Tier civ list ?

[Attakuiu]

Hi all, is there any sort of Tier civ list updated? Thanks in advance.

 

[Bleys]

There are some articles out there about this.

My personal favorites are Simon Bolivar, Joao, and Peter. Hojo and Alexander are also very strong.

Here is one I found.

Civilization 6 Tier List: The Best Civ 6 Leaders

If you're looking for the most comprehensive list of the best leaders in Sid Meier's Civilization 6, look no further!

www.thegamer.com

 

[Linklite]

There are some articles out there about this.

My personal favorites are Simon Bolivar, Joao, and Peter. Hojo and Alexander are also very strong.

Here is one I found.

Civilization 6 Tier List: The Best Civ 6 Leaders

If you're looking for the most comprehensive list of the best leaders in Sid Meier's Civilization 6, look no further!

www.thegamer.com

I saw a tier list the other day that had João as C Tier. I'm not sure I would place much faith in them.

 

[rocksinmypath]

I saw a tier list the other day that had João as C Tier. I'm not sure I would place much faith in them.

Yeah, I also find it hard to agree that he's only average. I've been compiling my own list and played Joao a couple days ago. It was the first game in deity (no game modes) I managed to get all of the policy card wonders + Oxford University + Ruhr Valley + Amundsen-Scott early enough for it to be useful.

Joao has a highly coherent kit, but the ability to get a trade route after meeting another civ alone is powerful enough to make him well above average. Even on a non-naval map like Pangaea, where he'd be using most of his traders for domestic trading, I think he'd be at least average.

 

[Finvola]

Yeah the tier lists can be a bit strange. I think it's a given Russia will always be S tier or S+ if there is such a thing. Japan as well. Somebody put Macedon as F tier on a list I saw and that's ridiculous. I do play on Deity, but I am by no means an expert or fantastic player but I can play and win on Deity for the most part. I played as Macedon the other day and I never snowballed so hard on Deity as I did with him. I rolled everybody over and won in fewer turns than I ever did before. I play on Marathon and it was before mid-game that I won by domination. So I don't agree that he is F tier. Maybe some people making these lists just don't know how to play the leaders properly but it's pretty straight forward with Alex. I don't believe Portugal is C tier either.

 

[Abaxial]

It would be interesting to compare civs according to how strong they are in the hands of a player and how strong when run by the AI. For instance, I can quite believe Finvola regarding Macedon, but I find that when I encounter them on a map, they are usually doing badly. Russia played by the AI usually means a map swarming with redundant great writers and artists with nothing to do.

So actually, one wants two different tier lists!

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

Over the years, I think I've only seen one decent tier list out of at least a dozen.
Don't put much faith in them.

 

[Bleys]

Joao is a monster, especially on maps with lots of coastline, Small Continents is my personal fav map. Get him up to 20 cities, each trade route with 40 gold + the extras, the income becomes insane. I had something like 50,000 gold, pre-atomic, on Immortal with him a week or so ago. Build a district, instantly max out the buildings.

 

[bbbt]

Most of the tier lists out there are really one person's impression, and really dependent on their playstyle and how much they've played the game in varying ways.

There was an old tier list thread in the strategy forums but I think it was only vanilla, and there are the Victory elimination threads (i.e. best civ for cultural victory) in this forum that are effectively tier lists, but I don't think they only include Rise and Fall/Gathering Storm civs

 

[ManoftheHour333]

Does anyone know why major Civ YTers like Potato McWhiskey or Saxy Gamer never put out a final Civ tier list? I remember loving FilthyRobot’s for Civ V…don’t know why none of the super prominent Civ VI players never did one.


Also, how dare someone dismiss Joao…easily A tier at the LEAST lol

 

[Finvola]

I thought Saxy had done tier videos before? I know he did a couple of joke ones (like best looking male/female leaders) but I thought he did an actual tier list at some point but perhaps it was an earlier list.. I don't think he's uploaded for a while, though. His videos really helped me improve my game. Potato too, when he used to do the series where he explained his thought process.

And I totally agree with Joao, no way is he C tier. I think it is one of those cases where the person who made the list just wasn't playing him correctly or didn't have their map settings suited for him.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

Joao is a monster, especially on maps with lots of coastline, Small Continents is my personal fav map. Get him up to 20 cities, each trade route with 40 gold + the extras, the income becomes insane. I had something like 50,000 gold, pre-atomic, on Immortal with him a week or so ago. Build a district, instantly max out the buildings.

Well if you play that type of map, of course he's good.
He will never be at the top of a tier list though, because of map dependency.
He's still decent on Pangea, but nothing special and certainly not anywhere near the top.

Good tier lists have to take circumstances into account, which most of them never do.
Thecivlifer's tier lists on youtube for instance are a bloody joke in that regard.
If I recall he even rated Estadio do Maracana and Statue of Liberty as S tier wonders, which says a lot how much of a grain of salt one should take tier lists.

 

[rocksinmypath]

Well if you play that type of map, of course he's good.
He will never be at the top of a tier list though, because of map dependency.
He's still decent on Pangea, but nothing special and certainly not anywhere near the top.

Why does that even matter? That's a factor you can control. Joao isn't any more map-dependent in a meaningful way than most other leaders. Peter wouldn't work well on a hot map, Pachacuti would be bad on an old-age map, and Simon Bolivar (or any other land-based military leader) wouldn't be great on Archipelago. If you play on Archipelago or Small Continents with Joao, you're likely to get a good map and won't need to re-roll a hundred times to get a good game going.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

Why does that even matter? That's a factor you can control. Joao isn't any more map-dependent in a meaningful way than most other leaders. Peter wouldn't work well on a hot map, Pachacuti would be bad on an old-age map, and Simon Bolivar (or any other land-based military leader) wouldn't be great on Archipelago. If you play on Archipelago or Small Continents with Joao, you're likely to get a good map and won't need to re-roll a hundred times to get a good game going.

It's a factor because not everyone plays sea maps, thus if you make a tier list you gotta account for the various map types that people play.
Heck, some people even enjoy random maps, or maps where they gotta play whatever start they are given (no rerolls, meaning you could end up on the exact opposite terrain that you were hoping for and which makes the civ strong).

Which is my point, a proper good tier list tries to rank the leaders as unbiased as possible, factoring how strong they are on their own merits vs dependencies on certain conditions.
It's fine saying that Joao is strong, but the vast majority of tier lists don't mention their dependencies on certain setups, so stating their tier ranking as an "undisputed fact" is just flat out misleading.
So far I've really only seen one good tier list that attempted to do so, and quite successfully for that reason.

 

[Patine]

I don't really care about tiers, myself. I play who I want, and if it's a walkover or I get trounced because of it, that's how it goes. There'll be more games to be had, ideally.

 

[Abaxial]

I did some experiments with Joao and random starts recently, and a lot of the time the random maps gave him problems. For instance - you start on a coastal hex but it turns out to be part of a lake. Or there are no potential trading partners anywhere nearby. So it's not just ocean vs non-ocean.

Personally I'll reroll if I don't like what I got. I play for fun and I don't see the point of struggling on with a map I am not going to enjoy.

 

[Henri Christophe]

I did some experiments with Joao and random starts recently, and a lot of the time the random maps gave him problems. For instance - you start on a coastal hex but it turns out to be part of a lake. Or there are no potential trading partners anywhere nearby. So it's not just ocean vs non-ocean.

Personally I'll reroll if I don't like what I got. I play for fun and I don't see the point of struggling on with a map I am not going to enjoy.

To avoid this kind of issue to start in a coastal lake, you can always choice the real earth location, then you can trade with Africans and Europeans easily.

 

[Abaxial]

To avoid this kind of issue to start in a coastal lake, you can always choice the real earth location, then you can trade with Africans and Europeans easily.

Then you know the geography right at the start of the game. Spoils the fun of exploration.

 

[Kotofei]

Does anyone know why major Civ YTers like Potato McWhiskey or Saxy Gamer never put out a final Civ tier list? I remember loving FilthyRobot’s for Civ V…don’t know why none of the super prominent Civ VI players never did one.

Boesthius did a good updated one fairly recently. He did a good job noting which civs are "situational" and ranked them more or less appropriately based on that. I agree with him that only Peter and Jay are truly "S-Tier" in the sense that their start bias means they generally always have what they need to run away with the game.

As others said, there's too much subjectivity and dependency. Eleanor on Pangaea with the right start? S tier IMO. On a water map? lol. Gitarja is the opposite. What are your game settings? (Trajan with early Voidsingers?) Heroes turns the game upside down.

gtg firing up a Trajan game with SS.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

Boesthius did a good updated one fairly recently. He did a good job noting which civs are "situational" and ranked them more or less appropriately based on that. I agree with him that only Peter and Jay are truly "S-Tier" in the sense that their start bias means they generally always have what they need to run away with the game.

As others said, there's too much subjectivity and dependency. Eleanor on Pangaea with the right start? S tier IMO. On a water map? lol. Gitarja is the opposite. What are your game settings? (Trajan with early Voidsingers?) Heroes turns the game upside down.

gtg firing up a Trajan game with SS.

The attempt at creating a more balanced tier list was good, but I feel that he overrated Jayavarman as well.
I have played around quite a bit with the new Jayavarman, and I must say that he has some dependencies that can be the difference between a stellar game or "just" a good one.
If you get a very thick jungle with multiple holy sites for +4 adjacency or better (sacred path + work ethic), he becomes absolutely ridiculous once the synergies start rolling.
Meanwhile if you have to utilize something like river goddess and don't get very high adjacencies, Jayavarman is "only" good.
My problem with him is that he takes quite a lot of time to ramp up in power, namely by being dependent on a religion without any bonuses to actually getting the religion fast, nor getting any early faith bonuses to secure the pantheons he wants.
This also spills over into his ability to secure an early classical golden age, which is a factor in my personal ranking on whether a civ is OP or not.
Still a good civilization, but nowhere near as consistently broken as for example Russia is.

Heck, I've played Russia with desert folklore and it still was almost as disgustingly OP as Tundra is, just because of how strong and fast the Lavra ramps up Russia's early game in combination with Monumentality (which is almost guaranteed as Russia).