First Game Impressions

[Fluphen Azine]

Your comment comes across rather snarky IMHO . Fxs said there would be more of a balance between the two. Also, you write as if the game needs to 'demand' expansion (I don't feel encouraged, I feel tall is no option, like said), yet Extermination one can forego entirely. By that logic this is a 3X game? Or does 4X mean giving you the options and freedom to do a set number of those 4?

You're reply came across as 10x snarky when compared.

 

[bladex1200]

Your comment comes across rather snarky IMHO . Fxs said there would be more of a balance between the two. Also, you write as if the game needs to 'demand' expansion (I don't feel encouraged, I feel tall is no option, like said), yet Extermination one can forego entirely. By that logic this is a 3X game? Or does 4X mean giving you the options and freedom to do a set number of those 4?

I hope Firaxis goes back on any statements about supporting tall play. One of the big +s to this game is that it promotes expansion as long as your economy can support it. IMO the biggest issue is that there's no loyalty penalty for forward-settling right next to someone (in fact, the old penalty of "I can go to war and take the settlement" is actually lessened in this iteration because settling too close to someone isn't enough of a diplo malus to become hated and thus won't allow an immediate formal war), so people can forward-settle despite huge swaths of the map being empty and suffer no direct issues as a result.

Tall play is the bane of 4xes, paraphrasing from a Civ 4 streamer who hit the nail on the head with 5, "Bigger should always be better, but it should be difficult to get big".

 

[Tuvok694]

Things I noticed in my first and second game (difficulty governor/viceroy):

• I could handle the antiquity age quite well, but exploration age is obviously too hard for my little brain. The AI settles the distant lands like crazy, I could hardly find a place for a settlement.
• For me it was almost impossible to keep my religion. The AI converts my cities again and again and again, it's pointless.
• Natural disasters are much much much too often. (Though I did choose the low setting in the game setup) Most of the time I'm just repairing things and then the next storm, volcano or flood destroys everything again.

Somehow it was still fun to explore the gameplay, but in the end I was quite frustrated that I did so badly on such a low difficulty level. (Despite having played so much Civ6 over the last years)

 

[StargazingDog]

Maybe specialising instead of focussing on growth would stop it a bit?

Uh, yeah. That's the main goal of towns: the specialization and them feeding your cities. If you aren't specializing, they are using their food to grow instead of sending it to local cities. If you aren't specializing, you are indeed playing "wide" and will spend a lot of unnecessary time deciding where to place citizens. By definition, to play "tall" you must specialize your towns.

 

[StargazingDog]

in fact, the old penalty of "I can go to war and take the settlement" is actually lessened in this iteration because settling too close to someone isn't enough of a diplo malus to become hated and thus won't allow an immediate formal war

There is a penalty for settling too close and a large penalty for sharing borders.

 

[bladex1200]

There is a penalty for settling too close and a large penalty for sharing borders.

The settling too close malus is like -20 and only makes someone dislike you, they'd still have to either denounce you (giving you time to build up your forces) or have already hated you because of their agenda for settling close to them to be a serious risk (unless its an AI that declares a lot of surprise wars, or can always declare formal wars, like Machiavelli, not sure about other AIs).

Penalty for sharing borders is def way larger but given how long cultural growth takes in this game (due to being one-tile-growth and being attached to food/pops), AI can routinely forward-settle you or vise-versa without necessarily bringing on an early war.

 

[cairnsy44]

I will have to put my hand up and update my original thoughts when playing. I said it felt "soulless." Finished my first game yesterday (Fred-Oblique as Romans/Normans/French) won by points when I was sooooo close to winning Military. Was leading on Culture too. Had fun but felt totally clueless. Amina was progressing better than me, as was Ibn, but I ramped up the war machine and cleared them off the continent, leaving Charlemagne with a small corner and Napoleon and Confucius on the other one. As I figured stuff out, I came to enjoy it more. Second game (Xerxes-King as Persia/Abbasids/TBD) has been fun and I am in the middle of it at the moment. Maybe it's the newness and joy of learning a new game, but while it certainly has some things to improve (natural disasters/UI/unit icons/Civ Pedia), I would say at least a 7/10. Religion is a bit annoying. Constantly having to clean up after a foreign missionary comes in to make a mess. I am anxiously waiting to get back to playing, so I have to say I like it. Hope others can form their own opinions. Can't wait to learn more ways to play.

 

[TheGrayFox]

I hope Firaxis goes back on any statements about supporting tall play. One of the big +s to this game is that it promotes expansion as long as your economy can support it. IMO the biggest issue is that there's no loyalty penalty for forward-settling right next to someone (in fact, the old penalty of "I can go to war and take the settlement" is actually lessened in this iteration because settling too close to someone isn't enough of a diplo malus to become hated and thus won't allow an immediate formal war), so people can forward-settle despite huge swaths of the map being empty and suffer no direct issues as a result.

Tall play is the bane of 4xes, paraphrasing from a Civ 4 streamer who hit the nail on the head with 5, "Bigger should always be better, but it should be difficult to get big".

Tall is the bane of 4x? Civ 5 literally sold more and has a larger player base than IV and almost every iteration of the series has had 1 city challenges…

And bigger doesn’t always mean better when we’re talking nation-states, there are plenty of examples of this throughout history.

 

[GreyAlive]

A brief list of impressions....

- Too many notices, today I was going mad
- Religion in general and religion legacy path in particular needs way more refinement to be fun and fully playable
- Too many disasters...I mean, vulcanos everywhere, floods pretty much every couple of turns
- Narrative are fun
- Graphics are really good, love zoom in and take a look at cities or battles
- Settle for peace needs improvement, I don't wanna banter only with town-cities but also with resources
- Max town number is too low, ok it's a thing to value during the gameplay and adapt but if I'm the spanish during exploration age you can't soft cap and only add a bunch after some research...you have to be able to expand much more

 

[Ryansinbela]

Not on my PC right now, but IIRC each modern civ has a culture setting for antiquity and exploration buildings. While it's hard coded into the XML, I don't think its set in stone and a mod (or preferably Firaxis) would be able to keep old styles

How do you view the XML

 

[bladex1200]

Tall is the bane of 4x? Civ 5 literally sold more and has a larger player base than IV and almost every iteration of the series has had 1 city challenges…

And bigger doesn’t always mean better when we’re talking nation-states, there are plenty of examples of this throughout history.

I consider Civ 5 to be one of the worst entries in the franchise, especially in its earliest iterations where wide play was severely hampered by scaling tech costs, an opinion which I am not open to revising.

One city challenges are meant to be "challenges" for a reason, they're handicaps imposed on the player and require deft use of mechanics and exploiting the AI to win. Civ 4 and 3 also had one-city challenges and neither of those games pushed for tall play in the slightest.

Bigger doesn't always mean better when we're talking about nation-states, of course, because it is hard to get big. There's a lot of drawbacks to additional settlements historically and in prior Civ entries - in Civ 3, you had corruption, in 4 you had gold maintenance based on number of cities and distance from capital. Bigger is only better if it can be sustained, if you can adapt to the logistical and material costs of expansion. But bigger, when you can adapt to expansion, should never be INFERIOR to smaller. That is nonsensical and in Civ 5 with scaling science costs and the strength of the Traditional social policy that became the case.

 

[Vandlys]

You're reply came across as 10x snarky when compared.

Sorry it came across that way. It was not at all intended as such.

I hope Firaxis goes back on any statements about supporting tall play. One of the big +s to this game is that it promotes expansion as long as your economy can support it. IMO the biggest issue is that there's no loyalty penalty for forward-settling right next to someone (in fact, the old penalty of "I can go to war and take the settlement" is actually lessened in this iteration because settling too close to someone isn't enough of a diplo malus to become hated and thus won't allow an immediate formal war), so people can forward-settle despite huge swaths of the map being empty and suffer no direct issues as a result.

Tall play is the bane of 4xes, paraphrasing from a Civ 4 streamer who hit the nail on the head with 5, "Bigger should always be better, but it should be difficult to get big".

Maybe that's the issue.

Uh, yeah. That's the main goal of towns: the specialization and them feeding your cities. If you aren't specializing, they are using their food to grow instead of sending it to local cities. If you aren't specializing, you are indeed playing "wide" and will spend a lot of unnecessary time deciding where to place citizens. By definition, to play "tall" you must specialize your towns.

That's why I was attentive enough to place the caveat of not even having finished a second game. I didn't even know this but am looking forward to trying out two or three urban cities with some towns feeding into them. Thanks for the help!

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I consider Civ 5 to be one of the worst entries in the franchise, especially in its earliest iterations where wide play was severely hampered by scaling tech costs, an opinion which I am not open to revising.

One city challenges are meant to be "challenges" for a reason, they're handicaps imposed on the player and require deft use of mechanics and exploiting the AI to win. Civ 4 and 3 also had one-city challenges and neither of those games pushed for tall play in the slightest.

Bigger doesn't always mean better when we're talking about nation-states, of course, because it is hard to get big. There's a lot of drawbacks to additional settlements historically and in prior Civ entries - in Civ 3, you had corruption, in 4 you had gold maintenance based on number of cities and distance from capital. Bigger is only better if it can be sustained, if you can adapt to the logistical and material costs of expansion. But bigger, when you can adapt to expansion, should never be INFERIOR to smaller. That is nonsensical and in Civ 5 with scaling science costs and the strength of the Traditional social policy that became the case.

I didn't mind the idea of a land of large cities vs smaller, spread out ones. The game just needed another balance pass to even things out a bit.

 

[TheGrayFox]

I consider Civ 5 to be one of the worst entries in the franchise, especially in its earliest iterations where wide play was severely hampered by scaling tech costs, an opinion which I am not open to revising.

and I consider Civ 5 to be one of the best entries in the franchise. I'm not asking you to revise your opinion, I'm just asking you to not state that allowing for tall play is "the bane of 4x games" as if it's given and undeniable fact, especially considering V is the second most popular game in the series.

Bigger doesn't always mean better when we're talking about nation-states, of course, because it is hard to get big. There's a lot of drawbacks to additional settlements historically and in prior Civ entries - in Civ 3, you had corruption, in 4 you had gold maintenance based on number of cities and distance from capital. Bigger is only better if it can be sustained, if you can adapt to the logistical and material costs of expansion. But bigger, when you can adapt to expansion, should never be INFERIOR to smaller. That is nonsensical and in Civ 5 with scaling science costs and the strength of the Traditional social policy that became the case.

The problem with earlier civ titles and why V moved to make playing tall more viable (I agree early in its devolop, it went too far in this) is that the methods and penalities they used to limit expansion weren't enough to actually curb or deincentize expanding any and everywhere you could and expanding, even if to a completely garbage land was preferable to building stronger, more cultured, more productive core of cities.

If I choose to create an smaller and leaner empire, I should have that ability to remain competitive in the game without having to expand to deserts on other continents to keep up.

 

[bladex1200]

Tall play is the bane of 4xes, paraphrasing from a Civ 4 streamer who hit the nail on the head with 5, "Bigger should always be better, but it should be difficult to get big".

Maybe that's the issue.

I can definitely agree with that. I feel that right now expansion is too easy early in the game especially with no loyalty, city maintenance, etc to hold back just expanding up to or slightly-past your settlement limit. I think the limit itself is a bit too low at times and can leave parts of the map uninhabited instead of being filled up with cities, but the expansion needs a penalty to overcome per-city in order to make growth more organic rather than having a settlement race at the beginning until people start going to war or switching to aiming for objectives.

 

[bladex1200]

and I consider Civ 5 to be one of the best entries in the franchise. I'm not asking you to revise your opinion, I'm just asking you to not state that allowing for tall play is "the bane of 4x games" as if it's given and undeniable fact, especially considering V is the second most popular game in the series.

Popularity =/= quality and I disagree that it's a deniable fact. Tall play is the bane of 4x games and necessarily requires a total misunderstanding of what the eXpand part of the 4x formula means in the first place. The point isn't to just "expand to the point where you feel like" but to "expand within your ability to do so", since as a core feature it promotes victory. Just like how the eXploit shouldn't be limited either (which would artificially promote wide play), you should be encouraged to develop each city to its maximum potential, it should just be costly to do so unless you play correctly. Similarly, eXplore shouldn't started giving diminishing returns just because some players hate exploring and uncovering the map, and eXterminate shouldn't be made unviable or artificially extra-difficult just because some players hate warfare.

The problem with earlier civ titles and why V moved to make playing tall more viable (I agree early in its devolop, it went too far in this) is that the methods and penalities they used to limit expansion weren't enough to actually curb or deincentize expanding any and everywhere you could and expanding, even if to a completely garbage land was preferable to building stronger, more cultured, more productive core of cities.

If I choose to create an smaller and leaner empire, I should have that ability to remain competitive in the game without having to expand to deserts on other continents to keep up.

See the issue is that you're asking to be competitive even if you don't insist on attempting to cut the larger empires down to size, that is the problem here. I agree you shouldn't have to expand into deserts on other continents to keep up, and I would argue Civ 4's maintenance mechanic disincentivizes that until very late in the game (most desert cities will have almost zero food or productive output but cost precious gold, thus making them net-negatives on your empire until they develop which costs crucial turns and gold), but I disagree that your "smaller and leaner" empire should be inherently more competitive in raw output with a larger empire that's as-developed in all its territory.

If you want to remain competitive in a 4x game then the correct way to do so as a smaller empire is to leverage diplomacy (alliances, convincing other civs to declare war on the big fish, mutual defense pacts, etc) and the concentration of your military to allow you to explore and hack off pieces of larger, less-consolidated, less-developed empires early enough before they become unstoppable.

 

[Jeppetto]

Popularity =/= quality and I disagree that it's a deniable fact.

You disliking something =/= it being objectively bad.

 

[bladex1200]

You disliking something =/= it being objectively bad.

I never implied that, the second part of my sentence "I disagree that it's a deniable fact" is backed up by my argumentation in the rest of the paragraph, not by the implication that just because something is popular it therefore lacks quality (which I also wasn't implying, my apologies if it seemed so). My implication was merely that popularity has no comment on quality - popularity tends to imply quality, but plenty of popular things are crap and are only popular because of marketing or because a periphery demographic that has different quality metrics or preferences in mind enjoyed it.

 

[TheGrayFox]

Popularity =/= quality and I disagree that it's an undeniable fact. Tall play is the bane of 4x games and necessarily requires a total misunderstanding of what the eXpand part of the 4x formula means in the first place. The point isn't to just "expand to the point where you feel like" but to "expand within your ability to do so", since as a core feature it promotes victory. Just like how the eXploit shouldn't be limited either (which would artificially promote wide play), you should be encouraged to develop each city to its maximum potential, it should just be costly to do so unless you play correctly. Similarly, eXplore shouldn't started giving diminishing returns just because some players hate exploring and uncovering the map, and eXterminate shouldn't be made unviable or artificially extra-difficult just because some players hate warfare.

1) Quality is a completely subjective measure, I'm sure the 1/3rd of the playerbase still playing V over IV at any given time will tell you that.

2) In your opinion, playing tall is the bane of 4x games. In my opinion, you are wrong

3) your argument falls apart when you realize you can play and win 4x games without exterminating other civs and that the explore part of the 4x formula usually gets thrown out half way through most 4x games.

See the issue is that you're asking to be competitive even if you don't insist on attempting to cut the larger empires down to size, that is the problem here. I agree you shouldn't have to expand into deserts on other continents to keep up, and I would argue Civ 4's maintenance mechanic disincentivizes that until very late in the game (most desert cities will have almost zero food or productive output but cost precious gold, thus making them net-negatives on your empire until they develop which costs crucial turns and gold), but I disagree that your "smaller and leaner" empire should be inherently more competitive in raw output with a larger empire that's as-developed in all its territory.

Incorrect, lots of times playing tall in V involves going to war and puppeting the cities of larger nations after you create a much stronger, leaner, and more productive core of cities. Also no where am I arguing that playing small should ALWAYS beat wide play or that a leaner empire should be "inherently more competitive" in raw output than a larger one. That actually is a strawman

I'll also point out that you're wrong about 4's maitanence mechanics as they did very little to limit ICS, which was hands down the best way to play IV. This is a problem that even Soren Johnson, the head devoloper of the IV awknowledged and is exactly why Old World moved to having predetermined city sites

If you want to remain competitive in a 4x game then the correct way to do so as a smaller empire is to leverage diplomacy (alliances, convincing other civs to declare war on the big fish, mutual defense pacts, etc) and the concentration of your military to allow you to explore and hack off pieces of larger, less-consolidated, less-developed empires early enough before they become unstoppable.

and nothing about V changes this reality. You still do all these things playing tall

 

[Sherlock]

How is the narrator? It's that woman from Game of Thrones, right? She's a fine actress but I don't know if she has the gravitas to be near as good as the previous narrators. She's no Leonard Nimoy, Sean Bean, or William Morgan Sheppard.