I treat Civ 6 as a competitive game. 99% of the time I play multiplayer games with friends or randoms, sometimes in leagues. We have a set of rules to enforce fair play, we restart games if starting location of any player is worthless. We don't quit games and we don't spare weaker players. We tend to end games in industrial/modern eras, because by that time the game is mostly decided (someone snowballed significantly). Most importantly, all above are what make Civ 6 a fun game for me. I believe this is the necessary preambule to filter out people with different concerns and mindsets, for their own sake. The following article would only waste their time.
Let's start off with the fact that all activities in the game can be divided into two categories: disruptable and non-disruptable. Building a district is non-disruptable most of the time, but may become disruptable if your opponent has an adjacent city and a culture bomb unit. Building a wonder is always disruptable because if other player manages to outperform your production, you won't be able to build the wonder. Assigning your governors is always non-disruptable, however after being assigned, they can be assassinated by enemy spies. Your espionage is always disruptable (and in general, all your activities on enemy territory are disruptable 99% of the time).
I believe this distinction is very important for competitive gameplay, because disruptable activities define points of interaction between players, or so called areas of competition. If there were no disruptable activities, it'd have been the same as building cities in Sim City on separate PCs and then comparing them by income/population/etc, and there would've been no victory other than score/time.
In this post, I want to highlight several areas of competition and elaborate on why those might've been better off as non-disruptable.
1) Great people acquisition. It is an area of competition, because certain great people are more powerful (and desired) and there can be only one great merchant/scientist/engineer with every specific bonus, so good players always compete for more powerful great people. This is an interesting way to establish competition between players, but I believe it does more harm than good.
First of all, players that are able to acquire GP faster than others are generally among the strongest on the map (by science/culture/production). Giving them the ability to acquire even more advantage ensures their snowballing (in Civ6, there are lots of things that allow you to snowball and few effective things that allow you to come back from being snowballed). This also ensures the fact that adding even more powerful great people increases the snowballing.
I believe it would've been better for great people to be independent for each player. Instead of having a pool of GP with effects, let it be just a pool of available effects per era per player. Everytime anyone acquires a GP, he/she can pick only one effect for him, and no effect can be picked twice. This way, anyone can have those sweet +1/+2/+4 science boosts for their science buildings, as well as wonder production and free traders.
2) Religion. Competitive player(s) that play without mods might agree with me that unless you play a religion-heavy civ, in 95% of occasions you don't need religion. But this post is not about it. Religious beliefs (especially follower beliefs) open up new playstyles and synergies (Reliquaries, Jesuit Education, Choral Music), and some people would rely on these beliefs to compete in the game. In such situations, being locked out of a particular belief or pantheon might ruin the game for the player. I believe, there's no reason for beliefs and pantheons to be civ-exclusive, besides the artificial competitiveness. Such things make you play suboptimally and in some cases get wiped out of the game for doing so.
3) Wonders. This one is interesting. I am actually a fan of wonders being 1 per game. And it was hard for me to cope with the thought that some starting positions literally require certain wonders to achieve decent yield outputs and tempo. So I came up with the compromise: every wonder can be build by every player, however the one that manages to finish the wonder first gets an additional yield boost, or added tourism. This way unique bonuses from wonders become reliable and players can count on them in their games.
4) City-states. Being a suzerain of certain city-states ensures heavy snowballing (Antananarivo, Babylon, etc.). The reason is that suzerain bonuses are quite strong under right circumstances. I believe, being a suzerain should net you an advantage, but it should be a yield advantage, while unique CS bonus must be available to everyone who commited at least X number of envoys to a city-state.
If there was less/no competition in the above, every player would've had more possibilities to thrive, to develop, and snowballing would've been much less of an issue. Also, more diverse gameplay strategies would've existed.
That's it. Thank you for reading that far. I'm bad at making wrap-ups, so please let me hear your thoughts, critique, whatever comes to your mind after reading all this...
Let's start off with the fact that all activities in the game can be divided into two categories: disruptable and non-disruptable. Building a district is non-disruptable most of the time, but may become disruptable if your opponent has an adjacent city and a culture bomb unit. Building a wonder is always disruptable because if other player manages to outperform your production, you won't be able to build the wonder. Assigning your governors is always non-disruptable, however after being assigned, they can be assassinated by enemy spies. Your espionage is always disruptable (and in general, all your activities on enemy territory are disruptable 99% of the time).
I believe this distinction is very important for competitive gameplay, because disruptable activities define points of interaction between players, or so called areas of competition. If there were no disruptable activities, it'd have been the same as building cities in Sim City on separate PCs and then comparing them by income/population/etc, and there would've been no victory other than score/time.
In this post, I want to highlight several areas of competition and elaborate on why those might've been better off as non-disruptable.
1) Great people acquisition. It is an area of competition, because certain great people are more powerful (and desired) and there can be only one great merchant/scientist/engineer with every specific bonus, so good players always compete for more powerful great people. This is an interesting way to establish competition between players, but I believe it does more harm than good.
First of all, players that are able to acquire GP faster than others are generally among the strongest on the map (by science/culture/production). Giving them the ability to acquire even more advantage ensures their snowballing (in Civ6, there are lots of things that allow you to snowball and few effective things that allow you to come back from being snowballed). This also ensures the fact that adding even more powerful great people increases the snowballing.
I believe it would've been better for great people to be independent for each player. Instead of having a pool of GP with effects, let it be just a pool of available effects per era per player. Everytime anyone acquires a GP, he/she can pick only one effect for him, and no effect can be picked twice. This way, anyone can have those sweet +1/+2/+4 science boosts for their science buildings, as well as wonder production and free traders.
2) Religion. Competitive player(s) that play without mods might agree with me that unless you play a religion-heavy civ, in 95% of occasions you don't need religion. But this post is not about it. Religious beliefs (especially follower beliefs) open up new playstyles and synergies (Reliquaries, Jesuit Education, Choral Music), and some people would rely on these beliefs to compete in the game. In such situations, being locked out of a particular belief or pantheon might ruin the game for the player. I believe, there's no reason for beliefs and pantheons to be civ-exclusive, besides the artificial competitiveness. Such things make you play suboptimally and in some cases get wiped out of the game for doing so.
3) Wonders. This one is interesting. I am actually a fan of wonders being 1 per game. And it was hard for me to cope with the thought that some starting positions literally require certain wonders to achieve decent yield outputs and tempo. So I came up with the compromise: every wonder can be build by every player, however the one that manages to finish the wonder first gets an additional yield boost, or added tourism. This way unique bonuses from wonders become reliable and players can count on them in their games.
4) City-states. Being a suzerain of certain city-states ensures heavy snowballing (Antananarivo, Babylon, etc.). The reason is that suzerain bonuses are quite strong under right circumstances. I believe, being a suzerain should net you an advantage, but it should be a yield advantage, while unique CS bonus must be available to everyone who commited at least X number of envoys to a city-state.
If there was less/no competition in the above, every player would've had more possibilities to thrive, to develop, and snowballing would've been much less of an issue. Also, more diverse gameplay strategies would've existed.
That's it. Thank you for reading that far. I'm bad at making wrap-ups, so please let me hear your thoughts, critique, whatever comes to your mind after reading all this...
