I haven't played for 2 months and decided to give Australia a shot. Two hours later, I still think that Civ 6 is not a good game. Playing this game, I just realized:
1. Why can't I still not save the settings for the map after 6 months???
2. Why can't I generate a new map without going to the main menu??
This is definitely annoying, I agree. Part of me suspects that the dev team doesn't actually like the 'reroll my start' approach to gameplay (they want people to 'play the map').
3. I really don't like that the maps are all balanced now. In 4, you really had a great start with a neat production city. In 5, you went for the Salt or a Spain Eldora start. Unbalanced? Who cares! It was fun! 6 is just this multiplayerish "every start is basically the same" approach. That's why there are nearly no save games out there with great starts. Because it doesn't matter. In 5, I restarted 10, 20 times to get a good start. And that was fun! If you want balanced, go for the balanced start option.
The maps aren't that balanced, one of the major complaints for Civ 6 for instance is that you need hills near your start for production. Spices are the new salt. But yes, there is no equivalent to Spain.
4. Early game is still the "all-out-war" approach. I was playing islands with Australia, I did nothing to offend anyone (no forward settling etc) and ALL the AI declared war on the same turn. This is so much BS, it's hard to describe.
I haven't had the same experience to that degree. I do agree that they should make befriending civs, at least initially, easier. Perhaps bump the positive from delegation exchanges. Maybe add a 'give a gift' function to make that functionality more obvious, and make the boost last longer. I think the early AI agressiveness is to partially compensate for his later weakness.
5. All the basic game system are overly complex and difficult to follow. As Australia, you obviously need to look after the appeal of the tiles. To do that, you need to check lenses. This is something that was never necessary in early games. You should always be able to see everything on the main screen. And not hidden somewhere else. There is way too much micromanagement in this game for no reason at all. It's not like it is additional fun..
Maximum micromanagement of things like optimum district placement like is really only necessary if you are playing for maximum 'optimization', which is really only useful for top level play. It was the same in Civ 5 - people would always say 'always manually assign citizens, never put your workers on auto since the computer does a worse job', etc. Probably good advice for deity. On Immortal or Emperor (what I normally played in Civ 5), you really didn't need to (and I didn't since I found it annoying).
Having said that, I wouldn't mind if they brought back some of the 'city governor'-esque automation from Civ 4. I.e. manually do things if you want optimize, let the computer half-ass it for you if you don't. Also, I think they should just drop builders completely and just have improvements build from the city build menu. And add friggen production que.
6. The Eurekas are THE WORST THING EVER INVENTED IN THIS SERIES. They dictate your game. You always need to follow your railroad tracks, basically doing the same things over and over again. Kill something with a Slinger. Kill 3 Barbs. Build this. Build that. Oh and please never ever try something unusual, because Eurekas will seriously try to prevent you from doing that.
Sort of the same of above. I mostly ignore a lot of them. Science is easy enough to obtain that putting resources into something I wouldn't do anyways (or delaying something I need now) doesn't seem worth it.
7. The civic tree is still incredibly boring and also brings no additional fun to the game. Civ 5 social policies were so much better.
I like Civ 6 policy system better in that it is more flexible (a lot closer to Civ 4), and avoids the 'railroad tracks' of the Civ 5 social policies. I do think it could be streamlined a good bit more though (reducing/combining the number of policy cards, making them more than just stat boosters, adding some more game effects to the civics tree, etc.)
Can't think of anything else at the moment. It's just.. no fun.
I've played it for a good 200 hours so far, but it's definitely a lot less of a goto than Civ 5 BNW was for me. For me I think it's a combination of the fact that the game mechanics are still pretty similar to Civ 5 BNW (so a lot doesn't feel that new), and the game runs friggin slow on my machine. The former will be hopefully fixed by expansions and mods, the later will have to be fixed by my bank account unfortunately.
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