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.
xcom 2 lost touch already. It went all 'story game' rather than 'replayable' game.
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.
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.
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.\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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.