How do I get into Civ 6?

[Abegweit]

I'm a dedicated civver who wasted many thousands of hours on the first four iterations of the game. Loved them all. When Civ5 came out I actually bought a new computer in order to play the game. I quickly soured on it. Bad mechanics. Too easy to win. Massive penalties against the player for no reason. Unfun. Just in general boring.

I finally broke down and bought Civ6 a month ago. After toying around with it for a while, my initial reaction is that it seems to have potential. I think I like it. However I simply don't understand it. Can someone point at something which would help me learn it?

To be more specific, the user interface is simply atrocious. Consequently, I don't understand the tiles and their yields. OK I get the basic ideas of food, production and gold. But what benefit does a luxury tile give me? What does an improvement do for me? Why do I want Iron? Is there a UI mod which explains all this to me? How do I know if I need more amenities or housing or what to do about it if I do need them?

Eurekas seem like a nice concept. Unfortunately, again because of the UI, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to them. I play through the game and I get a popup which says that because I did something-or-other I get a major advance towards something-or-other, I promptly forget this of course. Is there a UI mod which explains what I have to do to achieve an advance and shows which ones I have accomplished?

One objection I have to this game is that it seems to be unnecessarily complicated. Each tech brings about five benefits, most of which I don't understand. Previous iterations gave at most one. But I am willing to work through the learning curve if only I could find a path.

 

[empresskiova]

UI: Lots of folks use a mod to help navigate. Community Q? User Inferace (CQUI) is one of the popular ones. You may need to find one to taste.

Amenities: As you can figure, these tell you how happy (or not happy) your people are. Each City has it’s own Amenities line in they city governance block in the lower right part of your screen. Having positive Amenities gives that city %bonuses to total yields. +1 gives you +10% extra food and +5% everything else. +3 gives you +15%? food and +10% everything else. Having negative amenities will reduce yields by a %. Having very low Amenities (like -7 or whatever) will throw your city into revolt. “Rebels” will spawn in your city to cause chaos.
Additionally, higher population cities need a lot more amenities. I don’t remember the exact number, but I think its 1 amenity per 2 citizens in a city.

Luxuries: After they have been improved with the proper improvement, they will provide you with 1 amenity to 4 cities. Additional copies of the same luxury do nothing for your empire; these are a trading commodity. The amenities that these grant are distributed to your cities by the game, and the game does a good job keeping every city at about the same level of happiness.

Strategics: Strategic resources in this game are used to develop certain units. Horses are needed to train Horsemen and Cavalry. Iron is used to build Swordsmen and Knights. To get access to that strategic, build the right improvement over it (or have a district on top of it when it gets revealed). Your empire needs 2 copies of a strategic to build a unit, and those 2 strategics can be used over and over again. If a city has a unit developing district (Encampment, Harbor, or Aerodome), it only needs 1 copy of the strategic to build units.
Not every unit needs strategic resources, either.

Housing: This number is found in the city block in the lower right hand of the screen. Each city can have a population equal to it’s housing + 5. Cities get housing from a bunch of sources, but the main source will be from improvements. On the builder’s list of options, if you wait a few seconds you can see if an improvement gives housing. A city will slow down growing a lot if its only got 1 housing left, and further slowing down if it has no available housung.

Techs: One of the options in the top left of the screen will open the tech tree. The tech tree tells you all of the Eurekas, and what you gotta do to get their boost. Same goes for the civics tree.
For the most part, its the Ancient era techs that have a bunch of effects (mostly letting you make more builder improvements or letting them tear down features like woods). It also opens up districts in this game, and new units.
Civics opens up a bunch of policy cards, which net you bonuses in your empire.

Complexity: The complexity means you are going to learn new things each game. Start at a low level, and pull levers and hit buttons. Hold your mouse over things to open up the tooltip. Just don’t rely on the civilopedia this time around lol. Good luck and have fun!

 

[PhilBowles]

Complexity: The complexity means you are going to learn new things each game. Start at a low level, and pull levers and hit buttons. Hold your mouse over things to open up the tooltip. Just don’t rely on the civilopedia this time around lol. Good luck and have fun!

With the caveat "up to a point". It's a game with a steep early learning curve but nothing much to learn beyond that. After an initial enthusiasm after the last patch that kept me going for 200 hours or so (vs. about 50 in the preceding year) it's already got stale to me once again. While if the OP is complaining about Civ V being "too easy to win", well Civ VI is still easier. And I remain frustrated by Civs' lack of distinct personality - there's only so much of a Scythian religion rush, Spartan cultural powerhouse or Roman science leader I can take.

 

[Abegweit]

With the caveat "up to a point". It's a game with a steep early learning curve but nothing much to learn beyond that. After an initial enthusiasm after the last patch that kept me going for 200 hours or so (vs. about 50 in the preceding year) it's already got stale to me once again. While if the OP is complaining about Civ V being "too easy to win", well Civ VI is still easier. And I remain frustrated by Civs' lack of distinct personality - there's only so much of a Scythian religion rush, Spartan cultural powerhouse or Roman science leader I can take.

This game strikes me to have a lot of interesting decisions to make. What's more it's clearly an expansion game, like civ should be. Civ5 failed on both counts, so I am somewhat surprised by your comment. Can you amplify?

 

[PhilBowles]

This game strikes me to have a lot of interesting decisions to make. What's more it's clearly an expansion game, like civ should be. Civ5 failed on both counts, so I am somewhat surprised by your comment. Can you amplify?

The issue is primarily that most of the decisions that seem interesting have limited game impacts. Tech progression tends to be 'follow the eurekas', which means your early tech decisions are mapped out for you, and as you play through repeatedly you'll find that you can more or less random walk through many parts of the tech and civics tree without significantly affecting your chances of victory.

Expansion, similarly, ceases to be interesting when the question 'where to expand' boils down to 'anywhere there's room'. While you want to choose good city spots for early cities, there's no mechanic in place to punish settling any intervening areas later - you don't suffer much for poor city placement. District bonuses outweigh the adjacency bonuses from terrain, and ultimately just building districts adjacent to one another boosts adjacency bonuses for nearly all of them. So you end up with another superficial decision that's of some gameplay relevance, but less than it appears and where the correct choices are obvious. 'Settle mountains and rivers' was a go-to plan in Civ V, a game often criticised for the relative unimportance of city placement, and the district system doesn't add any real nuance.

Ultimately, if you're making different decisions every time but the outcomes are mostly the same, there's no actual depth to the decision-making, and that's Civ VI in a nutshell. A game doesn't need only one or two optimal paths to discover, but Civ VI goes to the opposite extreme where as time goes on it's simply too easy to get the sense that decisions don't matter to the outcome. The game's lower difficulty than Civ V (though it's a lot closer to Civ V difficulty than it was) doesn't particularly help.

For instance, after playing for 50-odd hours I felt I'd reached a new appreciation for the policy system, which genuinely is an area where Civ VI decision-making is relevant, and expanded my understanding of the number of policies that are situationally useful. But I was only a couple of playthroughs further in before I realised I still wasn't seeing any real difference in game outcomes (such as overall resource outputs, expansion speed or time to victory) whatever decisions I made or policies I adopted.

 

[AmtrakQuebec]

"Wasted" thousands of hours?????? HOW DARE YOU!!!!

 

[Archon_Wing]

The UI is indeed terrible, so I recommend downloading CQUI.

The Eureka system is a bit of a mess yes, but the idea is simply to tech in an order that will allow you to gain them, but not that you have to gain all of them. Ideally, you may want to swap around research in order to maximize the boosts.

Luxuries provide amenities to 4 cities. Duplicate luxuries do not do anything, and should be traded.

Resources are divided into 3 kinds. One is "bonus" resources wheat/deer which aren't tradable, they just provide higher yields and can also be gathered akin to chopping in previous games. The other is strategic resources (iron, horses, oil, aluminum, coal) which are needed to build units. You need 2 sources of strategic resources to build a unit, but only 1 if you have an encampment or just upgrading a unit (Upgrading units tends to be most effective). Unique units per civ do not require resources, and nor do archers or their successors. Finally luxury resources increase amenities (happiness).

Builder charges are now limited, so you must pay much more attention to them and not just spam farms everywhere. In general, production and gold, is pretty important though.

Civ 6 puts a lot of focus on tile management and district placements. The main thing is that districts are limited by population so you really have to pick and choose what districts you build in the early game.

Oh, as for the tech tree, pay attention to the star icons; mousing over them will tell what abilities you gain.

Overall, the difficulty for 6 is significantly lower than 4 or 5's though I don't really have much respect for V's difficulty since the AI plays on difficulty 2. Hopefully this changes. But on the good side, I do like the flavor of the civs; most of them are pretty distinct and offer a different type of game for the most part.

 

[drubell]

The civilopedia can explain some questions too, but the Civ6 civilopedia is a pretty inferior one compared to Civ5. The Civ6 civilopedia chooses not even to describe how to generate Domestic Tourists (which are necessary for achieving a Cultural Victory)

 

[Disgustipated]

Domestic Tourists (which are necessary for achieving a Cultural Victory)

Are domestic tourists really needed? That's just for defense, right? Defending against AI cultural victory. What you want are foreign tourists. Honestly, I can care less about my domestic tourists. I just build a bunch of stuff, and the cultural victory happens. I only care about that first number really.

 

[drubell]

Are domestic tourists really needed? That's just for defense, right? Defending against AI cultural victory. What you want are foreign tourists.

From the wiki (I'm not in a position to boot up Civ 6 itself at the moment):

"To achieve a Culture victory, you must attract visiting tourists by generating high amounts of Culture and Tourism. Victory is achieved when you attract more visiting tourists to your civilization than any other civilization has domestic tourists at home.

• A player's domestic tourists represent the tourists from a player's civilization that are currently happy vacationing within the player's borders.

• A player's visiting tourists represent the number of citizens a player has attracted from the domestic tourist pools of other civilizations"

So yes, the number of Domestic Tourists is a number that is meant to be the breaking point for Visiting Tourists to be higher than Domestic Tourists, but...

When you play the game and look at the Cultural Victory tab, it will show a number representing Domestic Tourists and Visiting Tourists, but NOWHERE is the number you see defined in the game for Domestic Tourists. You might see you have 100 Domestic Tourists or something when you look at the Cultural Victory tab. What does that mean? How can I know the value of that number without a definition? What specifically can I do to improve that number?

The Tourism lens at least help you understand what's going on with the Visiting Tourists end, but Domestic Tourists? Where is it? It's not in the Civilopedia. It's not in a lens. It's not listed on the Victory tab. Your definition of it being "cultural defense" is a term that's well-defined in the Civ 5 civilopedia, and is likely where you learned of that particular term and system. It is nowhere in the Civ 6 civilopedia, and I think it's unacceptable for Civ 6 to make such a mistake in having absolutely no clear information on how you generate Domestic Tourists.

All the Civ 6 civilopedia would have to do is to write that Domestic Tourists were "a representation of a civilization's lifetime cultural generation" (which people learned by looking through the files and finding out exactly how Domestic Tourists were generated) and I'd be okay with it. But it's not.

 

[Abegweit]

I want to thank everyone for the useful information but I still can't get into this game. Part of the problem is definitely the UI. I mouse over a tile and it says "Bonus resource gypsum needs something-or-other". Nothing more. How difficult can it be to explain the current tile yield and the benefit I would get from improving it? Quite honestly it astonishes me that, after a year of this game, these basic issues haven't been addressed. So if someone could give me a link to a mod which fixes this, it would be much appreciated.

I really do think that this could be an interesting game if only it provided proper info.

 

[Abegweit]

Another question. One of my opponents attacked a City State that I want to cultivate a relationship with. I decided to send some units up to interfere with the attack, just to get in the way. To my astonishment I have to declare war on said CS in order to do so. What's more there seems to be no way to sign an Open Borders agreement in order to move my troupes into position. Is there something I am missing?

 

[stinkubus]

You must be suzerain to have open borders with a CS.

 

[Archon_Wing]

I want to thank everyone for the useful information but I still can't get into this game. Part of the problem is definitely the UI. I mouse over a tile and it says "Bonus resource gypsum needs something-or-other". Nothing more. How difficult can it be to explain the current tile yield and the benefit I would get from improving it? Quite honestly it astonishes me that, after a year of this game, these basic issues haven't been addressed. So if someone could give me a link to a mod which fixes this, it would be much appreciated.

I really do think that this could be an interesting game if only it provided proper info.

In options, reduce the tooltip delay to like 0.2 seconds. The default is like really long.

 

[Victoria]

I quickly soured on it. Bad mechanics. Too easy to win. Massive penalties against the player for no reason. Unfun. Just in general boring.

Sounds like everything that is wrong with this release also... and you still bought it?

Are domestic tourists really needed? That's just for defense, right?

Correct... if you are going for a CV you will need to generate some strong culture initially anyway and a lot of tourism things generate culture so you can pretty much ignore it.

but I still can't get into this game

Maybe it is the UI... maybe its the complexity... and its about to get a lot more complex.
My advice would be to not try too hard. Play some games on a lowish level where you feel comfortable to just get the feel of things asking questions here as you go. Some general rules that help.

1. More cities is better but more than 15 ish is tedious but very strong
2. Settlers , get them out there early, and get districts placed early. Districts get more expensive to build the more techs/civic you have
3. Attack early if you are happy being violent. Taking cities is far more cost effective than growing them. If you can get your way to knights by about turn 70 there is no stopping you.
4. Building early versions of units and upgrading is very cost efficient, especially when you get to the Mercenaries civic.
5. Chopping is very powerful in this game and increases over time like districts, have a read on the chopping example in my signature.
6. Eurekas are also very strong
7. Pushing culture early is important

Some of the above some people consider exploits, its just a question of how you feel.

Your initial comments do confuse me a bit. I guess in Civ VI's defense it is a complex game with choices and often not such a clear path as other releases. I soon got bored of the same path in Civ V, this version does have a lot more choices but that may be causing you more confusion.

 

[Abegweit]

Sounds like everything that is wrong with this release also... and you still bought it?


Correct... if you are going for a CV you will need to generate some strong culture initially anyway and a lot of tourism things generate culture so you can pretty much ignore it.


Maybe it is the UI... maybe its the complexity... and its about to get a lot more complex.
My advice would be to not try too hard. Play some games on a lowish level where you feel comfortable to just get the feel of things asking questions here as you go. Some general rules that help.

1. More cities is better but more than 15 ish is tedious but very strong
2. Settlers , get them out there early, and get districts placed early. Districts get more expensive to build the more techs/civic you have
3. Attack early if you are happy being violent. Taking cities is far more cost effective than growing them. If you can get your way to knights by about turn 70 there is no stopping you.
4. Building early versions of units and upgrading is very cost efficient, especially when you get to the Mercenaries civic.
5. Chopping is very powerful in this game and increases over time like districts, have a read on the chopping example in my signature.
6. Eurekas are also very strong
7. Pushing culture early is important

Some of the above some people consider exploits, its just a question of how you feel.

Your initial comments do confuse me a bit. I guess in Civ VI's defense it is a complex game with choices and often not such a clear path as other releases. I soon got bored of the same path in Civ V, this version does have a lot more choices but that may be causing you more confusion.

Oh. I don't regret buying the game at all. I do regret buying CiV. As I said I loved the first four iterations. I suspect that I would like this game too. Unlike CiV, the tiles seem to have potential and the game actually rewards growing your CIV. It's just that the UI is just so unclear. Why do I want Iron and what is point of Mining stone? Basic stuff.

I will add another compliant. There seems to be endless tiny crap everywhere. Two tech trees in which each advance gives some tiny advantages. Same thing with religion. Is that a third tree? Previous games gave fewer but bigger advantages.

But that's a small thing. If the UI explained to me what the point of stuff was then I could make intelligent choices.

 

[PhilBowles]

Oh. I don't regret buying the game at all. I do regret buying CiV. As I said I loved the first four iterations. I suspect that I would like this game too. Unlike CiV, the tiles seem to have potential and the game actually rewards growing your CIV. It's just that the UI is just so unclear. Why do I want Iron and what is point of Mining stone? Basic stuff.

I will add another compliant. There seems to be endless tiny crap everywhere. Two tech trees in which each advance gives some tiny advantages. Same thing with religion. Is that a third tree? Previous games gave fewer but bigger advantages.

But that's a small thing. If the UI explained to me what the point of stuff was then I could make intelligent choices.

And then, as I noted in my earlier response, you'd come to realise that those choices don't much matter. Civ VI can get by with its terrible interface in part because individual decisions simply aren't that important - I won my early Civ VI games on Emperor without having any real idea how the district or amenities systems worked or taking much note of any specific tech or civic orders. It's much the same as Civ V's atrocious interface for reassigning citizens - you eventually just come to accept that it rarely makes any difference whether you manually reassign them or not, removing a major part of the city management strategy of previous games. Incidentally, Civ VI retains a similar interface and it has the same marginal relevance to gameplay.

 

[Victoria]

There seems to be endless tiny crap everywhere. Two tech trees in which each advance gives some tiny advantages. Same thing with religion. Is that a third tree? Previous games gave fewer but bigger advantages.

These are not quite the tiny advantages or similar trees you make them out to be.
I used to hate that they made the civics into a tree, I did like the V way of doing it but you get used to things.
The tech tree gives you tech advantages but the civic tree gives you the options to slot only a few options in the tree at a time, some are quite powerful. Religion is purely one option within the civic tree.

The lack of information in the UI is bad and certainly not everything is known to this day, read the posts attached to my signature as some examples.

 

[Abegweit]

And then, as I noted in my earlier response, you'd come to realise that those choices don't much matter. Civ VI can get by with its terrible interface in part because individual decisions simply aren't that important - I won my early Civ VI games on Emperor without having any real idea how the district or amenities systems worked or taking much note of any specific tech or civic orders. It's much the same as Civ V's atrocious interface for reassigning citizens - you eventually just come to accept that it rarely makes any difference whether you manually reassign them or not, removing a major part of the city management strategy of previous games. Incidentally, Civ VI retains a similar interface and it has the same marginal relevance to gameplay.

To be clear, I am playing on Immortal and holding my own. But that's part of my objection. I suspect that think that if I actually understood the game that I would easily beat Deity. I don't have a problem with that. I once beat Sid on Civ3 against all the absurd advantages that the AI had on that level. I just want the developers to explain the game. If they have to up the AI advantages to give me a challenge then do it. Just please please explain the game to me.

These are not quite the tiny advantages or similar trees you make them out to be.

I did not make them out to be anything. I just wanted to point out that previous iterations of the game gave at most two (sometimes zero) advances for each tech, all of the, clear in their objective. This one gives four or five. And check out what you get for your first Pantheon. About fifteen. All of which are tiny and most of which are close to useless.

 

[PhilBowles]

To be clear, I am playing on Immortal and holding my own. But that's part of my objection. I suspect that think that if I actually understood the game that I would easily beat Deity. I don't have a problem with that. I once beat Sid on Civ3 against all the absurd advantages that the AI had on that level. I just want the developers to explain the game. If they have to up the AI advantages to give me a challenge then do it. Just please please explain the game to me.

This just confuses me - why do you want to put time into understanding and playing a game you expect to be able to beat easily on its highest difficulty level? I agree that the developers shouldn't artificially inflate the difficulty by making the interface clunky (I never liked playing Total War games on Legendary for that very reason - basically identical in terms of AI bonuses to Very Hard but with reduced player camera control), but there seems little point in trying to make efforts to understand things that don't matter. Follow Victoria's advice, grab those 15 or so cities, and just coast to victory by randomly clicking buttons.