bumpyglint
Warlord
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2016
- Messages
- 235
Hoping Firaxis will read this, I try to tell you why Civ VI is still less popular and apprecciated than Civ V and why the next expansion probably will not change anything about this (even if I hope it will).
I will not even consider the smaller problems, I will go directly to the major points:
1) The game is INCREDIBLY static after the first 1-2 ages. Nothing changes, literally. After the AI built its cities and provided them with walls, the game will be the same for ever (if the player doesn't directly wants to conquer all the world). Just as an example, if you play Europa Universalis IV you will see nations rise, you will see empires fall, colonies to get their independence, and the world will change every few years (often in a drastic way). In Civ VI instead if you take a picture for every ages after the classical/medieval you will see no difference, ever. Sometimes the AI will sacrifices its production in random stupid wars, but nothing will change with battles (except maybe in the Information Era, where 99 % of matches are already finished). And how did Firaxis try to change this? With the Loyalty system. In this way sometimes the AI will place a city in such a stupid place that they will lose it in 9-10 turns, giving the Idea that something changed in the map. The Loyalty system can be pretty fun, but at the moment is just a system which the AI can't handle and that give the false impression that the AI is actively changing the game.
I think this is even more evident by the fact that in Civ V at the end of the game you could watch a 2D version of the map with all the progress of the game while in Civ VI they removed this feature: probably they noticed that the map was always the same after the first ages so they found ridiculous to add this feature also in Civ VI.
Changing features like walls could help the AI to be more active on this front.
2) The proportion between Science/Culture and Production in this game is totally wrong, and this has huge consequence in the gameplay. In this game it's totally normal to reach the Industrial Era around the 1000 AD for some strange reason, while instead you need something like 20 turns to build anything (and the game usually ends at most around turn 300...you build 15 things per city in the whole game). This means that you keep unlocking tons of thing you will simply have to TOTALLY ignore. When you know how to play you don't even pay anymore attention about all the things you are unlocking with Science/Culture because you already know what to build and what to ignore, but for a new player this is pretty bad. You got the costant idea that it doesn't matter how good you are, you will always be in a society full of genius scientist that can't build anything.
This has huge consequence expecially for the war: when you will have finished to build a good army for your historical period, guess what? You will pass on a new age and you will have to update it again. The solution for Firaxis to avoid this? Simple, putting just 3-4 units for every type in all the scientific tree so that they could become older a bit later. I think it's incredible that at the moment you will pass directly from Knights to Tanks (while Civ V, who didn't have this problem, had tons of more units and they didn't get "old" one second after building an army).
Obviously I'm not saying that every city should always build the 100 % of everything for its age, this must obviously be a game made of choices, but come on, the situation at the moment is pretty ridiculous.
3) Linked to the last point, the AI is so bad that at higher difficulties they had to buff it incredibly: this means they will always produce everything, while you can focus only on one or two aspects. If you don't want to lose, this aspect must be war, because the AI is so bad at moving units that you will win even with one third of their units and you will steal everything they produced until that moment (while instead if you try to outsmart them on the production side you will always lose because of their bonus). This makes the game too much unilateral at higher difficulties, you can't really choose different strategies, which is a big problem for a game that should point on different aspects of the Society.
4) Rome became rich thanks to the Mediterraneum, Colonial Nations became rich thanks to the Atlantic Ocean and even nowadays an Ocean, the Pacific, is the center of the world commerce, but in Civ VI this aspect is TOTALLY ignored. Settling on the Coast can be good for Housing (still worse than a river) and really few times for resources, but having a good control of the seas is totally useless (or at least, way more useless than controlling the land). Even if you got a perfect fleet your opponent could simply ignore coastal city and you will have wasted tons of production for what? Nothing. Coastal city should have at least a good bonus for trading, and this bonus doesn't exist, because don't even try to tell me that the little trade range bonus is a good trade-off for a civ that invested a lot in the "Sea part" of the Science Tree and for the production of a fleet. Society like Venice, Genoa, the Colonial Spain, England and so on simply can't exist in a game like this, because focusing on controlling the seas gives way less advantage compared to the one you can take focusing on the same way on the land.
5) Since the introduction of the Loyalty system, it's impossible to have colonies. I find this pretty ridicolous considering that colonization has been a thing for centuries in our history. I would simply try to change this in someway, for example I would not have used the population as the basic systeam for Loyalty, but I think it's too late to change this...
6) The Culture Victory is meh. It's not only incredibly bad explained in the game, but if you want to win with this you have to focus about it since the beginning while instead if you don't want to win with it you will totally ignore all the tourism system (I know that actually you can win a cultural victory without focusing on it since the beginning, but when this happens is because you are in such a good position compared to the AI that you could simply win in any different ways). The point is that tourism is "all or nothing". If you focus on tourism and at some point you discover that you can't win with it, you simply wasted everything until that moment. If you focus on science/war/religion but you can't win with it, maybe you didn't play in the most optimized way but you will still have some new usefull techs/cities/bonus. This is pretty no-sense, they should add even a minor bonus for tourism so that you can't totally focus or ignore it (a bonus like in Civ V could be enough). This is expecially true considering that the AI will NEVER win a cultural victory so all the Civs with some type of tourism bonus are underpowered (because they will simply never get any advantage by them) and the AI will often focus on Great People/wonders/building about Tourism that it will never use, wasting tons of resources.
Actually I think that they said they will change the Cultural Victory with the expansion, so maybe this will change (I hope it).
7) The AI. I don't have to add anything else to this part, you know what I'm talking about.
I just hope this expansion will not simply add new features (that pretty often the AI can't handle) and that instead it will try to fix these problems, but I think they are so much eradicated in this game that almost nothing will change until Civilization VII (even if I'm pretty sure Civ VII will sell WAY LESS than Civ VI if they don't fix this game).
I will not even consider the smaller problems, I will go directly to the major points:
1) The game is INCREDIBLY static after the first 1-2 ages. Nothing changes, literally. After the AI built its cities and provided them with walls, the game will be the same for ever (if the player doesn't directly wants to conquer all the world). Just as an example, if you play Europa Universalis IV you will see nations rise, you will see empires fall, colonies to get their independence, and the world will change every few years (often in a drastic way). In Civ VI instead if you take a picture for every ages after the classical/medieval you will see no difference, ever. Sometimes the AI will sacrifices its production in random stupid wars, but nothing will change with battles (except maybe in the Information Era, where 99 % of matches are already finished). And how did Firaxis try to change this? With the Loyalty system. In this way sometimes the AI will place a city in such a stupid place that they will lose it in 9-10 turns, giving the Idea that something changed in the map. The Loyalty system can be pretty fun, but at the moment is just a system which the AI can't handle and that give the false impression that the AI is actively changing the game.
I think this is even more evident by the fact that in Civ V at the end of the game you could watch a 2D version of the map with all the progress of the game while in Civ VI they removed this feature: probably they noticed that the map was always the same after the first ages so they found ridiculous to add this feature also in Civ VI.
Changing features like walls could help the AI to be more active on this front.
2) The proportion between Science/Culture and Production in this game is totally wrong, and this has huge consequence in the gameplay. In this game it's totally normal to reach the Industrial Era around the 1000 AD for some strange reason, while instead you need something like 20 turns to build anything (and the game usually ends at most around turn 300...you build 15 things per city in the whole game). This means that you keep unlocking tons of thing you will simply have to TOTALLY ignore. When you know how to play you don't even pay anymore attention about all the things you are unlocking with Science/Culture because you already know what to build and what to ignore, but for a new player this is pretty bad. You got the costant idea that it doesn't matter how good you are, you will always be in a society full of genius scientist that can't build anything.
This has huge consequence expecially for the war: when you will have finished to build a good army for your historical period, guess what? You will pass on a new age and you will have to update it again. The solution for Firaxis to avoid this? Simple, putting just 3-4 units for every type in all the scientific tree so that they could become older a bit later. I think it's incredible that at the moment you will pass directly from Knights to Tanks (while Civ V, who didn't have this problem, had tons of more units and they didn't get "old" one second after building an army).
Obviously I'm not saying that every city should always build the 100 % of everything for its age, this must obviously be a game made of choices, but come on, the situation at the moment is pretty ridiculous.
3) Linked to the last point, the AI is so bad that at higher difficulties they had to buff it incredibly: this means they will always produce everything, while you can focus only on one or two aspects. If you don't want to lose, this aspect must be war, because the AI is so bad at moving units that you will win even with one third of their units and you will steal everything they produced until that moment (while instead if you try to outsmart them on the production side you will always lose because of their bonus). This makes the game too much unilateral at higher difficulties, you can't really choose different strategies, which is a big problem for a game that should point on different aspects of the Society.
4) Rome became rich thanks to the Mediterraneum, Colonial Nations became rich thanks to the Atlantic Ocean and even nowadays an Ocean, the Pacific, is the center of the world commerce, but in Civ VI this aspect is TOTALLY ignored. Settling on the Coast can be good for Housing (still worse than a river) and really few times for resources, but having a good control of the seas is totally useless (or at least, way more useless than controlling the land). Even if you got a perfect fleet your opponent could simply ignore coastal city and you will have wasted tons of production for what? Nothing. Coastal city should have at least a good bonus for trading, and this bonus doesn't exist, because don't even try to tell me that the little trade range bonus is a good trade-off for a civ that invested a lot in the "Sea part" of the Science Tree and for the production of a fleet. Society like Venice, Genoa, the Colonial Spain, England and so on simply can't exist in a game like this, because focusing on controlling the seas gives way less advantage compared to the one you can take focusing on the same way on the land.
5) Since the introduction of the Loyalty system, it's impossible to have colonies. I find this pretty ridicolous considering that colonization has been a thing for centuries in our history. I would simply try to change this in someway, for example I would not have used the population as the basic systeam for Loyalty, but I think it's too late to change this...
6) The Culture Victory is meh. It's not only incredibly bad explained in the game, but if you want to win with this you have to focus about it since the beginning while instead if you don't want to win with it you will totally ignore all the tourism system (I know that actually you can win a cultural victory without focusing on it since the beginning, but when this happens is because you are in such a good position compared to the AI that you could simply win in any different ways). The point is that tourism is "all or nothing". If you focus on tourism and at some point you discover that you can't win with it, you simply wasted everything until that moment. If you focus on science/war/religion but you can't win with it, maybe you didn't play in the most optimized way but you will still have some new usefull techs/cities/bonus. This is pretty no-sense, they should add even a minor bonus for tourism so that you can't totally focus or ignore it (a bonus like in Civ V could be enough). This is expecially true considering that the AI will NEVER win a cultural victory so all the Civs with some type of tourism bonus are underpowered (because they will simply never get any advantage by them) and the AI will often focus on Great People/wonders/building about Tourism that it will never use, wasting tons of resources.
Actually I think that they said they will change the Cultural Victory with the expansion, so maybe this will change (I hope it).
7) The AI. I don't have to add anything else to this part, you know what I'm talking about.
I just hope this expansion will not simply add new features (that pretty often the AI can't handle) and that instead it will try to fix these problems, but I think they are so much eradicated in this game that almost nothing will change until Civilization VII (even if I'm pretty sure Civ VII will sell WAY LESS than Civ VI if they don't fix this game).
.. city states would becamo more important , there would be actual war starter because of them (now it is only emergancy)
But I always feel there's something happening. It feels a bit more organic than the continuous warmaking against City-States that I found in CiV (and BE) - and stuff like Free Cities helps that, albeit in a rather niche way. The visibility on agendas has really helped (they were very opaque in the past), and Grievances could really help with all of that as well.
