Old timer's, what are your thoughts so far?

[SofNascimento_]

I'm extremely disappointed with the artstyle. It looks like a mobile game and I expected much more.

However, I'm really liking the gameplay mechanics we've been seeing, so I'll probably enjoy the game regardless.

Won't pre-order though, because of the unfriendly practice of pre-order DLC.

 

[raen]

Looks promising.

I still play Civ 1 in Mobile, good for spending time at public transport. Civ IV I have a mod on it, and a pleasure to play, still not leaving unless Civ 6 gets me big time, specially if is better to mod, as they also say.

 

[cephalo]

I am the exact opposite of an old timer. In fact, I spent a few hours playing Civ4 for the first time today. And I hated it, the interface was agony compared to 5, and it's obviously so much uglier.

However, it has made me a lot more interested in 6. CiVI is clearly a return to the style of the franchise, and it's now obvious to me that 5 was a big step in a new direction.

I'm now feeling excited about 6, as it essentially looks like a remake of 4 with the past parts of 5 included. So yeah. /My boring opinions.

No no no no. You don't judge Civ4 in a few hours. Play a whole game of Civ4 BtS with religions and corporations, and not to toot my own horn, but you should use PerfectWorld2 map with the 'new world' option. If you do not do this you will be missing out on the very best PC game ever ever ever.

 

[isau]

I played Civ 4 for years but after Civ 5's expansion packs can never look seriously at that game again. It's true that Civ 5 was less balanced out of the box. Mods have almost entirely fixed that.

The real issue with Civ 5 is not making enough balance passes to fix the meta game. Civ 5 is a much more complex game than 4 ever was. Any complexity in 4 came from the choices being better balanced with each other and in 5 there being a fairly clear path, due to poor choices made in the design--in particular, attempting to add the concept of "tall" cities and then allowing this concept to supplant wide strategies, and bad balance of the actual units that made some unit classes (Ranged) superior to others (Melee).

The one thing I still mostly dislike about 5 is the policy trees. They came about during a terrible time in the game industry when every game decided it needed a "tree" system, to follow the example of World of Warcraft. That's seemingly remedied in 6 unless we're in another situation where some governments vastly outperform others--but again, that's a balance issue, not a fundamental design issue.

 

[Staler87]

I played Civ 4 for years but after Civ 5's expansion packs can never look seriously at that game again. It's true that Civ 5 was less balanced out of the box. Mods have almost entirely fixed that.

The real issue with Civ 5 is not making enough balance passes to fix the meta game. Civ 5 is a much more complex game than 4 ever was. Any complexity in 4 came from the choices being better balanced with each other and in 5 there being a fairly clear path, due to poor choices made in the design--in particular, attempting to add the concept of "tall" cities and then allowing this concept to supplant wide strategies, and bad balance of the actual units that made some unit classes (Ranged) superior to others (Melee).

The one thing I still mostly dislike about 5 is the policy trees. They came about during a terrible time in the game industry when every game decided it needed a "tree" system, to follow the example of World of Warcraft. That's seemingly remedied in 6 unless we're in another situation where some governments vastly outperform others--but again, that's a balance issue, not a fundamental design issue.

Basically every system was more in dept in civ IV (here are some examples):

Diplomacy: Gone are options for permanent alliances, vassal states, and even some basic stuff like asking people to attack cities. We did get denouncements but these really don't work as intended and essentially serve the same purposes as stopping to trade with someone.

Economics: I mean, do I really have to explain this one?

Science: Civ IV slider system and the fact that every tech does something interesting really makes its technology system operate on a higher level. In civ V you couldn't deficit spend to rush techs and some of the techs felt really meh, especially the late game ones.

Espionage: In civ V you have these spy things that have set actions when you assign them to cities. Civ IV allows you to conduct both passive and active espionage. You can just accumulate information against an opponent and actively send agents to cause trouble. In civ V you have only one of these options (looks like that brought back both for civ VI though ).

Government: Civ IV had a flexible government system that really offered some tough choices. In civ V you just built up bonuses and once you started a tree there was really no point in not finishing it.

I do have to admit that culture victories in civ V can be more interesting but some balance issues hinder this. Ultimately I see some categories where civ V could be better than civ IV but the balance/AI is so bad that nothing comes of it. I'm not saying that civ V is a bad game (I've logged 200+ hours) but it just doesn't stand the test of time.

 

[flash20]

Great thread .. so many memories!
I've started as a kid with CIV1. Back then, I couldn't even understand english but somehow, after many tries (probably easiest difficulty level) I managed to survive until computer won a space race. But I must have missed it because I kept going into future tech NN hopping that it will get me somewhere
Great times ... my first games were just going with a settler around the map and I remember my happiness when I figured that I can build a city with it after getting it killed many many times!

After CIV1, somehow I skipped the whole series until few years ago. My laptop back then was not good enough for CIV4 so I bought CIV3 and that was it ... hundreds of hours. Fortunately my wife was forgiving
Later I got CIV4 and that is definitely the best game ever for me.
Naturally I bought also CIV5. I didn't love it but I liked it.

I usually play for few weeks CIV4 and then I switch to CIV5. When I get tired of CIV5 I quit gaming for few months (My wife likes that moment) and I go back to CIV4. Never-ending cycle.
Now I have big hopes for CIV6 so my "cycle" could become a little bit longer

CIV6 looks great. I love the graphics, civ 5 was for me too natural and to dark. I hated this ugly jungle everywhere. Honestly I even liked the graphics in CIV3 (I was playing it after 2010). Watching that lonely knight walking through my lands, trying to get to his homeland was cute.

1UPT has it's pros and cons. Moves had to be smarter and planned. Ranged units added a lot of fun to the game. But traffic jams on the other hand were driving me nuts a specially when I wanted to get to an enemy through my ally's land.

So yeah .. big hopes for CIV6. Probably will buy it on release day, with a nice dress or pair of shoes for my wife, and a big remote controlled car for my kid. This is going to be most expensive CIV game for me.

 

[MKI]

I never play at Civ I, but they're all awesome, with differencies, enjoyable for different things, and I really want to play at Civ VI.

The funny thing is that a mainly play Civ III after buying Civ IV, and I mainly play Civ IV after buying Civ V. I play a lot a Civ V game this year, and I expect Civ VI to be awesome, but I think I still play a lot of Civ V game after getting the 6th one

 

[Drakarska]

I played Civ 4 for years but after Civ 5's expansion packs can never look seriously at that game again. It's true that Civ 5 was less balanced out of the box. Mods have almost entirely fixed that.


I find the irony of this vastly amusing.

The real issue with Civ 5 is not making enough balance passes to fix the meta game. Civ 5 is a much more complex game than 4 ever was. Any complexity in 4 came from the choices being better balanced with each other and in 5 there being a fairly clear path, due to poor choices made in the design--in particular, attempting to add the concept of "tall" cities and then allowing this concept to supplant wide strategies, and bad balance of the actual units that made some unit classes (Ranged) superior to others (Melee).

Um, I'm a little puzzled here. You state that V was a more complex game, yet the rest of your paragraph appears to contradict this.

The one thing I still mostly dislike about 5 is the policy trees. They came about during a terrible time in the game industry when every game decided it needed a "tree" system, to follow the example of World of Warcraft. That's seemingly remedied in 6 unless we're in another situation where some governments vastly outperform others--but again, that's a balance issue, not a fundamental design issue.

6 is still on the "maybe list" as far as I'm concerned. We'll have to see how the honest reviews are after it launches.

 

[Furycrab]

What's the deal with the super dramatic 4 vs 5 debate?

Personally, being an ol' timer, I just find that 5 aged a little better than 4. Not that much better. Mostly just that the main issues with 5 are that the AI couldn't play it's own game, things that got dramatically improved. I think if I wiped my memory and just played both games with expansion and patches, I'd slightly prefer 5.

As for 6, I'm loving what I'm seeing, small things like ways to leverage high production in the late game despite the 1upt.

The cards system looks really interesting, both in how they add diversity to the play, but also how it rewards culture instead of science.

I'm really curious about how inspirations/eureka moments play out and how it'll affect strategies and build orders.

Overall just feels like 6 takes all the goodies learned from 5 and BE and throwing more active play /decisions. Feels like win in my book.

 

[godeater]

Played since Civ 1. Not sold on the cartoon art style for the leaders but love everything else I've seen so far for Civ VI.

 

[Aristos]

Science: Civ IV slider system and the fact that every tech does something interesting really makes its technology system operate on a higher level. In civ V you couldn't deficit spend to rush techs and some of the techs felt really meh, especially the late game ones.

Butbut...but... you got the Giant Death Robot!

Seriously, I hope they did not bring that monument to stupidity back in Six. Nor other monuments.

 

[footslogger]

I've played civ games since Civ 2 and in no previous version have I ever paid much attention to diplomacy. I might start with that intention but rival civs always felt pretty much interchangeable and after a while I couldn't be bothered to interact with them more than strictly necessary. Civ 6 has clearly made a big effort to make diplomacy more important and that combined with the much more distinctly flavoured civs gives me the sense that I am going to enjoy the interactions much more this time. In an odd sort of way I think the civ world is really going to feel more fully occupied this time and not just me against a bunch of cardboard cutouts.

 

[Windsor]

My main thought right now is that Civ6 looks a lot less like the usual vanilla-version we usually get. It almost looks like a Paradox-game with tons of stuff going on. The RPG-crowd and everyone who is a "more is more" person is certainly going to be very pleased. I'm still very unsure if there's actually a good solid core mechanic in there or just a bunch of toys to play with.

I'm also worried about performance. Civ5 was terrible and it doesn't seem to have gotten any better. Hopefully they'll at least give us a reasonable "quick movement" option (the one in Civ5 is a joke), but time between turns seems to be a problem.

As for graphics, using a map as fog of war doesn't look good imo. And I miss the amazing looking mountains from Civ5, but that's not really a big concern for me.

I want solid core gameplay, reasonably paced and hopefully its interesting for high-level players.

 

[Staler87]

Butbut...but... you got the Giant Death Robot!

Seriously, I hope they did not bring that monument to stupidity back in Six. Nor other monuments.

I'm going to have to retract that statement. You can't describe a tech, or in this case, a group of techs, that has the giant robot of death in it as meh. Different adjectives are required.

 

[Aristos]

I'm going to have to retract that statement. You can't describe a tech, or in this case, a group of techs, that has the giant robot of death in it as meh. Different adjectives are required.

Careful now, for if you use the deserved adjectives you may be infracted.

 

[nthexwn]

I'm also worried about performance. Civ5 was terrible and it doesn't seem to have gotten any better. Hopefully they'll at least give us a reasonable "quick movement" option (the one in Civ5 is a joke), but time between turns seems to be a problem.

Dude you don't even know! I've got a 22 civ deity marathon game on a custom map which I've been playing off and on for the last 3 years. It's up to about 400 cities now. It takes:

• 2 hours to load the game (crashes about 50% of the time)
• 1 hour to capture a city
• 30 seconds to select a unit or switch to a ranged attack
• All night long to process the end of a turn (seriously, I just go to bed)

I'm glad they've purportedly canned the old engine. There were many things in it which ran in Big-O(h god what are they doing to n!?) complexity...

 

[noto2]

I started with Civ 2 when I was a teenager. I enjoyed 3, loved 4. 5 was a mixed bag and disappointing after 4, but I've learned to like it.

I really wish the developers would actually get hardcore gamers to test the game out before release. Firaxis often makes really stupid and simple balance errors that gamers discover within a week of release.

Developing a competent AI, especially for tactics, is difficult, and so I'm not going to whine about that because I have no idea how difficult it is to do. But there is no excuse for releasing a game with stupid, useless features and balance errors. I hate it when a Civ game is released and I'm completely uninterested in playing half the civs in the game because their UA/UU/UB is badly designed/useless. This also applies to civics/policies. When one thing is always the best option (rationalism) and another thing is basically always an inferior choice (exploration), it makes the game dull and boring.

It's easy to fix because I spent a couple dozen hours downloading mods and even modding the game myself to make it much better. I know how easy it is to fix these problems, so there is no excuse. They really need to cut it out. Look at Poland vs America in Civ 5. What kind of a fool would think that's acceptable? Look at 4 city Tradition rationalism vs wide empire play in the unmodded game. Sheesh.

 

[Gorbles]

Knowing what issues are doesn't necessarily mean you have the scope or resources to address those issues in time. Games development is a hectic process that I wish people had more of an insight into.

 

[markieness]

Didn't like the are style at first but now it doesn't bother me as much.

Looks like it will be a step up from 5.

 

[Khalid]

I started when I was a kid with Civ I, learned English trying to understand it

PLayed a bit of II and III, loved both IV and V. When I finally bought a new machine able to run V, I could never return to IV again. 1UPT was the deed for me. I always imagined in IV two huge armies finally meeting in a field for battle and then firing stone from catapults at each other for months before clashing swords.

I got V together with G&K, so I was completely taken by it from start. So far it seems that VI will be even better, especially with the policy tree changes.