The mid to end game of Civ6 is so bland

[c4c6]

Ed Beach is not satisfied with end game either. Future expansions will help.

Yes, me too! I was mightily relieved when I heard on the presentation of the Nubian DLC, that he is currently at a board game convention ...

 

[earlc]

I agree with KayAU regarding what is, to me, the biggest issue:

This is a common problem with 4X strategy games. In the beginning, you make fewer, but more important decisions. At the end, you are making many more, but far less important decisions. I think it was a bit better in Civ 5, for a couple of reasons:

• I could play tall, which meant I didn't have to spend 90% of my time making mundane decisions about production queues. These are interesting in the beginning, when you just have a few cities and every decision matters, but a chore at the end. I actually prefer clicking "End turn" over and over to doing chores.
• There were some new elements introduced in the late game, mostly related to the World Congress, ideology and cooperative projects.

There are different ways of dealing with this, but in general, I feel the best approach is to minimize the micro-management, and introduce something new to do instead. Reducing the micro-management can be done by making tall viable, or by at least introducing some limitation to how many cities you can effectively manage directly in some way. This should be done anyway, in my opinion. Another way would be to enable some degree of automation (production queues, governors), or add UI features to manage larger empires. Improving performance and turn times would also improve the experience.

As for adding new things to do in the late game, it's not hard to come up with ideas. Expanded diplomacy, expanded espionage, world congress/UN/planetary council, end game crisis, cooperative projects, lunar/orbital expansion, information warfare, economic warfare, there are many possibilities. It would be especially good if these new elements could potentially change the standings of each civ, without making what happened earlier irrelevant. It is not impossible to achieve that. Elements like spies are not necessarily tied to the other strengths of the empires. The way ideology worked in Civ 5, you could have a bunch of other players choose a different ideology, influencing your people, and soon your empire was unhappy. The blooming of the planet in SMAC changed the map, and could disadvantage more technologically advanced factions. Just to mention some examples.

The worst part is being forced to keep dealing with old game mechanics that no longer mean much of anything in the modern era. No, I don't care what x conquered city with low production in the middle of nowhere is producing while I'm going for a space race, nor upgrading pointless hinterland cities. I don't care what what the swarms of missionaries and inquisitors are doing outside a religious victory. I don't even care that much about upgrading and moving units, though that can't disappear. But certain end-game nuisances could definitely be cleared up in favor of the introduction of more interesting mechanics. Being able to automate city production or just have them automatically loop district projects would be a start.

I also agree with the conversation regarding mechanics that feel like setbacks, particularly if there's little way to predict or avoid them, or if they're not evenly spread across the world. The main exclusion to this, to me, would be the civil war/revolution concept, which I think is a great way to balance the latter half of the domination game - as it is now, once you conquer a couple civs it becomes pretty clear that you're going to win and no one can stop you, even on higher difficulties. "Gamey" setbacks should be avoided completely, and they need to remove the "we're winning, they fear us!" thing. I mean, that sort of thing could instead complement a United Nations type game, where other civs dislike you if they feel you're trying to dominate world politics or doing too many foreign interventions. In a cultural victory game, a globalization concept where leaders of other civs begin to resent you as your culture starts to dominate their own. Science, maybe something to do with hoarding resources or having unsustainable practices.

That said, climate change would also be a good setback to reintroduce and expand upon, and could tie into the united nations and world opinion as well.

 

[UWHabs]

Even just a way to reduce micromanagement late in the game would be a huge boost. Being able to designate a region of cities as a separate "state" and put them under AI control would go a long way to speeding up the late game.

But yeah, the key is that late in the game, every change you make has such small impact. When your civ is making 300 science per turn, it's hard to get excited about an extra 10 science from building a research lab, and that's only if you're running the double science policy. But early game when your civ is only making 8 science per turn, the extra 2 you get from a library is huge. Heck, even just deciding where to place things - if you can get a +4 campus early that can be a massive boost, but late in the game, I really don't care about that +4 campus if it's going to remove a mine or another useful tile.

 

[Sherlock]

We need to be able to create a production queue to help with mid/late game tedium.

Also, can you set a city to produce gold, science, culture, etc? If not, why not? That's a basic thing.

 

[Archon_Wing]

We need to be able to create a production queue to help with mid/late game tedium.

Also, can you set a city to produce gold, science, culture, etc? If not, why not? That's a basic thing.

District projects do that. Campus projects generate science, commercial hub ones generate gold, theater square generate culture, others generate gold and it is generated per turn even if it isn't finished. When it does it gives great people points.

We really should be able to loop it.

 

[UWHabs]

You mean like puppet states in Civ5?

Yeah, but would be nice to have it not just for captured cities. Like, if I settle a new continent with 3-4 cities, would be nice to just turn them over to the auto-governor for building everything. Essentially set up a mini colony or state for everything but my biggest 4-5 cities.

 

[Japper007]

I like the idea of Civil Wars and unrest, it's essentially what EU4 does as well; even if you become the major power in the world, and no one can really stop you anymore, the game still remains challenging as you have to pace yourself in conquests to avoid overextension and seperatist revolts. I'd suggest tying Tourism and Religion into this, i.e. you have to culturally intigrate the new population. It would make these mechanics tie more into the game as well, since they now don't matter much besides their associated victories.

 

[HEF]

Interesting...

For a while, believed that the real draw to Sid Meier's Civilization V, Beyond Earth Rising Tide & VI was how effective the player can emotionally charm or unsettle the roster of animated world or colony leaders and at the same time achieve specific victory conditions.

The direction of discussion in this thread gives this overwhelming impression that the Civilization game series should include mundane functions similar to that of a place of employment just because a handful of vocal detractors have a short attention span.

 

[Stalker0]

To me it's 2 factors.

One is what most have described, there's too little to do in the late game.

The second is that even with the balance patches late game things just take too long to build, which makes hammers the king of resources and removes the joy of getting newer and cooler things on a fairly frequent basis

 

[Stilgar08]

What are you comparing? CiV complete? CiV Vanilla was an utter mess and compared to that, CiVI is quite good... I agree lots of the complete-stuff is missing currently but it took CiV many years to get into a playable state. UN was part of an expansion too, AFAIK. Nevertheless you're right and there's only one conclusion to be made: Don't buy vanillas, wait for the completes...

I didn't buy CiV before the second expansion came out and I was right.

I was hyped for CiVI and still love the game regardless of all the current flaws. But this will be the last Civ Vanilla I bought...

 

[EgonSpengler]

Crafting the ending of anything is extremely difficult. The bigger the project, the harder it is. Think about how many television shows ended really well, really satisfyingly.

I don't think I've finished a game of Civ VI all year. Most of them, I either lose early or I reach a point where I know I'm going to win by about halfway, turn 250, and then I quit because I know the game will do nothing to change anything, to challenge me. The AI will turtle - even though there's nothing to be gained by doing that - and there are no random events.

 

[Karpius]

My suggestion to everyone would be to create your own challenges within the game. Obviously, most folks have figured out all the ins and outs of this game to the Nth degree to the point that they easily beat any of the standard victory conditions quite easily. Once you reach that point, then the next step is to create your own challenges.

Be creative and inventive! Limit yourself to five cities and see how far you can go.

Build an empire without ever advancing from the Chiefdom government.

See if you can get the Science, Religious and Domination victories all within three consecutive turns. (Which requires having no turn limit)

Can you nurture that very first warrior all the way to a Mech Infantry Army and give it the glory of capturing the final capital?

How high of a score can you get by the end of each era?

Just how happy is your population when you reach that end game?

These are just a few ideas that can let you take Civilization beyond meeting simple victory conditions and become more of a creative exercise for those so inclined.

 

[HEF]

My suggestion to everyone would be to create your own challenges within the game. Obviously, most folks have figured out all the ins and outs of this game to the Nth degree to the point that they easily beat any of the standard victory conditions quite easily. Once you reach that point, then the next step is to create your own challenges.

There it is.

 

[UWHabs]

There's also something to be said for not necessarily having a challenging game all the way through. A lot of the time, I will fight hard to get my advantage, and then the last 20-30 turns is basically doing trivial calculations and hitting end turn to finish the game. I have my money reserve if anyone wants to declare war on me, I'm ahead in science and/or culture enough that I really don't have to worry about anything, and it's just playing out the end.

And you know what? Sometimes that's fine. Like, I would have hated to have a bunch of arbitrary tasks and things that I would have had to do to complete the game. So I did what I could, stopped caring about perfectly optimizing my dollars, and played out the end game. A bit boring, but I got through it quickly enough that next time I'll go start a new game. The early game is where the real challenges are, anyways.

I do wish sometimes that there was something that caused the end-game to play differently than earlier, and to really appreciate a "modern" game. But on the other hand, sometimes it's nice to just play out the stretch and start anew.

 

[Japper007]

My suggestion to everyone would be to create your own challenges within the game. Obviously, most folks have figured out all the ins and outs of this game to the Nth degree to the point that they easily beat any of the standard victory conditions quite easily. Once you reach that point, then the next step is to create your own challenges.

Be creative and inventive! Limit yourself to five cities and see how far you can go.

Build an empire without ever advancing from the Chiefdom government.

See if you can get the Science, Religious and Domination victories all within three consecutive turns. (Which requires having no turn limit)

Can you nurture that very first warrior all the way to a Mech Infantry Army and give it the glory of capturing the final capital?

How high of a score can you get by the end of each era?

Just how happy is your population when you reach that end game?

These are just a few ideas that can let you take Civilization beyond meeting simple victory conditions and become more of a creative exercise for those so inclined.

This is just making exuses for poor game design, there are many people who've played civ 4's Deity mode for years and still can't beat it consistently, even without challenge runs. Civ 5 is the same, to a lesser degree, but even there, there is challenge and entertainment to be had in a Deity run. Why should civ 6 be any different? Civ is a game first and foremost by design, this is clear from it's win conditions and such, leave the "you need some wacky challenge to make it interesting" to sandboxes like EUIV and Tropico.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

You can take two different approaches.

You can complain the game isn't balanced/good/challenging enough and respond to that by using the same OP strategy over and over, or simply stop playing the game. Nothing wrong with that per se, but I (and many others) find that boring.

The alternative is to spice things up as you like and play the game differently to how you achieved your sub-100-turn Diety victory. A lot of people find that more fun, and there's no harm in it. This is not making excuses for the game. It is simply not true that what I've just said implies that I think Civ6 is perfect or the devs shouldn't fix things. It's simply making the most of a flawed product, while hoping the flaws get fixed. I'm tired of having to explain this to people. There is no dichotomy where you either have to hate every aspect of Civ6, or love every aspect of it. That is an incredibly toxic point of view to have about anything in life, let alone something as innocuous as a video game.

I guess there's also a third option, which is to mod the game. That can be fun in its own right.


Anyway, this is all completely off topic, so I'll end my rant here.

The cup holder in my Ford Focus is loose and the drink doesn't stay in there straight.

TOTALLY UNDRIVEABLE!!!!!!!

 

[EgonSpengler]

You can take two different approaches.

I agree, and I'll add a third approach: Mess around with the starting conditions. Like, a lot. Don't nibble at the edges, go a little crazy. Myself, I like to play at Emperor, because I find the higher difficulty settings alter the game in ways I don't like, besides just making it harder.But I noticed a few things:

1. I found that on Continents I was able to wipe out my neighbors on my landmass and build a 30-city superpower before meaningfully interacting with the other 1/2 of the civs.
2. It's also evident that (a) sprawling nations have an advantage over smaller ones and (b) many of the AI simply won't expand into available space. (This isn't unique to my playstyle, I think lots of people find this to be true.)
3. Some civs just don't build their military, and are practically begging to be conquered by their militaristic neighbors.

So I started playing Pangaea maps with a hugely increased number of civs. On a Large map, for example, I've had 2 exciting games in a row with 16 Civs instead of just 10. My next game, I may raise that to 20, fully double. It becomes a mosh-pit almost immediately, and any civ that doesn't defend itself gets taken over without remorse. I mean, hey, at least that's kind of historically accurate.

 

[EgonSpengler]

The cup holder in my Ford Focus is loose and the drink doesn't stay in there straight.

TOTALLY UNDRIVEABLE!!!!!!!

I don't begrudge anyone who plays Civ VI as a kind of nation-sized "city builder" game. Let's face it, there aren't many alternatives. But the game itself isn't aiming for that or portraying itself as that; it is aiming to be, and portraying itself as, a competition between nations where warfare is a primary and obvious means of achieving dominance. A nation in Civ VI that cannot defend itself is like a soccer player who can't or doesn't run. Likewise, the game is clearly intended to be played through to the modern age; nobody here is demanding cup holders, we're demanding a reliable transmission and brake lines that don't leak.

 

[Rosty K]

I wonder if cutting the turn limit by 1/3 or so will provide a more nervous ending (normally I'm winning the marathon game before 1000 turns out of 1500).

 

[HEF]

The cup holder in my Ford Focus is loose and the drink doesn't stay in there straight.

TOTALLY UNDRIVEABLE!!!!!!!