[NFP] Is Civ 6 doomed?

[GIO888]

Civ VI definitely feels, well, "done" to me.

Humankind will force both evolution and refining - maybe even a whole new engine - on Civ VII.

What with Zombies, Vampires already, and "Wokieness" in general, this actually worries me. Where's WWI? WWII? Actual human history!

 

[aieeegrunt]

Civ VI definitely feels, well, "done" to me.

Humankind will force both evolution and refining - maybe even a whole new engine - on Civ VII.

What with Zombies, Vampires already, and "Wokieness" in general, this actually worries me. Where's WWI? WWII? Actual human history!

Back in Civ4 I guess

I notice the defenders of Civ6 have shifted more and more to veiled ad hominems, “ya but you’ll buy it anyways” being a classic substitute for an actual argument. Which is why I bought Fallout76. Oh wait I didn’t, because they removed everything I liked about Fallout.

Concession accepted I guess!

Moderator Action: Please state your opinions without characterizing those that disagree with you in this way, it is trolling. leif

I put a ton of hours of hours into Civ6 before deciding it simply does not work as classic Civ game. That isn’t a negative, that means I have an informed opinion.

The game is basically an empire building sandbox power fantasy. Apparently this is what sells now.

The AI might as well not exist. There is zero challenge to the player other than surviving the first 50 or so turns on Diety.

The whole game revolves around simple board game mechanic yield minimaxing. That is basically it. It’s one long materialschlacht. Wide dramatically overpowering tall is an obvious tell, and everything about this game is a positive feedback loop for the player.

The irony being that this is the kind of sterile thintelligent environment where an AI SHOULD excell, so the AI coding is either hilariously bad or deliberatly gimped for that power fantasy thing.

History in this game is basically set dressing and what designers call “chrome”. A lot of the yield minmaxing strats are hilariously ahistorical. Nobody starts a building and leaves it unfinished for decades to amortize the cost, but in Civ6 you do. Deliberatly building obsolete units and then rubbing them with gold to magically make an ironclad a battleship or whatever.

I mean it’s pretty sad when a mobile port of an older civ game gives me far more interesting challenges and decisions

 

[Timewarp]

I would like to thank everyone for their participation in this thread. I am looking for a setup of Civ that is entertaining and enjoyable. I found roadblocks toward achieving that goal.

I brought up scenarios that occurred to me in this game, and either other people have experienced the same thing, or people mocked me for interpreting things strangely. No where is there an indication that these problems are just in my head. These problems are real, and added together they are significant.

As long as the virus is a thing, I will put some time into Civ VI. With the help of all of the wonderful responses in this thread, including the ones mocking me, I've found the niche that Civ VI will play in my life going forward. I have the scenarios that work for me, I have an idea of how the AI acts (and barbarians in games I include them), and I play the game in a way that suits my needs.

imho: Civ had a great reputation coming into Civ VI. It did not live up to these expections. Not even close. I wish it did, but it just does not. And fixes to it would be quite expensive.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I would like to thank everyone for their participation in this thread. I am looking for a setup of Civ that is entertaining and enjoyable. I found roadblocks toward achieving that goal.

I brought up scenarios that occurred to me in this game, and either other people have experienced the same thing, or people mocked me for interpreting things strangely. No where is there an indication that these problems are just in my head. These problems are real, and added together they are significant.

As long as the virus is a thing, I will put some time into Civ VI. With the help of all of the wonderful responses in this thread, including the ones mocking me, I've found the niche that Civ VI will play in my life going forward. I have the scenarios that work for me, I have an idea of how the AI acts (and barbarians in games I include them), and I play the game in a way that suits my needs.

imho: Civ had a great reputation coming into Civ VI. It did not live up to these expections. Not even close. I wish it did, but it just does not. And fixes to it would be quite expensive.

I’ve put a LOT of time and effort into making this game work for me, probably more than I should have.

What I have found is to make the AI even remotely competative:

None of the modes. None of them. The AI cannot remotely take advantage of them, and Barbarian Clans and Dramatic Ages guts them.

Turn Barbarians off. The combination of how OP they are and how terrible the AI is at fighting means any AI confronting one or more camps is going to be severely handicapped

Legendary Starts and Abundant Resources. The AI is terrible at builders, so this helps them

Don’t allow yourself to build walls. The OP nature of walls, the stupidity of ranged strikes, and the AI’s terrible warmaking skills means you can often defeat an invasion with walls and nothing else.

No unit upgrades. As well as being terrible history it does the usual Civ6 positive feedback win harder thing where you can cheaply upgrade an increasingly veteran army with no downsides.

Again, both broken and horribly ahistorical

Even with all of the above the AI is hilariously bad at warfare, and most things except sniping wonders, because of course it’s good at something that annoying and stupid.

I played a game this morning where I was next to Rough Rider Teddy, who had almost triple my military score and thus Surprise War’s me early in the classical era

Which is smart strategy. I didn’t have iron yet to boot. I had a few warriors and archers

I discovered horse back riding and Oligarchy just after.

He lost the war. Didn’t even take a single city. He lost it so badly I took Washington and his other two cities will follow shortly.

I will thus have roughly doubled the size of my civ half way through the classical era.

So the game is already over

 

[Fippy]

Programming even semi-competent AIs for strategy games is very difficult.
All-time top rated strategy hits like Civ4 or Homm3 have very poor basic AI strength as well.

But what they did was giving AIs huge bonuses on the highest difficulty levels, to make up for all their random decisions.
In IV i.e. this resulted in peoples still losing deity games regularly, very experienced players who know most tricks by now.

Those AI bonuses also must be easily usable for them.
Extra production and quickly growing cities results in more units, but that would be mostly useless if they run around like headless chicken..each on 1 tile
Instead IV makes it easy for them to form doomstacks which can be genuinely scary.

Ideally it would be #1 priority for Devs to create competitive AI for games that are pointless without them.
And using only mechanics they can handle when buffed properly. But we all know it's not like that nowadays.

Low challenge games are not doomed (esp. money wise), but they will not keep the attention of ambitious PC gamers.

 

[Gedemon]

But what they did was giving AIs huge bonuses on the highest difficulty levels, to make up for all their random decisions.

it's the same for civ6.

 

[aieeegrunt]

The issue is that Civ6 has the worst AI of the series by a mile.

The inability to wage war I blame on Civ6 also having the worse and least enjoyable combat of the series. The combo of 1UPT and low move allowance and the way ranged units work makes projecting force an agonizing ordeal of sliding tile puzzles.

If I wanted to play Tomb Raider, I’d be playing Tomb Raider.

It is also stupidly, hilariously ahistorical of course. Unit densities requiring stacking limits shouldn’t be a factor outside of Europe in the Industrial Age. Ranged units being this strong before bolt action rifles is also pure Hollywood levels of history.

But the AI failing at the economic side of the game is baffling, because Civ6’s boardgame mechanics makes the game VERY numbers driven and deterministic. The AI should be excelling here without any need for a bonus. I mean minimaxing is their wheelhouse.

Again I have to wonder if Firaxis wants a power fantasy sandbox or something

After a solid year of Civ6 I went back to Civ Rev2 on my iPhone and initially struggled. Civ6 actually atrophied my 4X skills the way Overwatch kills your FPS skillss

 

[ThunderLizard2]

The issue is that Civ6 has the worst AI of the series by a mile.

The inability to wage war I blame on Civ6 also having the worse and least enjoyable combat of the series. The combo of 1UPT and low move allowance and the way ranged units work makes projecting force an agonizing ordeal of sliding tile puzzles.

If I wanted to play Tomb Raider, I’d be playing Tomb Raider.

It is also stupidly, hilariously ahistorical of course. Unit densities requiring stacking limits shouldn’t be a factor outside of Europe in the Industrial Age. Ranged units being this strong before bolt action rifles is also pure Hollywood levels of history.

But the AI failing at the economic side of the game is baffling, because Civ6’s boardgame mechanics makes the game VERY numbers driven and deterministic. The AI should be excelling here without any need for a bonus. I mean minimaxing is their wheelhouse.

Again I have to wonder if Firaxis wants a power fantasy sandbox or something

After a solid year of Civ6 I went back to Civ Rev2 on my iPhone and initially struggled. Civ6 actually atrophied my 4X skills the way Overwatch kills your FPS skillss

I think you're right about the sandbox angle. Seems to be what a lot of studios are doing these days to reach a larger audience. Moving on to Old World and HumanKind for the time being unless/until dll is released for Civ VI.

 

[FinalDoomsday]

Yes AI for 4X games is hard but I've played three other 4X games recently and they all do a far better job than Civ VI and two of those games follow the 1UPT rules like Civ. I'm still adjusting to seeing the AI in Old World pull a badly damaged unit out of battle to recover.

 

[Aristos]

Yes AI for 4X games is hard but I've played three other 4X games recently and they all do a far better job than Civ VI and two of those games follow the 1UPT rules like Civ. I'm still adjusting to seeing the AI in Old World pull a badly damaged unit out of battle to recover.

Not only that but using flankers to perfection with their non-ZOC ability and longer movements... plus focus fire, and you see that great super promoted unit that you groomed so carefully go down in flames... thus, it can be done, and the difference is the dev.

 

[Abaxial]

Actually, one could answer, yes of course it is doomed. Consider instead, is Civ 3 doomed? I doubt if anyone plays it any more, so yes, it was doomed some time ago. Eventually Civ 6 will go the same way as everyone will be playing something else. Maybe Civ 7, we will see. I don't much fancy Old World - the idea that you can move one unit ten hexes if you don't move any other unit is not unknown to me, but I am doubtful it will work in a Civ-type game. Humankind doesn't appeal - I really don't like the idea that the Mayans suddenly turn into Vikings. Maybe I will spend some more time with CK3.

 

[Gedemon]

The reference would be civ4, I wonder if there will be a community as active for civ6 in 10 years than there is for civ4 now.

edit: math

 

[aieeegrunt]

The reference would be civ4, I wonder if there will be a community as active for civ6 in 15 years than there is for civ4 now.

Absent mods the answer is no a chance

 

[Socrates99]

Civ VI's prohibitive movement rules are a huge part of why its AI is rotten next to Old World's where units can really maneuver. It's why Lautaro can be such a PITA midgame when his raiders are strong and fast against players' perpetual golden ages. I thought V's movement was crap. I was shocked somebody decided to make it worse in VI.

It won't bother pulling a damaged unit out when it can't actually get away. It can't flank when it can't get around a line. Humans can do these things because humans can think a few moves in the future for multiple units while AI is "thinking" about individual units this turn.

I use a mod that increases movement by 1 for all units. I'm always pretty impressed at how successful Gran Columbia ai is. Its pretty rare for him to not wipe at least two neighbors out completely. If Chandragupta and Cyrus were better at using their UAs they'd probably wreck too.

The other thing that makes VIs ai worse than V at combat is it just doesn't produce units at the same rate. I don't know if it was turn time complaints or derisive comments about "carpets of doom" being no better than "Stacks of Doom" but for some reason VI's AI will only field a very token army. I'm fairly certain that was a choice not a mistake. I just think it was a bad one.

 

[Aristos]

The other thing that makes VIs ai worse than V at combat is it just doesn't produce units at the same rate. I don't know if it was turn time complaints or derisive comments about "carpets of doom" being no better than "Stacks of Doom" but for some reason VI's AI will only field a very token army. I'm fairly certain that was a choice not a mistake. I just think it was a bad one.

That does not excuse the AI for building wonders and civilian units while under siege and after losing their entire army.

 

[KayAU]

With regards to AI, I don't think many people are asking for a super powerful AI which can routinely beat expert players with no bonuses. I sometimes see people talking about Civ AI as if we were asking for the equivalent of Deep Blue.While it would be neat to have that as an occasional challenge, for many, that would not be the gameplay experience they would be looking for, as you would need follow the "meta" very strictly to be competitive.

What I would like, however, is an AI which feels like it's *there*. Vox Populi is often mentioned as a good example of a Civ game with good AI, and rightly so. However, it is not really *that* clever, and on a balanced difficulty level, you can usually beat it with relative ease. What makes it so good in comparison to vanilla Civ 5, and even better compared to Civ 6, is that it can play just about every aspect of the game effectively, and will generally punish you if you are careless. The AI will compete with you for tech, religion, wonders, resources, and city states, and they will develop and deploy armies and navies. They are also far more capable of using their military. As an experienced human player, I'm still much more capable in general, but depending on the situation and how careful I've been, the AI can occasionally really hurt me.

 

[Socrates99]

That does not excuse the AI for building wonders and civilian units while under siege and after losing their entire army.

I don't get your point. You're just restating what I said about it not producing enough units.

 

[James_Champagne]

I've almost hit the 1000 hours played mark with CIV VI and I feel by this point the game doesn't have too much surprises left. It's become a bit too easy to win now, I think... well, on normal mode at least.

By contrast, with CIV IV it's the opposite problem, I find the game too hard, and even on Prince mode I'm not sure I've ever reached the Industrial era. What inevitably happens is that the two biggest Civs will ask me to go to war or stop trading with the other, which will inevitably annoy the other, and then I'm promptly crushed by the stacks of doom. The last game I tried I thought I had a large enough army assembled to repel any attack, only to be crushed by an AI army twice the size, which made me wonder: "How fast are they cranking these units out? Is the AI cheating?" And so on and so forth. So it's like with one game I win too easy and the other I can't win at all (I guess CIV V falls somewhere in-between these two extremes but I find that one a bit bland sometimes).

 

[Aristos]

I don't get your point. You're just restating what I said about it not producing enough units.

I know you are saying that, but adjudicating it to turn times, or "derisive comments about CoDs", and speculating that it was a choice and not a "mistake" (a.k.a. bad coding). My point is that with that simple example, we could disregard turn times, CoDs and choice.

 

[Vargas1]

It's why Lautaro can be such a PITA midgame when his raiders are strong and fast against players' perpetual golden ages.

Honestly, one of the best ways to up the AI difficulty is to make sure Lautaro is in every game - he gets a good starting bias for campuses (even if the AI isn't always great about adjacencies), the chemamull helps with early culture, and the +10 against civs in a golden age is actually a huge boost as you move forward in the game.