Fall patch discussion thread

I saw a few instances with escorted settlers but kindda the other way around. Military units going to war with a settler attached...

 

Nearly forgot:

The AI does seem to be less likely to declare war super early or to declare pointless early wars (like one turn after they discovered you when they are half a world away from you and have no units within range of your cities).

I've started multiple games to see if the early aggro was still a thing, but so far I haven't been declared upon once.

AI relations still seem messed up or are displayed incorrectly. In my recent game my relation with Gandhi had four "bullet-points", three of them positive, one negative. The overall value was something like +7 or +8 and he was still listed as "unfriendly" for some reason.

S.

 

Managing early gold is definitely not a challenge in Civ VI. The early game units as well as the cities themselves are all maintenance free. You'd have to really try to run out of money. And if you ever did start running a deficit, that awesome -1 maintenance cost per unit policy comes very early.

Personally, I'd like to see them add 1 maintenance back to warriors and slingers and reintroduce mild city maintenance. That would make the early game a bit more tense economically. I'd also nerf the maintenance reduction cards.

 

Remember that the displayed values are per-turn modifiers and not absolute values, so he could still be unfriendly with a +20 though that would reach neutral/friendly much faster than +8. How much faster? No idea, I'm sure some people did the math, but most of the numbers are hidden by default so it's hard to say...

 

I got lost more joint declarations of war against me last night.
I suspect this is to do with buffing their eagerness to win but it may just be my bad.

 

Yes, this is exactly the problem. In Civ IV if I go heavy on early expansion I can even run a deficit at 0% science slider, then I have to work out other ways to pay for everything and to keep the science slider up. This is a big factor in making the game challenging.

It seems difficulty doesn't have much of an effect at all on your own empire in Civ VI. Difficulty only adds some more units to the AI, gives them a combat bonus against you and give them some production modifiers. I think difficulty should apply to many more areas. Apart from what was already there in Civ IV (higher upkeep, higher tech costs and so on) it would fit very well to add a difficulty multiplier to district cost increase. On the lower levels district cost increase shouldn't be as steep as it is now. The current rate, max out at 600, is good for deity. On settler difficulty it should probably max out at 300 or something like that. Keep chop yields increasing at the same rate for all difficulties, even if district cost increases slower on lower difficulties, otherwise you only nerf lower difficulties.

Maybe even some eurekas could scale with difficulty? All those that require you have some kind of improvement, a certain amount of units of a specific type and so on could require you have more of them on deity. If the early eurekas required 2 pastures, 2 farms on resources, 2 mines on resources, 2 quarries and maybe 5 or 6 mines for Apprenticeship, then they wouldn't all be automatic, like they often are now. Craftmanship requiring 4 or 5 improvements would also lead to a lot of interesting decisions.

AI should definitely get a massive combat bonus against barbarians. I really don't want to see a deity AI struggling with barbs.

 

Good point.

Although I wonder how much this is down to the AI-leaders and how much to the barb's behavior and their "rule-set".

- barb camps spawn super early (I guess on turn 0?) and they can pop up just a few tiles from your cities.
- plus they can spawn units at an insane rate.
- barbs are much less "docile" than in Civ V where the occupying unit would practically always stay within the camp and not move out towards your approaching units to engage them. In VI they nearly always leave the camp to go after my ranged units (which is actually pretty scary when you're still on slingers).

So if you're unlucky, you can get a barb camp spawning one "top of the line" unit for three or four turns in a row and all that just three or four tiles from your capital (it has happened to me.. should've taken a screenshot ).

After that happened to me and nearly ruined my game, I understood why I had also seen AI leaders get suppressed by constant waves of barbarians. This suppression happened quite often in my games, especially to AI leaders that were isolated on an island.

Yup. It would also require a bit more finesse than simply plopping down one city after the other. If ICS was reined in by, say, city maintenance based on distance or overall city count, it would offer an alternative path and sort of re-introduce the "tall"-option.

And why not? With districts I could easily see getting an incentive to go tall rather than wide... perhaps link the number of available districts to your overall number of cities or increase cost of district-construction with every new city you found (sort of like how policy-cost went up in Civ V for every new city you founded).

Adding alternative strategies to the game can only be good. As it is now, the only viable strategy against the ICS-crazy AI is to "out-settle" them and grab land quicker than they can.



S.

 

I don't know if anyone mentioned it already but trade routes got nerfed.
Harbor and IZ only give +1 production, holy site and theatre only +1 food ... instead of +2.

Also, I've run into a strange problem.
In late medieval, Gilgamesh declared war against me. After ~10-15 turns, my capital's war weariness increased quite rapidly up to +9 a few turns later (only in my cap, the rest of my cities didn't bother).
I pushed him back and conquered one of his cities. I got a warmonger (diplo) penalty of +9 across the board !! This is definitely new. After that, my capital went back to zero!!! Makes no sense.
And it got worse. Sumeria only had 4 cities and I conquered all of them. In the patch notes, it said you receive a heavy penalty for wiping out a civ. Ok, it increased to +32 which was to be expected I guess. But on the next turn or few turns later (not sure), the heavy penalty was applied a 2nd time to +64 !!! For a war that was declared against me. I had several friends in this game but obviously, diplomacy was ruined for the rest of the game.

The AI on Immortal didn't update their units at all. It was even worse than before. I was fighting slingers (!!!) and archers with tanks.

Overall, this patch just feels very buggy to me.

 

It's mentioned in the patch notes: "Fixed an issue where Trade Route yields were doubling in some instances."

This was a bug. It was always meant to be 1 for all districts but somehow they managed to make it double for every district that also has a unique version.

 

I do love the new era-specific load screen intros. "From the first stirrings of life...." was getting old fast.

 

Yes, ironically, when "From the first stirrings of life..." started, I wanted to kill something.

 

Plus I couldn't help but freak out every time I heard that quote because its wording.

First stirrings of life -> Stone-Age -> man taking his first upright steps?

Sooo.. man wasn't walking upright during the stone age?

S.

 

Well, all that stone was pretty heavy, soooo...

 

So, anyone seen an AI airplane yet or AA guns? Or are bombers still unchallenged?

 

No and I was wondering the same thing. Why have planes and no air wars?

 

My guess is they have issues building the aerodome districts. Cities too small, no district slots left, etc.
That doesn't explain the lack of AA guns though, in civ 5 they made a lot of them.

 

I honestly think they meant ice age, especially with the 'great beasts' line. Now if only there were an audio clip of Sean Bean saying "ice" for us to splice in...

 

On my huge marathon game, the barbs... aren't really doing anything. There's a ton of them around but they're not attacking my cities.

Now I'm bored again

 

I disagree. In the last few games I started (and didn't finish) every time I didn't start isolated I had pointless unwinnable (to them) wars declared on me by people with their capitols 30 tiles away constantly.