Daftest Messages

[Miserable Old Git]

There are lot....

My own favourite is when civs say "You are heading for bankruptcy..." when you have a 6-figure bank and are earning 4-figures each turn.

What are your favourites?

 

[Sykes179]

Teddy R once settled a city about 5 tiles from my capitol and then complained I was settling cities too close to him.

 

[Hellenism Salesman]

I was playing as Persia, defeated Rome, and got congratulated by Teddy for keeping peace on the continent.

 

[Zaarin]

I used to be baffled by the gossip message saying "So-and-So plans to found a city with their newly built Settler" until I started seeing gossip messages saying "So-and-So has dispersed a Barbarian Encampment with a Settler."

I was playing as Persia, defeated Rome, and got congratulated by Teddy for keeping peace on the continent.

There are many ways to keep peace; forceful subjugation is certainly one of them.

 

[7daysofwar]

Having Mvemba a Nzinga getting angry at me that I not adopted his religion because he had the Zealot aganda once. I was really confused when I saw that.

 

[Zaarin]

Having Mvemba a Nzinga getting angry at me that I not adopted his religion because he had the Zealot aganda once. I was really confused when I saw that.

I've never seen that one specifically, but I have seen Cleopatra many times with the Paranoid agenda. "I love your big army. By the way, I hate your big army."

 

[kaspergm]

I've never seen that one specifically, but I have seen Cleopatra many times with the Paranoid agenda. "I love your big army. By the way, I hate your big army."

In a slightly similar theme, we have to mention Haralds incessant nagging about your lack of fleet when you are completely landlocked, just because it's almost reached Civ6 meme status by now.

 

[Linklite]

Re: Roosevelt-

I commit genocidal war against 3 of the 5 civs on our continent (the other two being je and Roosevelt), and upon slaughtering the last of them, I get a message:

"Thanks for keeping the peace on the continent. Bully for you!"

Uh, OK? Then a few dozen turns later, after I've been trying butter him up and be a model neighbour:

"I wanted to avoid this, you know, but your idea of peace left me no choice."

That man has strange ideas on what makes a good neighbour!

 

[Zaarin]

In a slightly similar theme, we have to mention Haralds incessant nagging about your lack of fleet when you are completely landlocked, just because it's almost reached Civ6 meme status by now.

Also Wilhelmina throwing a fit because you won't trade with her from the other side of the world.

 

[pokiehl]

Agendas were a complete and total failure. This thread highlights just one obvious reason: nonsensical and immersion-breaking AI messaging due to wonky agenda triggers.

I hope they go back to AI flavor scores for Civ 7. The personalities in Civ 5 truly felt distinct. I can’t say the same for Civ 6, in which everyone feels the same except for them alternating between love and hate messages based on what arbitrary gameplay element you followed. What’s even worse is these outbursts barely even affect their actual behavior.

 

[Zaarin]

Agendas were a complete and total failure. This thread highlights just one obvious reason: nonsensical and immersion-breaking AI messaging due to wonky agenda triggers.

I hope they go back to AI flavor scores for Civ 7. The personalities in Civ 5 truly felt distinct. I can’t say the same for Civ 6, in which everyone feels the same except for them alternating between love and hate messages based on what arbitrary gameplay element you followed. What’s even worse is these outbursts barely even affect their actual behavior.

100% this. The AI personalities actually had meaningful differences in Civ5; in Civ6 everyone behaves exactly the same except for a couple (sometimes contradictory) neurotic fixations. I think Firaxis knows they were a bad idea because it seems to me like agendas were given less diplomatic weight over time.

 

[Thormodr]

Meh. The agendas aren't a failure. They give the AI personality and channel them in the proper direction. People complain about poor AI and yet this is a system designed to help out the AI a bit. At least, that was the intention.

Genghis mocks you for not having horse troops because he wants you to build them so he can capture them. Clever git.

The Maya don't want you settling near them since it would disrupt their civ specific bonii. (Mind you, didn't stop them from getting mad at me when I was a ways off and they forward settled me. Lol.)

The Inca want you to stay away from mountains because they want to settle there and get the bonii. Same with Ethiopia and hills and Gitarja and small islands.

I think Vietnam's bonus adds flavour to the game. Cross her and she'll never forget it. Makes her seem a lot more ferocious.

Now, do all the agendas make sense? Of course not. However, I think it is a solid idea that could be worked on and refined for Civ VII.

 

[racha]

YMMV, but I find all the full-screen messages that don't require a decision to be daft. Also the ones where the options are "d'uh" vs "why on earth would I click that?" (can we send you a delegation, for example: free 25 gold or no gold?). It would have been nice if a lot more of it had been moved to the sidebar so it can be ignored.

This is the one particular reason I was hoping modders would get dll access. My understanding (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that the Silent Diplomacy mod for Civ 5 needed dll access to stop a lot of these messages popping up.

 

[Zaarin]

The agendas aren't a failure. They give the AI personality

Do they, though? From where I'm standing, if all the civs had the same jersey, generic city names, no visual unique attributes, no leader screens, and generic dialogue, you could not tell one civ from another; in Civ5, the AI personalities actually behaved differently from one another.

Now, do all the agendas make sense? Of course not. However, I think it is a solid idea that could be worked on and refined for Civ VII.

I will be extremely disappointed if agendas return in Civ7. Ditching agendas and bringing back AI personalities is even higher on my Civ7 wishlist than ethnicity or a religion overhaul. With agendas, every AI personality is identical except where they're neurotic. At the very least, core AI personalities need to return with perhaps a stripped down agenda system added on the side--with only historical agendas and more thought put into the agenda (no more "muh hills" or "why won't you tRaDe with me from the other side of the world?!" or "your landlocked empire has no navy!!1!"). Even then, though, I'd prefer no agendas at all. Civ6 is full of good ideas badly implemented, but agendas were straight up a bad idea.

 

[kaspergm]

The agendas aren't a failure. (...) At least, that was the intention.

I'm not going to debate whether the idea was good or not, because that's a subjective question, but I agree fully with Pokiehl and Zaarin, in their implemented form, agendas was definitely one of the worst features of Civ6, and I hope to never see them return.

 

[Thormodr]

Meh. You have a right to your opinion.

I hope they return in Civ VII, in a refined form, as I said.

This pining for the awful Civilization 5 is bizarre. The AI had all the personality and charm of a stack of damp newspapers.

 

[Zaarin]

This pining for the awful Civilization 5 is bizarre.

No pining for Civ5 here. Civ5 is a difficult game to judge. In many important respects, it is indeed a weak game, but it also did several things better than Civ6: the AI had personality (don't mistake Civ6's colorful presentation of its leaders as actual personality; they're all identical under the hood), the endgame/late game was more interesting, the religion system wasn't built around an ill-advised Religious Victory, and the various systems interacted with each other better. In spite of those things, it is indeed an inferior game to Civ6--but that doesn't mean that many things in Civ6 don't need to be improved (or taken out back and shot) or that some of Civ5's ideas (including AI personalities) shouldn't be brought back.

 

[MrRadar]

Agendas were very meagre and low effort replacement of personality flavor scores. Flavor scores with variety margins ensured very distinctive and not quite the same leader personalities from game to game in Civ 4&5. But in 6, on the one hand devs went out of their way creating unique aspects of different civs, on the other hand they spared a lot of code to ensure that AI leaders could truly utilize them.

Agendas, at least, could have been a gradually evolving thing, adding something with every passing era, they could have been organized a bit like policy trees of Civ V, with diverging paths for different priorities, to bring some variety from game to game.

And surely there had to be some code for the AI there, to back their blabber. My coast all too easy to raid, you say, Harald? So what will you do about it, will you come and raid? No, I did not think so. Lost all your longships to barbs, what a shame.

And, on the same note, slapping campus and theater districts as priority ones for all the civs across the board in one of the latest patches, thus making all the civs even more alike among themselves, is just full capitulation from the side of the devs. No time and resources to make a proper job, but here's some magic bandaid for quick application, should work wonders. Except it doesn't.

 

[Linklite]

The principle of agendas, where the personality of the AI can be changed to have different priorities and it's not the same old Cleopatra every time is pretty good. People can object based on taste, but the principle is good. The problem is that it's like saying that Mexican is really good cuisine and then the "Mexican" restaurant you go to brings out Taco Bell.

Agendas could work really well. They could be something that keeps the game alive by stopping, or at least delaying, the leaders from becoming stale. The problem is that it would take a lot of effort and skill to pull off well, and I don't think Firaxis has it in them. They have their strengths, but I'm not convinced that they have it in them to do the AI well enough to make agendas work well, rather than the meme generator it seems to be now.

 

[Zaarin]

The principle of agendas, where the personality of the AI can be changed to have different priorities and it's not the same old Cleopatra every time is pretty good. People can object based on taste, but the principle is good. The problem is that it's like saying that Mexican is really good cuisine and then the "Mexican" restaurant you go to brings out Taco Bell.

Agendas could work really well. They could be something that keeps the game alive by stopping, or at least delaying, the leaders from becoming stale. The problem is that it would take a lot of effort and skill to pull off well, and I don't think Firaxis has it in them. They have their strengths, but I'm not convinced that they have it in them to do the AI well enough to make agendas work well, rather than the meme generator it seems to be now.

Perhaps, but, in my opinion, agendas would have to be combined with a much more robust AI personality system and a more nuanced diplomacy system to work; Civ6 has neither.