles pillaged. Spending "one charge" could have different costs, depending e.g. on nearby city sizes, accounting for the effort to move a builder to a distance location. It would be similar to buying an improvement, like UWHabs mentions above.

You could go further and generalize this resource as "labor", and tie it in with other game concepts, e.g. slavery, migration, mobilization, unions, ... As counter argument I think many people like to have more types of units on the map, but I'd rather have more meaningful ones. Maybe bring back the diplomat for instance.

 

[Nikolai II]

To continue on the topic of builder tedium in the post above: I'd like them to get rid of builders altogether.

If you want to improve/harvest a tile, to be optimal you need to plan ahead when and where to build how many builders, taking into account a potential policy cards reshuffle and maybe a governor, decide where to spend their precious charges, rinse and repeat. In previous iterations this wasn't as bad as workers didn't expire, you could queue commands (Civ 4) and automate them so at least they'd auto-repair improvements.

Why not directly improve/harvest a tile from the city screen? That's where you make the core decisions. In the rival Call to Power series, you could use a slider to funnel production into a "public works" resource, offering global charges to place improvements. In terms of Civ 6, this could be a city project, being modified by the same policy/governor effects if need be, but cutting out all the tedious builder management at least. What would be lost in terms of depth? The risk of having a worker captured is not much different from having tiles pillaged. Spending "one charge" could have different costs, depending e.g. on nearby city sizes, accounting for the effort to move a builder to a distance location. It would be similar to buying an improvement, like UWHabs mentions above.

You could go further and generalize this resource as "labor", and tie it in with other game concepts, e.g. slavery, migration, mobilization, unions, ... As counter argument I think many people like to have more types of units on the map, but I'd rather have more meaningful ones. Maybe bring back the diplomat for instance.

So do you envision something like CtP's public works?

 

[leif erikson]

Moderator Action: We need to get this thread back on track.
So, I would like to ask my fellow Civfanatics 3 questions:

1) Which features existing in Civ VI should be present at launch in Civ VII, in your opinion?

2) Which features existing in Civ VI do you realistically see happening in Civ VII at launch?

3) Should game companies introduce a new iteration without basic features (up to you to argue what those features entail) present in previous iterations?

Back to topic please

 

[greenOak]

To continue on the topic of builder tedium in the post above: I'd like them to get rid of builders altogether.

If you want to improve/harvest a tile, to be optimal you need to plan ahead when and where to build how many builders, taking into account a potential policy cards reshuffle and maybe a governor, decide where to spend their precious charges, rinse and repeat. In previous iterations this wasn't as bad as workers didn't expire, you could queue commands (Civ 4) and automate them so at least they'd auto-repair improvements.

Why not directly improve/harvest a tile from the city screen? That's where you make the core decisions. In the rival Call to Power series, you could use a slider to funnel production into a "public works" resource, offering global charges to place improvements. In terms of Civ 6, this could be a city project, being modified by the same policy/governor effects if need be, but cutting out all the tedious builder management at least. What would be lost in terms of depth? The risk of having a worker captured is not much different from having tiles pillaged. Spending "one charge" could have different costs, depending e.g. on nearby city sizes, accounting for the effort to move a builder to a distance location. It would be similar to buying an improvement, like UWHabs mentions above.

You could go further and generalize this resource as "labor", and tie it in with other game concepts, e.g. slavery, migration, mobilization, unions, ... As counter argument I think many people like to have more types of units on the map, but I'd rather have more meaningful ones. Maybe bring back the diplomat for instance.

The bolded is a good thing. Builder micro is one of the most strategically difficult elements of civ 6 and superior builder micro will give you a meaningful advantage over your opponents.

Getting rid of builders would take a lot of skill out of the game.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

1) Which features existing in Civ VI should be present at launch in Civ VII, in your opinion?

While there are some flaws in the resource system I think it should be there at launch. Strategic and Luxuries should work the same thought, not the two systems. Also give me an advisor that lets me know which Luxs I don't have that I need to get from other civs.