Major Flaws of Civ 6

Instead of excluding them, why not giving them the opportunity to become full civs? I made in an other thread the suggestion, that barbarian camps may become CS when left alone for long and the starting place is good. And that CS can become full civs after some time ( and maybe as a second condition if other civs droped out of the game ) in cases where they have enough viable space around them to expand. I think that would bring in more dynamic in the game. Many civs we actually have did not exited in 4000 BC, so I think a mechanic that let new civs emerge in later game make sense IMHO

Your idea on city states will keep the illogical situation intact that for a certain amount of time city states cannot develope into civilizations. It only increases the inconsistency when suddenly they can. The same goes for barbarians. In Civ I by the way there could be barbarian cities, like when the barbarians captured a city. Now I think of it I actually find the whole concept of barbarians illogical also since barbarian tribes were only less developed civlizations. In Civ IV you could exclude barbarians from the game also. I don't know how this is in V and VI (which I de-installed).
 
Hi everyone. I too have been playing Civ since the first version. Being someone who programs AI for a living I realise many of the problems with the AI in Civ. No AI can ever be perfect. But it should do a reasonable job of making appropriate decisions. On the whole I don't the AI is all that bad. But I am disappointed that we still rely on applying production and combat bonuses as a means of achieving play balance for the AI controlled players.

But the one issue that bugs me the most is the ridiculously long time for unit production vis a vis the time it takes to acquire new tech. This is especially so later in the game when the time to acquire new techs is relatively short and yet the time to produce things like ships and tanks is way too long. It's often compounded by the fact that even though you acquire the new tech you often have to first build the means to produce the units for it. Eg build a factory. The end result is that even if you go as fast as you can to produce a new unit, it can sometimes be obsolete before it arrives. Complex modern day systems like aircraft and ships do take time to produce. But that is often primarily in the opriginal R&D to come with the design. Once that's out of the way the actual equipment is rolled out on advanced manufacturing facilities at a steady pace. This is why it might take ten years to perfect the F35 strike fighter, but once that's done then those new fighters will roll out the door every few days. I would argue that the original R&D should be modelled in the dev time for the tech, not in its production. It should be possible, as it was in WW@ for whole new fleets, armies and air forces to be produced within a couple of years of acquiring the tech.

This may throw the AI into turmoil, especially if its relying on scenario specific scripting. But even if this was just provided as a option for users to select when configuring a new game, that IMO would be a good change. You could just have a few option to reduce unit production times by a percentage or factor like Reduce All Unit Production Times by 50%. If you want to get sophisticated. Apply a sliding scale for this based on the era. Eg reduce it by only 25% in ancient, 30% classical, 40% medieval etc.

It would also be good to combine this with the option to change the time to acquire tech. Eg Increase tech acquisition times by 50%.

One of the benefits of this approach would be players who like to play primarily in say the classical era could start a game then, increase the tech time to say 200%, so they end up spending a long time before the tech changed. then they could reduce the unit production times so they can effectively create a classical era campaign.

That's my food for thought for today. What do you think?
 
I do not oppose against the existance of one city civilizations but against the concept that certain one city civilizations cannot expand into multiple city civlizations. The older civilizations used to start from city states, but from there they would expand into true civilizations. Best example; Rome. I oppose to the concept that when the city of Delhi is founded it can expand into an Indian civilization while a city like Amsterdam, which is founded around the same time in the game, is not allowed to expand into a Dutch civilization. City states like Monaco do not exist because they didn't have the logical possibility to develop into multiple city civilizations but because they didn't have the oppertunity. And in Civ VI I oppose against that lack of logical possibility.

I will point out that the Vatican used to control a lot more territory - it had temporal authority over the Papal States.

However, some entities are simply satisfied with what they have and are not interested in expanding. I think that is fine.
 
6. City States. That I must include city states in my games is the prime reason I stopped playing Civ IV. I cannot digest the unlogic given that one city can grow into an empire and another must stay a city state.

I love the city states, it adds a great mechanic and who said any of this game matched in reality. This game would be duller without it IMO
I know I will not change your mind as you seem to always be posting your distaste but it is a mechanic... just ike this game is vaguely like reality. Its nice when it matches but it is not that much really. Especially horsemen without stirrups for goodness sake.
 
Things that really need to be changed, particularly in the context of Emperor and above difficulty games.
I think the flaws in Civ 6 are well-recognised by players and your points are definitely valid. However, if your main concern is that the AI gets unfair advantages above Emperor difficulty, I think the other post that boils down to "just live with it" or "just don't play on Diety" is probably the correct answer for the time being (we don't have to like it).

The best way of course is for the actual AI (with the emphasis on the 'Intelligence' in "Artificial Intelligence") to improve at higher difficulty levels to present more and more of a challenge to the player. What we got however is a game that tries to simulate better AI with bigger and bigger bonuses at higher difficulty levels - which is totally unfair of course, but is the only way the developers could increase the difficulty without coding an AI that could actually play the game better with a more level playing field. If the AI can't use planes or can't upgrade units properly whether they are at Prince difficulty or Diety, then there's little hope of a genuinely challenging game anyway without gross cheating...

What the developers should do however is to ensure that the AI gets bonuses in a way that is still fun to a player playing at higher difficulties. The game still needs to be fun at higher difficulties. Building wonders is something that is fun to the player and doesn't significantly present more of a challenge if the AI gets them. So, in this case, wonder production should be on a more level playing field. But they should still get unit production and building bonuses otherwise they won't have a hope.
 
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Bump. Edit and Additional points inserted. I've made a similar, more commented post in Steam's Civ 6 discussions feel free to pick up from there.
 
My wish list for improvements in the next patch would be as follows (in order of priority):

1) Improve AI aggressiveness and require city walls to be built.
2) Streamline movement - religious units belong on a separate layer and possibly introduce rules to have units move a little further. PLEASE bring back numpad movement.
3) Make diplomacy meaningful (ideally with a diplomatic victory but that's probably a long ways off) - at this point I would like to see war monger penalties that make more sense and some major trade benefits for good relations.
4) Game balance changes for units and districts: ideally slightly shorter production times, make scouts/anti-cavalry/melee a little stronger, and improve benefits for entertainment and possibly theater districts.
5) Changes to religious victory condition. This just doesn't work very well right now and it's not very fun.

The AI has always had bonuses on higher difficulties. That's just not going to go away and a lot of people enjoy playing on the higher difficulty levels (me included). Yes, the bonuses are high but it's an intentional handicap for players who want a challenge. Personally I think that the difficulty needs to be increased because emperor is usually kind of a cakewalk even with the AI bonuses unless you just have a horrible starting location.
 
My wish list for improvements in the next patch would be as follows (in order of priority):

1) Improve AI aggressiveness and require city walls to be built.
2) Streamline movement - religious units belong on a separate layer and possibly introduce rules to have units move a little further. PLEASE bring back numpad movement.
3) Make diplomacy meaningful (ideally with a diplomatic victory but that's probably a long ways off) - at this point I would like to see war monger penalties that make more sense and some major trade benefits for good relations.
4) Game balance changes for units and districts: ideally slightly shorter production times, make scouts/anti-cavalry/melee a little stronger, and improve benefits for entertainment and possibly theater districts.
5) Changes to religious victory condition. This just doesn't work very well right now and it's not very fun.

The AI has always had bonuses on higher difficulties. That's just not going to go away and a lot of people enjoy playing on the higher difficulty levels (me included). Yes, the bonuses are high but it's an intentional handicap for players who want a challenge. Personally I think that the difficulty needs to be increased because emperor is usually kind of a cakewalk even with the AI bonuses unless you just have a horrible starting location.

See what I mean? Suggestions to make Civ 6 more challenging always boils down to "We need AI to wage more wars better" and that just destroys what Civ is all about.

From the way you suggest AI should get more cheats and you can only derive fun from that sort of challenge it implies

a: You don't care much about nurturing/building an empire, victory is all that matters.
b: You prefer a warmongering route to victory
c: You don't care much about Wonders

Am I wrong about any of those assertions?
 
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I enjoy all aspects of the game but I was just stating what I felt were the most flawed parts of it. I do think most of ancient/classical history was littered with warfare so I do believe that was an intentional choice by the developers. A large part of building an empire to stand the test of time is defending it from aggressors. I will admit that I tend to gravitate to domination games (just because I get a little antsy and I enjoy using a variety of units). I'm also better at domination than cultural and science which require more finesse and micromanagement. I've mainly been playing the GOTM series and those force you to play all victory conditions. I like building wonders but they are pretty weak in Civ6. Yeah they are much tougher to get on high difficulty because of the bonuses but again you can easily ramp those down to King or Prince where the playing field is more even - that's entirely up to you.
 
I wonder if the OP likes the way how barbs spam at higher levels. My capital once got rushed by 3 horsed units within 20 turns, and then another 3 more popped up like 5 turns later at immortal (I bet there will be more at diety but I sort of gave up at least for now). Because the units are more costly in Civ6 so the old way of building enough units as fog busters is no longer effective at least in first 40 turns. It's purely a matter of luck (or lack of) as the player has absolutely no chance once it happens. One can only beeline archery and pray that their camps don't pop up close to your cities. For a strategic game I personally don't like seeing a random factor so game-changing. My view about barbs is that they are included to include SOME randomness and force the players to build ADEQUATE number of military units in early game. They should not put you back to zero even you go purely military at the beginning.

Ironically, the supposedly more productive AI civs actually handle the barbs even worse than human players at higher levels (the higher the level, the worse). Almost half of the games when I pulled out early conquests, I realized my major enemies are the barbs, not the AIs' resistance already depleted by the barbs. What is worse is these barbs like to pillage the cities I'm going to conquer, and pillaged districts are VERY difficult to repair (this is another issue I really hate, and there's no way to remove a pillaged or mislocated district and start another one from scratch). Not only is this very frustrating, once again, this is almost purely about luck.

I hope the devs can reinstall some sort of grace period, or like Civ4 included transition from animals (which don't cross the border) to human barbs which makes more sense to me (instead of widespread use of horsemen in like 3400 BC as if the barbs learned riding horses from aliens). I'll also welcome a bit more options in the barb setting (remember the rampaging barbs? not just barbs or no barbs)....is it so hard for the programmer to code like 4 levels of barb activities? I guess it is...... after so many patches the game still can't even remember the player preferences and I have to tediously re-enter again and again, and no restart button yet (but that's another issue, anyway).
 
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I agree that the impact of Barbarians spawns at the start; especially on Deity are too luck dependent and completely beyond a player's realm of control.

I hate it even more now that I know that the Devs did this to encourage a build up of military so that they can forcibly "prepare" players to engage in wars with other Civs.

I usually restart when I encounter more than 1 Horsemen Spawning Camp at the start. 6 Horsemen besieging your capital at a time when you barely have a slinger is just not fun and not fair. There's no solution to this that doesn't put you at a major disadvantage compared with other Civs. That's not a challenge simply because it's not reasonably within my control.
 
OP is a wall of text so I will respond in kind

a: AI is useless at war, period.
This is just an issue with AI programming, not really much to be done about it, it'll get better with time and updates.
c: City Capture Penalties.
I don't specifically agree that capturing cities should be penalized more but expansion in general should. There is no real penalty for expansion, this also makes the game favor war mroe as of course it's much easier to expand by conquest than colonization. In Civ 3, you had corruption and waste, in civ 4, you had increasing city upkeep, in civ 5 you had global happiness which IMO penalized expansion far too much and led to much of the world being uninhabited into the late game. In civ 6 there is really nothing, your luxuries don't go as far but you will get more copies of them, and tech/civic costs don't scale so the rewards for expansion and conquest are huge. But that is the only way to keep up on Deity I guess.
d: Warmongering "Penalties".
Yeah everyone tends to hate me for stupid reasons anyway. Catherine constantly reminds me that I know nothing before I even have the civic to build spies. I don't even know why the AI is denouncing me half the time. But at the same time the penalty for even capturing 1 city is enough for everyone to hate me for the rest of the game.
e: AI Bonuses.
This goes back to the war issues, the AI is just not that good right now. There is nothing we can do except wait for updates, and no way to improve without learning from experience. There is no way for it to be competitive at the very poor level of play without huge bonuses. I haven't played on Deity yet, I can imagine how unbalanced it is makes it not very fun. But balancing the game around Deity bonuses being fun would make it imbalanced for normal/casual players on Warlord or Prince and I'm sure there are a lot more of those. Once the AI improved the insane bonuses will make it almost impossible to play without doing everything perfectly, I get the impression that it is not and you are trying to play normal games on Deity, I'd much prefer it to be like Civ IV where Emperor is the highest you can play a normal game on and to win at Immortal/Deity you have to do everything perfectly and exploit game mechanics to even have a shot.
f: Military Production.
I do agree somewhat. Because the AI is so bad a small army can easily pull off a conquest. Building and maintaining such an army is very cheap and easy and building a large one isn't that hard. But this is only true in the early game, in the late game I feel like units are too expensive, compared to how cheap techs are by the time you build units in some of your cities they will be obsolete, I would like to see larger armies. Maybe make the + unit production policies scale by era so it would be +25% for ancient/classical and up to +100% for atomic/information units.
Districts and Wonders consume workable tiles; essentially reducing poductivity of larger populations.
Don't really have an opinion on the rest of this, I would like to see more housing options (lol) but I hate how Wonders consume tiles, if you have a capital with mountains/coast and build many wonders you will run into serious space issues making it worse than new cities with less wonders. You should at least still be able to work the land.

Haven't played on Deity but yeah, I'd imagine getting a production boost is overpowered, the boost to tech and building districts/builders should be enough, this should probably be removed.
2: Imposed Scarcity of Land.
I really don't agree with this, I'd rather see it this way with more early game interaction and colonization later on in the game, I usually play on Large and haven't tried below Standard but it seems there is enough map that it takes most of the game to settle, everything gets settled and a lot of the newer land is not fully developed. Compared to Civ V especially which did not do a good job of this I think it is good.
3: Pacing and Great People.

a: The early game and mid game ends too early because the AI advances too quickly.
I haven't played on Deity but I can definitely see this being a problem. Yes beelining into the atomic era while still using caravels and muskets is stupid. It should calculate average tech level or something or at least make you reach the new era in both tech and civics to qualify.
b: Some great people are just plain overpowered and their abilities favour very different victory conditions that their type would suggest. They're all great people; why are some greater than others?
Eh, part of this is flavor, I don't really agree with the specific issues you complain about, part of the deal of putting very highly powerful boosts for one victory inside another victory's progression is to enable you to compete at something you haven't been focusing on all along, you shouldn't be able to just stack everything when focusing on one victory like getting all the tourism boosts while doing culture. And maybe if you don't have the production late game but plenty of money that extra tourism boost can be what you need to switch from science to culture victory.

But yeah there is definitely a pretty huge balance issue, like +100% space race production vs just 1 or 2 late game tech boosts, theres just no comparison.
c: Great People points. (GPP)
Huh, I've hardly ever built any projects and just get great people from points or money/faith, although again I haven't played on Deity, interesting that it is that huge an issue.
4. Inflation.
I kind of agree with this, late game production times get extremely slow for districts units and wonders, meanwhile tech and civics are actually speeding up, I'd like to see production speed up as well. Best way I can see to do this would be adding some % production boost to factories and power plants instead of just flat cogs, perhaps have both with the cogs spreading to nearby cities and the % boost only to the city that builds it.
b: It is impossible (You can't compete for one) to found a Religion on Deity if your opponents favor Religion (Unless you're China or Arabia).
I really don't see this as being a problem at all. In fact I see it as being highly desirable. Deity is supposed to be really hard. You're not supposed to be able to just play a normal game as any civ with any strategy and have it work. If you really want a religion on Deity, play as China or Arabia. If getting a religion is so easy that it's doable on the hardest difficulty without even picking an optimal civ then it is too easy, period.

Founding a religion is balanced around Warlord/Prince/King level of difficulty that most people play on. There is no way to balance it to be mildly challenging on Deity without making it completely broken at this level, and there is absolutely no reason to.
6: Wonders.
Yeah I agree with this. Wonders are very very expensive and some are just not that good. It's always worth building the Forbidden Palace if you can but then some are just worthless,
7: Theming Bonuses
Yeah I don't fully understand how theming works but couldn't theme a single art museum in the late game going for a culture win and ended up theming an archaeology museum in a conquest game by accident. This adds to those cultural wonders not being that good. The whole great works system is kind of confusing and the problem is it just isn't balanced to work too well. It should be pretty easy to have themed museums with great works from different eras if youve had a few great artists, it really isnt.
8: Diplomacy

a: Most AI Agendas are beyond the player's control and don't even make sense.
I completely agree with this, it's a good idea but the implementation is awful, I'm constantly getting denounced or insulted by random leaders with no explanation over things completely outside my control. Catherine in particular constantly complains that I don't have enough spies and within a few dozen turns would both insult me for being broke and compliment me for being rich when I was running about +50 gold the whole time. Warmonger penalties are just absolutely ********, I get hated by every civ, all game because I took 1 city in a war someone else started when I've been at peace the entire rest of the time.

But again, this is largely AI optimization issues that will be improved in time.
b: Diplomatic Penalties are insignificant.
Unfortunate but necessary with how broken diplomacy is in general.
c: There should be more options available, such as Ultimatums.
Civ has never had that kind of detailed diplomacy but yeah, there is already Casus Belli and it is EXTREMELY annoying when someone settles between your cities on what is obviously your clay and there is no option but full blown formal war and every civ on the map hates you for the rest of the game. Take a page out of EU, you should be able to proactively warn opponents not to settle near you and if they do, get a Casus Belli to take that city and only that city with greatly reduced warmonger penalties. But of course that would require warmonger penalties to work.
9: City States

a: City states are still too vulnerable. The AI is way too aggressive against them.There should be penalties for Conquering City States, like loss of Envoys from other city states and even the permanent war against city states for conquering too many.
Yeah, getting -1 envoy with all city states for conquering one would be fair. It would also be neat if you could somehow sack/ransom them instead of just full blown conquest.
c: City State Insurgencies.
Seems to be pretty straightforward, when a city has too much negative amenities for too long it spawns rebels, city states very rarely build entertainment districts and have at most 2 or 3 luxuries so they can support a max of like 6-8 pop and end up with 12+, constant rebellion is inevitable, gives em something to do with all the units they build anyway.

Most elegant fix would be to somehow have city states trade resources with each other or with civs to make that up, would prob be hard to implement. Alternative fix could be to have them share luxuries with their suzerain, either integrate them into however the hell the amenity distribution system works, or just have them get a copy of all the luxuries from their suzerain. Then late game city states need to be aligned with a major power or are highly unstable and prone to rebels, that sounds like the ideal solution. Cheap and dirty fix would be just add amenities to city states in later eras but something needs to be done.
d: Reward for being the first to meet a City state.
Nah, needs to have this, it's random but so much about the start of a game is random and affects the gameplay so much, it's fine.

You have some valid points and I tried to give more feedback than just stop complaining about Deity being unbalanced but...stop complaining about Deity being unbalanced. The game is balanced to a more casual difficulty level, this isn't going to change and there's no way to fix it. Deity isn't supposed to be balanced, it's supposed to be prohibitively, disgustingly hard. As it is the AI is such a joke in key ways that extreme boosts are the only way to make it competitive. But as I've said there is no way to fix this but wait for improvements in the AI. I feel like if you were playing the game in a year or two after the first expansion, all your issues about Deity being hard would still be valid, but you'd actually have a challenge playing on Emperor/Immortal where you can pursue a more peaceful route rather than exploit every possible advantage to be able to win.

sorry for the tl;dr can't sleep
 
I appreciate your tl;dr reply it's probably the most extensive one I've seen so far.

Try on Deity and you will immediately realise that war is the solution for literally everything, even peace.

Concerning Warmongering; if you don't penalise captured cities there will never be true diversity in Civ 6 because War will always be the best strategy.

With Regards to Religion there should never be impossibilities or luck dependent elements labelled as "choice" or challenge in a game; that's just bad design. I challenge you to fly unaided by jumping off a cliff. I also challenge you to strike the lottery. Are those real challenges?

As for your view on Deity being unbalanced as a necessary evil; challenge should never come at the expense of fun. If the challenge is so unfair then the reward should be equally unfair or else Civ 6 will just be less fun on higher difficulties. Unfortunately there's no way to "unfairly" reward players in Civ 6 for overcoming outright cheating opponents so the result is just frustration in the face of failure. Rather than accept it the right choice is to fix it. They definitely can given the resources they have now.
 
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A minor gripe. When I have one or two scouts near an AI border they act like I'm about to invade. it shouldn't ever consider scouts or rangers as a threat.
 
A minor gripe. When I have one or two scouts near an AI border they act like I'm about to invade. it shouldn't ever consider scouts or rangers as a threat.
They are combat units and I have used them to kill units and capture cities so the AI is right to consider them as a potential threat
 
Excellent analysis and summary, probably the best I've seen around. Kudos. That's why after playing a few games even making a simple mod to address Tech issues I've decided to go back to Civ5 and give a chance to Vox Populi. Well, Civ6 is as of now light years behind VP. I only miss graphics and wonder movies from 6, but instead I get amazingly smart AI that actually scares me sometimes, wonderful diplomacy and city-states, re-worked combat that is actually challenging and many more.
 
Instead of excluding them, why not giving them the opportunity to become full civs? I made in an other thread the suggestion, that barbarian camps may become CS when left alone for long and the starting place is good. And that CS can become full civs after some time ( and maybe as a second condition if other civs droped out of the game ) in cases where they have enough viable space around them to expand. I think that would bring in more dynamic in the game. Many civs we actually have did not exited in 4000 BC, so I think a mechanic that let new civs emerge in later game make sense IMHO
Barbarian becoming cities would be a great challenge to the game if it is always at war with everyone. Can you imagine a barbarian tribe being on the same place for centuries without developing itself into a civilization? Another way is when barbarians capture a settler and no one gets it in a number of turns. I think that barbarians could use this settler to found a city somewhere. Barbarian cities should be always at war with everyone else and not accepting envoys.

City states really could develop in new civilizations, but these new civilizations would stay very late in score. I think that city states could capture and annex enemy cities (maybe a barbarian city as mentioned above) and then become a new civilization. In this case newer cities would be named with city state names that aren't in current game.

Well, it would be a very nice challenge, but it will require that much of the game be redone.
 
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