its a shame its so many months away. the changes they are making plus the changes made in gods and kings make this quite a compelling game. really if they could figure out a way to make the huge map about 4 times bigger and add more technologies and path complexity to the tech tree, the game would be just about what it should have been on release
it got me thinking, was Jon Scafers effort a complete failure, and has Ed been brought in to clean it up and make it a respectable game, or are we just in a world now, where the business model is games will ship half baked with two years incremental improvements?
Having said that, will Civ 6 be an evolution of 5, or a complete rewrite?
Civ's own business model has moved incrementally towards more content-based expansions throughout the series' history - this isn't new.
Civ 1 had no expansions.
Civ II had expansions that were merely officially-sanctioned fan-produced scenarios.
Civ III had officially-produced scenario packs as its expansions.
Civ IV was the first to add new content in expansions, most of which were relatively small additive additions to the game.
Civ V takes the obvious next step and packages substantial, game-changing content in its expansions.
This isn't simply a money-grab: it allows elements that benefit from development and an individual focus to be added to the game, and also for the developers to respond to and accommodate player feedback through expansions.
Civ V's development suggests developers pay quite close attention to what players want: consistent after the release of both Civ V and G&K were calls for something like Civ IV's UN, international trade routes, greater focus on diplomacy, a change to cultural victories, shared victories and other elements we're told are to be added in BNW. G&K itself of course included the then-most requested features, espionage and religion (likely to have been included at some stage anyway) as well as an also-requested change to the diplomatic victory condition and substantial improvements to AI performance, diplomacy and naval warfare (which probably wouldn't have been included).
I didn't play the pre-patch, notoriously buggy, stone-resource-less, ICS-ridden Civ V, but the product I played post-patch (pre-G&K) couldn't fairly be described as "half-baked" except in retrospect following the addition of major new content in the first expansion.
I'd agree that it was thinner on the ground than it should have been - the civ roster seemed small with some obvious omissions that were added later as DLC (no Babylon? No Spain? No Vikings when they were in game's the opening cinematic? No scenarios at all), and there should have been some kind of espionage, but it was a more thorough redesign of the main game engine than had previously been attempted, and added new elements to the series (such as CSes, a new approach to strategic resources, and Natural Wonders) while retaining others that had been added to Civ IV in expansions (Great People). As a base product, then, it wasn't appreciably underdeveloped.
As for Civ 6, Civ seems to follow a pattern of redesigning the game every other edition - Civ II was closely patterned after Civ I; Civ III was the first to change major game elements, and this represented the foundation Civ IV built on. So we might expect Civ 6 to be Civ V Plus in the same way.
Still, with both expansions Civ V is going to be a much higher-detail game than its predecessors, with all-new concepts like the archaeology and Great Works systems on top of more developed religion and (apparently) trade and "Congress" mechanics than Civ IV. Including all of these in the base Civ 6 will probably not be feasible, and will leave relatively little to add in future expansions, so Civ 6 will probably start as something similar to Civ V with more features than vanilla Civ V but fewer than Civ V with both expansions (and certainly many fewer civs than 43) - no doubt to be greeted by furious complaints of "dumbing down"...
