This is a forum that Firaxis staff clearly read. That seems to make it a good place to rally voices of dissatisfaction. You believe criticism is unhelpful? Suffering in stolid silence sure isn't the solution.
We don't need to know why Firaxis' haven't improved airpower. We just need to agree that it's not unreasonable that after these years of Civ VI enjoying success for fans to expect a quality pass that addresses a major area of letdown. We just need to agree that there's something unacceptable about it. If people can agree to that, rather than just dismiss it as a dead horse getting beaten (and people literally said that) and suggest that complaints be relegated to a subforum (also said), then away goes polarization.
What constructive discussion is there other than expressing the desire for improvement? Modding? Good for some, but not all players use them. I don't use mods unless they have fairly cosmetic impacts on the game, and it's for the simple reason that game elements are interconnected. Change one, and you must do a holistic balancing pass on the others. I don't expect that from mods. Should I?
I never said criticism was unhelpful. Honestly, maybe I'm just not being clear enough
People, in general, don't disagree that the AI needs work. Which means that when it comes up as often as it does, people are going to tire of it being raised. Attention is a finite resource, and there are other things that can be raised as well. Plus, with repetition, constructive discourse is often extinguished. Which is when it becomes a dead horse being beaten. People already agree that the AI needs work. What people disagree on is where that comes in the long list of priorities most games developers have in supporting their products.
If folks have trouble accepting the completely fair difference in opinion on said priorities, then that's on them. Firaxis aren't giving me everything I specifically want with the game either, but I don't make threads about it every time there's an update. Should I? Is that a constructive approach? You don't seem to realise, but there have been a
lot of threads about the AI recently, and a lot of them involve the same posters, and a lot of them involve the same arguments. To and from the same posters. If the reason for all of this is because you (personally) haven't seen enough agreement that the AI needs work? Well hopefully I can convince you otherwise. The AI needs work. I agree with you on that. We disagree on the relative priority given other things in the game, and we'll likely never agree on those kinds of particulars. Do you agree with that?
I'd argue that those 'competitive' offerings don't really offer Firaxis any incentive to increase difficulty settings: Paradox markets most of what they sell as 'grand strategy games', and for the most part these do not offer technically challenging gameplay or even have defined victory states. Their hook lies in giving the player the ability to make different strategic decisions that send their session in different directions, but once you have a basic grip of the mechanics it is all but impossible to actually "lose" the game, as oppose to being thwarted in meeting personal objectives. There's also far too much randomness introduced by their event systems for a 'pure' strategy game.
Stellaris is the only true 4x I'm aware of from Paradox, and AI woes aside that too is set at a relatively low difficulty by default. The other popular 4x offerings I'm aware of are the Endless games, which are easier than Civ VI. It seems that the people who are buying 4xes these days want games that play as sandboxes rather than as strategically challenging experiences - and to some way that's a reversion to Civ's own roots. From the start Civ has had an arcade-style high score table, earlier games had a detailed timeline feature at the end of the game, it had the in-game reward of the palace that had no gameplay function but was simply an achievement to complete, and the date stamps on turn numbers were a good way to set personal goals such as "research gunpowder before 1AD". They also famously introduced the "One More Turn" phenomenon to allow play beyond the point of victory - and this was widely-enough used to become a meme, whereas today the One More Turn option is used so rarely that Firaxis didn't even bother coding the victory conditions to continue after 2050 in Civ V (in the event that you hadn't won, or had completed one victory but wanted to complete others).
A lot of people started with Civ IV, which made a more serious effort than earlier entries to be a challenging strategy game, so it's easy to forget that the sandbox approach of Civ VI is actually closer to the originals - though the early games had far more meaningful difficulty level scaling (never mind that games in that era tended, on average, to be more challenging than modern games). Across the series as a whole, I see Civ IV as the anomaly more than the newer games - for all that for me personally, I'd rather have a challenge than a sandbox in a modern Civ game and find Civ VI unsatisfying in that regard.
Once again, I think that's a completely fair analysis. I come at this from the other side of the coin, so, predictably, I find Civ. VI satisfying in general.
Historically, I've been playing on and off since the original, but I think I came to both III and IV too late. I bounced hard off of Civ. III, can't really remember why, and by then CiV was already around the corner, which I played a lot of (and then Beyond Earth on top of that). I have IV, but I basically haven't played it. Given my comfort with 1UPT and the other things I've gotten used to with V and VI, I don't think I would without excessive modding (and weirdly as a modder myself, I generally avoid gameplay-altering mods unless they're total conversions I have an appeal for).
It would be a good exercise though, for Firaxis (or anyone interested) to run a design analysis against victory states in, say, the original Civ. vs. Civ VI, and work out pacing, how victory types can snowball, how forgiving it can be, and so on. I know returning to the original (which I do occasionally, mainly for the palace, but sometimes just for nostalgia) often results in frustration because the economy alone is very carefully-balanced in that game. I prefer a bit more forgiveness in my game mechanics these days, and I honestly don't know at the moment (without giving myself some time to think on it) if it's more personal preference, or more that I think it's good design.
I mean, I'll always support more options, including any number of harder or less forgiving game modes. But obviously the developers don't have the luxury to implement endless variations of them (which is why I got into games modding in the first place, with RTS games, years ago).
