Solipsist
Chieftain
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2020
- Messages
- 5
This is my first post in this forum and I haven't browsed through the entire history so I don't know if somebody brought this topic already up (I also literally made an account just to write this), neither am I a hardcore player of all the Civ parts (as for anyone who might say that some of the things I bring up aren't that impactful on Deity/when taking some exploits or other strategies into account), but I have several hundred hours in Civ V and I usually play on Emperor or Immortal, so I think that I'm qualified enough to have some opinion on the topic. I did look through quite a few posts and I haven't seen a single person talking about it, so I wanted to give my two cents on the topic:
I'm certainly biased towards Civ V as it's my most played game (overall) and I also played it with all DLCs from the beginning, so I didn't experience it's rough start, but I still think that my arguments hold water.
With that our of the way:
Combat in Civ VI feels utterly meaningless in comparison to Civ V to be honest. I don‘t have all that much play time in Civ VI yet and I‘m starting to doubt whether that will change all that much in the future and the reasons are the following:
Not only are units mostly interchangeable, they also feel incredibly dull. I never thought that I would use AT-infantry instead of normal infantry simply because it was cheaper and didn‘t require any strategic resources. But, boy how great was my disappointment when I saw that AT-infantry only receives a meager +10 bonus against tanks. AT units in Civ V were so much more meaningful, because they were actually specialized. A 100% bonus against tanks is something that you feel immediately, even if the base strength is 20 lower: 50*2 = 100 vs 70 → 42.86% advantage, even without any further promotions.
And that is the same for all units in Civ VI, all units that are supposed to COUNTER someone, don‘t do that at all. Even the spearman which gets +10 on it‘s base of 25 only gets an effective improvement of 40% (vs. The 50% bonus in Civ V and also a significantly better match up, as I‘ll explain). Which means that the following happens in Civ VI: spearman 25+10= 35 vs 36 horseman. Sure it‘s 35 vs 28 when against the heavy chariot, but that‘s only one of the two units the spearman is designed to counter and I doubt that all that many heavy chariots are being used.
But even with the HC as an enemy the spearman only enjoys a 25% advantage vs. Civ V where the spearman had a 11+5.5=16.5 vs 12 → 37.5% advantage.
While the spearman is admittedly from a different era as the horseman, the following example of the pikeman results in a very similar result.
The pikeman has 41+10 = 51 vs. 48 knight → 6.25% advantage, which means that your counter is barely stronger than your enemy, and that is only the case for the heavy cavalry, whereas your advantage against light cavalry from the same era is merely 51 vs. 44 → 15.91%. Whereas previously you had a 25% advantage against a unit from the same era, so you already start to feel the diminishing returns from the +10.
But that‘s only the beginning of where combat sucks.
Terrain has become meaningless as well. The times were you could hold a piece of rough terrain with a few units with the right promotions seem to be gone.
I don‘t even look at the terrain in Civ VI when attacking, the difference in the result is absolutely neglectable, while in Civ V – oh boi were you in for a horrifying experience if you didn‘t use terrain properly. +25% defense for an enemy in rough terrain, -20% when attacking over a river and -33% for cavalry and tanks attacking cities.
Sure, you have -10 for attacking over rivers in Civ VI, but once you have musketman (which kind of happens really fast) that disadvantage is lower and only continues to decrease: 55-10=45 vs 55*0.8=44. The other modifiers are similar, or rather even worse, as they‘re also absolute values, but even smaller ones, which in combination with higher total unit strength (which I‘ll go deeper into further down below) leads to miniscule differences in the relative strength of units to each other.
To refer to Hearts of Iron 3 (which is obviously a different game, but nonetheless an example where things are similar to Civ V, because that's simply more realistic), if you were to attack a city with a pure tank division you would get -50% on your attack modifier or even more, depending on how heavy your tanks are. Similar results with attacks in other types of rough terrain.
So it‘s kind of obvious that terrain should have a decisive effect on the outcome of a battle (a substantial part of Sun Tzu‘s „The Art of War“ is just about the different ways to use terrain) and not just in the older eras, but as can be seen in reality, even nowadays terrain can be decisive in a battle/war.
How many times did I personally struggle with cities that had a belt of rivers around it, combined with some forests and hills these were massive fortresses that could hardly be taken until the modern era, when bombers and artillery could be used in large quantities.
In fact I had so many great times experiencing WWI combat in Civ V firsthand (usually on Emperor or higher) when I tried to invade a stronger AI nation and I would just attack some city for 10-20 turns, get so close to taking it, but expanding too much of my offensive force to actually do it, or take a city to get rolled over by some counter offensive.
Carefully going over each unit and calculating when the right moment for an assault would be, weighing a citadel against the loss of the great generals bonus. It was (and still is) a feeling that a decision actually mattered and that if I wasn‘t cautious enough, I might lose the entire game.
None of that is the case for Civ VI.
Many people have criticised the late game of Civ VI already, but not only is it boring and unenjoyable, the units themselves are also boring as hell.
There are less, that is obvious, but despite the fact that one would expect each iteration to be a substantial improvement over the previous one, you instead get corps and armies that really mitigate differences in tech and on top of that the difference in strength between units is decreased. The best example is that warriors start with 20 strength (?! why the hell would one of the weakest units start with 20 strength, that‘s almost the longswordman in Civ V). Then comes the swordman which is stronger than the rifleman in Civ V (but still only a 75% improvement, like in Civ V) and then you instantly jump to the musketman which is the equivalent of the WW-infantry in Civ V (leaving out one upgrade) and in the next step jumping over two upgrades, but reaching the same strength as the Civ V infantry (both having 70).
What one can observe is that the scale has simply become more compressed, while the jumps are less meaningful, because the old promotion system using percentages has been scraped in favor of just giving a few more points of strength, which results in diminishing returns, the higher the base value of a unit is.
While in Civ V you could easily get units with two promotions right out of the production which meant up to +30% in open terrain (Shock II), +30% in rough terrain(Drill II) or 50% (Cover II) against ranged attacks to name just a few of the more relevant ones.
And what has Civ VI to offer?
+7 against melee and ranged and +10 for defending against ranged units, which is when compared nothing but a joke. Even when taking the musketman with 35 in Civ VI, his +7 only result in 20% more strength and the +10 defense against ranged result in 28.57% additional defense. Both promotions only give a small improvement when taking relative strength differences into account and as always in Civ VI their effect only continues to diminish with time, as +7 is only a 10% increase for infantry (compare that to infantry in Civ V with Shock II: 70*1.3= 91 vs 77 = 70+7).
Of course I could go through every single promotion and start comparing all the details, but I hope that the general idea gets across with what I just showed: Experience was a significantly larger factor in Civ V, that made an elite army actually “elite” and highly experienced units that had promotions like logistic (+1 attack per turn for artillery) or march (heal 10TP every turn even when acting) were beasts and there was hardly anything more satisfying (at least to me) than to obliterate some city with artillery that could attack twice per turn (on top of the fact that artillery was an actual counter to cities due to +200% strength when bombarding cities + a special siege promotion that gave +50% strength for bombarding, which ties into the previous section).
Maybe some people didn’t like the old system, but let’s be honest:
Experience is a massive factor in combat and I might be influenced by other strategy games I played, but when refering again to HoI3, there experience was measured as a percentage and that percentage was just a straight buff to all values of the unit (it added to a universal attack and defense modifier). Of course that is a very different game, but I think that it exemplifies how experience is not just some improvement to strength, a better experienced unit can also get more out of it‘s equipment and as such increase the difference in effective fighting strength even further, which was exactly what happened in Civ V.
As I said, I may very well be biased towards Civ V, but I don't see any area where the combat and promotions of Civ VI are better than those of Civ V, in fact they are consistently worse and appear to be not exactly thought through (I didn't even do a deeper dive into AT units in Civ V vs Civ VI).
Is it just me or have other people similar issues with Civ VI?
I'm certainly biased towards Civ V as it's my most played game (overall) and I also played it with all DLCs from the beginning, so I didn't experience it's rough start, but I still think that my arguments hold water.
With that our of the way:
Combat in Civ VI feels utterly meaningless in comparison to Civ V to be honest. I don‘t have all that much play time in Civ VI yet and I‘m starting to doubt whether that will change all that much in the future and the reasons are the following:
Not only are units mostly interchangeable, they also feel incredibly dull. I never thought that I would use AT-infantry instead of normal infantry simply because it was cheaper and didn‘t require any strategic resources. But, boy how great was my disappointment when I saw that AT-infantry only receives a meager +10 bonus against tanks. AT units in Civ V were so much more meaningful, because they were actually specialized. A 100% bonus against tanks is something that you feel immediately, even if the base strength is 20 lower: 50*2 = 100 vs 70 → 42.86% advantage, even without any further promotions.
And that is the same for all units in Civ VI, all units that are supposed to COUNTER someone, don‘t do that at all. Even the spearman which gets +10 on it‘s base of 25 only gets an effective improvement of 40% (vs. The 50% bonus in Civ V and also a significantly better match up, as I‘ll explain). Which means that the following happens in Civ VI: spearman 25+10= 35 vs 36 horseman. Sure it‘s 35 vs 28 when against the heavy chariot, but that‘s only one of the two units the spearman is designed to counter and I doubt that all that many heavy chariots are being used.
But even with the HC as an enemy the spearman only enjoys a 25% advantage vs. Civ V where the spearman had a 11+5.5=16.5 vs 12 → 37.5% advantage.
While the spearman is admittedly from a different era as the horseman, the following example of the pikeman results in a very similar result.
The pikeman has 41+10 = 51 vs. 48 knight → 6.25% advantage, which means that your counter is barely stronger than your enemy, and that is only the case for the heavy cavalry, whereas your advantage against light cavalry from the same era is merely 51 vs. 44 → 15.91%. Whereas previously you had a 25% advantage against a unit from the same era, so you already start to feel the diminishing returns from the +10.
But that‘s only the beginning of where combat sucks.
Terrain has become meaningless as well. The times were you could hold a piece of rough terrain with a few units with the right promotions seem to be gone.
I don‘t even look at the terrain in Civ VI when attacking, the difference in the result is absolutely neglectable, while in Civ V – oh boi were you in for a horrifying experience if you didn‘t use terrain properly. +25% defense for an enemy in rough terrain, -20% when attacking over a river and -33% for cavalry and tanks attacking cities.
Sure, you have -10 for attacking over rivers in Civ VI, but once you have musketman (which kind of happens really fast) that disadvantage is lower and only continues to decrease: 55-10=45 vs 55*0.8=44. The other modifiers are similar, or rather even worse, as they‘re also absolute values, but even smaller ones, which in combination with higher total unit strength (which I‘ll go deeper into further down below) leads to miniscule differences in the relative strength of units to each other.
To refer to Hearts of Iron 3 (which is obviously a different game, but nonetheless an example where things are similar to Civ V, because that's simply more realistic), if you were to attack a city with a pure tank division you would get -50% on your attack modifier or even more, depending on how heavy your tanks are. Similar results with attacks in other types of rough terrain.
So it‘s kind of obvious that terrain should have a decisive effect on the outcome of a battle (a substantial part of Sun Tzu‘s „The Art of War“ is just about the different ways to use terrain) and not just in the older eras, but as can be seen in reality, even nowadays terrain can be decisive in a battle/war.
How many times did I personally struggle with cities that had a belt of rivers around it, combined with some forests and hills these were massive fortresses that could hardly be taken until the modern era, when bombers and artillery could be used in large quantities.
In fact I had so many great times experiencing WWI combat in Civ V firsthand (usually on Emperor or higher) when I tried to invade a stronger AI nation and I would just attack some city for 10-20 turns, get so close to taking it, but expanding too much of my offensive force to actually do it, or take a city to get rolled over by some counter offensive.
Carefully going over each unit and calculating when the right moment for an assault would be, weighing a citadel against the loss of the great generals bonus. It was (and still is) a feeling that a decision actually mattered and that if I wasn‘t cautious enough, I might lose the entire game.
None of that is the case for Civ VI.
Many people have criticised the late game of Civ VI already, but not only is it boring and unenjoyable, the units themselves are also boring as hell.
There are less, that is obvious, but despite the fact that one would expect each iteration to be a substantial improvement over the previous one, you instead get corps and armies that really mitigate differences in tech and on top of that the difference in strength between units is decreased. The best example is that warriors start with 20 strength (?! why the hell would one of the weakest units start with 20 strength, that‘s almost the longswordman in Civ V). Then comes the swordman which is stronger than the rifleman in Civ V (but still only a 75% improvement, like in Civ V) and then you instantly jump to the musketman which is the equivalent of the WW-infantry in Civ V (leaving out one upgrade) and in the next step jumping over two upgrades, but reaching the same strength as the Civ V infantry (both having 70).
What one can observe is that the scale has simply become more compressed, while the jumps are less meaningful, because the old promotion system using percentages has been scraped in favor of just giving a few more points of strength, which results in diminishing returns, the higher the base value of a unit is.
While in Civ V you could easily get units with two promotions right out of the production which meant up to +30% in open terrain (Shock II), +30% in rough terrain(Drill II) or 50% (Cover II) against ranged attacks to name just a few of the more relevant ones.
And what has Civ VI to offer?
+7 against melee and ranged and +10 for defending against ranged units, which is when compared nothing but a joke. Even when taking the musketman with 35 in Civ VI, his +7 only result in 20% more strength and the +10 defense against ranged result in 28.57% additional defense. Both promotions only give a small improvement when taking relative strength differences into account and as always in Civ VI their effect only continues to diminish with time, as +7 is only a 10% increase for infantry (compare that to infantry in Civ V with Shock II: 70*1.3= 91 vs 77 = 70+7).
Of course I could go through every single promotion and start comparing all the details, but I hope that the general idea gets across with what I just showed: Experience was a significantly larger factor in Civ V, that made an elite army actually “elite” and highly experienced units that had promotions like logistic (+1 attack per turn for artillery) or march (heal 10TP every turn even when acting) were beasts and there was hardly anything more satisfying (at least to me) than to obliterate some city with artillery that could attack twice per turn (on top of the fact that artillery was an actual counter to cities due to +200% strength when bombarding cities + a special siege promotion that gave +50% strength for bombarding, which ties into the previous section).
Maybe some people didn’t like the old system, but let’s be honest:
Experience is a massive factor in combat and I might be influenced by other strategy games I played, but when refering again to HoI3, there experience was measured as a percentage and that percentage was just a straight buff to all values of the unit (it added to a universal attack and defense modifier). Of course that is a very different game, but I think that it exemplifies how experience is not just some improvement to strength, a better experienced unit can also get more out of it‘s equipment and as such increase the difference in effective fighting strength even further, which was exactly what happened in Civ V.
As I said, I may very well be biased towards Civ V, but I don't see any area where the combat and promotions of Civ VI are better than those of Civ V, in fact they are consistently worse and appear to be not exactly thought through (I didn't even do a deeper dive into AT units in Civ V vs Civ VI).
Is it just me or have other people similar issues with Civ VI?
