Where VI does better in:
- Map generation
- Wonders more visible
- Districts
- Builders system
- Religion
- Graphics
- Leaders and civs
- Music
- Envoy system
- Diplomatic victory
- Great People system
- Natural wonders
- Disasters
- Loyalty system
- Happiness
- UI
- ...
Where V does better in:
- Ideologies
- Policy trees
- Tall gameplay
- Large cities
- ...
Needless to say, i think VI is the better game, despite it's flaws.
I think you can cross out "Tall" in the Civ V list, so it just reads "Civ V does better in gameplay".
I'm very surprised you list Civ VI as having a superior UI - the UI has been a much-criticised bugbear from day 1 and hasn't undergone any substantial changes. It's pretty but less intuitive than the older system - and doesn't it still hide sentry mode - you know, one of the key unit commands - away in a dropdown somewhere?
Music is excellent in Civ VI, but also in Civ V - I've gone back and forth between them and certainly wouldn't say one is better than the other overall. Civ VI has more variety both in music within a civ and in the sheer number of civs it supports and the diversity of musical cultures those represent. I do prefer Civ VI's era-linked changes in arrangement to the (not always particularly different) war/peace divide in Civ V's music, though.
I have never liked the envoy system - I'm in the minority who preferred Civ V's more dynamic approach to city states. True, they never fixed the gold-buying quests completely when they should simply have been removed altogether, but while the implementation was imperfect I preferred the basic Civ V system to a static 'levelling-up' exercise. The latter also seems to be harder for the AI to use, or at least target, appropriately, so you don't get the tug-of-war over key city states that you would in the earlier game. I do like the city state-specific bonuses, though, particularly the unique improvements.
Religion, I don't agree is handled better in Civ VI. The entire religious combat/victory feature is something I'd rather the game was without, and religion is overall much too disconnected from every other game system. They've tried to address that by making a bunch of extra non-religious units dependent on buying with faith, but they could have buildings that produce a faith resource without having any other religious features. They basically just imported the Civ V options wholesale but didn't really do anything with them, while at the same time much of the rest of the game - especially the fact that religious buildings require a specific district that is usually a low priority and has adjacency bonuses you'd rather use for campuses - tends to incentivise nonreligious gameplay, or at least building religious infrastructure too late to get a religion.
I'll grant that Civ VI gets an edge in terms of how it implements all the things that aren't in Civ V - that's hardly a recommendation, any more than it's a recommendation for Civ V that it handles Courthouses better than Civ VI. It's also got better map graphics but, gah, the leader screens! Even after becoming acclimatised to them, and no longer particularly objecting to their cartooniness, I'd take the Civ V ones any day..
I'm also not sure I'd say Civ VI does Natural Wonders better. Having more variety is nice, but one advantage of Civ V's NWs was that natural tile yields were low so Natural Wonders were relatively more valuable. In Civ VI not only do you have high tile yields, you can naturally get even 'special' yields like science and culture from resources, which you could only get from Natural Wonders in Civ V.
For the Civ V bucket, things it handles better:
- Tourism. This actually feeds into gameplay rather than just being a culture victory counter which isn't used as a game resource (and the culture victory in general was better-handled in BNW than in any version of Civ VI). Similarly, the archaelogy system in Civ V was better not because it was any different mechanically from that in Civ VI, but because archaeology played better in the context of overall gameplay while in Civ VI, like religion, it can be ignored if you aren't playing that part of the game.
- Diplomatic relationships. This will be a contentious one since it's a sore point for many Civ players, but at least until late-game ideologies come along and mess with everything you can put effort into relationships and be rewarded by alliances that result in practical gameplay benefits: allies will join your wars and *actually fight your enemies*, and you get appreciably better deals rather than just a bit less gold demanded for open borders. I enjoyed the way tripartite relationships worked, with denouncing a mutual enemy reinforcing a friendship. The downside was that the system was much less well-documented and easy to grasp for newer or more casual players than Civ VI's, but it was more than just the trade screen diplomacy Civ VI went back to after pushback against the Civ V system.
- AI personalities. Civ V had personalities that varied on a range of different axes, as did Civ IV's. Civ VI's agendas replaced that and, again, seems to have been aimed at making it easier for newer players to quickly appreciate how to make Civ X or Y happy/unhappy. I feel it came at the cost of a lot of character, it results in too much repetitive predictability in AI behaviour, and it did away with a meme in the process (I haven't once seen Gandhi nuke anyone that I can recall). Previously you'd be scared of a nearby AI civ because you knew it was prone to be aggressive or untrustworthy - now all civs have the same tendency towards early aggression and civs are only scary if, like Sumeria, Scythia or Nubia, they have early unique units that are good against cities. No one needs to care about Genghis Khan, not because - as in Civ V - he was aggressive but unshakeably loyal once befriended, but just because he doesn't do anything until the Middle Ages since that's where his units are and his early aggression consequently isn't that dangerous.
- Strategic resources. The 'stockpile' system has barely seemed relevant in Civ VI, while having a static limitation on how many of a unit or key building you could have based on the resources available in the empire made each individual source of a resource more important in Civ V, one of the few cases where the map is more important in Civ V than Civ VI.
- Trade. The trade limit imposed by BNW and the way it scaled with game pacing made for a healthier economic system that limited snowballing - Civ VI is still close to the maligned days of 'ICS' (Infinite City Spam) with its 'rich get richer' play pattern. The BNW system was also balanced by removing gold from the landscape (other than some luxury resources), increasing the importance of trade over sea vs. over land, and adding boosts for roads and markets.
EDIT: Others beat me to mentioning the World Congress (in both implementation of the system and AI behaviour) and the much lower difficulty and weaker AI of Civ VI.
A game with great ideas, some flawed execution, and no soul.
I saw this quoted before the original post, without the context that it was about Beyond Earth, and genuinely "agreed" that it's a perfect description of Civ VI.
I disagree, Tradition is really good but Liberty is more than viable, especially for Domination.
It's fully viable, but bear in mind people are often talking about them in terms of maximising win percentages/turns to win. That you can pretty invariably win more easily with Tradition means there's not much incentive to go wide. To me the biggest issue is that the placement of the trees so early in the game means you have to make a decision which way to go before you've seen much of the map. This makes Tradition a lower-risk strategy, since if you take Liberty and aren't in a good position to take advantage of it early it will be a long time before you start seeing the benefits.
Stealing my own post from a similar older thread....
Where I prefer Civ 6:
1. Districts. I love the system and how it makes geography a bigger factor in the game.
I'm somewhat indifferent to districts (and don't really like the way specialists now work as citizens working district tiles), but I think they could have done more with the concept. There are only a couple of districts that get significant adjacency from geographic features (mostly district bonuses come from adjacency to other districts) and those tend to push exactly the same city placements you wanted to follow in Civ V anyway: find rivers, mountains, jungle and hills.
5. The amenities system. I definitely like it more than Civ 5's happiness system, which I found to be too punishing.
I find that amenities in Civ VI are essentially meaningless, which leads to the opposite problem.
1. Civic cards. I like that we have more options, but I hate having to micromanage these all game. I really preferred Civ 5's policy system.
I like the option to micromanage in Civ VI - as with Civ IV's policy system, I actually find that I don't change them very frequently in practice. I also like the design space it's opened up with a number of civs, that get to replace one policy card type with another or add extra policy cards as part of their rules.
2. Production balance. Everything simply takes TOO LONG to build.
People made that complaint in Civ V as well. In Civ VI I think the issue is that it's harder to specialise cities around a specific resource, so you can't go all-in on having a production city. Because of the district system, you can only have one Industrial District in any city and - barring terrain or mine adjacency bonuses that differ between them, plus natural tile output - any city is broadly as productive as any other with the same district.
3. Limited use builders. I realize unlimited builders would be broken in this game, but I hate leaving tiles unimproved and I feel like I spend half the game making builders; this is partially a consequence of number two.
I think limited use builders are overall an improvement, but 3 charges might not be the correct starting number. Also an issue in Civ VI: chopping, which is too widespread and too exploitable. I'm not sure why most resources and features need to be choppable, rather than just woods/jungles/marshes.
7. Snowballing. This happens in 5 too, but I think a bit less. In both games, I often get to the point where I think "I've clearly won, but I still need to go through turns for another 4 hours before I actually finish", but it seems this happens much earlier in the game in Civ 6 comparaed to in Civ 5. Partially this may be becuase I almost always go for passive victories (science, culture, diplo in 5) over active ones (I really hate doing domination/religious victory, it's so tedious)
Mostly, it's an inevitable consequence of go-wide gameplay.
8. This is a really tiny thing, but I like that farms next to fresh water in civ 5 get more food (with certain techs). They don't do that in civ 6. Again, a small thing, but it always annoyed me how fresh water basically means nothing except to city housing.
I still miss having to have freshwater in order to build farms at all (which was removed in Civ V but part of all earlier incarnations).
10. and this is the biggest one... the civ 6 balance/meta seems to be heavily leaning towards spamming out cities (no matter how crappy they are) and killing and conquering as much as possible. I want to build! I'd rather play tall than wide, but that's very hard to justify in 6.
Here's one thing I'll say for this approach in Civ VI: having become accustomed to playing tall in Civ V, it wasn't until Civ VI went too far in the other direction that I realised *just how boring* going tall is. There isn't a lot to do except shuffle units around as you have so little production space. I wouldn't be surprised if this is much of the reason so many people still strongly dislike Civ V, since it seems from the Tradition obsession that not many people were actually exploring how the game plays with more than four cities.
Having essentially no constraints on expansion was not a good move for Civ VI - there's a reason all prior Civ games had mechanisms to constrain it. In Civ VI it seems production is the only limiting factor. Loyalty does a good job of pacing expansion, but only if you're in a Dark Age or the nearest rivals are in a higher Golden Age while you're in a normal one. I like that idea of pacing expansion by Age, but I get the impression that many people play to get a permanent Golden Age which rather undermines the point of the loyalty system.
