[GS] The most liked and disliked features of Civilization VI (Results)

oSiyeza

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This is my best attempt to synthetize the results from the users of this forum, from the post available in:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/your-3-best-and-3-worst-things-about-civ-6.654770/

I created a new post, since this is not intended to be a place to submit more opinions for the poll, but to discuss the results themselves, and maybe comment on how FXS could aproach these results.

Results.jpg


I tried my best to group the opinions on the users in separate categories, according to the intent of the words of the participants. I also discarded any feature with less than 5 votes, comments that were so general that I could not reasonably say what was the specific praise or criticism or not well structured, and comments answering a question other than the one in the OP.

I have to say that most of the results like the universal praise of the district and city unpacking system or the universal bad opinion on the AI, diplomacy and religion were expected by me; however, I did not expect at all the WC being the most disliked system on the game. Also I expected more complains on loyality or age/era systems, but it seems that actually people kind of likes them. The more you know…

EDIT: Results only showing 10 or more votes.

Results_Short.jpg
 
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I agree about the World Congress being poorly implemented. There are too many proposals. The upvote and downvote system on opposite proposals can be a bit confusing. Also, it is hard to know how other civs will vote. So, it feels like a lottery where you are picking your numbers and then rolling the dice to see what you get rather than a diplomatic system.

I really liked the system in Alpha Centauri where you could vote on one clear proposal and try to convince/bribe other civs to vote your way. And it was clear how civs would vote too as your allies would support you. Also, there was a great election system with clear bonuses if you got elected the council leader. And it tied in nicely with the diplomatic victory.
 
Nice graph, though nothing surprising can be gathered from it.

I would ignore anything between 10/-10.

People who participated really dislike the Diplomatic aspect of the game is the main take away.

AI, Religion and Diplomacy unsurprisngly at the bottom.
 
Nice graph, though nothing surprising can be gathered from it.

I would ignore anything between 10/-10.

People who participated really dislike the Diplomatic aspect of the game is the main take away.

AI, Religion and Diplomacy unsurprisngly at the bottom.

I would say features between 10/-10 are maybe less significant. But I still think there may be some valuable information there.

I agree this is hardly surprising, but maybe helps to put some perspective, for example some problems like the AI being not in the top 5 disiked features, is maybe meaningful with the current state of the game, and says a lot of how bad diplomacy, WC and religion are.

I think the WC has actually 3 separated problems:
- It is very difficult to ignore and disruptive in the game (Which would be ok, if not for the other two points)
- As you said, There are too many proposals. The upvote and downvote system on opposite proposals can be a bit confusing.
- Proposals are totally meaningless.

While religion is, in my opinion a much worse system, I think may have less negative votes, since you can just ignore it and disable the religious victory condition.
With WC, the propblem is that people actually want meaningfull diplomatic interactions so feels specially dissapointing.
 
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Added to the OP a version with all features with less than 10 votes removed. Probably better than the original in order to show the actual results.
 

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While religion is, in my opinion a much worse system, I think may have less negative votes, since you can just ignore it and disable the religious victory condition.
With WC, the propblem is that people actually want meaningfull diplomatic interactions so feels specially dissapointing.

Definitely - you can interact with religion sort of as much as you want: ignore it as you said, spread it to your empire for a bonus but not really participate in the 'religious battle' system, or attempt to go to full religious victory. WC is pretty much forced one type of participation.

Familiarity might also be part of it. Religion is near identical to Civ 5 (just the addition of the religious combat for the most part). WC is relatively different and arrived later.
 
Basically people like much of the new stuff that civilization VI bring to the franchises but the game do a poor job with many of the old stuff like city building, diplomacy and weak harmless ai. A Quick takeaway would be it is a good role playing game but a rather lackluster strategy game.
 
This is fascinating since it echoes my feelings about tha game very well.

While the world congress in Civ VI might work very well from a gameplay perspective, I think it falls flat in terms of roleplay.

For civ v I understood their being a host. Making proposals etc. It felt like a meeting of nations. Civ VI's just doesn't have this feeling at all. I saw somone compare it to gambling and it does have this feel a bit. Every 20 turns or so their is a random buff/nerf applied to the game.

However I do like how emergencies work with the world Congress in Civ VI.

If I was in charge of designing it I would get rid of the random proposals every 20 turns and have a screen of proposals people can pay a small diplomatic favour cost to propose at any time, similar to how you can propose or pass emergencies at the moment. Then empires either vote up or down.

I feel you could also make the proposals more powerful and game changing because of this.

If we had access to the DLL, we could tweak these features player's mostly dislike.

In terms of religion. Its strength has to be neutered because we all asked for a religious victory. This area is moddable though. So if they wanted somone could redesign the beliefs to be more powerful and say that they are designed to be played with religious victory turned off. Putting religion back into a supporting role for the other victory conditions. But allowing it to have more of an impact.
 
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Only real surprises to me are seeing loyalty as a positive, and map generation / policy card system as negatives. I like the policy card system and I think the map generator has ended up pretty good. Loyalty I like as a concept but I think it needs a rework, having it be a zero sum game of "loyalty to current owner" I don't think makes any real sense, they should track loyalty to each civ individually.

The rest I think pretty much echoes my thoughts.
 
This is fascinating since it echoes my feelings about tha game very well.

While the world congress in Civ VI might work very well from a gameplay perspective, I think it falls flat in terms of roleplay.

For civ v I understood their being a host. Making proposals etc. It felt like a meeting of nations. Civ VI's just doesn't have this feeling at all. I saw somone compare it to gambling and it does have this feel a bit. Every 20 turns or so their is a random buff/nerf applied to the game.

However I do like how emergencies work with the world Congress in Civ VI.

If I was in charge of designing it I would get rid of the random proposals every 20 turns and have a screen of proposals people can pay a small diplomatic favour cost to propose at any time, similar to how you can propose or pass emergencies at the moment. Then empires either vote up or down.

I feel you could also make the proposals more powerful and game changing because of this

To Firaxis, if you are reading this:

WC: I think I would definitely reduce the number of proposals, make a system where one player can host the WC and submit one proposal, based on turns and how well he is doing in diplomacy. And make proposals much more meaningful and impactful. Tie to diplomacy and espionage.

Religious game: Religious combat needs to be overhauled. Interact with more systems, and made less tedious, the charges system does not work. Allow to heal in foreign holy sites of the same religion, including maybe meditation to add new charges. We need less unit spamming and more meaningful and funny gameplay. Religion should be more meaningful outside combat, and have a support role on regular combat, or be able to convert combat units...

Diplomacy: Needs more flexibility, more options and more dynamism. Also needs to interact more with other game systems. Bring world wars. Tie to espionage and WC.

Tall vs Wide: Allow tall cities to have an extra ring of land, like modern megalopolis. And increase a bit money, trade bonus, research tourism, production and influence according to population. Increase the soft penalties for spreading too much. (Only a bit).

UI: No brainer, more QoL. Just look at the mods of the community for inspiration.

AI: Keep improving the game in every patch. You are doing a good work. Focus on diplomacy, AI being more consistent with their objectives, late game aggression and use of late game military.

End Game, Depth and lack of challenge: These are not separated issues, and reflect how all the other problems interact together to make a worse experience.
 
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All of these problems with the UI, WC, and religion; and Firaxis responds by adding meteors.

To be honest, I like the idea of meteors, and would love to have quakes and tsunamis. I think new content is great, as long as they don’t ignore the problems the game has.
I think secret societies and other new game modes would be a really good opportunity to fix these ongoing problems.

In the end I totally get your point and mostly agree with you. But also think that at this point we can only get support for the game if they still can sell new content. I would be happy if they use this oportunity of one year of full support to address these issues.

That is why I did this post, to tell FXS very clearly what we think as a community.
 
To Firaxis, if you are reading this:

WC: I think I would definitely reduce the number of proposals, make a system where one player can host the WC and submit one proposal, based on turns and how well he is doing in diplomacy. And make proposals much more meaningful and impactful. Tie to diplomacy and espionage.

Religious game: Religious combat needs to be overhauled. Interact with more systems, and made less tedious, the charges system does not work. Allow to heal in foreign holy sites of the same religion, including maybe meditation to add new charges. We need less unit spamming and more meaningful and funny gameplay. Religion should be more meaningful outside combat, and have a support role on regular combat, or be able to convert combat units...

Diplomacy: Needs more flexibility, more options and more dynamism. Also needs to interact more with other game systems. Bring world wars. Tie to espionage and WC.

Tall vs Wide: Allow tall cities to have an extra ring of land, like modern megalopolis. And increase a bit money, trade bonus, research tourism, production and influence according to population. Increase the soft penalties for spreading too much. (Only a bit).

UI: No brainer, more QoL. Just look at the mods of the community for inspiration.

AI: Keep improving the game in every patch. You are doing a good work. Focus on diplomacy, AI being more consistent with their objectives, late game aggression and use of late game military.

End Game, Depth and lack of challenge: These are not separated issues, and reflect how all the other problems interact together to make a worse experience.
I really like the positive and constructive tone of this post, this is something a lot of people could learn from. The overall Civ VI experience is an excellent one, for my money, but all of the above would make it a deeper and more rounded game.
 
Personally, I think my least favorite feature of Civ VI is the unit tree. It’s just such a weird and arbitrary upgrade tree that doesn’t make sense. Why do Swordsman not have a middle upgrade in the Medieval Era on the way to Musketmen, but there’s a light cav upgrade in the Medieval Era? Why do we jump from Musketmen to Modern Infantry, without a Rifleman in the middle? It doesn’t make sense from a historical perspective, and it’s bad for balance too. I can think of a number of unique units that would be substantially better if they replaced a Longswordsman or Rifleman type unit, so they could be upgraded into rather than needing to always be raw built (Samurai, Khevsur, Redcoats, Garde Imperiale are a few that spring to mind).

The unit tree is one of the few things that I think Civ V did straight up better than VI.
 
Personally, I think my least favorite feature of Civ VI is the unit tree. It’s just such a weird and arbitrary upgrade tree that doesn’t make sense. Why do Swordsman not have a middle upgrade in the Medieval Era on the way to Musketmen, but there’s a light cav upgrade in the Medieval Era? Why do we jump from Musketmen to Modern Infantry, without a Rifleman in the middle? It doesn’t make sense from a historical perspective, and it’s bad for balance too. I can think of a number of unique units that would be substantially better if they replaced a Longswordsman or Rifleman type unit, so they could be upgraded into rather than needing to always be raw built (Samurai, Khevsur, Redcoats, Garde Imperiale are a few that spring to mind).

The unit tree is one of the few things that I think Civ V did straight up better than VI.

That was indeed mentioned by some people. Mostly of topic outside the feature list in the OP, also was one of the critizism filtered by having less than 5 votes.
I agree with you, but I think is not a big problem, and is actually one thing that I think has been totally solved by mods.

Overall, I think the unit tree has some minor (but somewhat annoying issues that can be easily solved). And that get also overshadowed by the late game pace (still quite bad) and by the
strategic resource system, that while not perfect, is definitely a great idea.
 
To Firaxis, if you are reading this:

WC: I think I would definitely reduce the number of proposals, make a system where one player can host the WC and submit one proposal, based on turns and how well he is doing in diplomacy. And make proposals much more meaningful and impactful. Tie to diplomacy and espionage.

Religious game: Religious combat needs to be overhauled. Interact with more systems, and made less tedious, the charges system does not work. Allow to heal in foreign holy sites of the same religion, including maybe meditation to add new charges. We need less unit spamming and more meaningful and funny gameplay. Religion should be more meaningful outside combat, and have a support role on regular combat, or be able to convert combat units...

Diplomacy: Needs more flexibility, more options and more dynamism. Also needs to interact more with other game systems. Bring world wars. Tie to espionage and WC.

Tall vs Wide: Allow tall cities to have an extra ring of land, like modern megalopolis. And increase a bit money, trade bonus, research tourism, production and influence according to population. Increase the soft penalties for spreading too much. (Only a bit).

UI: No brainer, more QoL. Just look at the mods of the community for inspiration.

AI: Keep improving the game in every patch. You are doing a good work. Focus on diplomacy, AI being more consistent with their objectives, late game aggression and use of late game military.

End Game, Depth and lack of challenge: These are not separated issues, and reflect how all the other problems interact together to make a worse experience.


The graph you made is helpful, but I don't think I agree with, like, any of your suggested changes.

WC: The only part I agree with is that the system should tie into diplomacy and espionage. I think it already does tie into Diplomatic Visibility, but it would be nice if it could tie into the Spy system (Spy mission at the Government Plaza, maybe), and some way to influence votes of other Civs would be nice. Maybe let every player propose 1 topic along with a bid in Diplomatic Favor, then whoever bids the most gets their proposal to be one of the selected ones (and the others still random)? Diplomatic Favor already is the method for letting someone who is doing well in diplomacy (alliances, suzerainty, grievances) have more influence over the voting, so I don't think a hosting overhaul is necessary and I doubt they want to rehash Civ5's system, or they would've done that in the first place.

Religious: I don't think it is possible to overhaul Religious Combat into something that is satisfying, given that we already have *normal* combat. I agree that there are many cool things they could've done other than unit spam, but it is too late to change that. Buffing the hell out of all the beliefs would be a good start though.

Diplomacy: It already is tied to Espionage and the World Congress, and the Emergency system plus Alliances already allows for World Wars. The AI just needs to be more dynamic so it isn't stuck in an alliance with you forever, which is exactly at odds with what everyone kept saying for years about the AI being illogical and always hating you for even a small bit of war.

Tall vs Wide: More land would not help tall cities one bit. You'd still be better off founding a new city to use that land, since so many of Civ6's yields are flat and 1-per-city. They just need to make more percentage-based increased and fewer one-per-city restrictions. And Tall should never be as good as Wide, it should just be better than not-Tall, which it isn't at the moment because it provides no benefits to grow but it still takes up amenities.
 
Tall vs Wide: More land would not help tall cities one bit. You'd still be better off founding a new city to use that land, since so many of Civ6's yields are flat and 1-per-city. They just need to make more percentage-based increased and fewer one-per-city restrictions. And Tall should never be as good as Wide, it should just be better than not-Tall, which it isn't at the moment because it provides no benefits to grow but it still takes up amenities.
It should be tall and wide being optimal, right now it is basically just all about wide and non about tall. Civilization IV did a pretty good job here but the balance in CIv V and VI have been a bit messy.
 
It should be tall and wide being optimal, right now it is basically just all about wide and non about tall. Civilization IV did a pretty good job here but the balance in CIv V and VI have been a bit messy.

Yes, I agree. Wide has an inherent risk of conflict, which means it should always be the most rewarding. Tall has no interactivity or risk of conflict, but it does have the risk of rewards that never materialize. Growth is about sacrificing the immediate (which could snowball) for more stuff later. It should be better (long-term) than not growing. The calculation to be made is which moments to stall growth to instead do something immediately because that thing will snowball better than growth would. These moments should absolutely exist (and the prevalence of these choices is part of what makes the early game much more interesting than the late game).
 
Only real surprises to me are seeing loyalty as a positive, and map generation / policy card system as negatives.

Id guess complaints about the map generation are largely related to starting position more than the overall map itself. And map sizes - I know there were a lot of complaints at launch about 6's map sizes being smaller than 5's.

I'm split on the policy cards. I like it overall, but It's a little too micromanagement for me, but I like it better than the sliders. I'd say less of them, and a different unlock/placement method.

The military ones especially I find meh. I'd almost like them to combine the military policy cards with promotion system in some fashion.
 
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