New patch 20 December

[GT_OKEZ]

• Religious units may now Fortify Until Healed
• Coastal Raids can now pillage districts in addition to the buildings within
• Great Admirals are no longer allowed to spawn on wonders in water tiles (ex. Huey, Great Lighthouse) so they cannot become stranded in lakes

These are nice quality of life changes. Religious units are quite useless outside of holy ground and die all too easily creating a loss in religious pressure. I wonder if the fortify bonus increases their defensive theological combat too? Admirals being trapped inland was an annoying thing and I'm glad coastal raiding got a buff. Any improvement towards Naval military is welcome in my book!

• Cities can no longer receive yields from more than one regional building per type; they take the highest (ex. production from multiple Factories)
• Cities can no longer receive amenities from more than one regional building per type; they take the highest (ex. amenities from multiple Stadiums)

This is huge. This will change the meta significantly and I think for the better overall. Players are no longer pigeonholed into ICS-style play or forced to cluster Industrial Zones. The production nerf opens up more options actually since spamming factories will no longer be the mandatory strat for winning. War will also be more costly due to the amenity nerf and I don't know what to think about that aspect yet.

• Decreased production costs of Wonders progressively
  • From the Industrial era (about -10 percent) to the Atomic era (about -40 percent).
• Decreased production costs of all Space Race Projects by 40 percent.

Obviously to compensate for the factory nerfs. I'm glad they've really made space race more viable especially in a multiplayer environment which tend to be unit-focused domination until you outright win or everyone else concedes. This is an indirect nerf to France and Egypt and the wonder policy cards since their bonuses will actually be slightly less effective in terms of actual production discounted.

Increased research costs of Technologies and Civics progressively

• From the Industrial era (about +5 percent) to the Information era (about +20 percent).

In general a good thing in terms of running away with science and culture. This is a nerf to Civs that get their uniques later in the tech tree and those typically are not Civs that are too powerful.

• Increased Faith from Mission
• Increased Culture from Chateau

I like the Mission buff better than the Chateau. Spain can always benefit from more faith but is that raw faith or is the buff only triggered with the continent bonus? The problem with the Chateau is the river requirement which just isn't realistic when much more important things need river tiles. It would be nice if they made the Chateau more similar to the Stepwell where it actually provides housing and isn't river restricted. This is a useful small buff to Spain if it's raw faith and not continent restricted and a crap buff for France that won't change much or anything at all.

• Lowered the minimum unit upgrade cost
• Improved clarity on Warmongering penalties associated with taking a civ's final city

I thought upgrades were a little on the expensive side so I like this change. It's a huge buff for Civs that have good UUs that can be upgraded into like Rome and Arabia. It's worse for civs that have UUs that must be hard built like America and England. I'd have like to seen a buff to UUs that cannot be prebuilt and upgraded into but I suppose these things can (and probably will be) modded. Any clarity on warmonger penalties is greatly needed since its some of the info is nebulous at best.

• Spaceport district no longer requires population to construct

I appreciate the buff to science victory conditions in general.

• Most Civilization unique districts now require population to construct (like normal districts)

Ok huge change here and it will definitely reconfigure the power balance of the Civs. Scythia, Sumeria, Germany ( and possibly now Poland) are still at the top since the only one these this change effects is Germany. No more free Hansa (but its still cheap) which sounds like a nerf but its also an indirect buff to Germany since Germany's UA is even more valuable now since no other Civs can imitate it with their unique districts. Civs like England are going to plummet in terms of power as the free royal navy dockyards was the only thing keeping them at least moderately strong. The RNDY's base bonuses are not strong at all and the only thing that made it good is not being population capped - it's really no better than a standard harbor now which England can construct a little cheaper. It's says 'most civilizations' so maybe England was spared? If Brazil wasn't spared it going to make them pretty awful as entertainment districts already got nerfed with the AOE amenities. Brazil, if played right, relies on the street carnival for its unique gameplay but street carnivals still are not as important when having to compete with other core infrastructure. The reason I really liked Brazil is because having a free street carnival was an awesome bonus without having to sacrifice my core infrastructure. Russia is going to hurt a bit. Russian cities typically grow slower thanks to food problems in tundra but you need tundra for the pantheon and Lavras to really shine. Quite the dilemma even though the Lavra is a pretty good district on its own. Greece's monster culture will be slowed down which I'm ok with actually. But let's talk about the Elephant in the room and that's Japan! This was an indirect buff to Japan of pretty epic proportions. Since unique districts are only discounted now, and in most cases only marginally better than their vanilla counterparts, Japan gets this benefit x4 along with better adjacency bonuses! I think this propels Japan ahead of Greece and Russia in terms of value while England and possibly Brazil (depending on which Civ's unique districts were spared) go to horsehocky. This will definitely change the game depending on who got nerfed and who didn't. The powerhouses still remain largely untouched (Scythia, Gilgamesh, etc) but we'll see what happens.

I welcome all the AI changes and bug fixes. I haven't been playing single player much but I'd like to give it another spin with the changes.

Let me comment on Poland before everyone freaks out!

I haven't looked at the new patch yet live (I'm at work) but here's my thoughts after reading.

Winged Hussar - I assume a Knight replacement or maybe an additional unit? If it's a Knight replacement that already sounds great since Knights are amazing as is. It says 'strong on the attack' which I assume is a combat bonus when attacking like the Beserker but then does that mean it's weak on defense like the Beserker? If not then this is going to be an overpowered unit. If it suffers the same defensive penalty as a Beserker then I actually think it's not strong at all in the grand scheme of things. Knocking a unit back sounds like a cool mechanic and really sucks for melee and melee already sucks. Melee's only job in this game is to be strong front line blockers. Winged Hussars eliminate this remaining usefulness to melee which spells bad news for great generals if a WH can knock their escort out of the tile and reset the general (in NQ latest mod the general dies!) The knockback is definitely strong but this unit will be mod nerfed if it has the combat benefits of a Beserker but none of the penalties. If that's the case that's almost like evidence Norway was meant to be the joke civ.

• Poland’s “Golden Liberty” unique ability allows them to gain territory when they build a Fort or Encampment, even allowing them to steal territory from other civs! They also convert a Military Policy slot into a Wildcard slot, giving them extra flexibility in culture.

Well, don't get forward settled or settle yourself by Poland especially if they have Defender of the Faith or Crusade too. The culture flipping is something I'm glad to see back in the game since the good old days of IV. It looked like the tiles taken are 3 around the encampment and fort? I think that's still manageable though if used right can be pretty troll. I don't think its broken, not on paper anyway. If you defeat a Polish city then do you get the extra tiles they annexed? If so then it makes taking a Polish city more enticing! What gets me here though is the ability to flip military into wildcard slots? At first I freaked out a little but then the wording is tricky. It's technically NOT an extra policy slot (unless you build the wonders like FP and Alhambra) but Plato's Republic is still technically better but only marginally, just less flexible. If you can actually flip as many military policy slots as you want ( and most military policy is useless to keep on except for a 1 or 2 policies i.e. conscription) then Poland should always be going for autocracy, monarchy, fascism to get the most out of this ability. I actually like the bonuses of all three but the slots typically suck - it's good to see a Civ that can properly take advantage of these governments.

Jadwiga allows you to spread your religion to the nearby city when you gain another civ’s territory with Golden Liberty. Her relics provide bonus Faith, Culture, and Gold

Not as crazy as it sounds actually.
-Relics are rare but I expect the Poland player would be enticed to go for a Martyr strat. Finding an early relic from a hut would be nice but still not as nice as Mvemba I think.
-Mvemba is still better since his bonuses extend to more than Relics and I'd take food/production over faith/culture any day. .
This is a nice bonus when you can manage to trigger it but not game-breaking by any means.
The increased religious pressure makes a Crusade strategy interesting to consider, I like it!

• The Sukiennice, or Cloth Hall, gives bonus Production from foreign Trade Routes, and Gold from internal Trade Routes.

So what building does the sukiennice replace? This is meh depending on how much production we're talking about. In most cases I think internal trade routes are still superior (there are possible exceptions like Egypt) so the gold bonus is nice especially if you need money to upgrade/pay for an army.

TL;DR on Poland
- The ability to flip tiles is going to be really nice especially with a defender/crusade belief behind it and possibly a pain to deal with. On the upside maybe you get the extra tiles when you capture a Polish city which could be cool.
- I think the ability to flip military policy into wildcard policy is Poland's strongest trait though its technically not an extra policy SLOT and I think some people I talked to already misread that. Sounds strong on paper but I suspect it will not be a crazy as people think. Go autocracy, monarchy, fascism governments obviously.
- The relic bonus sounds nice but not amazing since relics are rare and the sukiennice sounds okay but not thrilling.
-Winged Hussar is either going to be the strongest unit in the game capable of beating knights and getting to great generals by knocking escorts out all depending on what that 'strong on attack' means and if it's actually weak on defense like the Beserker. I hope to see later on.

 

[Athmos]

seems to me that they got scared of this mechanic and quickly reverted back to the hated Civ5 model of few cities. If you combine this new nerf with the amenities model of 4 cities for your whole empire, you can tell what their intention seems to be

I don't think so. Actually this mostly nerf large cities, which are the one needing lots of production to build new districts late in the game. Same thing with amenities, you can have any number of size 4-5 cities (which have a quite bearable base -1 amenity), able to build 2 district each, they will still be net contributor in terms of, well, everything. Small cities are actually much less impacted than large ones, so actually this patch will favor empires made of lots of smallish cities.
It will simply shift the focus more on caravans and cash buying for production.

Basically, it will remove the main counterweight to the scaling costs mechanism. Since they adjusted wonder and space project costs, it will mostly make builder, settlers, units even slower to get in the late game. I don't understand what they're aiming for at all.

 

[Stilgar08]

I disagree. Until now, you had to think carefully were you put you first cities, and make important decisions because there is a tension between early game benefit (optimal adjacency bonus) and late game benefit (optimal overlap bonus). This will go entirely from the game, since getting a single IZ to overlap with each city is trivial, and doesn't require any planing at all. I think even in my very first game where I didn't know about overlap from the start, most cities benefited from 2 to 3 other IZ, without any forward thinking.
Maybe you didn't take the overlap into account with your city, but it is still one less layer of planing for everyone that did.

Why is the overlap bonus entirely gone? No, it's not, the rules have changed but it's not gone. And IZs are still a VERY good district by any means. I'm pretty sure I'll still built them often but not always as before... It's a nerf.

You're right, btw: For my early cities I tend to focus much more on adjacency and resources than on overlapping. Early adjacency is just so good since it accumulates right from the start (snowballing). Still I never ran into problems because not focusing on overlapping from the start. On Deity you might have a problem if you don't count your tiles but to me it's not much fun to play deity anyhow.

Oh, and one more aspect I completely forgot to mention: Maybe AI is better in handling the new rule than the old one, making it a bit more competable...

 

[Athmos]

Of course it won't affect any starting strats, and as production is always the crunch, we will still build them everywhere. But where the overlap could be an important consideration before (when planning for your spaceship building cities for example), now it simply doesn't matter. There is no compromise to be found between early game and late game, one less layer of planing needed.
For me, that puzzle-solving aspect is one of the main interest of the game, so I don't like it getting simpler, and I don't understand why they removed that part since as you say, player who won't care didn't care previously either. Player who liked that planing will miss it, and everyone will just still have to build IZ everywhere, we'll just get less of a reward out of it, and remove the thinking part completely.
It look like they didn't think enough about what they meant, or I must be missing something, It really doesn't make much sense.


The problem with AI planing I think is that they build any available district just about anywhere. So they often take their best IZ spot with an early wonder or a holy site. And since IZ are normally the last district to become available, when they get to apprenticeship they have no slot left, and have to go with many holy sites, and a few theaters, campuses and encampment scattered wherever.
The AI is just dumb, there simply wasn't much work put into it. The only easy fix would be to give the AI enough housing bonuses that It can grow enough to build more important, districts, or maybe just free district slots. Of course, If it could make actually plan its city like the player is supposed to, that would be much better, but let's be honest : given how much better it became at handling 1UPT tactics since civ 5 came out, I'm not optimist.

 

[smartcanuck1988]

I agree that the overlapping/stacking bonus from factories led to some really interesting decision making when planning your cities. Yes there is still overlap but now that only one factory matters, that element of investment for greater rewards is gone. There was some glimmer of strategy when you had to choose if you want to not essentially produce anything right now but rather build up your factories infrastructure for a greater production boost that would help you in the late game. Now it's just build 1 factory and you must shift your focus elsewhere because another factory is essentially useless. Unless I'm interpreting the changes wrong?

It seems like the devs really dislike the idea of stacking anything. Be it bonuses or units. But in my opinion it is stripping away a very reasonable strategic choice.

 

[DocRock]

This will not get me back into playing.. There are still so many things missings (save the settings, restart the map...), the AI is still a mess..

Furthermore, many of the key mechanics that fail (in my point of view obviously) stay unchanged. Slow movement, stupid Eurekas, ICS as the only viable strategy, combat as the only option on Deity and so on.

I guess I'll just wait a for months before touching the game again.

 

[Chibisuke]

I don't see how this is a buff to Germany, indirect or otherwise. It's a huge nerf. The free Hansa was massive for them. The Hansa is still a good unique but with it no longer free combined with regional production nerf, Germany just went down by a fair bit.

 

[PendragonWRB]

My correction about previous build was based upon a Bath finishing, which did show correctly, but I stopped paying attention after that so it may be only districts that are fixed which seems odd. That must have been an accident because why would you fix only districts?

 

[CultureManiac]

Oh wait, there might be a bug with a mod I have installed (or because I'm continuing a game from before the patch), because this can't have slipped past Firaxis: all my resource icons on map are now displayed with 3 other resource icons, as if the images are arranged in a grid, but the game was taking the wrong square region to display on screen. Bugger, looks like I might need to start a new game...

This happened to me using the Chao quick UI mod. There's a fix for it here https://github.com/chaorace/cqui/issues/180#issuecomment-268446886

 

[Cosmic Fox]

aww no SDK not even a mention of it, though some nice balance changes, game effect added to DB now that is very welcome indeed!

 

[LDiCesare]

You sound like you're in a hurry. I kinda like the way they're making changes every month, even if I'd like some things prioritised over others. I suspect that the big AI changes will come a bit further down the track, as they have to make sure it is responsive to everything else. I'm pretty comfortable that Firaxis is very keen to produce a good product for us all! I'd be more concerned if they had rushed an AI fix, when it is the hardest thing they have on their plate.

I'm not in any hurry. I read the patch, to me it's useless, so I'll look at it a bit later. I will simply not spend any money on the game or DLCs/expansions till/if they make a decent AI. Whatever they do in the meantime is just irrelevant to me, except the DLC being an indication they are not working to make the game enjoyable by me but to charge money from others.
I am not certain at all Firaxis is trying to provide a good product to those who want a challenge. I think they try to provide variety, and thus provide new content they can sell, while I'm looking for replayability and challenge without added content.

 

[TomeTraveler]

While it's going to change much about the way I play, I think that nerfing the overlap bonuses is in general a good change. All of my recent SV games became exercises in simply one area: cramming as many cities as I could around my spaceship production city, so long as I could fit an IZ within overlap range. Anything that encourages a player to settle several pieces of barren tundra while ignoring unnocupied, prime real estate on the opposite edge of one's empire, is a flawed mechanic in my opinion.

 

[Olleus]

Disappointing. Lots of necessary changes are not included (making the AI semi competent, or the ridiculous ways the districts cost scale, a whole myriad of UI stuff), and some changes made that look to be for the worst.

Removing the stacking of IZ feels bad. It was definitely OP before, and thus a dull predictable part of the game, but rather than making it more interesting they pretty much eliminated it. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. Why the obvious solution of having factories give a production bonus equal to half of the IZ adjacency bonus, with the old stacking rule, wasn't used is beyond me. That would prevent factories from being spammed as good placement would be necessary for them to have any effect.

I dont think this patch is enough to convince me to go back into Civ6 just yet. Shame.

 

[Esperr]

Already been playing for a few hours, first the bad:

The already unbearable production is now even more unbearable late game. I let a game drag just to see how it would be and it becomes such a slog to get anything built. Its annoying and unfun. The factory overlap was both cool as it gave your empire a sense of cohesion and it was also the only thing even remotely keeping the mid to late game production at a reasonable pace. Also, Toronto went from "this game is going to be a bye" to next to useless.

The good:
Late game science increases are cool and much needed. The Hansa is no longer just the bestest thing ever to be doing. Earth map is earth map. I don't really know why they made the spaceport of all things not require population but sure.

I think it's a step in the right direction overall, but the production thing just needs to be fixed already. Nobody likes the slog and now its just worse. My fear is that they are also going to slowly move the game back to civ V style four city tradition with these kinds of changes.

 

[Chibisuke]

It seems to me that warlike Civs are more powerful as a result of this change. Early land grab is much more essential. We will need more cities with ideal resources nearby. Also, I think this makes the AI a little stronger vs human since humans were probably the only ones taking advantage of regional stacking to any significant degree. So that also means warlike Civs are better.

 

[Magil]

Factory/Power Plant overlapping was a terrible solution to a bad problem (I don't honestly feel like there would've been a solution to this problem that wouldn't have encouraged building IZs everywhere as long as they were allowed to overlap). This is the correct decision to make in regards to regional buildings.

Production costs (relative to research time) do still need to be addressed, but I fear it's a core game issue that is inherent to V/VI that is keeping production costs high (you know which one). Fortunately that is an extremely easy thing to address with modding (tech/production costs that is).

 

[juanpavo]

I don't really know why they made the spaceport of all things not require population but sure.

Likely to help the AI build them sooner and in smaller cities. The AI has trouble growing cities in general.

 

[klail]

Still no restart button =/

Just use this, works great:

http://civ6mods.com/2016/11/restart-button-mod-remgrandt/

 

[Cymsdale]

There is no way to "make IZ stacking more interesting". If the optimal play is to always do it, it's always going to be uninteresting. Now they have an effective diminishing return on industrial buildings and it opens up the door to build more interesting things instead. Using hammers to make more hammers is the least interesting use of hammers there is. It's important to have methods to build up your economy, but there needs to be a point where it makes sense to actually use your economy to build other, non-hammer-related, things instead. The levels of production you got with stacking simply broke the game, I'm not sad to see it go in the slightest.

 

[UWHabs]

There is no way to "make IZ stacking more interesting". If the optimal play is to always do it, it's always going to be uninteresting. Now they have an effective diminishing return on industrial buildings and it opens up the door to build more interesting things instead. Using hammers to make more hammers is the least interesting use of hammers there is. It's important to have methods to build up your economy, but there needs to be a point where it makes sense to actually use your economy to build other, non-hammer-related, things instead. The levels of production you got with stacking simply broke the game, I'm not sad to see it go in the slightest.

Yeah, I'm basically of this point of view. I do wish they did something to vary things - maybe if Factories gave 2+the adjacency bonus, and they took the highest one, that would be a cool mix of getting some overlaps working while having an even more important role for the placement, but overall I think the stacking just made IZ way too OP. Will have to test it out to see how to get late game production, but definitely I think it will make encampments more valuable, as now in most cities they'll actually be able to give you as much production as an IZ would, unless if you're friends with a lot of industrial city states.