This is the hardest series to learn

[ohmybob]

Wait...so each city I start should have one major focus? IE only one city has science stuff

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Oh sweet summer child...
I remember the days when there were no ingame tutorials, no actually useful advisors that explained basic game mechanics. Back in those days we had to read the manual and still didn't really know what we were doing until we figured it out on our own, and the user interfaces of most turn based strategy games were GARBAGE TRASH.
Some "hardcore players" have a certain romanticism about those times, but they were dark times indeed.

And the AI sucked. The games were less complex than now (despite seeming more complex because of the GARBAGE TRASH interface and lack of tutorials) and the AI still couldn't handle it.


I apologize if I sound patronizing and elitist, I just had to get that off my chest. If I started playing Civ 6 now with no experience in 4x games it might feel overwhelmed as well, but the grumpy old man in me remembers the dark times.

 

[Bad Wolf]

Wait...so each city I start should have one major focus? IE only one city has science stuff

This isn't a hard and fast rule, but generally yes, you want to get into the habit of specializing your cities - you don't have to make every city devoted exclusively to one thing though. Some cities will naturally grow bigger and have more production (your capital almost certainly will be one of these) so you can have those cities take on multiple roles. It's certainly not essential on the easier difficulties but it sure is on the harder ones.

 

[Disgustipated]

no actually useful advisors

The Civ2 advisors weren't particularly useful, but they made up for it in funniness. "Build City Walls!". Sometimes I think Civ 6 needs an aggressive sounding voice yelling at me to build city walls.

 

[Bad Wolf]

The Civ2 advisors weren't particularly useful, but they made up for it in funniness. "Build City Walls!". Sometimes I think Civ 6 needs an aggressive sounding voice yelling at me to build city walls.

Everyone new to the series needs to watch these, the advisors from Civ 2 were the best part of that game.

Oh, can't forget about anarchy:

 

[bonafide11]

I’m an experienced Civ player, but there is so much going on in Civ VI and much of it isn’t clearly explained that I can’t imagine a newbie figuring it out before giving up frustrated. It has to be very intimidating. I think Civ IV did the best job of making the game easy to pick up and play but requiring a lot to master.

 

[pietro1990]

well that means its going to be a good game europa universal isn't a easy game either but its a masterpiece

 

[Sherlock]

I think the thing that separates the casual player from the expert is stacking bonuses.

I can never keep track of 'if I build this here, and use that Civic, and have it next to a river, and am playing as so-and-so, then I'll get this huge bonus'.

 

[drubell]

I've been playing Civ 4 on the side recently (I had played it way back, but never to a point where I was willing to play above warlord) and that one's taking me much more time to develop a mastery over than either Civ 5 or 6.

 

[Xmonger]

On the contrary I'm finding it easier than Civ VI base and Civ V. My difficulty with Civ (since I) has been all the micromanaging. But now with Era's it helps me keep track of the big picture. I hope they do more with that in the next expansion.

 

[Grotius]

Wow, were those advisors really in civ 2? Videos and all? The chick and Elvis do look vaguely familiar, but I don’t remember any cut-scenes.

 

[Bad Wolf]

Wow, were those advisors really in civ 2? Videos and all? The chick and Elvis do look vaguely familiar, but I don’t remember any cut-scenes.

Yes, you had to have the disc inserted however.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

the anarchy one is the best one

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Oh sweet summer child...
I remember the days when there were no ingame tutorials, no actually useful advisors that explained basic game mechanics. Back in those days we had to read the manual and still didn't really know what we were doing until we figured it out on our own, and the user interfaces of most turn based strategy games were GARBAGE TRASH.
Some "hardcore players" have a certain romanticism about those times, but they were dark times indeed.

And the AI sucked. The games were less complex than now (despite seeming more complex because of the GARBAGE TRASH interface and lack of tutorials) and the AI still couldn't handle it.


I apologize if I sound patronizing and elitist, I just had to get that off my chest. If I started playing Civ 6 now with no experience in 4x games it might feel overwhelmed as well, but the grumpy old man in me remembers the dark times.

When I cite old games as better than Civ 6 UI, I do choose carefully for this reason. Just as in 2018, 1995 had plenty of bad games. The garbage of back then is worse than the garbage of now. However, the good UIs from then are better than Civ 6's by any reasonable measure, including clarity/learning curve. Civ 6 hides too much stuff, asks too many unnecessary inputs and the civlopedia's maintenance puts it a step down from good manuals.

It still beats similarly bad UIs from 20 years ago, but I'd like the aiming point for a AAA title in its genre to be better than that.

 

[criZp]

Never have i been so overwhelmed. There are just so many choices to make and things to upgrade. It's very hard to know what to do.

Just play on a low difficulty and focus on having fun building cities. If you're new then start playing without the expansion, so that there are less systems to take in.

 

[RohirrimElf]

Just decided to lower the difficulty one level. I`m losing the macro game on my last 2 attempts or forward settled bit to much. Can`t keep up expanding, getting enough military up, improve my land etc etc. Not enough production (played all my games with Korea)
I`ve decided to play a couple more relaxing games on emperor till i make the jump again towards immortal. So far i havent been playing with any mods that improve the AI or any big overhaul mods so that is a good sign.
Made 1-2 restarts cause the AI settled towards my direction and diddnt have much room to expand. The AI could settle 2x before you could push a first settler out. On some maps you are on a very bad spot real soon. Depending on what the AI does. On other games there is enough room to fit in 8 cities.
I agree with OP that the game could be overwhelming but there is no shame on picking the difficulty that fits the way you play. On single player you are not competing with human players anyway.

 

[dunkleosteus]

You sound like someone who hasn't played a paradox game.

 

[Bad Wolf]

When I cite old games as better than Civ 6 UI, I do choose carefully for this reason. Just as in 2018, 1995 had plenty of bad games. The garbage of back then is worse than the garbage of now. However, the good UIs from then are better than Civ 6's by any reasonable measure, including clarity/learning curve. Civ 6 hides too much stuff, asks too many unnecessary inputs and the civlopedia's maintenance puts it a step down from good manuals.

The Civ VI UI definitely needs a total overhaul, it feels like a beta version or something. I do enjoy the game but the UI makes it tedious to play sometimes. Like selecting trade routes - my god, this was so much easier in Civ V. In Civ VI so far as I can tell there is no quick and easy way to identify which trade routes available to you will net the most gold, or food, or science, etc. You have to look at the "available trade routes" menu and scroll down it, looking at every single possible route, and by the late game there can be hundreds of them! I'm still kind of incredulous that they didn't give us a way to sort the available routes by net gold, or food, etc., so that I can easily see which route would be best without having to spend several minutes scrolling through a menu. Then there's resources - no easy way to see how many of which resource I have, it's all contained in this extremely poorly-designed menu that, again, requires a lot of scrolling. The city detail UI is hard to look at and not intuitive; and I don't like how the only way to de-select a city is to select a unit. Yeah basically I'd like to see it totally redone.

And I really miss the little world-building details they gave us in Civs IV and V, like population, manufactured goods, number of soldiers in your army, etc.

 

[trashcat]

I had a hard time picking it up and I really enjoyed Civ V. It took me a few tries to get to the point where I felt comfortable with the game. Honestly, the biggest challenge was breaking myself of the urge to go "tall" vs "wide".

I think a new player would have a hard time getting into it for a bit. I'll find out when I try to get my partner to play it.

That said, part of the charm I've found with Civ V and VI is that once I get past figuring out the basics of how to play, the gradual exploration of the games inner workings over time is really fun.

I wish I had more time to really explore these. I have a couple of Paradox's strategy games and could just not put the time in to figure it out.

 

[Bad Wolf]

Paradox games are beasts for the shear number of game mechanics they throw at you right away, but they're not really as complicated as they seem at first. Take trade in EU4 for instance. My god it looks intimidating, but once you understand how it works (just watch a five minute Youtube video) the choices that you should make are actually quite obvious. Plus Paradox is usually quite good at demystifying their games' functionalities using tooltips.