New Patch for Rising Tide: Wonder War and Chungsu new colors

[SupremacyKing2]

the game showed once and for all that playing tall just isn't very interesting - there's not a lot of scope to do very much.

I agree. "tall" empires are less interesting because there is less for the player to do. Plus, I have found that expansion is more interesting. And, if the map has a lot of empty space between empires, like BERT has, then you have the problem of less conflict between civs which makes for a less interesting game. So, any civ game that favors tall and has too much space between empires, will be a more boring game IMO. Ideally, a civ game should never have long stretches where you feel your empire is running on automatic. There should be frequent moments where important stuff is happening that requires you to think strategically, like a city threatening to secede from your empire, or a neighbor beating you to a good city location, declaring war on you, or barbarians invading. Which is why I think that the best way for civ6 to be an interesting and exciting game would be for it to focus on expansion, territorial tensions and genuine choices in terms of military, diplomacy and managing happiness.

 

[PhilBowles]

I agree. "tall" empires are less interesting because there is less for the player to do. Plus, I have found that expansion is more interesting. And, if the map has a lot of empty space between empires, like BERT has, then you have the problem of less conflict between civs which makes for a less interesting game. So, any civ game that favors tall and has too much space between empires, will be a more boring game IMO. Ideally, a civ game should never have long stretches where you feel your empire is running on automatic. There should be frequent moments where important stuff is happening that requires you to think strategically, like a city threatening to secede from your empire, or a neighbor beating you to a good city location, declaring war on you, or barbarians invading. Which is why I think that the best way for civ6 to be an interesting and exciting game would be for it to focus on expansion, territorial tensions and genuine choices in terms of military, diplomacy and managing happiness.

Well, both extremes have issues. "There's empty space - guess I should spawn another settler", and the inevitably attendant barrage of 'city has finished production' notifications ("guess I'd better spam more units") is equally automatic, and frankly equally uninteresting. All Civ games have fundamental issues with pacing expansion - in all past entries you scrambled to spam cities as fast as possible, and rapidly ran out of colonisable map. Playing a simplified game of Sim City in each of a dozen plus cities gets tedious quickly, let alone with 100+ turns left, particularly when there are at most 4 ways to meaningfully specialise a city. In Civ V instead of scaling the timing of expansion you either expand rapidly early or it's not worth expanding at all.

There needs to be a middle ground whereby you expand slowly over the course of the game, similar to base expansion in a classic RTS. That's easier said than done in a Civ context, as the gameplay is inimical to slow expansion - the need to have a sizeable population base to build later-era units and buildings, the need to have a set roster of core buildings in each city, and the essential bucket-filling gameplay that characterises the series all promote fast expansion, since even when the space is available it's just not efficient to expand late.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

There needs to be a middle ground whereby you expand slowly over the course of the game, similar to base expansion in a classic RTS. That's easier said than done in a Civ context, as the gameplay is inimical to slow expansion - the need to have a sizeable population base to build later-era units and buildings, the need to have a set roster of core buildings in each city, and the essential bucket-filling gameplay that characterises the series all promote fast expansion, since even when the space is available it's just not efficient to expand late.

Well, the main reason why classic RTS promotes expansion throughout the entire game is because resources eventually run out as you collect them so the player needs to find new sources since the player needs that steady stream of resources in order to keep pumping out more military units. So maybe civ should do something similar where strategic resources could be depleted as you build units? It would force the player to build new cities near new sources of the strategic resources. Plus a mechanic like this could create interesting wars for resources. For example, if I am about to run out of a key resource and my neighbor is the only nearby civ that has it, I might feel like I need to invade them and take the resource by force in order to remain a powerful civ. And it would also create an interesting dynamic where civs that run out of a key resource could go down in power and another civ might rise to become more powerful.

 

[Galgus]

Personally, I feel like civ5 favors "tall" a bit too much. I prefer "wide" in my personal play style which might one reason why I like BE. As you said, BE definitely tends to favor "wide" over "tall".

I'm a big fan of the Civ 5 mod Cities of Marble for how it affects both tall and wide play.

It reworks and adds many national wonders, most of which grant free buildings in newly founded cities.

Somewhat discourages the extremely dull tactic of spamming as many cities as possible as soon as possible while encouraging developed empires to expand later.

I'm not a big fan of the extremes of wide or tall - of constantly spamming settlers or never going beyond four cities.

I agree. "tall" empires are less interesting because there is less for the player to do. Plus, I have found that expansion is more interesting. And, if the map has a lot of empty space between empires, like BERT has, then you have the problem of less conflict between civs which makes for a less interesting game. So, any civ game that favors tall and has too much space between empires, will be a more boring game IMO. Ideally, a civ game should never have long stretches where you feel your empire is running on automatic. There should be frequent moments where important stuff is happening that requires you to think strategically, like a city threatening to secede from your empire, or a neighbor beating you to a good city location, declaring war on you, or barbarians invading. Which is why I think that the best way for civ6 to be an interesting and exciting game would be for it to focus on expansion, territorial tensions and genuine choices in terms of military, diplomacy and managing happiness.

At least early game Barbarians could be far more of a factor than they currently are so far as keeping things interesting goes, possibly later with something like the Barbarian Immersion Enhancements mod.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

At least early game Barbarians could be far more of a factor than they currently are so far as keeping things interesting goes, possibly later with something like the Barbarian Immersion Enhancements mod.

I know we are drifting into civ6 ideas but if I were designing civ6, I would add more NPC entities in the early game for the player to interact with. You could have different types of barbarian camps as well as more city-states. And I would make it so that you could either conquer them or use diplomacy to turn them into your own cities. This would give the player more interesting obstacles to simple early game expansion as well as give the player new ways of expanding. In the early early game, the player would expand their empire through conquering camps or converting them and using settlers would come a bit later. It would also fill the map up more so that the early game is not "beat a few barbarians and settle 4 cities and the map is still half empty" like in civ5.

 

[Galgus]

I would love both the obstacles of that and the expansion options: there could even be ruins-esq bonuses for razing some cities.

The game would be more interesting if, at least for awhile, Barbarians felt like a constant threat that required a real military if the player wasn't in an incredibly defensible spot.

And even then they would hamper expansion.

 

[joncnunn]

Moderator Action:
The thread is now hopelessly derailed from the original topic (The new patch), and so is now closed.
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