[Vanilla] Under 40% of players have won a game (from Steam global achievements)

[halfhalfharp]

Same here... CivV so much easier, but that was because of the terrain dependancy of the game... Usually the human eye knows a great city spot (and will wander for 10 turns with their starting settler if need be) whereas the AI settles in place at t1 and has a horrible game. That, and war bribes as well as severe warmonger penalties make aggressive AIs self-destruct so you can get by the whole game without building a single military unit (scouts not included... But they can become archers with ruins)

Yeah the bribing of wars made my life in Civ V, too bad that it is gone in VI. It is almost impossible to keep friendship alongside with wars in VI.

And the tile management is a hell to Civ V players... and the requirements of the wonders just complicate the things. Even now I have difficulty in spoting a good location of city settling, in order to build the wonders I want and gaining district adjacent bonus.

Back in V, I could settle any place I want and develop a city without worrying about district limits and the numerous turns they take to build.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

This post baffles me. How do you define quality that this is your conclusion? Games were simplistic as hell and AI could be reliably reverse engineered just by playing the game for a little bit, and this was with a dumb brain 30 years younger than our current less-dumb 30 years older brain. There were never any surprises, and the few games where even the taste of emergent game-play or anything unexpect could surface were revered as masterpieces for no other reason.

First of all, the mentioning of "emergent gameplay" is worth a bemused smile.

I am defining quality in terms of end user experience. There are many games made in the past few years that soundly destroy the old games. Civ fails. Why? Because civ can't manage the basic things games like Warlords (before that series tanked) got right.

~ Ten years ago, it was possible to play through a civ game that allowed queue, management of multiple cities simultaneously, and even allowed a sortable city list where you could change builds on the spot. Units produced from these cities could be waypointed, and not only could pop-ups be blocked until the end of the turn, but the cycling involved worked. Let's completely ignore stacking. If civ 6 implemented just the superior UI conventions from earlier titles in the same series, it would shave hours from play time start-finish...despite that civ 4 UI was itself flawed!

Remember how people talk about tedious end game? Yes, hours of unnecessarily busywork added per game from an objectively inferior UI that shouldn't have made it into the game's beta phase adds tedium. Rimworld's tiny design team absolutely dumpstered civ 6 while Rimworld was still in alpha. Warlords 2, made pre-1995, dumpsters civ 6's UI. It's that bad and even people who don't identify the cause can identify the tedium.

However, we're not done. Civ 5/6 also have bad MP if you try to go with 5+ people for a long period of time. In this regard they're actually worse than Paradox MP (MP DLC policy is worse too). I could play a game in the 90's on a 56k modem with 8 players in an RTS and have fewer de-sync/drop issues. Civ 4 was hot garbage at it initially, then eventually managed this. Civ 5 never managed this. Many games can do so easily, but not civ 6. Will civ 6 make it into this century in MP experience? Time will tell.

Don't get me wrong. There are good mechanics in 6, it has better graphics, and it has ideas that the older games can't match. Firaxis has not perfected how these mechanics interact, but there's potential there. However, until they drag the UI out of pre-beta trash can status and make a legit effort to kind-of care about end-user experience while playing the game Civ 6 will continue to struggle with player interest as games drag on. Even civ 4 had this problem, but it was *objectively* HOURS faster to finish per game...owing almost entirely to AI IBT and especially player UI during player turns.

Civ 1 was made in '91 and the gameplay loop was found cities to found more cities until there's not more room for new cities, then conquor cities till no cities. All the other stuff we talk about on this forum all the time, did not exist. I wouldn't call that superior.

Civ was a weak series compared to contemporary versions of HOMM or Warlords. Civ 2's design/UI vs Warlords 2? Hahahahaha no. Firaxis brought Civ to the fore in TBS as the other series fell off a cliff with civ 4, but it didn't hang onto that very well.

I think you're being way too hard on Firaxis, too. They're an excellent studio with a whole lot more integrity than most others

I once thought that. It is disingenuous too look at prioritization of new civs DLC vs non-functional unit cycling, controls, delivering on cross-platform promises, or shoddy MP and still conclude there's "more integrity than most others". Even Paradox, whose DLC policy I hold in some disdain, is better than Firaxis. If you play MP in Paradox, everyone uses host's DLC. If you play MP in civ, players don't have access to the same options. To be fair unlike Paradox at least they don't lie outright about the cross-platform stuff though.

Well stated. Sometimes people are not happy unless they are unhappy. Games are simply a way to pass leisure time. If a game bothers you far more than you enjoy it/have fun with it why on earth would you spend any amount of time even thinking or writing about it let alone playing it?

Civ 6 can be good. I want it to be good. At one point I can still remember I enjoyed the civ franchise greatly.

But right now, it isn't good, and when players don't see the UI for what it is (hot pre-beta garbage in vanilla) it's baffling to me. Spending > 2 hours in a won run 4x is silly, and there is absolutely no reason any 4x game made in the last few decades should still be doing that. If the devs don't respect users' time I don't see why the game should command much respect.

 

[Duuk]

I am defining quality in terms of end user experience. There are many games made in the past few years that soundly destroy the old games. Civ fails. Why? Because civ can't manage the basic things games like Warlords (before that series tanked) got right.

I can still hear, "Greetings, Warlord" ringing in my ears. Thanks for that.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I can still hear, "Greetings, Warlord" ringing in my ears. Thanks for that.

I did an LP of that game during Civ 5 times and was really surprised at just how far ahead of its time that dev team was in game controls/anti-tedium.

• Players with a runaway lead were offered surrender as a victory condition option.
  
• It has vectoring for moving produced units to fronts automatically.
• It already has pathing saved and when interrupted will prompt the player, resulting in fewer moves against intention than civ 6, which plots auto-paths around targets but will move on these adjusted paths w/o prompt (I've seen right clicking a ranged attack cause a move + no attack in Civ 6).
• Game didn't have input buffering issues. Civ 5/6 have inconsistent input buffering.
  
• Despite the limited-stacking design implemented in the early-mid 1990s, it has unit cycling with hotkeys for unit cycling. Compare this with Civ 6, which functionally does not have unit cycling (it's so lollerbad they gave players the option to turn it off rather than fixing it).
• Push a button, see an enlarged minimap where unit locations and whose they are are obvious.
• To my knowledge, there are no instances of misinformation from the game UI.
• There is no equivalent to the opaque nature of war weariness, warmonger penalty, how tourism (central to a VC) is calculated, or take your pick of many other mechanics where youtubers and forum posters are literally more trustworthy than the developers, because they have a better confirmed track record for accuracy than the devs or game UI. In this game, if there's something you don't know you can find it in-game or in the manual (old equivalent of Civlopedia)

This game was contemporary to civ 2, which didn't even have pathing across turns! There are very few UI conventions Civ 5 or 6 actually do better. Even a lot of the demographics-on-hotkeys available today were present in that game. Thanks to the bottom menu and shift/alt/control queuing available in civ 4, that game had better city management...but Civ 5 and later scrapped that so they lose that advantage, same with controlling from city list.

I'd give Civ 5/6 the advantage in MP due to simultaneous turns being available, except MP doesn't work very well in these titles and by the time Warlords 3 rolled around (still in the 1990s!), that advantage was lost too .

 

[Duuk]

I did an LP of that game during Civ 5 times and was really surprised at just how far ahead of its time that dev team was in game controls/anti-tedium.

I never thought about it until your earlier post, but that's when I realized it had rally points, unit vectoring, and some top-tier stuff I'd kill for in Civ6.

And I was playing it in middle school (I think, I'd need to verify dates). Compare that with the fact that Civ6s domination victory isn't about domination and sometimes easier to achieve than Civ4's and it makes me wonder. I'd prefer a return to CIv4's domination victory (Own X% of the world's land area) because capital sniping or capital hunting both annoy me. Same for religious victory. Yes, I understand that Kongo doesn't 100% follow my religion yet. Yes, I understand that 90% of the world follows my religion and nobody else has any holy cities left yet. Just declare me winner already. Sheesh.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I never thought about it until your earlier post, but that's when I realized it had rally points, unit vectoring, and some top-tier stuff I'd kill for in Civ6.

And I was playing it in middle school (I think, I'd need to verify dates). Compare that with the fact that Civ6s domination victory isn't about domination and sometimes easier to achieve than Civ4's and it makes me wonder. I'd prefer a return to CIv4's domination victory (Own X% of the world's land area) because capital sniping or capital hunting both annoy me. Same for religious victory. Yes, I understand that Kongo doesn't 100% follow my religion yet. Yes, I understand that 90% of the world follows my religion and nobody else has any holy cities left yet. Just declare me winner already. Sheesh.

Civ 4 had the advantage of snowball capitulations too (peace vassals could DIAF but caps were solid enough). Removing that VC (based on land area/pop) made no sense in Civ 5/6.

Some of the VCs added to modern civs hurt it a bit, because they were never balanced in terms of competitive utility. Ideally, a "peaceful" victory is there to break a game's stalemate, since otherwise anybody who is trying should attempt to conquer someone closing on a peaceful VC. If you do that, these VCs don't really work any longer.

 

[Archon_Wing]

You can speed a domination victory in Civ 6 by having AIs surrender most of their cities to you. However, that's another can of worms (game throwing, to be specific)

 

[Ferocitus]

But right now, it isn't good, and when players don't see the UI for what it is (hot pre-beta garbage in vanilla) it's baffling to me.

For me, the UI was very easy to get used to, from the very start. It felt quite
natural to me, as has each change from one version to another since Civ I, and
it suited my play style.

I'm really glad Firaxis didn't spend time tweaking the UI instead of
concentrating on the many planned extensions they had in the pipeline. The
sooner they come out and rattle into place, the sooner Firaxis can take stock of
what needs to be changed with the UI and many, many other aspects of the game,
as a whole, and not in a piecemeal fashion. To make major adjustments earlier
would have been a ludicrous waste of time and effort.

Thankfully, calls for changes to the UI have been ignored by Firaxis, and all
power to them for not caving in to a disgruntled tiny minority who want
immediate drastic changes because the poor dears have a sore mousing finger!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

For me, the UI was very easy to get used to, from the very start

It's not just a matter of figuring out what to do and how to do it...though the UI is abjectly terrible in this regard and it is disingenuous to claim otherwise. There are numerous in-game rules that you can't answer how they work using the UI or Civlopedia. This is a strategy game, and the UI hides the rules. I'm not okay with that, and I'm not okay with consumers that support that. It damages a once pretty darned good series.

It's also a matter of limiting the number of inputs to the fewest reasonably attainable. In this regard civ 5 and 6 are objectively terrible and it is not hyperbole to say they are outclassed by > 20 year old titles. That this equates to extra hours per game is also not in question.

Those hours confer no extra decisions. They add nothing to the experience but more clicks. To the extent that one is glad they have the UI in pre-alpha, said consumer is supporting an objectively bad aspect of the end user experience.

The game should never have shipped with the UI in pre-beta. Calling basic UI conventions that indy developers and dredges like Microsoft alike have managed before a substantial portion of the game's playerbase was born "drastic" is pretty silly. I do not see any utility in defending Firaxis' pathetic UI, nor any credibility in arguments supporting it to this point. It's a disgrace that hides the game rules and forces thousands of extra inputs (compared to anything competent released since the internet was widespread) to no in-game benefit whatsoever.

If the devs wanted, they could make the city list sortable with changes to builds there by next patch. If you consider this "drastic" please explain how it harms the game in any meaningful capacity.

Ditto for functional unit cycling, providing the actual game rules, or making what happens when you right click the same as what the game says will happen before. Please explain how these would be "drastic" .

 

[Thormodr]

For me, the UI was very easy to get used to, from the very start. It felt quite
natural to me, as has each change from one version to another since Civ I, and
it suited my play style.

I'm really glad Firaxis didn't spend time tweaking the UI instead of
concentrating on the many planned extensions they had in the pipeline. The
sooner they come out and rattle into place, the sooner Firaxis can take stock of
what needs to be changed with the UI and many, many other aspects of the game,
as a whole, and not in a piecemeal fashion. To make major adjustments earlier
would have been a ludicrous waste of time and effort.

Thankfully, calls for changes to the UI have been ignored by Firaxis, and all
power to them for not caving in to a disgruntled tiny minority who want
immediate drastic changes because the poor dears have a sore mousing finger!

Agreed. Get the foundation laid (feature complete) and then get things spruced up, whether it be the UI, AI or what have you.

In the mean time, consider a few extra clicks a bit of exercise and a few calories burnt. Lol.

 

[Duuk]

I'll agree that the "right click changing what it wants to do after the fact" part kills me.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Agreed. Get the foundation laid (feature complete) and then get things spruced up, whether it be the UI, AI or what have you.

In the mean time, consider a few extra clicks a bit of exercise and a few calories burnt. Lol.

? The UI is a core game feature and an absolute foundation of user experience. If you have none at all, you literally can't play. Beyond that extreme, the UI is among the top reasons players don't finish games...the reason this debate came up in this thread. It might not be the top reason, but it might be. When you play 100's of turns > minute/turn for many of them on bad UI adds up, fast.

The game not ending close to when it's over was identified as a problem, and this is a part of the game that is objectively putting hours between those two things compared to a good UI. Complaints about "pacing" are also tied to this in part.

 

[hdbhdbvGFG541]

I love how people are defending bad ui.I mean just look at this:
CivIV: Click on your town, shift-click any queue. Ctrl-click to place new buildings\units to the top of your queue.
CivV: Click on your town, click queue bar, select all what you need to build, close queue bar, close town bar. Want to rearrange something? Repeat all steps.
Civ6:What queue bar?

But i guess the u defenders don't like to plan what buildings to build next,you know actually having a strategy.

Moderator Action: Don't troll other members like that, just because people aren't botrhered about a Production Queue doesn't mean they have no Strategy!! --NobleZarkon
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

Oh and let's not get into diplomatic ui which 4 nailed.

 

[abandag]

I know I spend the vast majority of my time playing offline. Last I looked, my Steam account says I've played for 51 minutes. In reality, hardly a day goes by that I don't play for at least 3 hours. Achievements don't really matter much to me. I've only actively tried for one that I can remember, the one for Japan having a district surrounded by six other districts. I'm pretty sure I did it, but I'm also pretty sure it never showed up in my achievements list.

I also rarely finish a game. I never come back to games I've already started. I don't even bother to save most games anymore. Sometimes if I'm having a really interesting game, I'll save it. Then still not come back to it.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Yea, not sure why a queue is such a controversial topic.You can queue moves for units. Why is this any different?

And indeed, Civ in general, has had a bad time explaining its own mechanics to people. Whether it is the hidden modifiers in Civ 4, that vague "opaque" diplomacy in Civ 5 Vanilla, to Civ 6's mysterious culture system and not even an event log so if you miss those notifications too bad, it just does a pretty bad job of conveying proper information to people.

I mean the hilarious thing is if you go into the city screen and mouse over a wonder, it doesn't tell you what the wonder does anymore, so you need to head over to civopedia. It doesn't detailed adjacency bonuses or even what that number does. When you grab an artifact, you'll have to manually tell what the hell is in your museums because the game sure won't tell you. When you change cards, it's also pretty much a guessing game on which card is better unless you're detailing everything yourself every turn. Wish there was a city list or something.

I mean, come on. TheMeinTeam is right on one thing. These things were in games 20 years ago when 32 MB was not the size of a file but rather all the ram a computer had, single core 200 mhz processors were the height of technology and floppy discs were still a thing. We play games on computers that are thousands of times faster now. It's not too unreasonable to expect more. Classic games were classics not because they were all some stroke of genius, but rather many of them became popular because they were easy to pick up and play but more importantly the concepts were displayed clearly. Easy to learn, hard to master. And one of the most important aspects is well, being able to play, something and understand the rules.

It's just a really bad impression for new players if they can't even issue basic commands. This, in addition to the start bug, is like a good chunk of complaints I've read from new users. They ask how could an AAA game have such flagrantly blatant issues that are immediately noticeable? It just doesn't bode well even if the game itself is solid. I bought Civ 5 BNW and Civ 6 at the same time. At first, I pretty much stuck with Civ 5 because of this. Then I got bored and ended up liking Civ 6 more, though I think it would have been much faster had Civ 6 presented itself a bit better for a first impression. But it still doesn't change the fact that in the same time I could play a Civ 6 game, I could play 2 Civ 5 games, or 3 Civ 4 ones. 6 just has a lot of things that waste time.

 

[Disgustipated]

No doubt the interface could use many improvements. But I just want to add a Civ4 type screen where you can assign production to multiple cities or even just one city from the screen isn't really reasonable for a game such as Civ6 where as many districts require placement on the map, and many buildings require a district to be in place first. To be honest, I never used this screen in Civ4 for assigning production. Perhaps I should have, but I didn't find it necessary.

Queue would be kind of nice, but again I never used the queue in Civ4. Situations change too often, and I like to keep tabs on my cities. CQUI handles this well enough.

Honestly I'm fine with the interface as is, I'd rather see AI improvements over interface.

 

[steveg700]

I don't see queuing as somehow indicating strategic play. Most people use queues to facilitate cookie-cutter city design. Queuing means there's an established standard operating procedure for designing a city, and nothing that might happen in the game might change it. Of course, I would suggest that more actually happen in the game to challenge that paradigm rather than the ham-fisted solution of taking away the queue. It's rather like Firaxis addressing the AI's inability to differentiate between land and water by making some units harder to kill in the water than on land.

As for not finishing games, I just "yawnquit" a game yesterday when it was really obvious that Montezuma really, really wanted to unleash fire and fury on me, but the AI couldn't bring itself to stop dancing all those Xbows around my border and attack already. Guess he couldn't find someone to sign on to a joint war.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

No doubt the interface could use many improvements. But I just want to add a Civ4 type screen where you can assign production to multiple cities or even just one city from the screen isn't really reasonable for a game such as Civ6 where as many districts require placement on the map, and many buildings require a district to be in place first. To be honest, I never used this screen in Civ4 for assigning production. Perhaps I should have, but I didn't find it necessary.

Queue would be kind of nice, but again I never used the queue in Civ4. Situations change too often, and I like to keep tabs on my cities. CQUI handles this well enough.

Honestly I'm fine with the interface as is, I'd rather see AI improvements over interface.

It is not hard for UI programmers who know what they're doing to grey out new districts when selecting a group of cities (anything else could just apply to valid cities only, which is what Civ 4 did). I heard a similar "bad interaction with districts" excuse for city queues, not that this stopped modders from trivially outperforming the dev's vanilla UI in a flash and implementing it anyway .

But even with CQUI active, each game will take hours longer than it would with an optimized UI. Trade route spam with no auto-renew or menu interface, city prompts, broken (effectively no) unit cycling, waypoints, bad input buffering all combine to contribute thousands of extra inputs. Add 30 seconds per turn on average, and in a 200 turn game you're adding an 1 hr 40 mins of dead time. But that's an unrealistically small estimate. Trade routes alone will chunk more time than that in domination runs.

That isn't hyperbole, it plays out in practice. It was already an issue in Civ 5, it's worse now. One of my viewers even added up the difference between civ 4/5 and it was > 2 hours per game then. With quite possibly 5x the cities being viable in civ 6 it's more by a margin.

AI issues are right up there too, but in terms of difficulty to implement we're comparing one of the lowest hanging fruits to fix the game in existence to one of the most difficult ones. "Incoming features preclude fixing the UI" is pretty ridiculous. The same isn't true for AI, which will have to use those features and use them decently for them to be an integrated part of the game. Programming an AI to plan around new stuff competently is MUCH harder than making buttons + hotkeys + columns in a menu for the new stuff. We have good templates for the latter and can even define metrics for identifying good ones and why. Making the AI suck less? Much taller order. I agree it's important though.

 

[Duuk]

The only base-game UIs I actively dislike are the trade route and spy UIs. They're just hideous.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The only base-game UIs I actively dislike are the trade route and spy UIs. They're just hideous.

Yeah, most of the UIs don't visibly LOOK bad (which is why the complaints aren't more common), but they require an absolutely tremendous amount of extra unnecessary inputs compared to what is necessary to accomplish the same task. It is actually more generous to Firaxis to assume they did not consider #inputs as part of the user experience whatsoever.