Comparing V vs VI

[PhilBowles]

If I were talking about how agendas *play* in Civ6 rather than the *idea* of agendas, I'd agree with you here. Maybe that was the original intention of the thread. The impression I got was that this thread was about "let's talk about the best and worst parts of each game so we can combine them into a better game", in which case talking about the idea of agendas is the important part, not how the AI has or has not been programmed along with them.

Certainly I was focusing on how they play. There are a lot of features in Civ games that are good in concept but leave something to be desired in practice - the Civ V take on diplomacy was among them, but generated endless complaints because it was seen as being opaque and the AI had difficulty with it.

I'm not sure that agendas particularly fit that bill, though, as they're only ever going to be civ-specific relationship modifiers of the sort Civ games have used since at least Civ IV. If there were a form of agenda system that actually prompted individual civs to play to specific favoured strategies that would be a different matter, but if all they're doing is giving different AIs different heuristics that tell them when it's safe to make an enemy of another civ there's not much gain in making those civ-specific. There is no reason, for instance, that only Cleopatra should care about whether a civ is militarily stronger than her in calculating whether to go to war.

Again, this is a flaw with the implementation of the AI.

It is, but it's a flaw unrelated to agendas as Firaxis envisaged them, which is only really naming something that already existed among modifiers - Byzantium in Civ IV liked religious civs and disliked nonreligious ones, for instance.

They don't quite all behave identically. If they all had the same abilities they would, sure. But since Qin does happen to have the wonder-building ability, his Builders will get spent on those and his land will continue to go unimproved, prompting the AI to make more Builders, thus spending less time on military, thus deciding not to declare war despite disliking you.

There are plenty of games where Qin doesn't build Wonders - his preference for doing so is a randomly-assigned value in each game just as it is for everyone else. He tends to complain if people have one or two Wonders, suggesting that he doesn't particularly commonly go in for actual Wonder-spam. I'm also not sure how much ability AIs have to use Civ-specific abilities, as opposed to benefitting from static bonuses. In short, the civ having the ability to do X doesn't entail that that AI civ will do X.

Even with static bonuses the AI actually has to build whatever's providing the bonus - in my current game (I got past the bug) Korea is only putting out 5 GS points past turn 150, so is clearly not building many Seowons assuming it has actual buildings inside any of them (though I don't know how many cities Korea actually has - the missing 8th civ turned out to be Japan, so there was a lot of crowding going on. Korea should have had first pick of much of China, but Mongolia seems to have expanded more quickly and India's been highly aggressive in this game - probably because of Chandragupta's agenda on a map that's squeezed five of the eight civs in his immediate vicinity).

I'm not talking about the agenda weights for the AI. I was talking about how *prominent* the agendas are. They are the flashiest part of the diplomacy system, the one you are most likely to notice. So any other nuances in AI personality are not noticed because the agenda system is in your face.

I mostly ignore the agendas - when I consider AI personalities I think in terms of favoured strategies, how expansion behaviour and aggression vary, favoured unit choices, religious tendencies and - in Civ V where it was a particularly prominent feature - tendency to backstab allies (something that basically doesn't happen in Civ VI). None of those vary with any consistency between civs in Civ VI, save for civs tending to favour the unit type that contains their unique unit.

I disagree that the other games had more evident AI personalities. I didn't notice them having distinct personalities in any of the games, but the agenda system is the closest to making playing with each AI different.

I sadly haven't been able to relocate the entertaining Civ V threads on leader personalities that gave a detailed description of each - that these varied hugely between leaders, that the poster presented them in a way that matched my experience and that there were multiple people on the threads agreeing with those portrayals strongly indicates it's not an artefact of perception.

AIs in Civ VI may have weights when looked at in the code, but for whatever reason that isn't being expressed in the game - perhaps the assignment of traits is too random, so that peaceful cultural-focused Shaka is only slightly less likely than peaceful cultural-focused Pericles in any given game.

I think I must have misworded my original claim because everyone is jumping down my throat here, because I did not mean that the Civ6 AI actually *plays* differently, but that *you play differently vs each AI*.

In Civ VI the problem with any system that requires you to engage with it for it to matter is that it's just roleplaying - the game isn't challenging enough for you to need to try and get small edges, even if that's what playing to AIs' agendas accomplishes. I treat all AIs the same and win well enough doing so - I'll fight the ones that become a nuisance or attack me (as Scotland briefly did in my game) but generally befriend any that don't get in my way to ensure that they aren't threats militarily (since backstabbing is absent in Civ VI). The identity of the specific civs that I need to keep an eye on varies between games and doesn't have any bearing on how I treat them - all that really matters is proximity and whether or not a civ can pose a threat to victory if it's becoming overly successful.

In my game the latter happens to be Scotland, purely as far as I can tell an artefact of the fact that it's one of only two civs (the other being mine, Arabia) that has no near neighbours and a lot of space to expand into - I had the advantage of Africa's landmass, but the drawback of North Africa being resource/production-poor and a lot of city states taking up useful real estate, while Scotland had less but higher-quality land and no city states to worry about (or, conversely, to benefit from while I had all of Fez, Hattusa, Kumasi and Zanzibar). The Maori were probably supposed to colonise the Americas or Australia, but have done neither (Scotland has been admirably historical by sending a lot of missionaries to Central America, but no units or settlers that I've seen - maybe they sent a settler but it perished in Darien), and all the Asian powers are spending resources attacking each other or are stuck in corners they haven't expanded from. None of that - other than the fact that on a TSL map Scotland will start in Scotland and Arabia, by a quirk of the Civ VI choice of capital and leader, in Egypt - has anything to do with the specific identity or traits of the civs involved, it's entirely down to the map.

I kinda turned around on thinking of barbs like this on Immortal or Deity around the time where I learned to break some really bad habits regarding how I handled them like avoiding settling on most hills, and better management of my early units to block Horse and Iron spawn locations. Still sometimes get a random game where there wasn't a realistic "good" decision I could have made, but it's cut down on the number of games where I feel barbs are the massive issue. Have Victoria from here to thank for that. Like I'll still sometimes consider Plain hills if the spot is too good to pass up or if playing Gorgo, but I've learned to hide my cities a bit better.

Settling on any hill can double or triple the range a scout sees your city, which is all that really matters when it comes to activating camps.

If you did know that but still think it's a major issue in 6, I'll just politely disagree.

None of that is really relating to the issue I mean. I'm not complaining that barbarians are an actual threat to cities - they rarely are unless they spawn next to you and spot you in the first few turns, and/or there are two camps next to you. Waves of barbarians artificially inflate the difficulty because they disrupt settling and development - you can't get settlers and builders out until they're suppressed. Nor is that an issue of using units effectively - units have only one action a turn, so it takes time to dispose of them. It's a pointless drain on time and tedious to keep killing units over and over - it's pretty much exactly the reason Zerg rushes are annoying in Starcraft. They won't kill you unless you're unprepared, but they waste time and disrupt early development.

In Starcraft, at least, it's a risky strategy for the Zerg player because they have to invest resources of their own into performing the rush and if it's beaten too effectively/quickly it's the Zerg player who falls behind. Similarly in Civ if you're beating back an early rush by an opposing civ. But Barbarians are a free nuisance that costs your rivals nothing, which is what I mean by artificially inflating the difficulty - and conversely, they add to the random element that I'd argue is already too pronounced in Civ VI because if they hit an AI rather than a player they can effectively take an entire civ out of the game without you doing anything and make life even easier.

Thst is another thing I like about Civ VI. I absolutely hated the emasculated barbs in Civilization 5.

Barbarians in Civ VI are rarely that dangerous unless you happen to have a start right next to a camp whose scout moves in in the first couple of turns before you can get units up, just tedious to deal with and repetitive. They're more of a threat than civs purely because civs don't do anything, and because you need to have a reasonable force sent to any new continent to clear out the barbarians (that at least makes sense) - but in general I'm dealing with fixing randomly pillaged land rather more often than is interesting. I don't tend to play especially aggressively, so there are plenty of games in which most of my battles are against barbarians simply because civs are too passive.

 

[Thormodr]

I agree things could use some fine tuning but I prefer raging barbs, myself. Barbs turned up to 11. Loved that in cIV.

 

[Furycrab]

None of that is really relating to the issue I mean. I'm not complaining that barbarians are an actual threat to cities - they rarely are unless they spawn next to you and spot you in the first few turns, and/or there are two camps next to you. Waves of barbarians artificially inflate the difficulty because they disrupt settling and development - you can't get settlers and builders out until they're suppressed. Nor is that an issue of using units effectively - units have only one action a turn, so it takes time to dispose of them. It's a pointless drain on time and tedious to keep killing units over and over - it's pretty much exactly the reason Zerg rushes are annoying in Starcraft. They won't kill you unless you're unprepared, but they waste time and disrupt early development.

Like I said. I used to have a similar opinion to yours on Civ 6 high difficulty barbs, but I changed my mind when I cut out my bad habits. The amount of barbs I see dropped dramatically when I learned how to handle them properly because I was on Civ 5 habits of settling on hills too much and as a result barb scouts got active a lot more, resulting in a lot more barb waves being spawned. I still sometimes get a game where I couldn't really do proactive about like say... 2 camps spawning at opposite edges of my first city, but it's a lot rarer. Was a post by someone else here, Victoria, who got me to revisit how I handle them and as a result I get fewer games where there are more barbs at my doorsteps than AIs on the map. If you are still getting a lot of games where you are constantly Zerged by Barbs as you put it, I'd suggest revisiting how you handle them.

If you are already avoiding settling on hills, hiding cities between forests or hills when relevant, and using your units to properly control any zones where a scout could see your city, and still think the high difficulty on Civ 6 is just about Barb zerg waves... I'll just agree to disagree.

 

[Atlas627]

Certainly I was focusing on how they play. There are a lot of features in Civ games that are good in concept but leave something to be desired in practice - the Civ V take on diplomacy was among them, but generated endless complaints because it was seen as being opaque and the AI had difficulty with it.

I'm not sure that agendas particularly fit that bill, though, as they're only ever going to be civ-specific relationship modifiers of the sort Civ games have used since at least Civ IV. If there were a form of agenda system that actually prompted individual civs to play to specific favoured strategies that would be a different matter, but if all they're doing is giving different AIs different heuristics that tell them when it's safe to make an enemy of another civ there's not much gain in making those civ-specific. There is no reason, for instance, that only Cleopatra should care about whether a civ is militarily stronger than her in calculating whether to go to war.

I don't see why they would only ever be civ-specific relationship modifiers. As we both have agreed upon, it would be better if the AI actually played to its agenda, and if it used its agenda for more than just determining its opinion of you, such as actually using it to determine if you are a target vs a threat. This could be done.

I agree that Cleopatra should not be the only one who cares about whether a civ is stronger than her or not, but she could be the only one who does so to decide if you should be *allied*. Or she could be the only one who does so every single game, while some of the AIs sometimes choose to not care about your military strength at all.

There are plenty of games where Qin doesn't build Wonders - his preference for doing so is a randomly-assigned value in each game just as it is for everyone else. He tends to complain if people have one or two Wonders, suggesting that he doesn't particularly commonly go in for actual Wonder-spam. I'm also not sure how much ability AIs have to use Civ-specific abilities, as opposed to benefitting from static bonuses. In short, the civ having the ability to do X doesn't entail that that AI civ will do X.

Even with static bonuses the AI actually has to build whatever's providing the bonus - in my current game (I got past the bug) Korea is only putting out 5 GS points past turn 150, so is clearly not building many Seowons assuming it has actual buildings inside any of them (though I don't know how many cities Korea actually has - the missing 8th civ turned out to be Japan, so there was a lot of crowding going on. Korea should have had first pick of much of China, but Mongolia seems to have expanded more quickly and India's been highly aggressive in this game - probably because of Chandragupta's agenda on a map that's squeezed five of the eight civs in his immediate vicinity).

Yes, this is all true. I was pointing out how, even if the AI plays exactly the same no matter which civilization it is, as long as exactly the same includes using whichever abilities it happens to have (which, if it doesn't, is a HUGE flaw with the AI), it will end up playing differently by accident. But I agree that this is not guaranteed, and in practice happens less often than I would like.

I mostly ignore the agendas - when I consider AI personalities I think in terms of favoured strategies, how expansion behaviour and aggression vary, favoured unit choices, religious tendencies and - in Civ V where it was a particularly prominent feature - tendency to backstab allies (something that basically doesn't happen in Civ VI). None of those vary with any consistency between civs in Civ VI, save for civs tending to favour the unit type that contains their unique unit.

I sadly haven't been able to relocate the entertaining Civ V threads on leader personalities that gave a detailed description of each - that these varied hugely between leaders, that the poster presented them in a way that matched my experience and that there were multiple people on the threads agreeing with those portrayals strongly indicates it's not an artefact of perception.

AIs in Civ VI may have weights when looked at in the code, but for whatever reason that isn't being expressed in the game - perhaps the assignment of traits is too random, so that peaceful cultural-focused Shaka is only slightly less likely than peaceful cultural-focused Pericles in any given game.

I remember those threads, and I remember feeling like they matched how I felt, but that the feeling could have been entirely made up. I never knew if I was projecting my wishes for different AI onto the different leaders. Perhaps this is the greatest strength of the agenda system: making some of the AIs buttons extremely clear, and obviously unique. The fact that they are not important enough to matter is a problem with the game balance and the AI weights, and I am not disputing that these problems do exist.

In Civ VI the problem with any system that requires you to engage with it for it to matter is that it's just roleplaying - the game isn't challenging enough for you to need to try and get small edges, even if that's what playing to AIs' agendas accomplishes. I treat all AIs the same and win well enough doing so - I'll fight the ones that become a nuisance or attack me (as Scotland briefly did in my game) but generally befriend any that don't get in my way to ensure that they aren't threats militarily (since backstabbing is absent in Civ VI). The identity of the specific civs that I need to keep an eye on varies between games and doesn't have any bearing on how I treat them - all that really matters is proximity and whether or not a civ can pose a threat to victory if it's becoming overly successful.

In my game the latter happens to be Scotland, purely as far as I can tell an artefact of the fact that it's one of only two civs (the other being mine, Arabia) that has no near neighbours and a lot of space to expand into - I had the advantage of Africa's landmass, but the drawback of North Africa being resource/production-poor and a lot of city states taking up useful real estate, while Scotland had less but higher-quality land and no city states to worry about (or, conversely, to benefit from while I had all of Fez, Hattusa, Kumasi and Zanzibar). The Maori were probably supposed to colonise the Americas or Australia, but have done neither (Scotland has been admirably historical by sending a lot of missionaries to Central America, but no units or settlers that I've seen - maybe they sent a settler but it perished in Darien), and all the Asian powers are spending resources attacking each other or are stuck in corners they haven't expanded from. None of that - other than the fact that on a TSL map Scotland will start in Scotland and Arabia, by a quirk of the Civ VI choice of capital and leader, in Egypt - has anything to do with the specific identity or traits of the civs involved, it's entirely down to the map.

I agree with this, but again that problem is not with the design of the system, but with the implementation, which is thus a matter of game balance. This is why I like the agenda system. It is a good idea that is ruined by the rest of the game having issues, which is honestly true of many of the game's systems. And it was true in every instance of Civ before this too. In Civ5 the Social Policies were only bad because the meta they formed was the safe and guaranteed one: don't expand, build by yourself. This wasn't because the system inherently encouraged it, it was because the balance coupled with other systems like Global Happiness and increasing science/culture costs per city resulted in the dominant strategy being one which had no risk. If the balance had been different, the Social Policies could have rewarded you more for taking the risk of expanding, so that you actually had to weigh up ahead-of-time which games were ones to invest in that risk, and which ones weren't.

 

[Furycrab]

I don't see why they would only ever be civ-specific relationship modifiers. As we both have agreed upon, it would be better if the AI actually played to its agenda, and if it used its agenda for more than just determining its opinion of you, such as actually using it to determine if you are a target vs a threat. This could be done.

I prefer the 6 approach where the Agendas are just small bonuses that might let you get away with small transgressions and not something that straight up warps their perception of you, and I'd rather the AI evaluate a target based on things like Warmongering/Military score/Proximity to own borders/previous trade relationships with no single factor being the deciding force.

The reason I prefer this is that when the AI goes along for the ride, it becomes sorta exploitable. Like... you respect an Agenda and all the sudden they are BFFs and never attack you? Sounds just worst, but that's kinda what some of the stuff in Civ 5 could do. The Ideologies were especially bad for this.

If you say... "Well it doesn't need to be an absolute system, the AI can maybe sometimes ignore it's Agenda". Then at that point you just have a version of what is in Civ 6, where the agendas it has will influence it's decisions but not supercede all the other things I mentioned earlier.

Edit: To be clear thought, I do think some of the Agendas are annoying, and you get WAAAAY too many reminders that you are respecting or not those agendas for how impactful they really are.

 

[Atlas627]

I prefer the 6 approach where the Agendas are just small bonuses that might let you get away with small transgressions and not something that straight up warps their perception of you, and I'd rather the AI evaluate a target based on things like Warmongering/Military score/Proximity to own borders/previous trade relationships with no single factor being the deciding force.

The reason I prefer this is that when the AI goes along for the ride, it becomes sorta exploitable. Like... you respect an Agenda and all the sudden they are BFFs and never attack you? Sounds just worst, but that's kinda what some of the stuff in Civ 5 could do. The Ideologies were especially bad for this.

If you say... "Well it doesn't need to be an absolute system, the AI can maybe sometimes ignore it's Agenda". Then at that point you just have a version of what is in Civ 6, where the agendas it has will influence it's decisions but not supercede all the other things I mentioned earlier.

Edit: To be clear thought, I do think some of the Agendas are annoying, and you get WAAAAY too many reminders that you are respecting or not those agendas for how impactful they really are.

Are you debating with the right person? I was talking about having the AI's playstyle line up with what its agenda is trying to influence you to do. Right now the AIs don't really have a playstyle, they just have an agenda. The agendas make sense, now the AI just needs to actually use the mechanics that cause their agenda to make sense. Harold needs to declare war just to raid your coasts, so his agenda of wanting to prey on those with weak navies makes sense. Some of these they know somewhat to do, like Victoria claiming foreign continents. Now they just need to extend that to other behaviors, which is the hard part.

 

[kaspergm]

Oh wow, that agenda discussion really did take off.

Obviously, a lot of it comes down to taste. I do think the overall design of leader personalities in Civ 5 - for all the problems with the AI - was better. I liked how they had a general personality, but with random fluctuations that toned each aspect up and down between each game. And I like how the AI would actually be deceitful and backstab you. I particularly think the Civ 5 GnK AI had a nice edge to it for the first half of the game; if you spawned next to an AI, you knew it was just a matter of time before it would come to tensions and war, so you better start prepare for it. However, GnK did have trouble with late game diplomacy, where maintaining positive relationships was all but impossible courtesy of random AI bribes for war. In BNW, the AI sort of lost the early game edge, but got more meaningful in second half, and I for one loved the concept of ideologies, even if it was not perfectly implemented (the AI tended to look too much on the early founder perks and too little on the actual government style and diplomatic relations when choosing their ideology).

My dislike for Civ 6 ideologies is not just a question of the ideologies themselves - although I do think most of them are inherently stupid in design, not necessarily because they don't make sense in terms of the civ's game style, but because they seem to overshadow all other parts of the diplomatic game - but my dislike for the system is also an overall dislike of the fact that Civ 6, even more than Civ 5 did - tends to shoehorn you into one and only one way of playing the game with each civ. Obviously that's the double edge that comes with making each civ unique, but it does tend to lock you into one specific play style before you even actually start the game, something that seems to go against the otherwise sound principle of playing the map that Civ 6 seems to be build around.

 

[Cedbird77]

V was a Masterpiece when it was finished. I love Vl . But it is unfair to compare the 2 imo. Yes the music of V was epic. The leader screens as well. Introduction to the trading routes. Was very fun and well done.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Thst is another thing I like about Civ VI. I absolutely hated the emasculated barbs in Civilization 5.

That barbs are actually worse in terms of their AI and being a threat. The only reason why barbs seem stronger in 6 than in 5 is A) because they spawn faster B) because the Deity AI is much worse in Civ VI than Civ V and consequently never deals with barbs, leaving it all up for the player.

I mean I'm happy that you like it this way, but to me it is pretty clear that this is simply another badly designed part of the game. City states do much better than Deity AIs with clearing barbs, which makes zero sense. I have seen Deity AIs struggle literally more than 100 turns with 2 barb camps in the snow.

Meanwhile the actual barbarian AI is so exploitable that you can genuinely run a settler into a barbarian scout and absolutely nothing will happen. Barbs are decoration, mostly, to fundamentally cover up a game without any challenge.

when barbarians are consistently more of a threat and a relevant game concern than AI civs, you know the developers have done something wrong.

This is a great point I think. The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure that almost all things relating to diplomacy/warfare/enemies challenging and punishing you will be gutted in future Firaxis games. They already essentially castrated the AI and gave the player a close to 100% win chance on pretty much any difficulty. Because Firaxis realized that 90% of their playerbase doesn't give a **** about anything but peacefully settling like 5 cities and building infinite wonders and districts. The Civ series is driving more and more towards simulation and away from a strategy game.

All I ever wanted from Deity difficulty was a game I can actually lose. In Civ 4, some players have invested hundreds of hours without ever winning deity. In Civ 6, I have put in like 300 hours without ever even the chance of losing.

Like I said. I used to have a similar opinion to yours on Civ 6 high difficulty barbs, but I changed my mind when I cut out my bad habits. The amount of barbs I see dropped dramatically when I learned how to handle them properly because I was on Civ 5 habits of settling on hills too much and as a result barb scouts got active a lot more, resulting in a lot more barb waves being spawned. I still sometimes get a game where I couldn't really do proactive about like say... 2 camps spawning at opposite edges of my first city, but it's a lot rarer. Was a post by someone else here, Victoria, who got me to revisit how I handle them and as a result I get fewer games where there are more barbs at my doorsteps than AIs on the map. If you are still getting a lot of games where you are constantly Zerged by Barbs as you put it, I'd suggest revisiting how you handle them.

If you are already avoiding settling on hills, hiding cities between forests or hills when relevant, and using your units to properly control any zones where a scout could see your city, and still think the high difficulty on Civ 6 is just about Barb zerg waves... I'll just agree to disagree.

no offense, but I think you should still definitely settle on hills, and in 90% of my games barbarians are absolutely irrelevant outside of the Eurekah. settling on hills gives me better cities, better cities always take precedent over something as minor as barbarians.

as you correctly say, barbs aren't actuall difficult to deal with. not at all. they're just a bit frequent imho, especially considering the AI does not deal with them well. and the AI is already crippled by so many other things.

Where does the "high difficulty" in Civ 6 come from, in your personal opinion?

 

[PhilBowles]

Like I said. I used to have a similar opinion to yours on Civ 6 high difficulty barbs, but I changed my mind when I cut out my bad habits. The amount of barbs I see dropped dramatically when I learned how to handle them properly because I was on Civ 5 habits of settling on hills too much and as a result barb scouts got active a lot more, resulting in a lot more barb waves being spawned. I still sometimes get a game where I couldn't really do proactive about like say... 2 camps spawning at opposite edges of my first city, but it's a lot rarer. Was a post by someone else here, Victoria, who got me to revisit how I handle them and as a result I get fewer games where there are more barbs at my doorsteps than AIs on the map. If you are still getting a lot of games where you are constantly Zerged by Barbs as you put it, I'd suggest revisiting how you handle them.

If you are already avoiding settling on hills, hiding cities between forests or hills when relevant, and using your units to properly control any zones where a scout could see your city, and still think the high difficulty on Civ 6 is just about Barb zerg waves... I'll just agree to disagree.

Once again I think you're missing the context of my point. My issue was never that "barbarians are a problem" - I'd agree that I don't use any sight lines to control them especially well, but I've already said I find them problematic only in the situations you mention with a very early spawn or two adjacent camps - it's a relative point: barbarians are *more* of a problem than opposing civs. Barbarians are at least active antagonists, and above all they get boring in quantity. The Zerg rush example was to explain why i consider them an issue to early cities, to combat an apparent interpretation that I was talking about having cities/units destroyed by them consistently, not to suggest that happens in every game.

When I say they artificially inflate the difficulty of the game I don't mean they make it difficult - it's a key complaint of mine that Civ VI is far easier than the other Civ games on Deity, barbarians and all. I mean that it becomes less difficult still if you imagine removing them and leaving the rest of the game the same. In Civ V if you remove barbs you may lose a bit of character but it likely has no impact at all on the difficulty of the game. In Civ IV if you remove barbs you lose access to a few free cities you can conquer but, again, it probably doesn't affect the difficulty very much other than removing the overly random barbarian invasion event, the only case in which barbarians really tended to be a threat in that game.

as you correctly say, barbs aren't actuall difficult to deal with. not at all. they're just a bit frequent imho, especially considering the AI does not deal with them at all.

This is exactly what I'm getting at - the frequency is tedious (though the AI will sometimes deal with them - usually when you're about to take a camp and a CS unit kills the unit you damaged and moves in before you get the reward...).

I mean I'm happy that you like it this way, but to me it is pretty clear that this is simply another badly designed part of the game. City states do much better than Deity AIs with clearing barbs, which makes zero sense. I have seen Deity AIs struggle literally more than 100 turns with 2 barb camps in the snow.

"Deity AIs" are no different from Settler AIs - the behaviour is the same. It should also be the same behaviour that manages city states as far as units are concerned (though I don't think CSes need to manually produce units, but spawn them on a counter).

Meanwhile the actual barbarian AI is so exploitable that you can genuinely run a settler into a barbarian scout and absolutely nothing will happen. Barbs are decoration, mostly, to fundamentally cover up a game without any challenge.

There was a Civ V issue that wasn't fixed until quite late that barbarians wouldn't register civilians as units and so would rarely take them - maybe this has recurred in Civ VI but I haven't noticed it. I have been punished for being careless with builders at least in the past, though I think it's barbarian military units that are inclined to take them. Scouts don't seem to prioritise taking them, I'd agree.

This is a great point I think. The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure that almost all things relating to diplomacy/warfare/enemies challenging and punishing you will be gutted in future Firaxis games. They already essentially castrated the AI and gave the player a close to 100% win chance on pretty much any difficulty.

There was a notorious bug with the first (Microprose) XCOM game where there was only one difficulty, because higher difficulties didn't implement properly (it's a testament to how tough XCOM was that I never noticed). I'm almost willing to give Firaxis the benefit of the doubt and think the same has happened in Civ VI - because it's the default difficulty I've certainly had games where I've accidentally forgot to change to Deity and started a game on Prince ... and occasionally kept playing because the difference from Deity is so hard to detect that I never realised I was playing on a lower difficulty. Unlike early '90s games, however, this game is patched several times a year so if this were genuinely accidental case of the game failing to scale in difficulty Firaxis should have noticed and fixed it long ago.

Because Firaxis realized that 90% of their playerbase doesn't give a **** about anything but peacefully settling like 5 cities and building infinite wonders and districts. The Civ series is driving more and more towards simulation and away from a strategy game.

That's what difficulty levels are for - that's a fine place to aim for Prince, but when that demographic doesn't care about beating every difficulty there's no reason it should be the case for Deity. I think it comes down to individual designers' ideas - Civ V was very much focused around being a strategy game (witness complaints that it forced you to choose a particular direction and stick with it). Civ IV managed both, but seems most fondly remembered for the sandbox elements that Civ VI inherited rather than for its difficulty or complexity. I do pine for Civ IV, but unfortunately after Civ V my tolerance for stack combat and the endless unit spam needed to support it is too low and so I've bounced off it whenever I've tried to return (also, I do dislike some of the design decisions - specialisation in particular was a bit too paint-by-numbers in the sense that you just built one or two core resource buildings and the game tells you which +X% modifier buildings to add, and the implementation of health/happiness had the same issues it does in Civ VI, which is pretty much a direct port of the Civ IV system. Maintenance also tended to result in expansion following a too-rigid pattern).

All I ever wanted from Deity difficulty was a game I can actually lose. In Civ 4, some players have invested hundreds of hours without ever winning deity. In Civ 6, I have put in like 300 hours without ever even the chance of losing.

I'm not sure I can say with confidence that I ever won Civ IV above King (those were the days before achievements let you track what you've done), and I can never remember how much time I spent on different incarnations. I may actually have played Civ IV less than the others since it came about at a time when I wasn't playing many computer games, but at the same time I have strong memories of many of its features and of course Nimoy's presentation.

I can say it is possible to lose Civ VI, or at least come close. The problem is, it's not possible to lose strategically - it's possible to lose because of the sheer randomness added by the 'play to the map' mentality, which proved a much better idea in principle than practice. The right early villages, early CSes, early eurekas, and high adjacency modifiers from the right terrain all massively alter the difficulty of the game, and the uncommon starting positions without access to any of them are at least challenging. I'm not sure who thought that it was a bright idea that some starting cities have +4 science while others have +1 or none just because there's a jungle and some mountains in the first one was reasonable, in a game where an early yield of 3-5 is fairly good - adjacency bonuses really need to start low and scale (as they do when adding district adjacency), or be unlocked by later techs (why exactly are mountains great for science before developments in astronomy, geology and ecology?) Similarly, special resource tile yields are too easy to get - why exactly is a society of Stone Age farmers obtaining scientific knowledge from geothermal vents?

Also, in a game that rewards expansion as heavily as Civ VI, simply the random distribution of other civs and CSes on the map makes a major difference to how fast you can snowball - if you have neighbours you need to invest a lot of early production into units rather than settlers and will usually be taking poor early cities that don't return the investment quickly (and sometimes having to destroy and resite them, though Civ VI is actually fairly good at AI city placement - I'd say generally better than CIv V). Hence situations like the ongoing game I've described a couple of times, which is drastically easier than it should be for a civ with a naturally poor starting position (no hills for production or any terrain with good adjacency bonuses other than a river in or near anywhere that can usefully be settled for Cairo) thanks to a huge area of empty space and early CS bonuses.

I'd be satisfied if the game were about as difficult as Civ V at a comparable difficulty. There is always the argument that new Civ games always seem easier to veterans because they've won the other games on high difficulties - but I have access to Civs III through V and can still play them all at will. I can tell that, for instance, I can't consistently beat Immortal on Civ V, and it's my preferred level to play at as a result. I don't see why a game with difficulty level scaling precisely so that it can cater to different levels of experience needs to become progressively easier with each incarnation. Civ V was a big step down from Civ IV by all accounts - but Civ VI seems a bigger step down from Civ V.

EDIT: Sorry, I'd meant to copy this into my last post rather than making a second post.
Moderator Action: Fixed that for you. Browd

 

[yung.carl.jung]

"Deity AIs" are no different from Settler AIs - the behaviour is the same. It should also be the same behaviour that manages city states as far as units are concerned (though I don't think CSes need to manually produce units, but spawn them on a counter).

yes. this is common knowledge. however we still need a distinction between the Deity "AI" and the CS "AI" because both have a completely different spectrum of agency. A CS cannot DOW you, cannot trade with you, cannot forward settle you, etc. Still they deal better with barb camps than actual opponents do, mainly because they have less room for decisions.

There was a Civ V issue that wasn't fixed until quite late that barbarians wouldn't register civilians as units and so would rarely take them - maybe this has recurred in Civ VI but I haven't noticed it. I have been punished for being careless with builders at least in the past, though I think it's barbarian military units that are inclined to take them. Scouts don't seem to prioritise taking them, I'd agree.

it is not a bug, it's on purpose. barb scouts never capture civilians unless their camp is destroyed. you are 100% safe from scouts as long as the camp is up.

There was a notorious bug with the first (Microprose) XCOM game where there was only one difficulty, because higher difficulties didn't implement properly (it's a testament to how tough XCOM was that I never noticed). I'm almost willing to give Firaxis the benefit of the doubt and think the same has happened in Civ VI - because it's the default difficulty I've certainly had games where I've accidentally forgot to change to Deity and started a game on Prince ... and occasionally kept playing because the difference from Deity is so hard to detect that I never realised I was playing on a lower difficulty. Unlike early '90s games, however, this game is patched several times a year so if this were genuinely accidental case of the game failing to scale in difficulty Firaxis should have noticed and fixed it long ago.

i can always tell whether or not I am playing Deity because of how many settlers the AI has. also, I don't think there is too little difference between Prince and Deity, clearly the AI has already enough advantages, the main problem is that the AI does not ever chase a win condition. You could give them twice the production bonus they have currently and they still wouldn't be a threat. Ask yourself: Have you ever seen the AI win a science, culture or diplomacy game? Once?

That's what difficulty levels are for - that's a fine place to aim for Prince, but when that demographic doesn't care about beating every difficulty there's no reason it should be the case for Deity. I think it comes down to individual designers' ideas - Civ V was very much focused around being a strategy game (witness complaints that it forced you to choose a particular direction and stick with it). Civ IV managed both, but seems most fondly remembered for the sandbox elements that Civ VI inherited rather than for its difficulty or complexity. I do pine for Civ IV, but unfortunately after Civ V my tolerance for stack combat and the endless unit spam needed to support it is too low and so I've bounced off it whenever I've tried to return (also, I do dislike some of the design decisions - specialisation in particular was a bit too paint-by-numbers in the sense that you just built one or two core resource buildings and the game tells you which +X% modifier buildings to add, and the implementation of health/happiness had the same issues it does in Civ VI, which is pretty much a direct port of the Civ IV system. Maintenance also tended to result in expansion following a too-rigid pattern).

The problem is not that this game is designed around Prince-level play (it is), but rather that Firaxis is moving away from strategy and war with every iteration, because people only care about "builder mode". Civilization 8 or 9 is looking, by the way things are shaping up, to be just a Sim City clone with some historical references.

Why would Firaxis even bother implementing war and diplomacy when most of their player base freely admits they do not give a **** about those features? They'll rather pump more money towards DLC, wonder movies, extra leaders and quirky aesthetics.

And there is no solution to this either, it's just a fact of life. People mostly don't like playing the game the way I like to play it, and I have to come to terms with the fact that the kind of 4X games I like (actually, the kind of games I like in general) are just dieing out.

 

[PhilBowles]

it is not a bug, it's on purpose. barb scouts never capture civilians unless their camp is destroyed. you are 100% safe from scouts as long as the camp is up.

That's a strange and highly specific restriction. Has there been any word on why they designed it that way? Barbarian horsemen are as fast as scouts and there's always the option of running into a camp that spawned just ahead of a moving settler, so - hostile civs aside - it's still desirable to escort settlers.

i can always tell whether or not I am playing Deity because of how many settlers the AI has.

It's probably a sign of how little attention I find I need to pay to AI civs that I don't tend to count their early cities.

also, I don't think there is too little difference between Prince and Deity, clearly the AI has already enough advantages, the main problem is that the AI does not ever chase a win condition. You could give them twice the production bonus they have currently and they still wouldn't be a threat.

This is exactly what I mean in saying there's no difference. If the AI isn't using its difficulty level advantages, there is no difference.

Ask yourself: Have you ever seen the AI win a science, culture or diplomacy game? Once?

Pretty sure I've seen it at least once (and it can win religion on Duel purely by accident), but I often play for long games - most people will have won long before the AI gets to that point, as it's never going to even try to win before turn 350 or so. People who optimised winning quickly in CIv V complained about the same thing there, and I played that game to late enough points that I observed the AI sitting on the techs and tools it needed to win and apparently deliberately not going for the final bit of rocket for a long time.

I can't bring to mind any actual science or diplo victory a Civ VI AI has achieved, at least in those victories' final form (and of course religion is essentially unwinnable for an AI on maps with an ordinary number of civs, though I might have seen it happen once, and domination literally unwinnable for an AI), but I wouldn't take that as a guarantee that it hasn't happened; I've seen the Civ VI defeat screen more than once, but as I recall it doesn't actually tell you which civ won or how. It is able to win culturally - probably because this is the result of passive accumulation of a resource rather than active AI behaviour.

The problem is not that this game is designed around Prince-level play (it is), but rather that Firaxis is moving away from strategy and war with every iteration, because people only care about "builder mode". Civilization 8 or 9 is looking, by the way things are shaping up, to be just a Sim City clone with some historical references.

I'm not quite as cynical as you are. I think it's clear Firaxis doesn't have the capability to test at high levels (don't they laud their Immortal player as being much better than most of the developers) and don't seem interested in having more than one playtester on staff who can win the game at levels above Prince, but I don't think they're deliberately trying to make it easy. Bear in mind that this is a dedicated Civ forum - dismissing Civ VI's difficulty level is fine in that context, and it's clear from looking at thread titles that there is barely any strategic advice content on the Civ VI forum while this was the major part of the other games' forum traffic (endless Civ V Rants thread notwithstanding). But the game is still likely to be difficult for more casual players, and it's the nature of the growth of PC gaming that games are simply a lot easier than they used to be in general because they cater to a wider and often more casual audience - go back to games from the '90s and most are fiendish by today's standards. But there's still an appetite for difficult games - one Firaxis recognised and deliberately catered to with their X-COM remakes, which remain harder than most contemporary games and were a phenomenal success: I think they were probably expecting them to be adopted by a hardcore niche audience rather than resurrecting an entire, large genre of turn-based tactics games.

I also don't know how well Civ VI ultimately performed and what its play figures have been like overall. The season pass pretty much confirms the game will have the same 6 year lifespan as Civ V, but even with newer models of distribution and less resistance among the audience to a DLC rather than expansion model it's not getting that much more content than Civ V had. It wasn't until after at least the first expansion that it consistently outperformed its predecessor in Steam play statistics, and it's currently well below (in rankings, if not numbers) where Civ V was at the same point in its life cycle. If it turns out that Civ VI was simply a less successful game than Civ V, they may well look into reversing some of the decisions it made - potentially including those relating to difficulty levels.

Why would Firaxis even bother implementing war and diplomacy when most of their player base freely admits they do not give a **** about those features?

Do they? Those were the two features that generated most complaints in Civ V (the AI is too bad at war, the AI is too aggressive, post-BNW the AI isn't aggressive enough; and endless complaints about the way diplomacy worked throughout the game's life), so it seems that at least here people care a lot about those features.

 

[9gkj548hkm20vk79dj689bnj4]

I prefer Civ 5 if only because dealing with things like
the UI,
interrupting leaders,
seeing AI moves (no, you can't ''really'' turn them off),
long production times,
stocking up on builders,
two tech trees for science and social,
remembering all the ins and outs of your unique abilities (often too situational),
dealing with many religious units,
and fiddling with policies and governors,
takes too much longer in 6. Maybe I'm just more used to the system in 5

what 6 really needs to do is have fewer decisions which are more meaningful. the most obvious of which, for me, is consolidating a lot of policies.

 

[Sostratus]

civ6’s handling of ranged combat is better. Ranged units were too tough defensively in 5. They fixed that in beyond earth though.
I can’t believe they discarded the mounted unit penalty vs cities.

I feel like naval combat was better in 5; probably because it was more important. But even if 6 had equally valuable seas, the balance between ships in the game is atrocious.

I think the gameplay of units starting with promotions made a big difference too.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

I'm not quite as cynical as you are

I'm not saying that Firaxis made Civ 6 easy on purpose just to tick me off It's not that they have any bad intention, it's moreso that Firaxis are forced to follow the money and report to their stockholders, and if a certain feature of the game doesn't have many fans (and clearly the majority of the playerbase prefers to play peaceful) there is absolutely no incentive to divert ressources to improve the war aspect of the game.

people here are a very bad representation of the general playerbase (we're fanatics), but when even 90% of the people here admit they play peaceful, it's probably more for the casual playerbase. there is a thread about this on the general forum if you are interested, sadly no poll.

civ6’s handling of ranged combat is better. Ranged units were too tough defensively in 5. They fixed that in beyond earth though.

also, the AI now sometimes moves and shoots! It's great!