subtledoctor
Warlord
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2014
- Messages
- 106
I just started playing Civ6 in my iPad, after however many years playing Civ5 on the PC. It's been a bit bewildering - right from the start, can I tell what is a good place to found a city? How many rings does a city get over time? 2 like Civ4, 3 like Civ5? How immediately do I need to be able to place districts? How close should I bee to mountains? How close to rivers? Apparently I can build a city away from the coast but still have a harbor and build ships? How does that work?
None of this is obvious. I started with Pericles, since I was a culture fiend in Civ5, on Prince difficulty. The district thing is super weird - I can't build a library or workshop until I've spent 20-40 turns* preparing a special place for them outside my city? But, other buildings can fit just fine in my city center. Why? Who knows. I founded a religion, almost by accident; what do I do with faith? How does religious pressure work? I took the religious texts founder's belief, like I used to in Civ5, but it doesn't seem to be effective. What the heck is "religious combat?" Should I care? Why are great people so weird and variable and often useless? How do you get them - basically just have the purple policy card for point generation?
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
* I play on epic speed, on a large map, with 40% more civs and 20% more city-states, to create competition for land and resources. Somehow though, parts of the game still end up going too fast, while others are dog slow. It takes ages to build anything, but I'm going through the tech tree super fast. By the time I build some units they are obsolete. (Except the ones in the middle ages - crossbows and men-at-arms seem to rule the field for like 1500 years.) And it's not me - I am playing very inefficiently, I'm the 3rd or 4th civ behind the tech leader. I suspect it's just that science tends to whiz by in Civ games on lower difficulty.
Basically it seems like this game has about 50% more systems than Civ5 had, and some of the ways those systems work is no longer as visible or clear in the UI. Dealing with increased complexity on a 11-inch screen is... not the best.
Anyway, people around here have probably read similar first impressions about this game for years. (Last thing to say is, this optional mechanic of treating with barb camps and allowing them to bloom into city-states is a stroke of genius. I guess not great on a Terra map though...) But I do have a real question. As in-game purchases, it looks like I can get Rise and Fall and Gathering Storm for $30 each. 60 bucks seems like... a LOT of money to pay for expansions to a game I already own. Usually when buying the latest Civ games I have just waited until I can buy the combined final version, preferably on sale. But that is not possible in Apple pretty little walled iOS garden. Everything is always max price.
Don't get me wrong - it is amazing to be able to play a real Civ game on a half-inch-think screen I can hold in one hand on the crapper. (We'll politely ignore the CivRev garbage from last decade.) I wish I can play Civ5 on an iPad - that game seemed to be just a bit simpler so as to make it ideal for a tablet. But my question is, should I look at Rise and Fall and/or Gathering Storm? Would they just make things even more complex? Alternatively, would they still be manageable, but smooth out some of the balance issues in the game? In my past experience you couldn't pick one or the other - you needed Gods & Kings in order to play Brave New World, right? R&F and GS seem to be separately available to me. Any reasons I should consider one or the other, or both, or neither? $60 is pushing me toward "neither," but I prefer not to play a busted old unbalanced unpatched version of a game...
All thoughts & opinions appreciated!
None of this is obvious. I started with Pericles, since I was a culture fiend in Civ5, on Prince difficulty. The district thing is super weird - I can't build a library or workshop until I've spent 20-40 turns* preparing a special place for them outside my city? But, other buildings can fit just fine in my city center. Why? Who knows. I founded a religion, almost by accident; what do I do with faith? How does religious pressure work? I took the religious texts founder's belief, like I used to in Civ5, but it doesn't seem to be effective. What the heck is "religious combat?" Should I care? Why are great people so weird and variable and often useless? How do you get them - basically just have the purple policy card for point generation?
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
* I play on epic speed, on a large map, with 40% more civs and 20% more city-states, to create competition for land and resources. Somehow though, parts of the game still end up going too fast, while others are dog slow. It takes ages to build anything, but I'm going through the tech tree super fast. By the time I build some units they are obsolete. (Except the ones in the middle ages - crossbows and men-at-arms seem to rule the field for like 1500 years.) And it's not me - I am playing very inefficiently, I'm the 3rd or 4th civ behind the tech leader. I suspect it's just that science tends to whiz by in Civ games on lower difficulty.
Basically it seems like this game has about 50% more systems than Civ5 had, and some of the ways those systems work is no longer as visible or clear in the UI. Dealing with increased complexity on a 11-inch screen is... not the best.
Anyway, people around here have probably read similar first impressions about this game for years. (Last thing to say is, this optional mechanic of treating with barb camps and allowing them to bloom into city-states is a stroke of genius. I guess not great on a Terra map though...) But I do have a real question. As in-game purchases, it looks like I can get Rise and Fall and Gathering Storm for $30 each. 60 bucks seems like... a LOT of money to pay for expansions to a game I already own. Usually when buying the latest Civ games I have just waited until I can buy the combined final version, preferably on sale. But that is not possible in Apple pretty little walled iOS garden. Everything is always max price.
Don't get me wrong - it is amazing to be able to play a real Civ game on a half-inch-think screen I can hold in one hand on the crapper. (We'll politely ignore the CivRev garbage from last decade.) I wish I can play Civ5 on an iPad - that game seemed to be just a bit simpler so as to make it ideal for a tablet. But my question is, should I look at Rise and Fall and/or Gathering Storm? Would they just make things even more complex? Alternatively, would they still be manageable, but smooth out some of the balance issues in the game? In my past experience you couldn't pick one or the other - you needed Gods & Kings in order to play Brave New World, right? R&F and GS seem to be separately available to me. Any reasons I should consider one or the other, or both, or neither? $60 is pushing me toward "neither," but I prefer not to play a busted old unbalanced unpatched version of a game...
All thoughts & opinions appreciated!