Official announcement: Hot off the presses. Next Civ game in development!!!!!!!

[pokiehl]

Recently?
2017 or 2018 I think

Ed became franchise lead as Anton Strenger became Lead Developer on Rise & Fall
https://www.civilization.com/en-GB/news/entries/announcing-civilization-vi-rise-and-fall/

He meant that they re-affirmed it with the announcement of a new Civ game being in development.

 

[UWHabs]

I don't even mind having a religious unit moving about, or frankly even the religious combat. What bothers me most of all is the unnecessary amount of types of religious units and the unit spam. There's no reason not to condense everything in an Apostle unit and then promote the unit in accordance to your needs, using an open promotion tree, rather than the randomised promotions they get atm.

I think it also really hurts that great prophets are just a rush to the first 5, and then nothing afterwards.

I think they really should have combined a lot of the current apostle functionality into Great Prophets. So you need to collect Great Prophets to evangelize the religion, to start inquisitions, etc... Maybe they would act like Great Generals otherwise in religious combat. I get why they don't want to give them unique abilities to avoid people arguing about religious stuff much.

But if you do that, then yeah, you probably want to re-work the other units to give you some balance to them.

I think I would still rather get rid of the units on the board, and you re-work the system a lot more like the espionage system. So you build your missionary or apostle, you choose a foreign city to send them to and settle in, and then you can run missions to either decrease the pressure of the religion in there, increase your pressure, or maybe you have a few other options too. You could set yours on a counter-mission, maybe there's different aggression levels where the passive spread missions have no diplomatic consequences, but the more aggressive proselytizer ones could have diplomatic consequences. That gets rid of the units from the board, but still lets you actively decide how aggressive to spread. And if you don't want that, you just build enough to cover your empire and put them all basically on counter-spread missions protecting your cities.

 

[Haig]

UWHabs, good ideas and I agree they should ditch the movable religious units.

Religion should spread both naturally (in a way that empires cant fully control) and also with some more simple mechanic.

 

[Hakan-i Cihan]

Honestly theological combat would be the very first thing I'd axe as part of the "one third."

I agree. But still I would like to see religious units (with much less spammable amount) have a 2nd ability besides the conversion/inquisition function. To plant in cities of other civs for gathering sources, religious pressure for x turns etc. or have some small "healing" skill in own cities to counter disasters/disloyalty/unhappiness/war weariness etc.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I don't even mind having a religious unit moving about, or frankly even the religious combat. What bothers me most of all is the unnecessary amount of types of religious units and the unit spam. There's no reason not to condense everything in an Apostle unit and then promote the unit in accordance to your needs, using an open promotion tree, rather than the randomised promotions they get atm.

I like the idea of one religious unit that starts out as a missionary and then could be promoted into an apostle and then a guru.
Warrior monks would stay the same.

I think it also really hurts that great prophets are just a rush to the first 5, and then nothing afterwards.

I think they really should have combined a lot of the current apostle functionality into Great Prophets. So you need to collect Great Prophets to evangelize the religion, to start inquisitions, etc... Maybe they would act like Great Generals otherwise in religious combat. I get why they don't want to give them unique abilities to avoid people arguing about religious stuff much.

I don’t personally see a problem with giving Great Prophets unique abilities, if that is what they were known for in history. They already leave out the problematic ones.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

UWHabs, good ideas and I agree they should ditch the movable religious units.

Religion should spread both naturally (in a way that empires cant fully control) and also with some more simple mechanic.

There could easily be a mechanic nearly identical to Trade Routes where you target another city with a Religious Mission. The missionaries move back and forth for a set number of turns, but can be intercepted by barbarians and rivals along the route.

Missions from your own cities to your own Holy City would be pilgrimages and would generate faith and spread your religion to the city of origin.

Missions to foreign cities would cost Faith and Gold per turn to maintain, but spread your religion in the target city.

 

[Thormodr]

Theological combat should have been a game mode.

Loyalty could also have been a mode. (Maybe incorporate into Dramatic Ages?)
HUMANKIND's influence is a much better system.

Loyalty needs to stay. I strongly dislike forward settling by the AI.

 

[blackbutterfly]

Loyalty needs to stay. I strongly dislike forward settling by the AI.

Yes, I suppose the premise was to prevent forward settling. But...

Have you played any of the TSL Earth maps?

Europe tends to fall into dark ages (free states).
Loyalty was so half baked.

It forces you to expand wider, taller, faster.
Then your enemies just fall into your hands.

I've been play testing the new Leader Pass TSLs on my map/mod UN Earth Maps.

Ptolemaic Cleo just took all of northern Europe though loyalty after it fell rather rapidly into dark ages. (This is with Dramatic Ages on BTW).
This was basically just a rollover. Took out Rome and Sundiata. Game over.

 

[Thormodr]

Yes, I suppose the premise was to prevent forward settling. But...

Have you played any of the TSL Earth maps?

Europe tends to fall into dark ages (free states).
Loyalty was so half baked.

It forces you to expand wider, taller, faster.
Then your enemies just fall into your hands.

I've been play testing the new Leader Pass TSLs on my map/mod UN Earth Maps.

Ptolemaic Cleo just took all of northern Europe though loyalty after it fell rather rapidly into dark ages. (This is with Dramatic Ages on BTW).
This was basically just a rollover. Took out Rome and Sundiata. Game over.

Then improve it. Don't get rid of it.

Don't really care about TSL but perhaps they could have modified loyalty rules for that. Dark Ages really skew the game, though.

 

[Xandinho]

Loyalty needs to stay. I strongly dislike forward settling by the AI.

Maybe not loyalty, but a mechanic that resembles it. Loyalty is a strange name for something that seems like culture pressure, so I'd rather they make some modifications to the mechanics and call it culture pressure.

 

[pokiehl]

I can understand not wanting to reuse the word “culture” for something that has nothing to do with that yield. The original name for Loyalty was “identity” as we can surmise from the game files.

Whatever they call it in 7, I hope it’s a lot more nuanced and impactful than it is now.

 

[The_goggles_do_nothing]

Don't really care about TSL but perhaps they could have modified loyalty rules for that.

Map dependent game mechanics are something i'm hoping for in Civ 7. The "reverse" as well, where what civs are in the game would effect what map is generated.

 

[pokiehl]

Map dependent game mechanics are something i'm hoping for in Civ 7. The "reverse" as well, where what civs are in the game would effect what map is generated.

Map-dependent mechanics would be so messy and inconsistent.

If something in the game requires a specific map configuration for it work well, then I suggest it should be redesigned to be better.

 

[Thormodr]

Maybe not loyalty, but a mechanic that resembles it. Loyalty is a strange name for something that seems like culture pressure, so I'd rather they make some modifications to the mechanics and call it culture pressure.

Sure, sounds good. Whatever they call it, I like the mechanic. They had cultural pressure in Civ IV and I enjoyed playing that way. (Bloodless conquests.)

 

[Takhisis]

I can understand not wanting to reuse the word “culture” for something that has nothing to do with that yield. The original name for Loyalty was “identity” as we can surmise from the game files.

Whatever they call it in 7, I hope it’s a lot more nuanced and impactful than it is now.

Well, cultural and political identity aren't always nor necessarily one and the same, in spite of the best efforts by various verticalist nationalists across the ages.

 

[PiR]

I don’t get why people cite the mode stuff (vampires etc.) as stuff they don’t want to return, as if it were offered as part of the core game.

We paid for that stuff instead of getting the easy bugfixes we reported here.

 

[Abaxial]

Well, religion does spread without missionaries/apostles, just by pressure, which is reasonable.

 

[pokiehl]

We paid for that stuff instead of getting the easy bugfixes we reported here.

I think it's a false dilemma to propose that it was some choice between "game modes" and "bug fixes." Getting that additional content was some devil's bargain in lieu of "easy bug fixes." Adding zombies didn't make them not fix bugs.

Besides, your comment misses my point. You seem to be responding to some statement like "I don't know why people are upset about the game modes" - which I didn't say.

Well, cultural and political identity aren't always nor necessarily one and the same, in spite of the best efforts by various verticalist nationalists across the ages.

Whatever name they use for this same concept in Civ 7, we can easily nitpick it to death, so I am not sure what point you're making in relation to what I said. I was just saying using the word "culture" could be confusing because it's a yield.

 

[blackbutterfly]

We paid for that stuff instead of getting the easy bugfixes we reported here.

New content = $$$

Bug fixes earn nothing.
Even Leader Pass, though free for us on PC (with all DLC or Anthology) does earn 2K+FXS on Apple stores

It looks like new management at FXS signals the studio is full steam ahead on season passes.
Expect all Civ VII expansions/DLCs to be in this format.

Unfortunately this model seems to result in increased quality problems
This is why I really hope FXS will use a new game engine or employ new technology for Civ VII. Though there is no indication of this.

I am most certainly not going to be pre-ordering Civ VII or purchasing it at launch.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Civ IV was an empire builder, Civ V and VI make me feel like I'm playing a board game. V in particular is rife with too much micro-management - moving units late-game is a chore. It doesn't add complexity to the game, just annoyance.

The moddability of IV is also unmatched. One of the key selling points of V was that it would be the 'most moddable Civ ever'. This promise was never fulfilled, or even attempted to be.

This, coupled with the mess of a launch with V left a lot of players with a bad taste in their mouths. Instead of apologising, Shafer ran away with his tail between his legs.

You can't imagine how much I agree with this. Unfortunately, Civ IV was released 20 years ago, and since then there's a whole new generation of players who only knew Civ as a board game and like it as such.

I never really understood the anti-stack ideology considering it allowed to keep a tiled map relatively clean. Not to say that it's a lot more convenient to move 10 stacked units all at once rather than 10 unstacked units independently.

But anyway, Civ 6 even increased the board game feeling in adding districts on tiles. So at this point, I have very little hope it would go in an opposite direction with Civ 7, particularly if the lead designer remain the same. The only way I believe to move forward would be to invent something else, such as making the game tileless, but I don't really expect it.