[R&F] Rise and Fall General Discussion Thread

[bbbt]

To bring this comment back from being wildly off topic, the thing with Civ is: it's undeniably Eurocentric in how it frames the world. The concepts it uses to drive game play, the tech tree, the intrinsic notion of "progress" in a historical sense which a) defines the idea of the game itself and b) is, in its current incarnation, something made up in Europe during the Industrial Revolution.

Well, they are doing their best to fight that notion of progress with their current spate of tech tree quotes

It's a bunch of entertaining game mechanics with historical dressing more than an history lesson or simulation. The driver is the basic appeal of those sorts of game mechanics. You are leveling up your Civ, improving it's int/cha/faith/culture stats, building your +5 Sword of Angkor Wat, etc. A SimCiv sort of game where you could play with different societal constructs would be interesting but very different mechanics.

For me, make the Civs you include have interesting game play mechanics. I'm all for diversity as well: I sincerely enjoy it and learning about it personally, and I believe that geography was destiny for the most part rather than an intrinsic ability of a certain people to build monuments immediately on city founding. If Romans had rolled a tundra start and the Inuit rolled a salt start with a mountain and a river, we would be hearing about them differently - except Romans without Rome and Inuit without tundra would't be Rome/the Inuit and the the whole hypothesis makes no sense anyway: which is why the game is historical fantasy.

Granted, I know some people are different: some people really enjoy playing as their home nation, some people love true start maps with true start civs and the nations they associate as significant, etc. But I feel these conversations always turn into oddly 'philosophical' ones (guilty as charged) when they are primarily just people's gameplay tastes.

 

[cvb]

Recall that, in spite of Sid's later denials, Civilization was initially based on an Avalon Hill board game that very explicitly followed a traditional definition of a civilisation - initially set wholly in Europe and the Near East. Every civ in that game was a significant early urban culture, and like its digital successor the gameplay revolved around settling cities, developing technologies, and proceeding linearly through different eras, with the final score that determined victory being weighted towards the civs with the most cities and the most advanced technologies.

I'd like to add, that depending on the civ you play, you need 1200 - 1400 points to finish (barren "Africa" less, fertile Egypt & Babylon more). At any phase of the game you can have at most 9 cities worth 5 points each. So maximum points from cities altogether count the same as ONE cheap tech: Cloth Making & Pottery 45 points, (followed by Drama+Poetry & Music 60, Metal Working & Astronomy 80 ... to the most expensive ones: Democracy 200, Philosophy 240 and Theology 250 ... sounds familiar?).

Because of this you can have Civil Wars split your empire and other catastrophes shreddering your city and people tokens now and than ... you can always recover AND still prevail (even after your civ is completely annihilated & regenerated) ... the ability to win is highly concentrated in the techs or civics(?) ... well, those were never distinguished really ...

 

[Nathaniel VII]

Ugh. I just can't anymore. I bought BE on day one, I bought BE:RT sight unseen. I bought Civ VI without even thinking about it, and I bought every piece of DLC for Civ VI (except the viking scenario pack).

I got hyped for a moment by the Expansion, but then I started a new game in celebration of it. On my Windows installation, because the Mac port still doesn't have the fall patch, and the current ETA "might very well be January" (from the Aspyr rep on the Steam forums). I ended up on a defective map surrounded by one other Civ and 2 city states, with whom I ended up at war because the terrain between the city states was so spam full of Warriors (in the Medieval age) that I couldn't get my settlers to open ground. There was one piece of Niter somewhere at the other end of the continent, because resource distribution is still seemingly random. But then again that doesn't matter that there were no horses anywhere in the world, because Scythia can make horse archers without them, which I can only assume was the easiest way out of the problem that maps are not balanced in any way and that Firaxis can't allow the AI to trade strategic resources in a reasonable fashion (i.e. without demanding you hand over the Holy Ark in exchange).

The game is simply not of sufficient quality at this point to warrant an additional purchase. It's embarrassing. I won't support it anymore. They had a year to fix everything, or at least a reasonable part of "everything", and they didn't. Instead they are putting out more paid content, leaving players with the faint hope that maybe the paid update will fix all the issues, hopefully, maybe. I want to like this game, I really do, but the quality Firaxis has been delivering over the past few years simply isn't acceptable anymore. And I'm not excusing it with "limited capacities" or such; Firaxis and 2k are "triple A" players in the industry, and I expect better.

</rant>

 

[Leyrann]

Ugh. I just can't anymore. I bought BE on day one, I bought BE:RT sight unseen. I bought Civ VI without even thinking about it, and I bought every piece of DLC for Civ VI (except the viking scenario pack).

I got hyped for a moment by the Expansion, but then I started a new game in celebration of it. On my Windows installation, because the Mac port still doesn't have the fall patch, and the current ETA "might very well be January" (from the Aspyr rep on the Steam forums). I ended up on a defective map surrounded by one other Civ and 2 city states, with whom I ended up at war because the terrain between the city states was so spam full of Warriors (in the Medieval age) that I couldn't get my settlers to open ground. There was one piece of Niter somewhere at the other end of the continent, because resource distribution is still seemingly random. But then again that doesn't matter that there were no horses anywhere in the world, because Scythia can make horse archers without them, which I can only assume was the easiest way out of the problem that maps are not balanced in any way and that Firaxis can't allow the AI to trade strategic resources in a reasonable fashion (i.e. without demanding you hand over the Holy Ark in exchange).

The game is simply not of sufficient quality at this point to warrant an additional purchase. It's embarrassing. I won't support it anymore. They had a year to fix everything, or at least a reasonable part of "everything", and they didn't. Instead they are putting out more paid content, leaving players with the faint hope that maybe the paid update will fix all the issues, hopefully, maybe. I want to like this game, I really do, but the quality Firaxis has been delivering over the past few years simply isn't acceptable anymore. And I'm not excusing it with "limited capacities" or such; Firaxis and 2k are "triple A" players in the industry, and I expect better.

</rant>

1. Firaxis can't help it that the porting isn't going well. So don't withhold your money from them because of it. That just doesn't make sense, no offense.
2. You got unlucky with your map. In fact, I haven't had a single map where I truly had some kind of unplayable starting location like you describe ever since the game came out, and I've probably started as many as 30 or 40 games. Maybe even more; I got about 280 hours in the game and I don't know how long I typically play before starting a new one.

 

[cvb]

Every fool can squelch a beetle, but no sage create one.

 

[Meluhhan]

Now, with the reveal of Seondeok, she does not look like the female leader whose abilities tie in with the golden and dark ages mechanics.

 

[LastSword]

The French and Germans are both ethnically Frankish and the Holy Roman Empire is generally considered to be the successor of the Carolingian Empire...

Read this already. As I wrote I couldn't find any source about mass genocide committed on eastern german tribes made by Franks after or during Charlemagne's conquest. So I don't think East Francia significantly was of frankish ethnicity if that matters in first place.
There is greater gap between modern Germany and Frederick Barbarossa than France and Clovis. Matter of continuity.


Golden Age female leader should be the hinted, promised, alternate leader of Spain.

 

[God of Kings]

I expected First Look videos to show up on Tuesdays at 10AM EST. The Korea video showed up seven hours earlier.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I expected First Look videos to show up on Tuesdays at 10AM EST. The Korea video showed up seven hours earlier.

That is probably a regional release. They did that with the Korean DLC in Civ V. I bet they will do a global release of the FL at the regular time.

 

[PhilBowles]

It would have been better if the game were called Sid Meier's Human Cultures.

Why? What it actually represents mechanically are civilisations. There's nothing stopping a game from being about civilisations, any more than Age of Empires games should be mandated to focus on cultures that lacked empires or Rise of Nations on societies that didn't form nation states.

The only point here is that 'civilisation' is not a synonym for 'society' or 'culture' - it's simply a descriptive term for one specific form of social organisation. That doesn't imply societies that aren't civilisations are in any way inferior - that's a long-outmoded idea - but it does imply they're poorly-suited for a game called 'Civilization' with a focus on urban societies, organised warfare, and technological development.

Indian soldiers, though, did play a very important role in WWII.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_in_World_War_II

They did indeed and more WWII games likely ought to include Indian and indeed African representation among the soldiers involved. I used them as an example specifically because they were involved in the war - but not as one of the major powers. There's a general expectation that WWII games represent Europeans fighting one another, not Indians fighting East Africans (which didn't happen to my knowledge - the Germans made much less use of people from their colonies than the British did and indeed in either WWI or WWII, if not both, their leaders used the British tendency to rely on Imperial/Commonwealth forces as anti-British propaganda).

As I wrote I couldn't find any source about mass genocide committed on eastern german tribes made by Franks after or during Charlemagne's conquest.

What relevance does this have? Charlemagne wasn't the only Frankish leader and the Franks didn't begin with him - the entire area was already ethnically Frankish. That's what most of those Germanic tribes were. The name was first used to refer to the tribes along the Rhine, and by the Middle Ages was used generically to refer to mainland Western Europeans from Germany to Iberia.

 

[Uberfrog]

That is probably a regional release. They did that with the Korean DLC in Civ V. I bet they will do a global release of the FL at the regular time.

In the run-up to Civ VI's release, the leaders for Japan and China I seem to remember being released at a more sociable hour for East Asia. I'm not sure why they didn't just do the same and put it out to general release.

 

[Lord Lakely]

The Governors from the Seondeok video

from left to right:
- Ottoman-looking dude
- bald male in orange clothing (Liang the Surveyor? Religion based governor?)
- Shang Yu from Disney's Mulan (the castellan?)
- African female(?) (Amani the diplomat)
- Troubadour/Merchant type of figure (gender is difficult to make out) (Raina the Financier?)

 

[PhilBowles]

I'd like to add, that depending on the civ you play, you need 1200 - 1400 points to finish (barren "Africa" less, fertile Egypt & Babylon more). At any phase of the game you can have at most 9 cities worth 5 points each. So maximum points from cities altogether count the same as ONE cheap tech: Cloth Making & Pottery 45 points, (followed by Drama+Poetry & Music 60, Metal Working & Astronomy 80 ... to the most expensive ones: Democracy 200, Philosophy 240 and Theology 250 ... sounds familiar?).

Because of this you can have Civil Wars split your empire and other catastrophes shreddering your city and people tokens now and than ... you can always recover AND still prevail (even after your civ is completely annihilated & regenerated) ... the ability to win is highly concentrated in the techs or civics(?) ... well, those were never distinguished really ...

It's very difficult to get to expensive techs without 9 cities or close to it for multiple turns, however. Catastrophes are as devastating as they are because they set you back too far to get multiples of valuable resources to trade.

 

[Cerilis]

We're getting a new City Panel UI anyway.

I hope the white filling is just a placeholder and will become green/orange for food/production later. D:

 

[Leyrann]

I hope the white filling is just a placeholder and will become green/orange for food/production later. D:

To be fair, it kind of reminded me of CQUI: A lot of stuff which you have to learn before you can play with it.

(yes, I indeed dislike CQUI and vastly prefer the base game UI)

 

[AvianBritish]

At 0:29 it looks like there is some sort of new "reef" tile in the sea; it doesn't appear that you can build on it with boats (to at least they've improved everything with boats apart from this tile) and it yields +1 Production. I can't see on the map that they've met Auckland [yet] to get their bonus for it.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

At 0:29 it looks like there is some sort of new "reef" tile in the sea; it doesn't appear that you can build on it with boats (to at least they've improved everything with boats apart from this tile) and it yields +1 Production. I can't see on the map that they've met Auckland [yet] to get their bonus for it.

It's probably the turtles.

 

[Cerilis]

Mhrm, it looks more like the reefs from beyond earth. Maybe they want to make sea settling more popular?

 

[sonicmyst]

Temple of Artemis confirmed.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Temple of Artemis confirmed.
View attachment 482247

I would have sworn that was the statue of zeus