Is the promise of no go to-tactic just a PR stunt?

[Thormodr]

xcom 2 lost touch already. It went all 'story game' rather than 'replayable' game.

In my opinion, neither of the x-coms can touch the original.

 

[Nixalo]

There will always be min-maxers who squeak out the best way to play a game. I think their claim is bold when you look around at the other strategy games and MMO's that say the same thing and fall short. In truth, I think that the goal is to ensure there isn't one strategy to overcome all obstacles, which is what we have no mostly. There will be top strategies developed for all sorts of different starts I'm sure but there isn't much you can do about that at today's level of technology

That's how I see it.

For example, their plan is to make a game where "Tradition/4cities" only works if you have a nonforest river capital and a mountain second city. If you start forest, tundra, coastal, or desert or don't get a mountainous second city, "Tradition/4cities" is suicide because (insert mechanical reason here). And even if you get river/mountain with "Tradition/4cities", a coastal crusader would wreck you.

Imagine competitive multiplayer Civ with a terrain based metagame.

 

[joncnunn]

That's how I see it.

For example, their plan is to make a game where "Tradition/4cities" only works if you have a nonforest river capital and a mountain second city. If you start forest, tundra, coastal, or desert or don't get a mountainous second city, "Tradition/4cities" is suicide because (insert mechanical reason here). And even if you get river/mountain with "Tradition/4cities", a coastal crusader would wreck you.

Imagine competitive multiplayer Civ with a terrain based metagame.

As I see it, two different changes in Civ VI are being missed up here:

The no single tech path is what they are addressing via tech rate bonuses for doing stuff related to the tech. (Building a Query giving a bonus towards Masonry / having a coastal city giving a bonus towards fishing technologies)

How they are addressing the never ever found more than four cities is:
1. Local city happiness instead of Global Happiness.
2. Districts with terrain bonuses.

In fact, what we've left to see is how with Civ VI is what is the intended break on city expansion. (e.g. Civ III's corruption + waste / Civ IV's city maintenance cost / Civ V's global happiness + 100% cities with X building for national wonders with puppets excluded.)

We've also yet to see how cultural policies or civic choices (whichever choice they've gone with for Civ VI) won't be cookie cutter.

 

[Nixalo]

As I see it, two different changes in Civ VI are being missed up here:

The no single tech path is what they are addressing via tech rate bonuses for doing stuff related to the tech. (Building a Query giving a bonus towards Masonry / having a coastal city giving a bonus towards fishing technologies)

How they are addressing the never ever found more than four cities is:
1. Local city happiness instead of Global Happiness.
2. Districts with terrain bonuses.

In fact, what we've left to see is how with Civ VI is what is the intended break on city expansion. (e.g. Civ III's corruption + waste / Civ IV's city maintenance cost / Civ V's global happiness + 100% cities with X building for national wonders with puppets excluded.)

We've also yet to see how cultural policies or civic choices (whichever choice they've gone with for Civ VI) won't be cookie cutter.

\Actually the reason for 4 cities is Legalism + College + Hard to find a good fifth city + you probably are at war after 4th city. Among other things.

Local happiness and Terrain district bonuses would actually make 4 cities more popular due to the difficulty of finding a spot that can support the 5th city buy the time you get a 4th settler.

More variety in your city number will probably by specializing the terrains. Especially with your capital.

For example, maybe you only can go wide if you have a massive food base. Thus you capital or second city must have a lot of grassland or flood plains for the "food district". However with low production, you maybe can't build too much of an offensive army. Maybe a coastal nation with enough resources and boats could also go wide. Mountain, hilly, forest, jungle, tundra, and plains based nations might be limited in city but sport options for massive armies, science, culture, religion, or gold.

Essentially the game would randomly give you and everyone X number of vastly different options and everyone gets to choose which one. The success of the idea is hinged on all the options being near equal in strengths and in flaws.

 

[Acken]

It's a PR stun imo.

We'll have our go to choices.

The question is whether or not Firaxis will react to it through patching or not.

 

[King William I]

I wouldn't call it a stunt or promise, more of an attempt. We'll have to see how it goes

 

[dexters]

It was an announcement press release with a list of features they are planning to have in the game. There's certainly an element of PR there, but it is to promote the product and let people know it is coming and to book vacation days ahead of time

A PR stunt is having Obama announce the game in the White House.

 

[UWHabs]

\Actually the reason for 4 cities is Legalism + College + Hard to find a good fifth city + you probably are at war after 4th city. Among other things.

Local happiness and Terrain district bonuses would actually make 4 cities more popular due to the difficulty of finding a spot that can support the 5th city buy the time you get a 4th settler.

More variety in your city number will probably by specializing the terrains. Especially with your capital.

For example, maybe you only can go wide if you have a massive food base. Thus you capital or second city must have a lot of grassland or flood plains for the "food district". However with low production, you maybe can't build too much of an offensive army. Maybe a coastal nation with enough resources and boats could also go wide. Mountain, hilly, forest, jungle, tundra, and plains based nations might be limited in city but sport options for massive armies, science, culture, religion, or gold.

Essentially the game would randomly give you and everyone X number of vastly different options and everyone gets to choose which one. The success of the idea is hinged on all the options being near equal in strengths and in flaws.

I always found the 4 city limit was mostly due to basically running out of new luxuries, so that any added cities would be net negative happy, combined with the fact that the penalties you got for a new city (tech cost, culture) were actually more punitive than the extra usually slight production you would get from the city.

And that was mostly because resources were pretty much useless. So even if you settle a spot with tons of resources, if you already had enough of them, they were basically useless. At least in 4, with the right civics, you could make a city with a single fish tile worth it for you, by at the very least working that for food and then throwing a couple scientists there. After 4 cities in 5 it never felt like the new cities helped my empire at all.

 

[beestar]

Not sure if this got mentioned earlier, but in this Time magazine interview, Beach specifically calls out 4-city (Tradition) and NC

“There were things you’d find on forums about how building your empire to four or five cities was the optimal strategy, and there was never any reason to go beyond that. There were tech tree assumptions that you always wanted to approach its beginning in the same way, and that you’d want to rush toward the National College or to the Great Library, get those built, get your science up, and once you’d done that there’d be other paths through the tech tree you’d always want to take in the same way.”

http://time.com/4324490/civilization-6-interview/#prclt-FQ1DJIiB

 

[joncnunn]

Local happiness and Terrain district bonuses would actually make 4 cities more popular due to the difficulty of finding a spot that can support the 5th city buy the time you get a 4th settler.

We already have a great amount of games in the series with local happiness. Short answer is that local happiness has ALWAYS encouraged founding cities as fast as possible. There are decades long debates on what the proper settlement patterns should be, but since after the first few cities there was no way for founding a new city to make existing ones unhappy, this mechanism has always encouraged founding cities.
In fact, since the city building the settler doesn't grow, it's a very good time to be building a settler whenever a given city is at the local happiness limit.

You have touched upon how many city states will there be in Civ VI, and also will they be more like Civ V or BE in regard to how many hexes they take up and how close you are allowed to found a new city to.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

They might genuinely attempt to accomplish this, but I also doubt it can be 100% successful. I have played enough various games to know that in very single game there are more and less optimal strategies and picks. You can try to make the game as customizable as possible, but at the end of the day people are going to discover the best, the easiest, the most effective way to play, and there is really nothing they can do about it because if they try and fix it, people will find something else that is optimal. No matter how hard they try, some things will just be better than others. The only way to keep the game fresh and rolling with different tactics it to patch every so often, but this has never been for Civilization, so I am not hoping for much in that regard. Still, interested to see the new change and play the game.

 

[Nixalo]

We already have a great amount of games in the series with local happiness. Short answer is that local happiness has ALWAYS encouraged founding cities as fast as possible. There are decades long debates on what the proper settlement patterns should be, but since after the first few cities there was no way for founding a new city to make existing ones unhappy, this mechanism has always encouraged founding cities.
In fact, since the city building the settler doesn't grow, it's a very good time to be building a settler whenever a given city is at the local happiness limit.

You have touched upon how many city states will there be in Civ VI, and also will they be more like Civ V or BE in regard to how many hexes they take up and how close you are allowed to found a new city to.

My point is that there were more than one aspect of the game the encourages the 4city-style play. It would be very easy to make a game with local happiness with low city encouragement. Spread out luxury. Stick happiness building deep in the tech tree. Make a pillaged luxury very damaging. Etc.

The simplest way to encourage play is making variable elements very important however.

 

[joncnunn]

My point is that there were more than one aspect of the game the encourages the 4city-style play. It would be very easy to make a game with local happiness with low city encouragement. Spread out luxury. Stick happiness building deep in the tech tree. Make a pillaged luxury very damaging. Etc.

The simplest way to encourage play is making variable elements very important however.

None of what you list actually discourages city founding; that is countered by simply founding a massive number of tiny cities as tight as possible, setting tiles such that they grow to happiness limit and then switch to production so they have at most a +1 food surplus, building a new settler whenever it's about to grow into unhappiness.

 

[redwings1340]

Well, the designers really do seem to be creating specific incentives for you to adapt your playstyle to your start. Faster tech based on where you are and buildings based on the terrain is not a minor change to the game.

The biggest issue could be that, if the balancing isn't perfect, an ideal inland flood plains start might be always better than, say, an ideal grasslands costal start. However, its looking pretty clear that in civ VI, you'll play the game very different ways depending on your start, especially early on.

 

[LDiCesare]

Differently, yes, but will your nation have a preferred start? For instance, will Egypt be more likely to start in deserts in order to be able to build pyramids? Will England or Portugal start near the coast in order to make use of their unique units/buildings/abilities? If that's the case, we may end up with the best strategies being tied to nations, such as pick Rome, spam praetorians, but with some added content (pick mongols, settle plains, spam horsemen).

 

[Txurce]

Differently, yes, but will your nation have a preferred start? For instance, will Egypt be more likely to start in deserts in order to be able to build pyramids? Will England or Portugal start near the coast in order to make use of their unique units/buildings/abilities? If that's the case, we may end up with the best strategies being tied to nations, such as pick Rome, spam praetorians, but with some added content (pick mongols, settle plains, spam horsemen).

If you mean that each nation will have an optimal strategy based on its preferred start, then the geographical parameters would need to be fairly narrow. It's quite likely that not every start will be optimal for any given Civ. Given the promised geographical emphasis, we could be in for more variance than usual in preferred strategies, even for an individual civ.

 

[redwings1340]

Differently, yes, but will your nation have a preferred start? For instance, will Egypt be more likely to start in deserts in order to be able to build pyramids? Will England or Portugal start near the coast in order to make use of their unique units/buildings/abilities? If that's the case, we may end up with the best strategies being tied to nations, such as pick Rome, spam praetorians, but with some added content (pick mongols, settle plains, spam horsemen).

I think I'd be fine with that. If I have to play the game several times with each civilization to truly understand what I need to do with that civilization, it will take me a very long time to learn the game and get good with it. In multiplayer, any incredibly powerful civ/start strategies can presumably be countered by other people teaming up against it. In single player, you'll just have fun once you figure out how to play as any particular civ. War and nearby civs are going to be more of a determining factor too, because I have a feeling you won't need to lose cities to get crippled by war anymore, since the value of your civilization will be more spread out over the map.

 

[Staal]

Essentially the game would randomly give you and everyone X number of vastly different options and everyone gets to choose which one. The success of the idea is hinged on all the options being near equal in strengths and in flaws.

This is key.

I don't see how people can call this a PR stunt. It is only a PR 'stunt' if the developers know what they are saying is false or unachievable. Nowhere did they say there will be no optimal strategy, only that they wanted players to change their strategy.

If there are multiple strategies, say 6-7, depending on terrain etc and those strategies are equal in effectiveness then they have definitely achieved their goal. Or I should rather say the phases of each strategy can differ during each age. The question is will they achieve it in practice? Only time will tell, but there is no need for all this cynicism. I fully believe the developers WANT to achieve their stated goal.

 

[HisDivineShadow]

A PR Stunt is a "planned event designed to attract the public's attention to the event's organizers or their cause".

So no, this is manifestly not a PR stunt. However, perhaps the OP just misused the phrase, and really meant something else, such as "marketing spin".

 

[Inexist]

Every game has a few optimal strategies, there really isn't a game exempt from that. They're trying to limit the options available, such as allowing pyramids only on desert tiles (saw this on another thread), which might only contribute to creating a more general strategy non-dependent on start position (take the Oracle rush from civ IV). People will tend to create ways to beat the game by (ab)using its game mechanics/dumb AI as much as possible, and as we know with civ, that's always possible and very fun.