thoughts on civ vi from old-timers

[MarkEmm]

Played every Civ game. 4000+ hours into Civ V according to Steam - lol - don't tell the wife.

Civ VI - boring and non-immersive. I've felt this since I started playing but have waited to log 60+ hours just to see if I changed my mind. I haven't. Can put up with the odd bug and stuff, but tbh feels rushed and incomplete.

Some of the bugs (production) and some of the omissions (doesn't remember game settings) are inexcusable. But the bottom line for me - I just don't look forward to playing it. I find it extremely dull.

Oh well, back to Civ 5.

 

[valamas]

Im 40. Been playing since civ1 using pirate copied Civ 1 also using a photo copied manual. I since amended that by owning every civ box and collectors edition to date.

Clocked up over 2000 hours on civ 5. (please drop the roman numerals firaxis) .

Civ 6 is the bomb. Sure. Patch will mend alot. (i am a computer programmer too. Ala commodore 64)

Love 1upt. Chess
Love the unstacked districts.
Love the science and civics change.
Terrain movement seems correct but slows units down a lot.
Ammenities fine. Strategic resources in how you use them to create units great.

Love the game. Bring on the patches.

 

[VirtualMark]

I have been playing this game since Civ I (which I played on an Artari ST computer....google it kids) and I must say that I have never witnessed such an incomplete game as Civ VI seems to be on initial release. Am I alone in that feeling? Not trying to start a hate fest or troll war, I'm just curious as to what some of the old-timers thoughts are on this.

It's beyond awful. I haven't got into a Civ game since 4, they have really gone downhill. Too many changes to the core gameplay, and a lot of it feels like change just for the sake of it.

Civ 6 honestly feels like nobody bothered to test it. For example, even scrolling is broken! You move the cursor to the edge of the screen, it goes left, right and down ok. But if you want to go up... you need to position it in just the right place below the top of the screen... what a joke.

The interface is cluttered, and that's an understatement. I can't even switch cities with the arrow keys! I played 4 after trying 6, and it's far superior. Plus because it's an older game, turn times are instant on my i7. Everything is just clear, snappy and responsive. Whereas in 6, it's just broken. If I want to change city production, I have to click several times to get it to register.

I don't know why they designed it like this, the menus in older titles worked fine. We don't need everything jammed onto one screen, what an awful idea.

And the game itself is just boring. Is it supposed to be fun to perform tasks to speed up your research? The idea was good in theory, but when I play it I find it dull.

I just don't get that sense of magic that I got from older Civ titles, which is a shame.

 

[ThunderLizard2]

It's the fact how all aspects of gameplay require thought and planning. Much more than before, everything affects everything

This is why the game will never be fun to play as it's just too complicated for an AI to handle all this stuff. Add 1 UPT in the mix and you'd need a HAL 9000 to play effectively (sadly although HAL was activated on January 12, 1997 almost ten years ago we still don't have a home based model!)

 

[Ricci]

I've been playing since Civ II and think every edition has been a step forward. The "Great Leap Forward" (in terms of change), obviously, was Civ V .

It seems like Fraxis et al. are trying to innovate, while at the same time, trying to keep the core playing mechanics that make Civ Civ.. That's tough to do.

Nice analogy, as the historical chinese "great leap forward", with all it`s fanfare, turned up being such an industrial and developement calamity to the nation, it struggled for the next ten years to get back on track.

 

[whyidie]

I'm happy to see so many long time players enjoying themselves. Even more encouraging to see so many who were disappointed with 5 (personally I loved it ) being able to enjoy the series again.

As with every Civ iteration everyday I want to play. This one has elements of everything before 5 in terms of moreness. More considerations, opaque effects, etc.,

I give it high marks for introducing new aspects to the series.

I give it low marks for the interface. Both in terms of design (iconography) and ease of use.

The interface is subjective though and I can see some people appreciate different aspects.

Prior to release I thought the leader screens were over the top. Having played it I'm quite impressed.

Still getting used to the map/unit style.

In terms of AI I find it no better or worse than prior releases.

I'm having fun, especially since my 10yr old took the "I liked the old one better" approach. Old dog new tricks, eh ?

 

[Martin Alvito]

Going all the way back:

- The original Civ seemed incredibly polished...because I played it on a Mac years after the original release. By today's standards it had some rough balance problems. Wouldn't mind the equivalent of Democracy in 2000 BC via the Pyramids these days.

- Civ II was a big step up across the board, but DaveV ultimately ruined it (and most subsequent vanilla Civs) for those of us connected to the Internet. Pyramids reworked and still broken.

- SMAC is a lot of fun if you play it somewhat inefficiently and leverage the designed faction strategies while refusing to succumb to the micro hell that is optimal play. If it were possible to program Formers to auto-terraform the map optimally, I'm not sure that the series needs further sequels.

- I didn't put a lot of time into Civ III. My impressions were of a warmonger's paradise that punished horizontal builders pretty hard (thanks DaveV). Pyramids not reworked and still broken.

- CIV seemed very solid at release with a high degree of difficulty that disproportionately rewarded exploiting production mechanics like the chop and the whip, as well as AI bonuses sufficiently large that you were more or less forced to warmonger at the start on Deity. The vanilla release felt most balanced at levels like Emperor and Immortal where the player had options rather than being shoehorned into chop rushing a bunch of Axemen or an early UU. Pyramids no longer out and out broken but still pretty good.

- CiV was a mess. Warmongering (Horse/CC strats and Warrior rush) was overpowered, the AI couldn't fight wars or close out won games and the AI received zero points on the net present value questions in the Economics 101 final. Pyramids worth building but not worth racing for on higher difficulties.

- I think we can all agree that, like Rocky V, Beyond Earth never happened.

- CiVI is a mess that shares many of CiVI's problems, but with a better set of problems overall. If real estate is about location and the set of bones (the physical structure) you have to work with, CiV was a property with more immediate appeal but more incurable structural problems than CiVI. The caveat is that it may be more or less impossible to teach an AI to play a game as complex as CiVI at a level that even begins to approach competence, which will in the long term render CiVI a great multiplayer game and a substandard single-player game.

Oh, and the Pyramids remain situational rather than the must build of the early days. Which feels somewhat weird.

 

[westyofoz]

I've played since Civ 1 and I'm 50, so I guess old for a gamer.
I think Civ 6 is a pretty good vanilla start. I'm reasonable happy with it. Builders are growing on me. The visuals I tolerate, but I am please with the innovative systems. I wa shappy to see religion expanded but the endless stream of apostles coming at you get tedious.

It is different from previous versions but still Civ. I like it, much better than Civ V's vanilla. Sure it has bugs and needs balance, but what vanilla release doesn't? Pretty happy with it, and I am willing to give it a thumbs up and I'm interested to see what the future holds.

 

[Roxlimn]

Unfortunately, it retains the worst mistakes of CiV, which makes it very tedious to play in the late game. In some respects, this has been a problem for the series all along. I'm talking about unit movement in the late game. When you have huge armies and you need to engage against a player halfway around the world on a huge map, then your army is going to be a few tech generations behind by the time if reaches the theater of operations. It's a huge problem that they've never figured out how to deal with--I don't even know they're trying. Movements speeds just need to be significantly ramped up for the modern era, but they can't seem to reconcile that with turn-based combat. When they shifted to 1upt, though, things got really ugly and moving an army is such a chore that in CiV, I refused to wage war until I got those Xcom units that I could actually pop across the globe in a blink. Anything else was too frustrating as I'd set a unit destination, then have to reset it the next turn because some worker happened to stop and block the tile my unit wouldn't arrive in for twelve turns anyway, then two turns later I'd have the unit blinking at me and forget where the heck it was going.

Civ VI allows you to Airlift units between Airports. You just need to have Airports at the theater of operation.

 

[nzcamel]

I give it low marks for the interface. Both in terms of design (iconography) and ease of use.

The interface is subjective though and I can see some people appreciate different aspects.

Interfaces often are messy to begin with. I remember how awful parts of IV's were on release, which they fixed quite nicely within a few months

 

[DocRock]

Average gamer age in Germany is 35 now, so we are all not *that* old

I haven't played the game in 2 weeks and I have to say that I do not miss it at all. With the programming bugs, it's not playable (back 2 desktop when taking a city for example). But! I think with a few patches and maybe an addon it has great potential. The metacritic of 90% is still a joke and proofs only one thing: don't listen to the press anymore. They rate on ad revenue. They need to hype AAA titles to stay alive. DON'T listen to them.

 

[Ferocitus]

I've played since Civ 1 and I'm 50, so I guess old for a gamer.
I think Civ 6 is a pretty good vanilla start. I'm reasonable happy with it. Builders are growing on me. The visuals I tolerate, but I am please with the innovative systems. I wa shappy to see religion expanded but the endless stream of apostles coming at you get tedious.

It is different from previous versions but still Civ. I like it, much better than Civ V's vanilla. Sure it has bugs and needs balance, but what vanilla release doesn't? Pretty happy with it, and I am willing to give it a thumbs up and I'm interested to see what the future holds.

Wise words from a youngster.

I'm 61 and have loved the series from the 1st moment of Civ 1.

Civ6, especially wih Gedemon's Ludicrous-size maps, is working beautifully for me.
All losses have been my own fault, and not because the AI went haywire and spammed me with troops or apostles.

I only wish that Napoleon was the French leader, and that the AI would remember our "disagreements" from Civ5.

 

[MrWhereItsAt]

Wow, Civfanatics member since 2002 and have only posted 23 messages in that time. I feel honored to hear from such a vet.

...can't resist. OK, so I have a few more posts than that...

CiVI has to be pretty much the most complete-seeming Civ game at launch of any since Civ2 for me (since everyone's doing it, I started with Civ 1 in '91). Normally Civ on release feels polished, but a bit empty, until the expansions come out, and then we get all dewy-eyed for that version as soon as the next comes out. Then for the next Civ they take a few steps back from the fully-expanded previous game and polish what's there to perfection, then gradually introduce new stuff again. In CiVI though, for the first time in forever it's a game that takes big leaps forward from the get-go. The double-tree system and the districts/Wonders on the maps are BIG, and several games in I'm just starting to get to grips with the complexity. Most striking to me is how the games I've played go almost as quick in the late-mid to late game as at the beginning. That's an absolute marvel, how that was achieved!

OK, so it's not perfect, and on playthrough 1 I identified the frustrating lack of many UI elements that I could easily count on in previous Civs (Military Advisor to tell me the cost of each unit, time until culture growth, how tourism is building up, yield isn't for some tiles, build queue, list of current agreements with AI in a convenient place, a freaking BACK BUTTON in the Civilopedia...), but all of these can be fixed with patches or mods.

But man, did I need this boost after Beyond Earth. And I really tried to want to play that forever.

 

[Cornelius Scipio]

I've been playing since Civ 1 (Tandy 486 with a whopping 4 megs of RAM), and I was pretty excited for this game. After starting a couple and playing one game all the way through, I gotta say I'm not as excited anymore. Early game isn't bad, actually Barbarians are way more of a threat than they've been in ages, but each era of the game seems to be less fun than the one before. The split science and culture trees make tech come way too soon, I had planes in the 1500s. But my biggest complaint is that I feel like I have way too little information about what's going on in the game, even though I have to manage a ton of cities. There doesn't seem to be any reason not to go big, but if you do, expect each turn to last about a month as you make 2000 decisions in cities you'd have just given over to the governor in the old days. Also, the AI is painfully bad, not only in diplomacy, but my god they're stupid at war. I conquered 3 civilizations with 6 units that I just upgraded all the way through the game in my last playthrough, and I wasn't even going conquest, I just got tired of the idiots denouncing me, or *****ing about something every 5 minutes. When 5 came out, I bought it, played through once or twice and then went back to 4 until gods & kings came out. I think 6 might force me back to 4 for a while again too. I really want to like this game, but for the first time I can ever remember while playing Civ, I was actually bored. By the end of my first play through, I was just waiting to finish my Mars mission so I could quit win. There wasn't any fun by that point.

I agree, absolutely. There are even worse aspects and the CimCity mechanics which are completely out of place.
Regard to the question: is this more finished or unfinished by the previous ones, it seems a little absurd, like saying: "did Firaxis cheated on us more this time, or the times before?". I paid 60,00 euros for this game (which is not little, not like having a drink in a bar and then forget), and I want a functioning thing. If I buy a car, I expect I can drive it safely and fast now, not in a couple of months after they have fixed it 2 or 3 times. Even if I decide I do not like the car so much as I thought, I want that it works!
Anyway, even the people who say they're having fun, admit it is unfinished and with many inconsintencies. I've come to the conclusion that debating on Civ VI is a rhetorical exercise. We should put pressure on the developers to work further and give us a game that is polished, with decent AI, usable interface, balanced resource, easier city managemen etc. Maybe an expansion that changes it extensively. I am not sayng how it should be, everyone has his or her opininion; what I say is that releasing a game in this state is unfair. Could we do something? Boycott Firaxis, go on strike? Sign up a petition? Beg? Ask the UN Council to intervene?

 

[Ferocitus]

Anyway, even the people who say they're having fun, admit it is unfinished and with many inconsintencies. I've come to the conclusion that debating on Civ VI is a rhetorical exercise. We should put pressure on the developers to work further and give us a game that is polished, with decent AI, usable interface, balanced resource, easier city managemen etc. Maybe an expansion that changes it extensively. I am not sayng how it should be, everyone has his or her opininion; what I say is that releasing a game in this state is unfair. Could we do something? Boycott Firaxis, go on strike? Sign up a petition? Beg? Ask the UN Council to intervene?

It is impossible to foresee all of the possible exploits that hundreds of thousands of addicts can find.

Expecting near-perfect balance on the release date is unrealistic.
The devs made a stab at a reasonable start, given their knowledge of who might be playing it when it's released.
No doubt there were also huge pressures to release at a certain time, finished or not.
Fine-tuning balance is much better done after collecting information from a very large sample of addicts.

You personally might have been happy to wait another year or more until the problems were all fixed, but most
most others would not be.

It's pretty obvious some mistakes were left unfixed before release, but I haven't come across one yet
that affects my games or diminishes my enjoyment of them.

I'm glad it's available now, and not when it satisfies a tiny minority of hyper-critical perfectionists.

 

[Cornelius Scipio]

I see your point: but let me ask you something: why do I have to pay full price now for a 50% working car, when probably in six months they are going to sell a 100% working model for a less price? You may say that this is the way it goes for videogames, no use complaining. Well, I still feel cheated. If we are all - as you imply - betatesters for Firaxis, well they should sell the first release for half the price, writing on the box - like drugs - "WARNING: it may contain bugs, unfinished features and other problems. Buy it at your own risk".

 

[beest]

Wow, Civfanatics member since 2002 and have only posted 23 messages in that time. I feel honored to hear from such a vet.

pff joined 2002, newbies

Anyway, I was just checking this thread as to see when I should buy civ6.

In my experience Civ5 a dreadful game on first release and unrecognizable from the fantastic game it became afterwards (hence my hesitation to buy civ6 on first release).

Ironically I think the best way to get this game improved is by buying it (so thanks to everybody that did so). If firaxis sees the game is succes they are more willing to put resources into it to improve it. Together with complaining of course

 

[Ferocitus]

Nice analogy, as the historical chinese "great leap forward", with all it`s fanfare, turned up being such an industrial and developement calamity to the nation, it struggled for the next ten years to get back on track.

10 years in a history stretching back a few millenia.
Proportionally, that's a long lunch for Civ devs.

 

[Tarquin_77]

I've been around Civ since the start... (well before, coz Empire on my 64 was great). Liked everything, although 3 and 5 took a bit more time to love.

6 is keeping me interested so far, about 100 hours in. The weird scaling costs for districts needs fixing, but as long as you focus on production first you have a good time. Flawed? Yes. Incomplete? Debatable. But I'm playing this rather than 5 so something must be right!

 

[REDfeller]

45 year old Civ 1 vet ( Can we stop with this CiV, CIV, CIVI nonsense please, it is absolutely ridiculous).

What made me fall in love with C1 and then hooked me throughout my gaming "career"?
Empire building, tactical and strategic decisions, talking softly with a big stick. Making friends, alliances and enemies. Constant decision making. Next turn syndrome til the birds are singing.
C4 was my favourite because it (eventually) had all of this. You could make long term friends and watch each other backs. Multiple religions in cities. War was a choice not an absolute must.

Since Mr Shafer got his hands on C5 and tried to turn it into Panzer General we have this ridiculous , war is the first, last and only option.
This has sadly carried on into C6.

C6 is a very complex game (too complex? certainly for the AI) and some of the design lessons from the last 25 years have been lost for some reason.

1. UI. Like the dashboard of a car, I look at the UI EVERY second I am in game, it is an absolute mess and I wonder who it has been designed for? Information is power and we have a complete lack of so far.
2. 1UPT, sigh. Great idea, but in a turn based game becomes a nightmare as the game progresses/tech advance/amount and the AI can not deal with the tactics required. Remember C1 where the highest attack in the stack fought against the highest defense in the stack?Why dont units have attack and defense ratings? I have never understood why this simple to understand design has disappeared, even in C4. Modern era wars are quite frankly, stupid and boring as hell in C5 & C6.
SOD where not great at all, but the AI could understand & use them, the human could counter vice versa. Simple = better more competent AI.
3. Religion. Tacked on to C5 because they suddenly remembered C4 had some good mechanics. Now it is a tedious mess that gives OP or unwanted GP, no happiness??? modifiers and magical "combat" pokemon mini game.
4. Cities. Unstacked. Mixed on this one. Seems to be fairly good but once again, completely alien for the AI to even compete with human decision making.
5. Wonders. Placement is an unwanted wall, but tactical decision. Again, the reason you can build wonders far later than available is bad AI decision making because of complexity.
6. Builders. I am sick of making builders. I understand a need for change but why even have them if you're just going to make me build 100 of them every game?Can't we have civil works from CTP?No more units at all cluttering the map.
7. Title screen. Click, click, click, click, click, scroll, click, click, click, scroll click. Sean Bean . . . wait . . . .Noooooo , I forgot to change the difficulty!! Argghhh!
Title screen. Click, click, click, click, click, scroll, click, click, click, scroll click. Sean Bean . . . wait . . . . Tundra start no river, instant reroll, oh wait, I can't anymore. Arggghhhhh.
This is my biggest gripe with the game so far.
8. Diplomacy. Very close to human behavior . . I hate you because your bigger than me, I hate you because you built a wonder I wanted, I hate you because your over there, I hate you because your not over there . . . etc etc

I feel we may need a seperate thread/database for good/bad design in Civ games and discussion around pro's and con's of each.

I think C6 has potential when modders/future patches but 1UPT will never work.

I play because I am a civ addict, but I think the series is going backwards in its original principles.

This is only MY opinion. I do not speak for any body else. Other players views may differ from mine. I may not be right about my views compared to somebody else. I am sorry if you don't agree, maybe we could discuss?