So what do you feel is still broken?

[Wyvern_Parade]

The way railroads have been implemented is so half-hearted and disappointing.

I forgot to mention this in my last post because railroads are so lame I forgot they even exist in the game. They need a button to automatically build a railroad between 2 cities, and something like each city connected to the capital by rail gets +5 food and production.

Another one that's not "broken" but a pet peeve of mine is that tourism isn't really tied to anything else in the game. Being culturally dominant over a civ should give you some percentage of their gold income and double loyalty pressure from your cities on theirs.

 

[AntSou]

nother one that's not "broken" but a pet peeve of mine is that tourism isn't really tied to anything else in the game. Being culturally dominant over a civ should give you some percentage of their gold income and double loyalty pressure from your cities on theirs.

No, I don't like this. It's just Domination in disguise like in Civ IV.

 

[Pietato]

Why can my city with 18 farms and +30 bonus food not send any food to its neighbour, who is in a drought and starving?

 

[Siptah]

There are a lot of things that I feel are wrong in the game that could and should be changed. I doubt we see much changes, however.

• resource trade and trade routes being two different systems
• unbalanced unit lines like spearmen
• chopping vs. improving imbalance that kind of ruins the game for me on harder difficulties
• specialists/large cities being too weak which kind of ruins the game for me on harder difficulties
• DV/world congress
• clickfests like agenda approval/disapproval messages, unnecessary trade spam, no auto-renewal of trade deals/friendships/alliances
• loyalty from newly conquered cities
• governor micromanagement orgy
• wrong information for production or movement in the UI
• earlier eras way too short, later eras way too long when it comes to how much actual time you spent in them
• it's almost impossible to run a deficit past classical era, declining an interesting economy mechanic. Upkeep for buildings and units should be increased significantly, maybe just short of a magnitude in the late game. Small cities should cost you money - no population or harbor/commercial buildings: gold yields should barely be sufficient.
• foreign tourists could generate money or culture or anything really
• agendas: it's pure roulette in many cases and your incentive to change your approach in order to fulfill them is rather small
• happiness/unhappiness has some impact, but I think unhappiness should be much more penalizing
• ability to send resources (including production!) from one city to another. Wonders could/should be nation- or region-wide projects
• less magically appearing out of thin air resources

Admittedly, many of them might be personal choice. The problem with all of them: FXS seems to think that more civs are the solution to all problems the game has.

 

[oSiyeza]

The AI still (as far as I can tell) never razes cities

To be fair, this is not a problem. The AI should not raze cities, as is inherently a bad decision in game. There are cero advantages on razing a city you can keep. Maybe this is a design or balance issue, but not an AI one.

Here are the things that still need in my opinion to be fixed:

• The AI not using air force and navy effectively.
• The AI seems to never repair its defenses in my games.
• The AI still is not capable of using air carriers properly (though it is possible some of this was tuned in the last patch, I have not seen it in my last game).
• The AI lacks basic diplomatic interactions, and feedbacks such as: “you are trading with my enemy, I dislike you more now”, "you are attacking my city state, we are over", and so on.
• WC and Religious combat. Simply not working as game mechanics.
• Disasters need to have separated options for intensity and frequency.
• Visual glitches with the position of the icons of the units, and where the units are.
• Diplomacy needs to have more options to be a functional mechanic (Give/exchange tech, declare war to, make peace with, suggest to attack this city, separation of air/sea/land/civil borders, give or trade units, share map of the territory ...)
• Espionage needs to have more options to be a functional mechanic (sabotage airports/seaports/nuclear silos, block canals, sabotage engine of modern military units, reveal position of military units, ...)
  
• When waiting for your turn, the game allows you to click on leader and government options, as if you could do something while you wait. You can’t, and you should not be able to misclick into a screen where you can’t see any info or interact in any way, and lag the game in the process.
• Religious and settler lenses are damaging to the eye, and literally make the game unplayable if you have any problem with color vision (I know).
• Trade routes still not show the actual route your trader will take.
• Trade routes preview makes impossible to see if there is already a road in place.
• Railroads are still a displayed incorrectly.
• Religious units don’t highlight holy sites where they can heal.
• Some basic features, available in previous games and featured years ago in mods are still not available, such as: use the current time of day in the day/night cycle, having a global relationship panel, or a demographics panel.
• Still don’t have a quick replay feature to see the world evolution after finishing the game.
• The civilopedia, still lacks info and has a lackluster design.
• Infantry still requires oil instead of niter.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

Simon the Colombian is one of the most broken Civs I think I have ever played!
They are so strong and they decide that you can promote a unit without loss of movement??
This is my first game with them and it is fun but I doubt I use them very often.

 

[playshogi]

I think teleporting after going through Bermuda Triangle is a horrible effect. No one on the design team had any courage to say "That's stupid"? Worse than GDR. Can the effect be modded out?

 

[kb27787]

Simon the Colombian is one of the most broken Civs I think I have ever played!
They are so strong and they decide that you can promote a unit without loss of movement??
This is my first game with them and it is fun but I doubt I use them very often.

I've even tried playing them peacefully and they are still very much broken... free 2 era score each era? (1 from GG and another from killing a barb unit with that GG in range). Hacienda triangles esp. on grasslands man... (even better if you can get a plantation in range) better than apprenticeship mines--same production and + 3 housing and gold on top of that. Builders and settlers with 3 move at the beginning of the game. Even apostles and rock bands can promote and move! That epic music as well!

Nerf the hacienda to 0.5 housing and I feel it would still be OP.

Aside from that, AI still paying through the nose for diplo favor (too abusable!)

 

[yung.carl.jung]

The AI still isn't trying to win. Even if they are, they never finish before t300. That is the thing I care about the most.

Infinite City Spam, even if it an intended feature.

Civ 6 is not an ICS, it never was. A game where building more than 20 settlers makes you win slower can, by definition, not be an ICS game. Civ 6 counters ICS very well with escalating settler cost.

3: Nerf wide. No, boosting tall or having the occaisonal tall specialist civ (like the maya) isn't enough. They need to nerf wide, becuase as is, it's always the optimal meta to conquer and city spam as much as possible and never have to bother actually building anything. And I hate that the pressure to do so is always there. This is the major reason I still go back to civ 5 sometimes.

This makes absolutely zero sense to me. Nerfing wide will simply mean that playing wide is worse or equal than playing tall, in which case no one would ever play wide. It also wouldn't make tall games more fun or intricate or strategic, it would simply dull the game down even more. Tall needs some actual mechanics to work in its favor, and those are largely already in place and simply need adjustment.

Playing wide needs inherently more work on the side of the player (micromanagement) comes with inherent risks (more territory you need to defend, more people offended, settlers can get stolen, wars can be lost). Why would I ever play wide if it isn't rewarded?

The problem with Civ 6 is that tall play is not rewarded or incentivized in any way whatsoever. I don't understand how you can't see that, as a tall player. Simply buffing amenities, food/growth/farms, housing and specialists would allow small empires to possibly compete with bigger ones, if incentives are used correctly. The articifical restrictions that Civ 5 had on wide empires not only almost killed an entire playstyle, it also made the metagame incredibly boring and it was also highly unrealistic.

Rather than having the AI cheat even harder (which I doubt would be enjoyable), I'd rather see some kind of "mercy rule" system that allows you to win earlier instead of having to slog through another 10 hours of pointless gameplay.

I don't get this either.. Just stop playing then if you know you've already won. Or do as many other people and play for fast win times.

I think what would make the game enormously better would be comeback mechanics. Why are there so few mechanics (like heroic ages!) which help out those that are further behind? This is something that both the AI and the player could use, and they work quite well already. Heroic Aging is one of the strongest strategies if it can be pulled off.

Russia's ability for TR is also one other example. It is a fantastic comeback mechanic, but absolutely useless if you're ahead. Tech stealing in Civ 5 was similiar. Those kind of concepts definitely work and make the game more interesting.

This is minor but I also think that isaac newton and Albert einstein need nerfs and changes. They are extremely powerful, and their boosts to universities stack with the rationalism card. I would firstly put albert's bonus onto research labs. I would also look at reducing the boost on newton to 1, and einstein to 2.
At a minimum, 1/2/3 for hypatia/newton/einstein. Or perhaps they give a bonus, but only to that particular campus or uni.

I can't help but feel they are just too centralizing in games. 20 science from a university building before CS boosts is completely over the top.

Before that I'd prefer to see a buff to the less fortunate GP. Some are just inexplicably horrible.

Compare Einstein to DaVinci with his 1 (!!) culture for Workshops. Or Science for Artifacts. There are so many GP that are pure duds and you simply hate getting them, which should never be the case. What were they smoking?

But then again this mechanic might actually need more of a rework than a simple change in my personal opinion. Bring us back Great People improvements!

On higher difficulties, there is only an illusion of choice. There are clearly optimal paths, which you actually have to take if you want to win. So there's no effective choice.

and what is that path? most people can't even agree on whether building scout, warrior, slinger or builder first is a good idea on deity, neither on which governor to promote when. I've played a lot of Deity, but with every game the optimal path for SV seems to change pretty drastically. upon release no one would've said, for example, that culture is as important to going to space as science is, but it's pretty much agreed upon now.

Civ 6 has much more strategic depth than Civ 5, where you could always just go Tradition and everything was easy, you had no real downside at all. I get the feeling some players want this back.

 

[MrRadar]

User Interface as a whole. It is still not for the users. All major problems are still the same as 3+ years ago. Terrible deal screen, impenetrable reports, misleading traderoutes screen, etc.
Pathing problems. If you want an embarked unit to navigate narrow and winding straits, you must babysit them tile by tile or they'll disembark at the first opportunity. Units still cannot pass with <1mp left on RR and modern roads.
Time waste while fighting the UI is as bad as before.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Why can my city with 18 farms and +30 bonus food not send any food to its neighbour, who is in a drought and starving?

This is a sub-set of Broken Trade System, because with a sea Trade Connection between cities from the Ancient Era, or a railroad connection from the Industrial Era, the 'food radius' should be every point reached by the railroad or sea trade route: that's why in 1900 CE you could get beef from Chicago or wheat from the Dakotas anywhere in the USA, or in 400 BCE Athens got most of its grain from Greek cities/colonies on the Black Sea coast and in 200 CE Rome got most of its food from Egypt or North Africa.
The amounts of food available from 'internal trade routes' is ridiculously small now, and doesn't begin to address the issues with the Trade system, especially since there is no 'trade' in Food between Civs: compare that to both the massive export of grain from the USA or Canada to everywhere in the 20th century and, conversely, the Balance of Payments problem the USSR had because its broken agricultural system required it to buy grain by the 1000s of tons every year for over 50 years.

Civ VI is missing so much, and we gamers are missing so many things we should be able to do, problems we should be facing that don't include Fantasy Soothsayers or teleportational sea tiles . . .

 

[dshirk]

I wept when I saw this today and thought wouldn't it be nice if we gave them a nice list of what mechanics clearly still have issues.
View attachment 556919

I would love the save for this situation if you can message me the file. Thanks!

 

[oSiyeza]

This makes absolutely zero sense to me. Nerfing wide will simply mean that playing wide is worse or equal than playing tall, in which case no one would ever play wide. It also wouldn't make tall games more fun or intricate or strategic, it would simply dull the game down even more. Tall needs some actual mechanics to work in its favor, and those are largely already in place and simply need adjustment.

Agree, in the second part. disagree a bit in the first.

The game needs to have a maximun number of cities before becoming suboptimal. Not only cause this is how empires work. As almost all succesful empires failed symply because they were too big to be maneagable (and other factors)... but because a more practical thing. Managing 100 cities is just a chore. Having as much cities as posible cannot be the optimal way to play, cause it is a tedious way to play (for many people). The game already does that with a soft limit scaling the prize of settlers. And I dont want to actually restrict the gameplay, but it does not succed on limiting the number of cities. My solution besides buffing tall would be:

Keep an option when you conquer a city to keep it as a vasal, or a pupet city. So it works for you an autopilot, without the need of micromanaging. Optional, of course, as some players would actually like to live in manage hell.

In addition to this of course you have to buff tall, an idea I already posted somewhere:

Allow for really big cities (megalopolies), with more population, an extra ring of land, more districts, and scale a bit city output by population (and trade).

That is it, there is no need for more caps or punishing wide. Make tall more viable, and make the posibility to keep conquered cities as puppets, so you can still go for a domination victory without having one million cities to manage.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Civilization IV I don't think anyone talked about tall vs wide, instead it was thing like cottage economy vs specialist economy vs hammer economy and so on which may indicate its strength over civilization V and VI, one clear way is in civilization IV you had to know when to expand and when to build up what you have which is very different from tall vs wide and even consider its rather simple economy, it felt it was much less clear how to build a good economy in IV than in V and VI in which it is quit straightforward, which is why all these economic terms was a thing in IV but I have not seen anything like that being really talked about in V and VI.

 

[UWHabs]

This makes absolutely zero sense to me. Nerfing wide will simply mean that playing wide is worse or equal than playing tall, in which case no one would ever play wide. It also wouldn't make tall games more fun or intricate or strategic, it would simply dull the game down even more. Tall needs some actual mechanics to work in its favor, and those are largely already in place and simply need adjustment.

Playing wide needs inherently more work on the side of the player (micromanagement) comes with inherent risks (more territory you need to defend, more people offended, settlers can get stolen, wars can be lost). Why would I ever play wide if it isn't rewarded?

The problem with Civ 6 is that tall play is not rewarded or incentivized in any way whatsoever. I don't understand how you can't see that, as a tall player. Simply buffing amenities, food/growth/farms, housing and specialists would allow small empires to possibly compete with bigger ones, if incentives are used correctly. The articifical restrictions that Civ 5 had on wide empires not only almost killed an entire playstyle, it also made the metagame incredibly boring and it was also highly unrealistic.

Yes, I like big cities because they make a beautiful empire, not because they're really valuable to me. Like my current game, I've built up a gorgeous core - my biggest cities are all size 20+, and just hooked up some nice +14-+18 coal plants, and are just set to be behemoths.

But what good is it all, really? They only have 4-5 districts each (partly because I hate replacing a +8 food tile with a puny holy site or so), so in reality, all that excess population is doing is just costing me amenities, which probably mean that these cities are a net negative, because that last population point sitting in a campus giving me a measly 2 science might be costing me 5% to all the yields in the city.

Give me a reason to grow tall, though. Make research labs give +1 science per population, or give me a policy card or gradual bonus to specialists working in buildings, or extra yields for growing the city to this size, and now you have a natural boost to tall play. Just getting +1 science/+1 culture from Pingala being in the city doesn't really cut it enough for tall play.

I don't get this either.. Just stop playing then if you know you've already won. Or do as many other people and play for fast win times.

I think what would make the game enormously better would be comeback mechanics. Why are there so few mechanics (like heroic ages!) which help out those that are further behind? This is something that both the AI and the player could use, and they work quite well already. Heroic Aging is one of the strongest strategies if it can be pulled off.

Russia's ability for TR is also one other example. It is a fantastic comeback mechanic, but absolutely useless if you're ahead. Tech stealing in Civ 5 was similiar. Those kind of concepts definitely work and make the game more interesting.

I do agree that some sort of increased comeback mechanics would help, and the current dark->heroic age is a minor way that helps. I think the bigger change that would help would be to reverse pillage rewards. Right now, it's stupidly set up so that if I'm in first place, I can go to war with a neighbour 3 eras behind me, pillage their land as I conquer them, and I get massive rewards. Pillaging should be based on the tech level of your opponent, so that if you go invade a more advanced neighbour, you can get some useful rewards out of it, but if you're pillaging someone behind you in science, that really doesn't help you.

Although on the flipside, that would also draw out games a little bit. I do think sometimes the game would be better if instead of having the current VC, if you're way ahead of your neighbours, the game can start up a "victory emergency", where basically you have 30 turns to end the game. You'd probably need that to be an optional game mode, since it would kind of suck to somehow lose that and cause a loss for me in the game, but it might be interesting to essentially have to build up your civ enough that you essentially declare yourself the victor unless if the AI can come at you to stop you, gaining large bonuses to do so. I mean, maybe in my current game it's "safer" to just tech out to space, but it might give a fun alternative to the late game rather than just hitting end turn as you race through the end of the tech tree, or use your modern armor to roll over your neighbours knights.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

The game needs to have a maximun number of cities before becoming suboptimal

I agree with pretty much everything in your post

The part quoted already somewhat in the game, though it is hard to see. When we're talking about Space Victory/Cultural victory (I suspect these 2 are the most common ones?) then these are mostly won by yields, like culture, science and centralized production. Yields are (slightly) affected by Amenities. In the early game, this is insignificant, so selling off your luxes is pretty much always correct, even if it's your only copy. In the later game however, a 5% or 10% boost can be massive, and so after t150 (like ~50 turns before you win) it is extremely effective to focus on amenities in order to get increased yields. Having many cities, especially ones without luxes (more often the case in wide, as opposed to tall!) is a drain on luxury. Warmonger penalties (if you're expanding violently) is also a problem. Cities not producing global yields (production, food and housing are local, science and culture for ex. are global) until they have a district is a huge nerf to tall playstyles in comparison to Civ 5, for example. There are a lot of mechanisms that discourage you from ICSing in Civ 6, they're just hard to see.

But I do agree with your central premise -- It should not be optimal to have 100 cities, simply for practical reasons. I do not want to manage 100 cities, ever. You propose some good solutions. A buff to the amenity system could also be another solution!

Give me a reason to grow tall, though.

We both want the same thing The first thing I said was, after all, that Tall play needs incentives. These can come in the form of population being worthwhile, or amenities having more impact, or housing having a positive effect on growth, or specialists being stronger. Or all of those! There should be a good reason to play tall, aside from "it's easier".

Victory Emergency sounds really cool and something like that is needed. When you have built your spaceport, the AI should absolutely do anything in their power to kill you, or try to win themselves!

 

[OmegaDestroyer]

The idiotic AI making demands on the player. Does anybody ever comply? I did it once on a lark and didn't notice it ever improving relations.

 

[Pfeffersack]

The idiotic AI making demands on the player. Does anybody ever comply? I did it once on a lark and didn't notice it ever improving relations.

I tried complying after last thursdays patch and noticed a +5 relation modifier. Refusal has no consequence.

 

[ezzlar]

If you build a lot of Industrial Zones you can get the Renaissance Great Engineer that makes your IZ to culture bomb when completed.

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

If I could only make one change I think it would be to move GP points back to specialists and away from buildings since this would instantly make farms and population more important but without putting any pointless restrictions on expansion.