Things you *don't* want to see in Civ7 and its expansions

[GeneralZift]

Not sure how popular this sentiment is, but I don't want to see too many 'nothing' resources. I mean random stuff like Grievances, Era Score, Diplomatic Favour, Stability, Sentimentality, Trust, Love, Ingenuity, Hegemony, Influence, Authority, or anything else

(some of those were jokes)

Some are okay, but once I have to juggle about a hundred different imaginary resources, it loses all immersion.

 

[BackseatTyrant]

Not sure how popular this sentiment is, but I don't want to see too many 'nothing' resources. I mean random stuff like Grievances, Era Score, Diplomatic Favour, Stability, Sentimentality, Trust, Love, Ingenuity, Hegemony, Influence, Authority, or anything else

(some of those were jokes)

Some are okay, but once I have to juggle about a hundred different imaginary resources, it loses all immersion.

First off, I think it's more accurate to call them currencies than resources, as they are social constructs represented as hard numbers. And to be fair, even the more tangible currencies, like Gold and Production, are about as much of social constructs as the ones you mentioned. It's just that most of us don't think of them that way because of their inherent links to industrial output and economic growth.

As for whether how many of these different currencies should be in the game, it really depends on where and how they're implemented. Another thing I feel affects the immersion factor, is what the different currencies are called; there's a reason I have a mod in Civ6 that renames 'Diplomatic Victory Points' to 'Prestige'

 

[Leyrann]

(some of those were jokes)

Felt like you started listing Cosmere Shards halfway through that list lol.

 

[AffineConstant]

Not sure how popular this sentiment is, but I don't want to see too many 'nothing' resources. I mean random stuff like Grievances, Era Score, Diplomatic Favour, Stability, Sentimentality, Trust, Love, Ingenuity, Hegemony, Influence, Authority, or anything else

(some of those were jokes)

Some are okay, but once I have to juggle about a hundred different imaginary resources, it loses all immersion.

All for simplifying and eliminating things, as well as trying to put as much as possible "on" the map. I love that districts and wonders are "on" the map, like iron/artifacts etc. You have 1 screen to think about where you can see everything, not a nest of stuff to get through in the UI.

Why was there Tourism and Culture and Loyalty when there could just be one cultural influence score per hex that you could see easily somehow. Egypt is edging closer to 50% culture influence over that city you have on the border with it, better do something about that before you get a rebellion!

Simplifying VII over VI seems like a major theme after the announcement was made. Less useless micro management, less giant variety of resources, less notification pop ups. A game with fewer, more interesting decisions to make rather than a ton of tiny inconsequential ones.

 

[Leucarum]

Culture is probably the most opaque win condition in 6 so probably is a prime candidate for simplification!

 

[Leyrann]

Culture is probably the most opaque win condition in 6 so probably is a prime candidate for simplification!

We had simplified culture in previous games.

I don't particularly remember much about Civ V's version other than that Civ VI's version was designed with the primary purpose of keeping the same core but making it more interactive, but Civ IV's version was literally "get three cities to 50 000 lifetime culture".

Which...

Yeah, no.

I don't want to see a return of that.

 

[Leucarum]

We had simplified culture in previous games.

I don't particularly remember much about Civ V's version other than that Civ VI's version was designed with the primary purpose of keeping the same core but making it more interactive, but Civ IV's version was literally "get three cities to 50 000 lifetime culture".

Which...

Yeah, no.

I don't want to see a return of that.

It's not a binary, It can be made less complex without being simplified that far! I don't want that either.

I think it's fair to say that culture is the most convoluted win condition - just explain the victory conditions to a new player and see which one takes the longest! And it is opaque, it's far less obvious how close a player is to winning. We're all fanatics, so to us the finer details are clearer than the average player. And for that reason I think it merits some simplification.

For the record it's one of my favourite win conditions. The one I want the most changes to is religion, but I think firaxis would be wisest to work on culture out of all the conditions.

 

[Patine]

All for simplifying and eliminating things, as well as trying to put as much as possible "on" the map. I love that districts and wonders are "on" the map, like iron/artifacts etc. You have 1 screen to think about where you can see everything, not a nest of stuff to get through in the UI.

All of the city improvements sprawling out on the main map, is, along with the way religion is done, and all that supernatural woo-hah (although, the latter is contained in a single expansion, fortunately), are the most offputting elements of Civ6, to me. I'd prefer civic improvements and Wonders return to being stacked in the city centre square with a zoom-in, like in Civ1-5.

 

[Leyrann]

I think it's fair to say that culture is the most convoluted win condition - just explain the victory conditions to a new player and see which one takes the longest!

I mean...

Culture: You have to draw more tourists to your country than any country has domestic tourists.

Science: You have to launch a spaceship that travels to an exoplanet.

It's quite similar.

You're probably thinking something along the lines of: "You must generate tourism from improvements, wonders, works generated by Great People and special units, which provides tourists from civilizations you have met. Meanwhile, civs generate domestic tourism from their culture generation. Your tourists from foreign civilizations must exceed the domestic tourism of all civilizations."

But I'd argue that's equivalent to: "You must scientifically advance to the end of the tech tree. Then, you must build Spaceports. You must first launch satellites into orbit, then continue with a moonlanding, and then start preparing for an exoplanet expedition. Each next step requires more technological progress. After launching the expedition, you can speed it up with special projects."

 

[UWHabs]

I mean...

Culture: You have to draw more tourists to your country than any country has domestic tourists.

Science: You have to launch a spaceship that travels to an exoplanet.

It's quite similar.

You're probably thinking something along the lines of: "You must generate tourism from improvements, wonders, works generated by Great People and special units, which provides tourists from civilizations you have met. Meanwhile, civs generate domestic tourism from their culture generation. Your tourists from foreign civilizations must exceed the domestic tourism of all civilizations."

But I'd argue that's equivalent to: "You must scientifically advance to the end of the tech tree. Then, you must build Spaceports. You must first launch satellites into orbit, then continue with a moonlanding, and then start preparing for an exoplanet expedition. Each next step requires more technological progress. After launching the expedition, you can speed it up with special projects."

I don't think the culture victory is inherently more complex once you understand it, and I think I know a lot about how it works, but I could not tell you how they calculate "domestic" vs "foreign" tourists other than on the culture screen. I'll go from 58/114 one turn to 62/115 the next turn, then 63/118 the next, etc...
The space victory is pretty clear "you have X pieces finished, and your journey is 12/50 turns complete, travelling at 3 light-years per turn". I an go to that screen and know exactly where I am, exactly how long it will take, etc...
The culture values jump around, you have all these individual modifiers. For some reason one civ I have +22 foreign tourists in, another civ I'm at +12.

I know people often hate some of the board-gamey nature at times, but for something like the culture victory, it might not be the worst to turn it to more of a "victory-point" style system, maybe. Make it a clear system - for sake of argument, whoever has the most great works has 1 VP, the most wonders has 1 VP, the most seaside resorts 1 VP, etc... With some bigger bonuses, like total counters for tourism output that give you another VP every 1000 tourism that you accumulate, and have it as a race as first to 50 VP or something like that. Maybe that system is dumb or whatever, but at least it would be clear in how you progress, who is winning, how far away you are from the goal, etc... Similar in ways to the diplomatic victory - you accumulate points in a certain way, and if I see I'm at 16/20 points, I know exactly how close I am to winning (other than knowing that the next congress resolution I'll have the -2 points against me resolution come up, etc..). The culture victory now especially is awkward because their "prediction" counter is always jumping all over the place. Like once that counter shows up and says I have 50 turns to victory, I know I'm actually like 15-20 turns away. And when it says 5 turns, I'm either winning in 2 turns or 20 turns.

 

[Leucarum]

Honestly, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that we could drag this out for a long time by overexplaining whichever victory condition we want to in order to score internet points. But also... I come to these forums for fun, so... I'm not gonna go down that rabbithole even if it costs me internet points!

As a fair arbiter I asked chatGPT to explain each victory type as succinctly as possible - and it seems to think Diplomatic needed the most characters, which... Fair, I can see that too. But there were some ommissions in there. So... Yeah. Not especially useful, or conclusive.

"Certainly!

1. **Domination**: Conquer all enemy capitals or eliminate all opponents.

2. **Culture**: Generate more Tourism than others' Culture per turn, become influential over all civs.

3. **Science**: Research all technologies, build a spaceship, and launch it to Alpha Centauri.

4. **Religious**: Convert majority of cities to your religion globally or have most converted cities.

5. **Diplomatic**: Gain enough Diplomatic Victory Points by winning World Leader elections in the World Congress."

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

It's not a binary, It can be made less complex without being simplified that far! I don't want that either.

I think it's fair to say that culture is the most convoluted win condition - just explain the victory conditions to a new player and see which one takes the longest! And it is opaque, it's far less obvious how close a player is to winning. We're all fanatics, so to us the finer details are clearer than the average player. And for that reason I think it merits some simplification.

For the record it's one of my favourite win conditions. The one I want the most changes to is religion, but I think firaxis would be wisest to work on culture out of all the conditions.

How about doing both at the same time?
Considering religion is very tied to the culture of civilizations around the world I'd be more interested in lumping the two together, and having a religion as a requirement for culture victory. Instead of converting other civs I would argue that you at least have to have the majority of your cities/citizens influenced by your religion. Then of course conversion of other civs would eradicate their chances for a culture victory, because you are effectively changing their culture.

 

[Leucarum]

How about doing both at the same time?
Considering religion is very tied to the culture of civilizations around the world I'd be more interested in lumping the two together, and having a religion as a requirement for culture victory. Instead of converting other civs I would argue that you at least have to have the majority of your cities/citizens influenced by your religion. Then of course conversion of other civs would eradicate their chances for a culture victory, because you are effectively changing their culture.

I'm open to making religion more interesting, and having it be one route to a culture victory is interesting and historically valid. I don't think I'd wany it to be a prerequisite though!

I am slightly worried we might have opened pandora's box on this thread.

 

[BackseatTyrant]

As a fair arbiter I asked chatGPT...

This is such an aside, I must implore you all to stop relying on ChatGPT or any other similar services for anything! Each and every single one of them are practically a scam that relies on mathematics that haven't been elaborated upon since the 1970s, and only recently became feasible because fintech bros got hold of data centers that require so much electricity, water & other resources, that saving the planet from a climate catastrophe that could wipe out humanity (if not all life altogether by turning the planet's atmosphere to Venus) is quickly turning into a lost cause. Not to mention how a lot of these "AI" companies used Mechanical Turk-types of trickery to fool venture capitalists into giving them the money they needed to run these operations.

This is probably why I have such little patience for fans who genuinely believe Firaxis' top priority should be to "make better AI"; half of the pleas are coming from people who genuinely believe this tech is anything resembling "artificial intelligence". And here's the thing: Aritifical Intelligence is not real. It doesn't exist, never has, and probably never will. Any example of "good AI" you can think of, was always a carefully constructed illusion from the developer's side. Sometimes, especially now in the 2020s, it was literally a Mechanical Turk-type of situation, i.e. the output data came from click farm with sweatshop-like working conditions somewhere in the Global South. This is not the key to to a techno-utopian future; it's just an excuse for turning as much human labour as possible forever cheap & exploitable.

I apologize for this rant potentially being too aggressive and/or off-topic for this thread. It's just that I don't want anyone's opinions or requests be informed by grifts like these

 

[Leucarum]

This is such an aside, I must implore you all to stop relying on ChatGPT or any other similar services for anything! Each and every single one of them are practically a scam that relies on mathematics that haven't been elaborated upon since the 1970s, and only recently became feasible because fintech bros got hold of data centers that require so much electricity, water & other resources, that saving the planet from a climate catastrophe that could wipe out humanity (if not all life altogether by turning the planet's atmosphere to Venus) is quickly turning into a lost cause. Not to mention how a lot of these "AI" companies used Mechanical Turk-types of trickery to fool venture capitalists into giving them the money they needed to run these operations.

This is probably why I have such little patience for fans who genuinely believe Firaxis' top priority should be to "make better AI"; half of the pleas are coming from people who genuinely believe this tech is anything resembling "artificial intelligence". And here's the thing: Aritifical Intelligence is not real. It doesn't exist, never has, and probably never will. Any example of "good AI" you can think of, was always a carefully constructed illusion from the developer's side. Sometimes, especially now in the 2020s, it was literally a Mechanical Turk-type of situation, i.e. the output data came from click farm with sweatshop-like working conditions somewhere in the Global South. This is not the key to to a techno-utopian future; it's just an excuse for turning as much human labour as possible forever cheap & exploitable.

I apologize for this rant potentially being too aggressive and/or off-topic for this thread. It's just that I don't want anyone's opinions or requests be informed by grifts like these

My use of it was very much intended to be tongue-in-cheek. And I pointed out the innacuracies in the post. As you said this isn't the place for this debate so that's all I'm going to say here.

 

[GeneralZift]

This is such an aside, I must implore you all to stop relying on ChatGPT or any other similar services for anything! Each and every single one of them are practically a scam that relies on mathematics that haven't been elaborated upon since the 1970s, and only recently became feasible because fintech bros got hold of data centers that require so much electricity, water & other resources, that saving the planet from a climate catastrophe that could wipe out humanity (if not all life altogether by turning the planet's atmosphere to Venus) is quickly turning into a lost cause. Not to mention how a lot of these "AI" companies used Mechanical Turk-types of trickery to fool venture capitalists into giving them the money they needed to run these operations.

This is probably why I have such little patience for fans who genuinely believe Firaxis' top priority should be to "make better AI"; half of the pleas are coming from people who genuinely believe this tech is anything resembling "artificial intelligence". And here's the thing: Aritifical Intelligence is not real. It doesn't exist, never has, and probably never will. Any example of "good AI" you can think of, was always a carefully constructed illusion from the developer's side. Sometimes, especially now in the 2020s, it was literally a Mechanical Turk-type of situation, i.e. the output data came from click farm with sweatshop-like working conditions somewhere in the Global South. This is not the key to to a techno-utopian future; it's just an excuse for turning as much human labour as possible forever cheap & exploitable.

I apologize for this rant potentially being too aggressive and/or off-topic for this thread. It's just that I don't want anyone's opinions or requests be informed by grifts like these

I mean wanting better AI for the next game doesn't really mean I want them to use chatgpt

 

[fluffy465]

I mean...

Culture: You have to draw more tourists to your country than any country has domestic tourists.

Science: You have to launch a spaceship that travels to an exoplanet.

It's quite similar.

You're probably thinking something along the lines of: "You must generate tourism from improvements, wonders, works generated by Great People and special units, which provides tourists from civilizations you have met. Meanwhile, civs generate domestic tourism from their culture generation. Your tourists from foreign civilizations must exceed the domestic tourism of all civilizations."

But I'd argue that's equivalent to: "You must scientifically advance to the end of the tech tree. Then, you must build Spaceports. You must first launch satellites into orbit, then continue with a moonlanding, and then start preparing for an exoplanet expedition. Each next step requires more technological progress. After launching the expedition, you can speed it up with special projects."

I think if you objectively analyze both victory conditions, then culture is going to definitely be simpler. It's been my experience, however, that for whatever reason it's way harder to understand as a new player. I tried explaining the victory condition to a friend who was new to the game, and I couldn't really instill more understanding than "more culture = good" and "more tourism = good". I suppose that's good enough to get by, so I'm not the biggest advocate of completely reworking the feature. I think part of the problem is that the game presents the system much more poorly than the science victory. The explanations it gives for progressing often amount to just leaving the player with 'just have more foreign tourists than domestic tourists everywhere,' which just turns one question (what is a culture victory) into two (what are domestic tourists & foreign tourists). It all feels somewhat opaque, which isn't helped by the fact that when it does give you a seemingly concrete number that makes sense in the context of the rest of the game such as "turns left until a culture victory", that number fluctuates wildly from turn to turn. The science victory, however, mostly uses mechanics that have been with the player for most of the game, particularly unlocking techs and district projects. The only exception being the interstellar part at the end, but even that is easy enough to understand by just mousing over things in the victory screen.

On another point about the system being opaque, I want to know where in the game it tells you how much tourism it takes to generate a single foreign tourist, and likewise for culture/domestic. For the science victory, analogous numbers are pretty easy to spot (tech science costs in tech tree, district project production costs in prod menu, ly/turn in victory screen, all paired with a generally accurate turn counter). I'm asking where that information would be about tourists only as a semi-rhetorical question, because I genuinely don't know whether you're given it anywhere in the game or not. If anything, I strongly in favor of completely changing how it's presented to the player so that it doesn't feel more complex than it actually is.

 

[GeneralZift]

Culture victory was far more easy to understand in Civ5, where the goal is just for your Tourism bar to beat their Culture bar.

I sort of understand whatever Civ6 is doing with Culture Victory, but it's not very intuitive.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I don't want a rigid win system where I have to decide early on what victory I'm going for, and then orient the entire game around it. That's one reason I stick to Civ 3 most of the time -- it's prettty free-wheeling. Culture is the only one that requires a lot of planning before. A lot of times I've planned for a peaceful UN or space victory, but then medieval wars to get resources put me on a path to conquest or domination - or, I was going for conquest and got tired of fighting, so I just expanded my empire to a point and then sat back and waited for space.

 

[GeneralZift]

I don't want a rigid win system where I have to decide early on what victory I'm going for, and then orient the entire game around it. That's one reason I stick to Civ 3 most of the time -- it's prettty free-wheeling. Culture is the only one that requires a lot of planning before. A lot of times I've planned for a peaceful UN or space victory, but then medieval wars to get resources put me on a path to conquest or domination - or, I was going for conquest and got tired of fighting, so I just expanded my empire to a point and then sat back and waited for space.

Actually I think this is still possible in newer games, I always find myself pivoting to random win conditions I wasn't aiming for, in both Civ5 and Civ6.

Although, perhaps you are right about it. I get this idea where if I want a science victory for example in Civ6, I need to plan ahead where all the campuses are going to go for max adjacency and such.