Does anyone else enjoy longer games with no unit spam?

[FiReFTW]

Watching some youtube lets plays I noticed quite a few ppl play on standard speed with no mods and also even on big maps where both you and the AI can massively spam cities and units to the point of insanity.

I find that type of game utterly boring, the games go by way too fast and you barely get units from an era when already u upgrade them to the next era, and theres massive unit spam and city spam in the game, its just ridicilous.

I enjoy games that actually last a good amount of turns so you can wage wars in one era actually, not through 4 eras or something, and I also don't like city or unit spam.

Im using marathon speed and also have a mod for extended eras so the tech and everything goes slower even than on marathon, and yet unit buildings and all that are not so affected so you can actually build units and replace units faster.

And I also play map sizes with amount of opponents so that its hard to spam alot of cities due to space restrictions and also use mods such as bigger distances needed between cities and also mods that make unit maintenance more so I really don't have an insane city and unit spam game, and yet you can replace units faster and eras take way longer so you can wage wars and its much more realistic.

Anyone else enjoy something like that also?

 

[sethjohnson]

Yes. I tend to play on small maps as i don't like having to deal with more than about 6 cities while my empire is growing. I don't like early on having to just spam settlers to secure your borders when i really want to have my cities developing districts.

I haven't tried marathon on VI yet. I did it on V and you're right that wars lasted one era. It makes having a civ's unique unit more effective as it can be game changing in it's own era without going obsolete too quickly.

 

[KayAU]

I'm just the same, and have been for a long time. What used to bother me especially throughout the civ series, was how long movement took compared to tech development. It always seemed ridiculous when I could not even move my units to where they were needed before they became obsolete. In the more recent games, I have been playing on slower game speeds to compensate for this. In Civ V, I play on Marathon, while in Civ VI, Epic seems about right to me.

I also prefer small maps and hate late game micromanagement. All those little decisions are great in the early game, but when you are making the exact same decisions later on, it's not fun, because: a) the decisions are no longer as important, and b) you have to make many more of them every turn. With smaller map sizes I get a smaller number of cities, and fewer chores. I prefer empty turns to turns with lots of unimportant busywork.

 

[dagriggstar]

I technically play on standard speed but with a few mods. Among other things I've halved (or more) science yields, force the world era to change every 60 turns, double civic costs and dark ages that actually suck (for example no great people points). Typically play on standard, detailed world continents (check the map to make sure both continents are separated by ocean), 13 civs and 13 city states. Games last to around turn 440 ish, which is about right for my taste.

 

[Sostratus]

I also prefer small maps and hate late game micromanagement. All those little decisions are great in the early game, but when you are making the exact same decisions later on, it's not fun, because: a) the decisions are no longer as important, and b) you have to make many more of them every turn. With smaller map sizes I get a smaller number of cities, and fewer chores. I prefer empty turns to turns with lots of unimportant busywork.

While queue and multi queue are great, we really need the ability to
1) queue all repairs as one item
2) repeat a project until I halt it
3) repeat trade routes until I reassign it
4) repeat counterspy operation Until I reassign it (actually why are spies even on the map? They could be in a menu)

This would extend to civ7 too.

In civ5 I could just slap a city on wealth or research for half an era if needed. I WANT to play games focused around later game action but controlling large parts of the map is too tedious due to the need to touch the production queue every 3-5 turns. And I only play small maps.

 

[Wolffleet]

I really enjoy the idea of projects. I dislike the idea that a city has to be constantly producing something.

 

[Shibooyeah]

Late game I:

Absolutely despise dealing with religious units and rock bands. There are just too many of them. Trash.

Get tired of having to manage production in all these cities. I've only just figured out how to use production queue so hopefully this will end. Just let me set my science city on permanent science and be done with it.

--

I only play on large size maps because I want more Civs in it.

 

[Linklite]

While queue and multi queue are great, we really need the ability to
1) queue all repairs as one item
2) repeat a project until I halt it
3) repeat trade routes until I reassign it
4) repeat counterspy operation Until I reassign it (actually why are spies even on the map? They could be in a menu)

I really agree with 1. At least, if my CD is damaged, let me queue all the repairs in one turn. Just had my CD damaged by something or other late game, the UI kept returning me to it every turn to tel it what to fix next because I couldn't just tell it to fix the CD, then market, then bank and finally SE in one go.

The others, I think I'd agree if there was a caveat of being an option of "run until...". For example, "Run project until city is able to build another district". That would make things much smoother and less negative micromanagement.

Trade routes and counterspy operations I'm not so bothered by; it comes up with a brief box and it's a single action on my part to continue the previous operation. I find it useful for trade routes because I have a sense of when it might improve, but I'd forget to check in with he trade route. I'll end up not optimising it.

 

[trev1972]

Late game management is tiresome for sure, in my last game i had a tonne of cities and was finishing a domination win and the amount of things i had to deal with each turn could be annoying.
Totally agree on the spies, a few times i have reassigned my spy to the wrong location when i have lots.

As for marathon i would love slower tech speeds, but midgame production is painful when setting up new cities already so i play on epic

 

[Myomoto]

I'm using the Extended Eras mod for this exact reason, it makes all the Techs and Civics more expensive, and it makes Eureka bonuses only like 25%. I've played like 3 full games with it now, and I really prefer it over the vanilla experience. I also use the Steel and Thunder unit pack, which adds a lot of the missing units from V back into the game (longswordmen, trebuchets, riflemen, etc.).

I am however considering to look for a mod that changes the movement rules back to how they were in V (i.e. you can enter hills/forests with only 1 movement, even if it actually costs 2 movement points), as I find a lot of the unit movement to be overly fiddly and laborious. If you have an army of 6-10 units, moving every single one individually every turn gets extremely tiresome, especially as the majority of the time you're just trying to get them to walk to the battlefield - there is literally nothing going on, you're just kind of herding cats around.

I really hope Civ VII goes back to some kind of stacked units, and then has the battles be played out in a tactical map or something, a la Endless Legends/Heroes of Might and Magic. I'm sure the AI would be able to keep up a lot better as well if it could just stack all its dudes together and move them to the fight like that.

 

[Deadly Dog]

Epic is good enough for me in terms of pacing and yes I seldom play extended conquest because large empires are tedious to manage in Civ6.

The Civ6 interface doesn't help - I don't even have a basic city list to work with,until I build a spy, and then I can only see what districts I have. City reports are almost useless.

 

[Ezumiyr]

That's weird, in my experience, marathon games tend to exacerbate unit spam. That is, since everything takes a lot of time, the civs focusing on unit making will just make even more units than the others. Then, you have more time to move your units where you want them to be (because moving a unit still takes the same number of turns).

I stopped playing marathon game because all my marathon games turn into military free-for-all, and it's even worse when it comes to religion.

I currently play with a mod (extended eras I think?) that tweaks numbers so it takes more time to research techs and civics, so you still feel like there are different eras, but I still play at normal speed. I don't have the time nor the desire to play at slower speeds. If I want slower games that feel more "historical", I play a Paradox game.

 

[JJOne]

Im using marathon speed and also have a mod for extended eras ...

As another one who enjoys slower games, what mod do you use for that?
I use the historic speed mod, I like the early pacing but the balance seems a bit off, but starting industrial the techs and civs come really quickly and everybody swims in gold.

 

[xxhe]

I am using the 8 paces mod. It makes each era last longer. I like the feeling a lot in my early and mid-game.

However, such mods (slower tech/civic) are all plagued by one thing: the late-game becomes very tedious. Especially the tech tree. It doesn't contain anything exciting in the late game.

 

[FiReFTW]

As another one who enjoys slower games, what mod do you use for that?
I use the historic speed mod, I like the early pacing but the balance seems a bit off, but starting industrial the techs and civs come really quickly and everybody swims in gold.

Same as you, however I have edited the mod to my preference... so its better balanced.

Im also using the gold deflation mod which makes gold not as easy to get and adds several maintenance costs and increases unit maintenance... ive also edited it a bit...

Also using the border distance mod, which makes bigger distance required to make a city, so helps with city spam.

Im still doing testing to balance it out better but so far its pretty decent, no unit spam no city spam.

That's weird, in my experience, marathon games tend to exacerbate unit spam. That is, since everything takes a lot of time, the civs focusing on unit making will just make even more units than the others.

Not if you use mods to prevent that.