Features that Civ 7 Could Do Without

[civac]

It's just general entropy. Your helicopter wing destroyed the swordsmen but one machine had an engine malfunction and had to crashland. One airman broke his neck stumbling and falling down the stairs during the alarm start.

 

[civilizationfanatic2000]

lack of variability

Europe north of the alps was spoken with negative terms by classical authors and underdeveloped by any metric in ancient times.

Look at Germany, the UK, France, etc now. In CIV this could never happen.

 

[Evie]

It is of course wholly impossible that these classical authors were ill informed about places they did not visit, wanted to support an expansionist and cultural supremacy, and replaced everything they didn’t know with their vague notions of whatt sounded like barbarian like.

Except the part where, well, actually that’s pretty much what they did.

Meanwhile the Roman legions were busy pilfering “underdevelopped” Celtic military technologies as upgrade to the mediteranean world standard equipment.

There were differences - one much more urbanized - but reading a great disparity in development - certainly reading "underdeveloped by any metric" - into that is reading far too much into things, and does not require variability in development to explain.

 

[aieeegrunt]

One thing that has always bothered me is technological disparity damage. For example, I have developed technologically to the point where I can build helicopters. I then use those helicopters to attack a swordsman and the swordsman is able to cause damage to my helicopter. Um, how the f does this happen? I am shooting the dude from a thousand feet in the air. Am I supposed to believe that a swordsman can throw his sword (or spear or javelin or pike or whatever) that far to damage my helicopter or aircraft? This is something that I think really needs to be dealt with in future iterations of the game. I am a person who focuses heavily on science and technology development in my game strategy. As a result, I am often one or two eras ahead of the rest of the world technologically. Inevitably, some douche bag decides to declare war on me and when I attack with my superior military units, they are damaged unrealistically by very primitive weapons. A swordsman is NOT going to do any significant damage to a tank. I mean, seriously, scratching the paint on my tank should not be considered damage. My aircraft should not ever be receiving damage from non-ranged ground units that aren't using gunpowder weapons. Contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, it is laughable to believe a tank, even the most modern we have today, can shoot down a jet fighter. Maybe a sub-sonic aircraft like a helicopter or a P-51 Mustang, but not a jet. That is what you have anti-aircraft guns and mobile SAMs and Stinger missiles for. The combat system really needs to be overhauled to be a bit more realistic. I don't care if you have a thousand swordsmen attacking one Panzer, they simply aren't going to damage it beyond scratching it.

Any game needs a certain amount of abstraction or it becomes so detailed it collapses under it’s own weight

A “swordsman” in a timeframe where one civ is advanced enough to build attack choppers isn’t literally “dude’s with swords”, unless you are the Sentinal Islanders, because via osmosis that unit would at have the tech level to make or buy small arms at least. Rifles, RPG’s, Machine Guns erc.

What being a swordsmen represents is a civ that is technologically behind you by a fair amount

If you want a real world example of “attack helicopter damaged by swordsmen” watch the movie Black Hawk Down.

The Somali tribesmen depicted there come from a society that is both behind enough and disrupted enough they can’t build modern military units. Their various militias and stuff would still have a trickle of access to modern weapons tho.

I’ve tried to think of a better mechanic to represent this, but honestly can’t think of one that is better *enough* than Civs to justify being needlessly complicated

Maybe upgrade the unit *graphics* so the sword guys become some sort of gun waving militia while keeping the same stats

 

[Malexander]

A lot of the speculation threads lately have been focusing either on new features that people want to see or old features that people dislike strongly and want to see removed. I wanted to focus on something different instead: what are the features of Civ that you don't really dislike strongly but wouldn't mind losing in a future version of the game? Here are a few that come to mind for me:

1) Spies. In real life, the primary purpose of spying is to gather information about enemy activity. In Civ, this is the least useful thing that spies do. The Spy unit in Civ 6 is a jack-of-all-trades who can harm your enemies directly (stealing Great Works, sabotaging Industrial Zones and Spaceports) but at other times just happens to sit in enemy territory while raking in money or helping you to catch up on your research. If spies only did offensive operations and counter-spying, and those offensive operations were a significant part of the mid-game and late-game, their inclusion might make more sense, but, as the system is now, it feels like fan-service is the primary motive for its inclusion.
2) The Corps/Army/Fleet/Armada system. I don't really mind having the system in the game, but I don't feel like it adds much, and I suspect that Firaxis included the system in Civ 6 just to pay lip-service to 1UPT haters. "Look, guys! We brought back unit stacking--sort of!"
3) Support units. I like the premise, but I hardly ever built them. Why build a Battering Ram when a Warrior is much more versatile and can function on its own? If support units were significantly cheaper than normal military units or they were the only way to compensate for certain weaknesses that normal units have, they might be more valuable, but I would be fine having a Civ game without them.
4) Archaeology. As it is now, archaeology is just another modern-era minigame that you can ignore safely if you're not pursuing a culture victory. Removing it might make the late game a little less tedious.
5) Individualized Great People. Having unique abilities certainly makes Great People more interesting, but it also makes the system much less scalable. (Firaxis couldn't just add 500 new Great Person names in a single patch if every one of them needed some distinguishing feature.) On top of that, it seems a little weird to have Great People who help you with things outside their specialization (e.g. Sun Tzu writing The Art of War).
6) Multiple leaders for some civilizations. Another feature that feels more motivated by fan-service than by the goal of adding depth to the game.
7) Eurekas and Inspirations. They make the process of earning techs and civics a little more fun, but they also add an extra layer of human-AI asymmetry to the game since AI players don't use them.
8) The ability to levy City-States' militaries. I think I only ever levied a City-State's military once in all my time playing Civ 6, and that was to get an achievement.

New versions of Civ always scrap some of the old content to make room for new mechanics, so what are the features that you wouldn't miss?

Spying should be somewhat automated. I like that there is support the ”rogue state” playstyle. Espionage and counter-espionage missions could be launched to an area from diplomacy menu once civ has trained at least one spy. Other espionage options could be available in dialogue with other nations, would always require a free spy. Spies would earn experience in Total War Shogun / Medieval style and could be lost in action.

Corps and Support Units should be somehow combined. The reason why people avoid building catapults and battering rams is because it is tedious and often difficult to move all different unit types to desired location without losing the support units on the way. One way to hasten this process would be engineer units that would enable building support units on field. Engineer would gain experience and if lost in action would have chance drop technology to capturing faction.

Multiple Leaders / Civ adds replayability value to the game, do not touch this. There should be more leaders to choose from. This one of the main reasons to purchase DLC to the game.

Individualized Great People is fine. The Civilization franchise has its foundations based on historical accuracy but for practical & RNG reasons Great People can create Great Works outside of their scope.

Eurekas & Inspirations is a good feature because they enable players to hasten a specific tech path early on.

Loyalty System in Civ VI is mainly a constraint to settlers where they can found a city. Should be rethought around espionage and/or city tile spreading when another civ has settled too close.

Manual Religion Spreading should be somewhat automated without entirely scrapping the religion units. Another great opportunity to perhaps steal something from Total War franchise.

 

[luca 83]

A lot of the speculation threads lately have been focusing either on new features that people want to see or old features that people dislike strongly and want to see removed. I wanted to focus on something different instead: what are the features of Civ that you don't really dislike strongly but wouldn't mind losing in a future version of the game? Here are a few that come to mind for me:

1) Spies. In real life, the primary purpose of spying is to gather information about enemy activity. In Civ, this is the least useful thing that spies do. The Spy unit in Civ 6 is a jack-of-all-trades who can harm your enemies directly (stealing Great Works, sabotaging Industrial Zones and Spaceports) but at other times just happens to sit in enemy territory while raking in money or helping you to catch up on your research. If spies only did offensive operations and counter-spying, and those offensive operations were a significant part of the mid-game and late-game, their inclusion might make more sense, but, as the system is now, it feels like fan-service is the primary motive for its inclusion.
2) The Corps/Army/Fleet/Armada system. I don't really mind having the system in the game, but I don't feel like it adds much, and I suspect that Firaxis included the system in Civ 6 just to pay lip-service to 1UPT haters. "Look, guys! We brought back unit stacking--sort of!"
3) Support units. I like the premise, but I hardly ever built them. Why build a Battering Ram when a Warrior is much more versatile and can function on its own? If support units were significantly cheaper than normal military units or they were the only way to compensate for certain weaknesses that normal units have, they might be more valuable, but I would be fine having a Civ game without them.
4) Archaeology. As it is now, archaeology is just another modern-era minigame that you can ignore safely if you're not pursuing a culture victory. Removing it might make the late game a little less tedious.
5) Individualized Great People. Having unique abilities certainly makes Great People more interesting, but it also makes the system much less scalable. (Firaxis couldn't just add 500 new Great Person names in a single patch if every one of them needed some distinguishing feature.) On top of that, it seems a little weird to have Great People who help you with things outside their specialization (e.g. Sun Tzu writing The Art of War).
6) Multiple leaders for some civilizations. Another feature that feels more motivated by fan-service than by the goal of adding depth to the game.
7) Eurekas and Inspirations. They make the process of earning techs and civics a little more fun, but they also add an extra layer of human-AI asymmetry to the game since AI players don't use them.
8) The ability to levy City-States' militaries. I think I only ever levied a City-State's military once in all my time playing Civ 6, and that was to get an achievement.

New versions of Civ always scrap some of the old content to make room for new mechanics, so what are the features that you wouldn't miss?

spies are very important, take for example the Cold War, and all the work of spies, take for example the u2 spy in 1956 or the operations in East Berlin throughout the Cold War . of course you could change the spy as a unit moving between cities create a less direct more abstract medoto

 

[AffineConstant]

spies are very important, take for example the Cold War, and all the work of spies, take for example the u2 spy in 1956 or the operations in East Berlin throughout the Cold War . of course you could change the spy as a unit moving between cities create a less direct more abstract medoto

They're important historically, but Civ has never made them fun or interesting. I'd be good with ditching spies unless they're somehow massively overhauled, I don't want the "defense" to be "randomly guess that maybe an enemy spy will be in one particular place of my dozen cities" and I don't want the "offense" to be "just keep rolling the dice on this plausibly minor thing I don't even care about."

 

[civac]

I disagree that spies are important historically. Sabotage, stealing funds, artworks and the like are of no consequence on the scale of Civ games. Actual information gathering can be more important but even that is often overrated.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I think you've hit on what should be a Basic Rule of Game Design: is the amount of time you spend on Anything in the game justified by the Result in the game?
Spending multiple turns building and placing spies, guessing where spies may turn up, using spies to attempt sabotage of a single thing or tile or steal a single bit of information or item - seems like a lot of effort for very little gain - Much Ado About Nothing, as someone once said . . .

That goes equally or more so for Missionary or Apostle Attacks - the entire Religious Warfare mechanic in Civ VI is More Effort than seems worth it, especially when you are not aimed at a Religious Victory at all but are forced to pay attention to the Apostolic Hordes from someone who is.

 

[dagriggstar]

Waiting 5 turns before being able to move great works if they have moved recently is very annoying and unnecessary.

 

[Quintillus]

I'm not sure I've played a strategy game where it seemed like espionage/spies were worth it, beyond perhaps a "choose which country you want to spy on and get some passive benefits" mechanic, which is the core of the route Civ4 took (with additional active options); I still turn espionage off at least half the time I play Civ4. In a way I feel like Civ6 does it as non-poorly as any game, at least the "Steal great works" can be helpful when going for a cultural win, and sabotaging spaceports/protecting your own can be useful in a space race game. But it's certainly not an essential or core part of the game.

I agree with the religious warfare being tiresome. It seems exciting at first but is a lot of busywork in practice. In my current game I intentionally decided not to found a religion just so I wouldn't have to deal with religious warfare. Some sort of more abstract system where you can invest faith points to increase the rate of spread from your cities, and perhaps direct in which direction you want to spread your faith, may be better - you can still pursue religious domination by building lots of temples and synagogues and cathedrals, and perhaps through diplomatic treaties, but it won't be the equivalent of being at war the whole game in terms of unit management.

 

[Krajzen]

The only espionage system I have ever truly enjoyed in any strategy game I've ever played was in Civ5 - not in spite of but because the espionage here is abstracted and minimalised. Here spies are managed through a separate screen, they are not physical entities on the map - and that's great, for I have always hated spy micromanagement in every game ever.

Instead of a million goofy, meaningless actions that don't matter on the large scale and are not even worth clicking, they have very few actions, all of which are however very useful:
1) Stealing technologies or preventing others to steal your tech
2) Increasing influence in city states and stealing other alliances with them, or defending your own city states
3) Acting as diplomats, enabling several very useful diplomatic moves (such as unlocking trading delegate votes with that civ, and some diplo modifiers)

And that's it.
- Simplicity, very few modifiers
- There are very few spies, unlocked only on era basis, so never too many of them
- No micromanagement
- All actions are very meaningful and satisfying, no 'why even bother' microscopic stuff
- Still no real frustration when they are done against you (compare with 'spawn barbarians' blood boiling troll move)
- Very few random dice rolls, actions are more time-based than savescum-based
- All actions make 100% sense in the context of real history

Admittedly you could introduce several more espionage actions adhering to this general design philosophy, but I have enjoyed it greatly. Minimum annoyance and waste of time, maximum strategic utility.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I disagree that spies are important historically. Sabotage, stealing funds, artworks and the like are of no consequence on the scale of Civ games. Actual information gathering can be more important but even that is often overrated.

Umm... Francis Walsingham?
I feel like England/Great Britain would have been radically different from today if he wasn't as successful as being Elizabeth's "spymaster".

If you are going to have some sort of diplomacy in game, I think espionage at least should be a factor and be present.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Umm... Francis Walsingham?
I feel like England/Great Britain would have been radically different from today if he wasn't as successful as being Elizabeth's "spymaster".

If you are going to have some sort of diplomacy in game, I think espionage at least should be a factor and be present.

Part of the attraction of Alternate History is that no one really knows how it might have turned out. Without Walsingham or any of the other 'Great Spies' of history, it might have made no difference at all, because another person stepped into the spot, or the Leader or other people in the Civ made other moves that negated his influence. It's a great canvas for the novelist (some of whom have, in fact, specialized in it, like Turtledove or Piper) but a can of worms for the historian or even semi-historical game designer.

On the other hand, you bring up a good point: Spies and Diplomacy are linked, so any change to one must include changes to the other, and at the moment, any Civ VI successor will need some kind of changes to both.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

The loyalty system can return (or some version of it) but not every city should be emanating loyalty pressure. I'm fine with having some method of preventing forward settling of capitals.

 

[AffineConstant]

I disagree that spies are important historically. Sabotage, stealing funds, artworks and the like are of no consequence on the scale of Civ games. Actual information gathering can be more important but even that is often overrated.

Britain made amazing use of them ever since "The Great Game". World War 2 alone was such a masterclass by the British that the US just up and copied them to create the CIA. The invasion of Sicily was over in days thanks to a spy operation by the British convincing Hitler the invasion target was Greece, moving tons of troops away from southern Italy. Not to mention the entire reason the USSR managed to produce an atomic bomb just a few years after the US was spies in the manhattan project/etc.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Britain made amazing use of them ever since "The Great Game". World War 2 alone was such a masterclass by the British that the US just up and copied them to create the CIA. The invasion of Sicily was over in days thanks to a spy operation by the British convincing Hitler the invasion target was Greece, moving tons of troops away from southern Italy. Not to mention the entire reason the USSR managed to produce an atomic bomb just a few years after the US was spies in the manhattan project/etc.

But also despite dozens of very credible indications from regular military intelligence, diplomatic and clandestine spy apparatus that the Germans were going to attack the USSR in 1941, Stalin refused to react because it didn't match what he wanted to have happen.

Which, I think, brings up the basic problem with 'spy operations' in game compared to Real Life. The operations you describe require that the opponent be Fooled. Given the amount of information available to the gamer in-game, how does the game present False Information to him that is both credible and doesn't feel like the game/AI is Cheating? You can see where the enemy units are wherever you have sight to the tile, you don't have to consult spies, or radio-intercept, or any other mechanism. IF the game presents fake graphics showing no unit or a bunch of units where there are many or none, most gamers will not be Thrilled.
On the other hand, 'fooling' the AI is already far too easy: whatever it 'knows', it doesn't react in any meaningful or effective way most of the time, so 'spy operations' become meaningless.

To make Spies work, then, will require, I suspect, a revision of the AI as well as the Diplomacy system as well as the entire system of presenting information about units and movements on the map, complete with 'fake' movements and units. That last will especially complicate the game and everything the gamer does, which makes it a marginal mechanic to introduce.

 

[AffineConstant]

But also despite dozens of very credible indications from regular military intelligence, diplomatic and clandestine spy apparatus that the Germans were going to attack the USSR in 1941, Stalin refused to react because it didn't match what he wanted to have happen.

Which, I think, brings up the basic problem with 'spy operations' in game compared to Real Life. The operations you describe require that the opponent be Fooled. Given the amount of information available to the gamer in-game, how does the game present False Information to him that is both credible and doesn't feel like the game/AI is Cheating? You can see where the enemy units are wherever you have sight to the tile, you don't have to consult spies, or radio-intercept, or any other mechanism. IF the game presents fake graphics showing no unit or a bunch of units where there are many or none, most gamers will not be Thrilled.
On the other hand, 'fooling' the AI is already far too easy: whatever it 'knows', it doesn't react in any meaningful or effective way most of the time, so 'spy operations' become meaningless.

To make Spies work, then, will require, I suspect, a revision of the AI as well as the Diplomacy system as well as the entire system of presenting information about units and movements on the map, complete with 'fake' movements and units. That last will especially complicate the game and everything the gamer does, which makes it a marginal mechanic to introduce.

Yeah, I mean the "steal technology" is straightforward, but I'm not sure how you do other thing. Maybe a spy could just be a physical unit, one that can see other spies when close enough, but is otherwise invisible, allowing you to reveal the fog of war and see what people are working on and where their units are and etc. That's really what most spying was about anyway, and it would make it far less abstract and much more interactive. Spy hunts spy, and if you don't have them the enemy has a site advantage on you.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Yeah, I mean the "steal technology" is straightforward, but I'm not sure how you do other thing. Maybe a spy could just be a physical unit, one that can see other spies when close enough, but is otherwise invisible, allowing you to reveal the fog of war and see what people are working on and where their units are and etc. That's really what most spying was about anyway, and it would make it far less abstract and much more interactive. Spy hunts spy, and if you don't have them the enemy has a site advantage on you.

Remembering that the whole 'spy operations' thing has to avoid Micromanagement to little purpose, which was the original complaint. Converting the 'spy' into an ordinary Reconnaissance Unit with Stealth capability might do that, but also leaves out some of the other spy operations like Industrial/Scientific Espionage or Assassination or Subborning of military/civilian Leaders. Whatever gets left out, some would-be John LeCarre or Alan Furst among the gamers will complain . . .

 

[AffineConstant]

Remembering that the whole 'spy operations' thing has to avoid Micromanagement to little purpose, which was the original complaint. Converting the 'spy' into an ordinary Reconnaissance Unit with Stealth capability might do that, but also leaves out some of the other spy operations like Industrial/Scientific Espionage or Assassination or Subborning of military/civilian Leaders. Whatever gets left out, some would-be John LeCarre or Alan Furst among the gamers will complain . . .

People will always complain, but this makes spies useful, non abstract, and even require strategy just like every unit each turn. Seems like a win overall if spies need to be included.