The art of civilization design - less is more

[Arent11]

So, recently I reverted to playing Skyrim. And I wondered why that was. I do think civ 6 is a decent game. So. why do I prefer playing an old game for the literally 1000th time to a relatively new game I usually love & cherish since civ 1?

After a little bit of thinking I suspect I got the answer. It's the RPGish feel. The basic civ game is ok, but there is that RPGish feel missing that makes me adore & care for my own little civ, name the cities, set out with my caravel to explore the world, trade tech with other civs. In Skyrim I can play a warrior, a mage, a craftsman. I can play the game in any way I see fit. Civ 6 is much more restrictive:

(1) There is no custom civ option, I have to delve into the files myself.
(2) The existing civs usually don't follow a certain theme. There are no pure warrior civs, pure science civs, purely religious civs etc. I have to create them myself.
(3) The traits are often unbalanced, ignored by players or simply weird. Some are highly conditional & easily exploited
(4) Just one example: As Australia, I literally paid other players gold so that they would repeatedly declare war on me so I would get additional production. Such conditional, highly specific & exploitative traits are simply bad design
(5) Civs have 4 traits. In fact, often they even have some minor traits that no one uses or notices. Which means many civs have 6+ traits.
(6) Many of these traits seem to be fillers that the designers came up with to "fill" the spot

IMHO less is more. It would be better to have just 2 traits that clearly define the character of a civ, form a common theme & are actually strong than 6+ traits that add a little culture here and a little faith there.

So, what do you think?

 

[Naokaukodem]

It is the era of little tweaks, since Civ4 (3?), just like wonders being not so powerful anymore. They call it minmaxing, I call it useless, boring, mean.

All in all there's just a couple of civs that are meaningful to pick up, like Rome with free monuments + roads, Legions (that don't require Iron except for the tech boost), Russia with extended territory (in Civ6 territory expands horribly slowly, it's a real purge, to the point considering ICS is an option ; by the time your cities would have full territory, the game is ended or soon to be for your capital and a couple of conquered cities, because AI doesn't seem to have this problem strangely), and... well, a couple of civs. Civs like France (wow, one more spy what a deal, more confident with the schizophrenic behavior of all AIs that will end up hating you anyway, a garbage UU and so on) and pretty much every other civ like the one which have bonuses towards early wonder construction (isn't that France also ? - well I'm french lol), are utterly useless in Deity. Can't too much speak for other in the moment, but for sure none of the others catched my attention significantly, so that I probably could say they are meaningless also.

Oh yes, I remember playing as Arabia and rolling over a Deity game, but I couldn't say if it's because of the replacement of universities unique building that seemed powerful on the paper (eventhough i couldn't really compare with the normal university), or just because i got lucky that noone were going science. (Ais tend to emphasis religion early much more than science, and can never catch up before you send your hydroponics in the space)

 

[Morningcalm]

Many civs are unfortunately just Molotov cocktails of various numerical bonuses lacking any truly unique abilities on the scale of Civ V's Venice or Austria; hopefully in the expansion we will see bolder designs (i.e. singular civ abilities like the ability to take over cities without the +1 to X, +2 to Y, +50% to Z sort of civ formulas currently in-game). Currently, some civs have coolish designs, but not too many.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Actually I believed once that having like 4-5 choices of truly different civs / gameplays could do the trick (civs - cs - barbs - huntergatherers - pastoral, something like that) but that ideas was very unpopular as people seemed to prefer more "tweaks". (to "expand replayability" so to speak)

 

[Sostratus]

Unlike Civ 5, Civ 6 has a lot of emphasis on how you use your tiles- namely improvement, district and wonder layout. A really easy way to spice up how civs play is by giving them a unique district with special adjacency or other terrain rules (see the Hansa) or a unique improvement that breaks up what you would normally want to do (because of adjacency bonuses, the outback station in desert, for example.)

Any major change to the basic calculus of how players normally work through laying out their empires really helps them think through each game rather than settle into patterns. I think many unique districts and improvements need a little spicing up, or at least revisiting.

Restrictions are also very fun. Even if the advantage attached is numerical (Like Kongo) simply having a restriction on what you can do really changes how you play. Plus, Kongo has a terrain dependent Neighborhood, which makes you think before you chop all those woods.

If we are a little creative with it, we can get a lot of playstyle mileage out of just those three things without needing to change the basic mechanics too much.

To the OP's point 3) and 7): The DLC civs all clearly have a much stronger package than the vanilla civs. I would expect, in expansions, for the new civs to be more focused than the older ones. I agree that they need to revisit the traits that just feel inconsequential. Namely, decide just how much "power" each civ's traits should have, since some (Aztec, Australia) are just totally overloaded compared to others (Norway, France.)

 

[Arent11]

To the OP's point 3) and 7)

I changed point 7 to point 6 because I got the numbering mixed up (Actually had only 6 points & jumped from 5 to 7).

 

[Ryika]

I think the problem isn't how many parts there are to the traits, the problem is how bland and unimaginative they are, which it itself might be caused by the amount of Civilizations that exist. I think having 1 main Trait that actually changes how the game works and then a few smaller ones that accentuate the gameplay would be just fine, but that main trait that has impact on the game just needs to be there, and currently it just isn't.

It's all numbers bonuses for so many Civs, sometimes it tips the balance towards constructing specific things a bit earlier, or maybe waging war at an otherwise undesirable point during the game in the very best case, but overall nothing that encourages - or even forces - you to play differently in the greater picture.

If you look at how well Endless Legend has managed to differentiate its Civilizations, or how Stellaris has made it so the "traits" you choose for your Race close certain paths and open up new ones, then the bonuses in Civ just feel basic and utterly unimaginative.

 

[Arent11]

I think the problem isn't how many parts there are to the traits, the problem is how bland and unimaginative they are, which it itself might be caused by the amount of Civilizations that exist. I think having 1 main Trait that actually changes how the game works and then a few smaller ones that accentuate the gameplay would be just fine, but that main trait that has impact on the game just needs to be there, and currently it just isn't.

Well, let's take a random civ. For example Norway:

Knarr: Able to traverse oceans earlier, naval units heal in neutral territory, units can embark/disembark without movement costs
Thunderbolt: Coastal raiding, 50% production for naval melee units, Longships
Berserkers: Stronger attack, weaker defense
Stave Church: production for each water based ressource

First of all, you notice there are a lot of smaller & larger traits. The major point, of course, is the 50% production bonus for ships.
The coastal raiding, healing, embarking is all extremely situational & doesn't really add to the civ. If you had no coastal raiding it might make the civ even more interesting, since big landing operations/invasions are one of the most fun parts of Civ & shouldn't be abstracted away especially if you have a sea based civ.
The Berserkers are too situational.
The stave church is downright weird. It forces me to get a religion/invest in faith to gain production. And the production boost is not so great that I would seriously
consider making such an extreme gamble in the early game. After all, you can also miss those prophets(!)

-> Altogether, if you would reduce the traits to just: (1) 50% ship production bonus and (2) able to traverse oceans earlier the civ would basically stay the same. Sure, coastal raids are handy on archipelago maps, but they take away the fun of invading & fighting on the beaches