For example, the district-placement mechanics may have introduced some technical complexities to a production queue.
Similar to starting a district and then leaving it for 30 turns as you build 3 other things
? There certainly could have been technical complexities there, but it's hard to imagine that they were insurmountable, and it's unlikely that they were significant compared to say AI pathing at war.
As far as reviewers giving the game very high scores, I think that most reviewers approach a game knowing that it's going to be patched and updated. So the review is focused more around the framework that the game creates.
Very few reviews, especially from major publications, that I've read explain that, or mention the issues they anticipate might be resolved in the future. This gives reviewers that don't say those things too much benefit of the doubt. You actually did mention the issues, and even linked a page to them. That is atypical.
I also consider the fact that the game hides rules from the player (including the specifics on attaining one of the victory conditions outright) to be a significant UI problem, but while you didn't cover everything your review is reasonable. Most are far more disingenuous and misleading.
I've seen near-perfect scores given for civ 5 vanilla, when its MP didn't work at all. A perfect/near perfect review for a product that objectively didn't perform one of its advertised features
. "I think this will be fixed in the future"? No, that kind of review is dishonest outright. Civ 6 vanilla is substantially better, but that's such a low bar.
With a game this complicated, if you wait for every bug, imbalance, etc. to be fixed, then the game would never release.
I'll settle for the game not lying to me, hiding its rules, or forcing me to spend nearly triple the time necessary on rote inputs on some turns. Seeing civ 4 selection bugs find their way clean through every civ 5 iteration and into civ 6 is extremely discouraging. The unit you select should be the one that moves when you give an order after selecting it. Why is that so hard that it's a (literally) 10 year problem?
So for advertised features, I can go to the store page and see that all of the advertised features work.
"Advertised features" is more a knock on civ 4, civ 5, and just to take a shot at them, EU IV. I didn't notice anything glaring there for 6, but 4/5 both promised MP it could not deliver, and EU IV has engaged in false advertising outright for > 2 years now (cross platform MP).
“Controls doing what the game says” I guess is closer to how the UI lies to you? Because I agree that the UI does lie and deceive the player in many ways in its current release. Aside from the auto-cycling thing, what are the controls not doing?
This list could get pretty long. Let me give a few quick examples:
1. Units you have the tech to construct but do not meet the requirements are not consistently represented (sometimes you can see them in build options but they're greyed out, sometimes they don't appear at all for reasons you can't discern).
2. When you attempt a ranged attack, but have terrain in the way, the game will usually show a unit path instead of the ranged attack arc. However, sometimes the arc doesn't show when you can fire from that spot. Sometimes, the pathing doesn't show when you can't, and your unit moves towards enemy melee units while attempting a ranged attack.
3. You can get variable outcomes on attack due to RNG, which is okay, potentially even desirable. The UI gives no representation of this when making it though, which is neither okay nor desirable. If I see a graphical display showing that I won't kill that unit and wind up out of position, I expect not to kill the unit. If I'm shown a center point with a range of possibility, I understand the chance I'm taking. Same deal in reverse when "decisive victory" results in damage but no kill.
4. There are many more that are not lies outright, but are just examples of excessively opaque rules where you wouldn't even know if something is wrong, because you have no means of determining what the rules are supposed to be in the first place. WW falls in this category.
On the basis of one turn (or more, I’m just trying to help quantify the argument), what meaningful decisions can you make in previous Civ game that you do not have in Civ 6?
It's not the per-turn thing, it's the per-time thing. It's still a human being sitting in front of the screen that needs to be engaged. Let's give a concrete example:
Civ 4: When you declare war on a civ, civs pleased or higher get a *permanent* negative hit for it. Others don't care. This opinion mattered greatly for determining who could declare on you. Each time you declared war, you had to consider this until you were too strong for it to matter, and had options to offset dislike. In some cases these options were dominant (same religion with Isabella), others unattainable (same government early with Shaka), others still possibly making the difference but not necessarily (extended open borders time + trading resources). You also had to consider the ramifications of moving "worst enemy" around, such that any tech trade you made could damage an important relationship more than the trade was worth in at least some situations.
Civ 6: Once you take a few cities, further consideration of your warmonger actions is irrelevant. They hate you irreparably whether you've taken 3 cities or 3000 cities, with no variability of behavior between those extremes.
So across a 200-250 turn game where you do some conquest, you had to consider your diplomatic position relative to opposition many, many more times in civ 4, while also plaything through those turns more rapidly. A mistake could set you back in terms of finish date/resources, so making the correct decision was *meaningful* to the outcome. Civ 6 *can* do this, but at present it does not do this. The player incentive to carefully consider interactions like that isn't there, so the choices you make aren't meaningful to the outcome, even on deity. The biggest mistake you can make is maybe not getting a better deal in a trade or something, once you've taken a city or three.
That's just one example, and by itself it doesn't ruin civ 6 or anything. It's when you combine LOTS of system differences like this PLUS the more number of needless raw inputs that you get a measurable difference.
