I was going to post this a week ago, then thought, "Nah, we've kind of been there, done that." Then thought,
Did get a bunch of likes when I pointed out that we're kind of at that point with the game where we've just run out of things to say, and I do have some opinions that haven't come up yet" As the internal dialogue continued debating, I read the thread "dreaming of one more patch" https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/dreaming-of-one-more-patch.673868 and decided to go ahead with it.
There's the obvious things that we've mentioned as a collective a hundred times - monopoly tourism, monopoly mode AI not improving resources, Hermetic Order in general, the AI at just about everything, naval warfare, and on and on... But what are the things that YOU noticed, maybe haven't come up here, that just don't sit right with you? Here's my list:
-builders can embark well before scouts: I understand that it's necessary for builders to embark to be able to improve sea resources, but this creates the situation where builders have a major scouting advantage over the unit class designed to do so. Sure, galleys are better at it, but mean making a whole new unit, and when you can see a border edge across a coast tile, it's way easier to just embark a builder for a quick meet.
-you can improve a tile this turn, but not the next turn: not just improvements, you could build wonders or even districts on a certain tile, and maybe that tile would have great adjacency, so you decide you're going to make that district when you reach the next "divisible by 3 plus 1" level and then whoops! there's a niter. You settle a city for the primary reason of getting that +7 campus and then whoops! there's an iron. Never a better reason to save-scum in my opinion; place the district, get the iron per turn and have that luscious campus. This could be a great city to send my trade routes from and it actually has a tile that can make Great Zimbabwe, so you settle it and find a strategic resource on the one tile that qualifies for the wonder. And while it's only temporary as opposed to discovering a strategic resource which is permanent, unlocking Natural History is the most annoying turn in the game as so many tiles that I've planned and pinned this and that to go there now have to wait for a city to make a theater square(which is a low priority district unless you're going for that victory condition), get the 1st and expensive 2nd tier building in it, and make an archeologist AND wait for him to get there.
-that gun is a melee weapon?: the beginning of the game makes sense, with swordsman being melee units and archers being ranged units. But from the time you hit gunpowder on, every single unit uses a weapon that is designed to strike the opponent from a distance, and for the sole sake of mechanics consistency (or laziness), some units are considered "ranged" while other units that use ranged attacks are considered "melee." An infantry is a melee unit while a machine gun (which is operated by an "infantry" unit) is considered "ranged." This gets even more ridiculous with naval units - there is a looooong list of differences between a battleship and a destroyer, none of which are that a destroyer extends a weapon from its limbs to make direct contact with its target. This also marginalizes the advent of gunpowder - it's not as bad as it was in Civ5, where a musketman is weaker than a knight, but still - the advent of gunpowder is one of the most, if not THE MOST, important and revolutionary changes in warfare, and should be reflected in this game by making a paradigm-shifting effect on how military units are considered and utilized - if military force A has the ability to use gunpowder weapons and military force B does not, then military force A wins - there are a few exceptions to this in our world's history (which could be accounted for in those instances by having greater advantages through unit promotions), but they are few and far between, so it really seems that there should be a dramatic shift in game mechanics which would also emphasize the military importance of being able to use this method of warfare. On a similar note...
-infantry... cost... oil... AND PER TURN!- Ah! I've just conceded that if I want to win by domination to plan on doing so with line infantry (and other units at the top of their class before resource-consuming units become a thing.) With early resources, if you have only 1 source of horses that means you can only make one horse-requiring unit every 10 turns, which makes sense. But later on, if you have only one source of oil, you can make only 3 oil-requiring units PERIOD. The game worked well before they incorporated resource-consuming units, and then they make it screwy by adding this element. And if each unit requires one resource per turn, then each source should produce more than 3 per turn of that resource, at least 5, I think 10 is appropriate - I have this one vein of coal or oil so I can make just 10 units that consume it, If I want more I can settle to get more of the resource. And the infantry unit in particular I have problems with - 1.) obviously the military personnel aren't drinking the oil and it's for the jeeps that are transporting them, so shouldn't they have a MUCH higher movement rate than men on foot weighed down by heavy armor? 2.) If the infantry are positioned at the battlefront, they don't need the vehicles to move them around and consequently wouldn't be consuming oil.
-Roads: a classic case of "it ain't broke but they fixed it anyway," roads were fine in previous civ games but they decided to change from workers to builder (not a bad move there) which made it necessary to reevaluate the construction and effects of roads... or did it? Builders now instantly make an improvement at the cost of a charge instead of being able to make unlimited improvements but taking longer and longer to make based on their sophistication, with roads being the quickest and things like oil rigs being the most turn-consuming. So they moved the construction of roads from a builder/worker function to a trade route function. But I have quite a few problems with the current implementation - 1.) roads are made but are nearly useless until late in the game - a road on a flat terrain with no feature serves NO PURPOSE until several eras into the game. 2.) A road over a hill or featured tile does allow the unit to move to that tile and still have MP remaining but whoops! an attack takes a full MP now instead of being able to attack if you have any little fraction of an MP remaining, so having a road there allows you to move and "skip turn" instead of moving and ending the turn for the unit - no difference except annoyance. 3.) By having the roads be made by a unit, you can create and customize your civilization's movement network instead of having uncontrollable trader units create the most direct path from city to city. 4.) I hear your counter-argument that roads can be made by military engineers, but this unit has probably the worst hammer:benefit return ratio, and I wouldn't delay a district, wonder, unit, or any other production queue to make one. Occasionally, I'll make a single military engineer to get the two forts boost, but otherwise I disregard them completely. 5.) Instead, how about traders don't magically poop out roads, but instead a builder can make it but for ZERO charges at the cost of being locked into the build for 3 or 5 turns? You would then need to either allocate one of your military units to guard it, or risk losing it to a rival civ or even barbs. IMO, that would be better.
Did get a bunch of likes when I pointed out that we're kind of at that point with the game where we've just run out of things to say, and I do have some opinions that haven't come up yet" As the internal dialogue continued debating, I read the thread "dreaming of one more patch" https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/dreaming-of-one-more-patch.673868 and decided to go ahead with it.
There's the obvious things that we've mentioned as a collective a hundred times - monopoly tourism, monopoly mode AI not improving resources, Hermetic Order in general, the AI at just about everything, naval warfare, and on and on... But what are the things that YOU noticed, maybe haven't come up here, that just don't sit right with you? Here's my list:
-builders can embark well before scouts: I understand that it's necessary for builders to embark to be able to improve sea resources, but this creates the situation where builders have a major scouting advantage over the unit class designed to do so. Sure, galleys are better at it, but mean making a whole new unit, and when you can see a border edge across a coast tile, it's way easier to just embark a builder for a quick meet.
-you can improve a tile this turn, but not the next turn: not just improvements, you could build wonders or even districts on a certain tile, and maybe that tile would have great adjacency, so you decide you're going to make that district when you reach the next "divisible by 3 plus 1" level and then whoops! there's a niter. You settle a city for the primary reason of getting that +7 campus and then whoops! there's an iron. Never a better reason to save-scum in my opinion; place the district, get the iron per turn and have that luscious campus. This could be a great city to send my trade routes from and it actually has a tile that can make Great Zimbabwe, so you settle it and find a strategic resource on the one tile that qualifies for the wonder. And while it's only temporary as opposed to discovering a strategic resource which is permanent, unlocking Natural History is the most annoying turn in the game as so many tiles that I've planned and pinned this and that to go there now have to wait for a city to make a theater square(which is a low priority district unless you're going for that victory condition), get the 1st and expensive 2nd tier building in it, and make an archeologist AND wait for him to get there.
-that gun is a melee weapon?: the beginning of the game makes sense, with swordsman being melee units and archers being ranged units. But from the time you hit gunpowder on, every single unit uses a weapon that is designed to strike the opponent from a distance, and for the sole sake of mechanics consistency (or laziness), some units are considered "ranged" while other units that use ranged attacks are considered "melee." An infantry is a melee unit while a machine gun (which is operated by an "infantry" unit) is considered "ranged." This gets even more ridiculous with naval units - there is a looooong list of differences between a battleship and a destroyer, none of which are that a destroyer extends a weapon from its limbs to make direct contact with its target. This also marginalizes the advent of gunpowder - it's not as bad as it was in Civ5, where a musketman is weaker than a knight, but still - the advent of gunpowder is one of the most, if not THE MOST, important and revolutionary changes in warfare, and should be reflected in this game by making a paradigm-shifting effect on how military units are considered and utilized - if military force A has the ability to use gunpowder weapons and military force B does not, then military force A wins - there are a few exceptions to this in our world's history (which could be accounted for in those instances by having greater advantages through unit promotions), but they are few and far between, so it really seems that there should be a dramatic shift in game mechanics which would also emphasize the military importance of being able to use this method of warfare. On a similar note...
-infantry... cost... oil... AND PER TURN!- Ah! I've just conceded that if I want to win by domination to plan on doing so with line infantry (and other units at the top of their class before resource-consuming units become a thing.) With early resources, if you have only 1 source of horses that means you can only make one horse-requiring unit every 10 turns, which makes sense. But later on, if you have only one source of oil, you can make only 3 oil-requiring units PERIOD. The game worked well before they incorporated resource-consuming units, and then they make it screwy by adding this element. And if each unit requires one resource per turn, then each source should produce more than 3 per turn of that resource, at least 5, I think 10 is appropriate - I have this one vein of coal or oil so I can make just 10 units that consume it, If I want more I can settle to get more of the resource. And the infantry unit in particular I have problems with - 1.) obviously the military personnel aren't drinking the oil and it's for the jeeps that are transporting them, so shouldn't they have a MUCH higher movement rate than men on foot weighed down by heavy armor? 2.) If the infantry are positioned at the battlefront, they don't need the vehicles to move them around and consequently wouldn't be consuming oil.
-Roads: a classic case of "it ain't broke but they fixed it anyway," roads were fine in previous civ games but they decided to change from workers to builder (not a bad move there) which made it necessary to reevaluate the construction and effects of roads... or did it? Builders now instantly make an improvement at the cost of a charge instead of being able to make unlimited improvements but taking longer and longer to make based on their sophistication, with roads being the quickest and things like oil rigs being the most turn-consuming. So they moved the construction of roads from a builder/worker function to a trade route function. But I have quite a few problems with the current implementation - 1.) roads are made but are nearly useless until late in the game - a road on a flat terrain with no feature serves NO PURPOSE until several eras into the game. 2.) A road over a hill or featured tile does allow the unit to move to that tile and still have MP remaining but whoops! an attack takes a full MP now instead of being able to attack if you have any little fraction of an MP remaining, so having a road there allows you to move and "skip turn" instead of moving and ending the turn for the unit - no difference except annoyance. 3.) By having the roads be made by a unit, you can create and customize your civilization's movement network instead of having uncontrollable trader units create the most direct path from city to city. 4.) I hear your counter-argument that roads can be made by military engineers, but this unit has probably the worst hammer:benefit return ratio, and I wouldn't delay a district, wonder, unit, or any other production queue to make one. Occasionally, I'll make a single military engineer to get the two forts boost, but otherwise I disregard them completely. 5.) Instead, how about traders don't magically poop out roads, but instead a builder can make it but for ZERO charges at the cost of being locked into the build for 3 or 5 turns? You would then need to either allocate one of your military units to guard it, or risk losing it to a rival civ or even barbs. IMO, that would be better.