What are Your Bottom 3 "Least well-Designed Civs"?

[andersw]

Venice: The civ gives too much freedom to neighbours and barbs. The only civ I have kept disabled for a long long time.
Shoshone: I dont play with huts and they have a ua based on it, the extra land grab also "wastes" border pops for authority play.
Indonesia: Game is based to be fine without extra lux, Im not hyped about calendar lux, I also see complaints on it being broken ie not always spawning correct.

 

[pineappledan]

We’re conquistadors allowed to cross deep ocean before? I didn’t change anything about them. I agree, the conquistador would probably be fine with the same base CS as the knight if they are to remain a knight replacement.

 

[Bruhmoment]

Germany - The UA is generally just pretty weak, can be negated by conquering cs. UU's are meh.
Hm..., who else, oh that's right - Austria - The UA is literally forcing you to go diplomatic, which she doesn't even do that great, tbh. You need to get gold and use it to "diplomatic marriage" other city states, not really that unique, before the patch it had the ability to buy city states and now it's just - buy out even more votes?
and the last one - Japan - One part of the UA is getting more faith and culture from defense and military buildings, but the other one is - Get GWAM points when a GG/GA is born in your capital. You gonna go conquer just to get some GWAM's quicker? Samurai is average, dojo actually isn't half bad

 

[Gazebo]

Civs that boom very late (Germany above all, but also France and Sweden despite being strong unlock their uniques a bit too late), civs that are very terrain dependant (Incas and Iroquois the main offenders here), civs that are pidgeholed into a conquest game from the get go, but are annoying to play (Huns and Mongols, I just despise the skirmisher line), civs that don't look very unique when you look at the map (Assyria, due to the 'invisible' UU and the UW you build once and forget about it, or Poland, with invisible horses coming out of nowhere and an UA that while strong feels very passive).

These are civs I don't enjoy play at all, but it doesn't mean they're badly designed or weak, they could be fun in other player hands. Most of those kits are also synergic and well thought after, just fail in practice.

Funnily enough, I like, or used to like playing the civs I vote as the least well designed: they are strong enough, just lack particular synergy or have a kit that is a mess.

1. Germany

I pretty much agree with everything pineappledan said about the UA, it doesn't reward friendship enough, nor helps getting into friendship status either. GA points also mean very little here, they are there for the sake of having some more (weak) yields but the civ is not about GAs. In the early game other diplo civs have a way to generate more influence, or lower decay, with CSs but as Germany there're good chances your UA gives you next to 0 benefits for the first 50-75 turns when the rewards are low. The hanse is once again a mess of bonus yields, , , and in the same building and forces you into statecraft/trade confederacy, at that point you're building up for ally city states and don't care much about basic friendship either, especially because bonus UN votes come from allies only.
The UU comes too late and is a purely offensive one, no synergy with the diplomatic kit. Having higher and than standard tanks also goes against the civpedia entry ("German tanks weren't markedly superior than French or Russian counterparts [...], but they had the German military genius behind them..."). It's also worth note that in this civ game the German leader is Bismark, not Hitler, and the panzer feels awkward. At a quick glance the other UUs match their leader timeline better.

Let's be clear on one thing: historically, realpolitik was never about friendship.

G

 

[pineappledan]

Oh I really like Japan, personally. All the special sauce is in the UB though, kinda like Assyria in that respect. The yields on levelling up used to be part of the UA in fact, but they were moved back because of how they interacted with the super-early exploration phase.

bushido is what Kris swords’ mystic blade should be. It’s got the interesting-ness of random bonuses, but with enough baseline consistency that it isn’t annoying.

Let's be clear on one thing: historically, realpolitik was never about friendship.

Yeah, but it was about opportunism and influence. You’re the one that suggested Germany be tilted towards leveraging friendship when you changed the yields on breakdown on ally/friends for Germany.

 

[Gazebo]

Oh I really Japan, personally. All the special sauce is in the UB though, kinda like Assyria in that respect. The yields on levelling up used to be part of the UA intact, but they were moved back because of how they interacted with the super-early exploration phase.

bushido is what Kris swords’ mystic blade should be. It’s got the interesting-ness of random bonuses, but with enough baseline consistency that it isn’t annoying.
Yeah, but it was about opportunism and influence. You’re the one that suggested Germany be tilted towards leveraging friendship when you changed the yields on breakdown on ally/friends for Germany.

Germany being CS oriented is a mechanical thing, though; having UA bonuses around 'making friends' is a one-way street for humans v. AI because humans can so easily shut it down by not 'playing by the rules' the way the AI would.

G

 

[pineappledan]

Germany being CS oriented is a mechanical thing, though; having UA bonuses around 'making friends' is a one-way street for humans v. AI because humans can so easily shut it down by not 'playing by the rules' the way the AI would.

I think we might be talking past each other (and maybe we should move this to the Germany thread)

Here was what I proposed as a change to Germany:

• Get rid of the GAP for Friends/Allies (+2/ for friends/allies only, scaling with era)
• +1WC vote for every 4 Friends and Allies. (down from 3 for just allies only)
• And then some bonus that turns friends into allies:

If Germany has 60 or more Influence with A City-State Friend, the City-State's Ally's Influence at double the normal rate.

The idea isn't to specifically reward friendship as much as allies -- being allied is already better, and I don't think anyone is proposing to make friendship preferable to alliances with Germany.

Normally, Friends get X. Allies get 2X+Y+Z
Germany’s UA gives A if friends, and A+B if allies.
People would like if Germany just gave A for both friends and allies, because the current UA just makes alliance even more desirable, widening the difference between friend and ally.

 

[Stalker0]

Venice: The civ gives too much freedom to neighbours and barbs. The only civ I have kept disabled for a long long time.

So in general, I really like the uniqueness of Venice's design, and its cool to have a quasi 1 city challenge as a civ. That said, I agree with you that the issue with Venice is not that the civ is "weak", but it tends to exaggerate the strength of their neighbors due to uncontested land.

If anything, it could be argued that Venice should get the Shoshone's super land buff, just to allow Venice to at least hold some territory.... though how you flavor that I'm not sure. Or do some kind of interesting change with city settle distance, where a city can't be settled within 8 of Venice instead of 4 or something (aka double the usual).

 

[SpankmyMetroid]

Iroquois is fine. The Carthage UA similarly obsoletes past Classical but no one's complaining about that. Trees aren't exactly rare in the game either.

Carthage gets big bonuses to international trade routes for the entire game with the diversity modifier. It doesn’t obsolete. Trees are common enough until the AI starts automatically chopping them down since they have workers that would be doing nothing until lumbermills/logging camps get unlocked. Unless you get to a city early I find that the inner ring or two of trees are usually gone which are obviously the most beneficial for city sieging.

 

[bahamut19]

I really would not want the most unique Civs to be made less unique solely because some players have some very specific play styles. It's funny the most mentioned Civs in this thread are the most interesting to play because they force you to play differently, or react to them differently when they are the AI.

Also, all of the changes the designers of VP have made to Civs when compared to their BNW versions are much more fun to play with. Thank you everyone who has contributed to a game I absolutely enjoy.

Anyway, I really hope VP doesn't devolve into a game where most Civs play similarly. Replayability is the #1 reason why VP is as successful as it is.

 

[andersw]

I've enjoyed playing several of the disliked ones and trying to get them to work.
But yes Germany can be tricky, very strong if you get them rolling, Austria easier but likewise becomes very strong if enough CS stays alive.
Iroquois needs fishing for forest heavy start, preferred with camp lux for rediculous early high production, the UU can be brutal in AI hands but I've struggled to use well myself.
I agree that Polynesia can be tricky, maybe because I play so much pangea, culture is nice but moai come on tiles without food.

 

[KaoticKanine]

I've griped more than once about the Iroquois in the past, and I still stand by my ill feelings on the civ's design. To start, the Iroquois' kit is hard focused on Forests/Jungles- the UA treats Forests and Jungles as Roads/Railroads (complete with City Connections) and grants all Military Units with the Woodsman promotion, the UU gets 20% CS in Forest/Jungle, and the UB adds additional yields to Forests/Jungles as well as Camps and Plantations (most of which would be in Forests and Jungles). While this certainly makes them very powerful with a Forest/Jungle heavy start, and regions with large swaths of Forest/Jungle, the thing is how often do you actually start with substantial Forests/Jungles? Let alone spawn in a big enough region covered with the terrain to truly make a Wide empire, be it through settling or conquest. In all my best games with the Iroquois, I only had enough Forest and Jungle to settle five or six cities before having to resort to locations lacking Forests/Jungles, and none of my enemies had enough Forests and Jungles to capture with the Mohawk Warriors. VP certainly improved the Iroquois from how they were in Vanilla Civ 5, but I still feel like you'd have to play in Aborea or YNAEMP TSL to have a chance at winning as the civ since only in those maps do you have forests aplenty. And the increased CS near Natural Wonders is just baffling to me: not only is it even more terrain dependency to the Iroquois that often doesn't work out but it's not even thematic with their history. The closest Natural Wonder to the real-life Iroquois is Niagara Falls, but from what I can glean that location was never really significant to the people. Such a component would make perfect sense with, say, an Aboriginal Australian civ due to Uluru, but not so much the Iroquois.

And on the note about thematics, the positives of the Iroquois' components mainly gear them for Domination (having huge production and high CS Units, but not much science, culture, etc). Which yes, does fit with the Iroquois Mourning Wars and immense brutality to neighboring tribes and white settlers. But the leader of the Iroquois in this game is Hiawatha, a man who famously hated war, vocally advocated for peace, and even became a disciple/representative of the Great Peacemaker, with whom Hiawatha would make the "Great Law of Peace" that founded the Iroquois Confederacy... Like, I know a Civ needn't reflect a leader's agenda, but the leader is still a big influence; is France's conquest-focused UA not because of Napoleon Bonaparte being the civ's leader in this game? But even then, the "Great Law of Peace" in itself is a more unique aspect of the Iroquois than benefitting from the woods, is it not? The Great Warpath was used by many Eastern Woodland natives, not just the Iroquois, and many civilizations around the world made use of forests (be they temperate or rain) to defeat their foes, such as Vietnam. But only the Iroquois have something like the "Great Law of Peace", turning the five warring tribes into a close-knit and dedicated confederacy that lives on to this day. ...So yeah, Iroquois are too RNG dependent to be fun and their kit isn't really accurate to the real-life civilization, or at least the leader represented in-game.

For the second, I'm gonna have to chime in with pineappledan in finding the Ottomans poorly designed due to their UA being at odds with their UU and UB. You gotta complete trade routes for big yields, but you wanna go to war to take advantage of the UU and UB bonuses, and being at war tends to result in very dead trade units or at least having much less targets to trade with. Not sure what could be done with the Ottomans UA to make it better, as I'm unfamiliar with Ottoman history other than "they were very good at conquering stuff" and don't know what dedicated warmongers need aside from "better military units", but pineappledan's suggestion looks very good.

For number three... Well, I wouldn't call them poorly designed, but I admit to having great difficulty understanding how to play China. They benefit from settling/conquering cities and making Great Works, that much is obvious, and they essentially have a better WLTKD. But they lose half of the yields they get from their UA on advancing eras, so I guess I'm supposed to delay advancing eras as much as possible? And the UA seems to gear them towards Wide-play (via Progress or Authority), yet the use of Great Works and abundance of food/growth is for Tall-play. And indeed, a guide I read recommended going Tradition as China, yet suggests settling cities like crazy...? And that's nevermind what policies and such you take with China after the Ancient Era ones, which just stumps me. I tried to play that Civ many times and it never works out. ^_^;

And for a quick tangent, I'm kind of surprised that the Shoshone are being deemed bad recently. I can agree to not liking their dependency on ruins, but the landgrabbing is honestly one of the more powerful parts of their kit: you can snag resources and lucrative features, such as Atolls and Oases, just from settling (whereas I often have to purchase such tiles because the "culture acquisition" keeps going for bare Grasslands or Plains tiles), which is especially good if a neighbor was blatantly aiming for those. And the increased CS in owned territory makes you the ultimate turtle. But then, I do suppose that the Shoshone lack any real path to a victory condition, having no bonuses to Science, Culture, or Diplomacy that the defensive boost would really help with. So I guess either the Shoshone UI could have its Culture yield increased to give them an edge in CV, or replace the Ruins bonus with anything else to give the civ an edge in SV, CV, or even DipV.

 

[Stalker0]

For number three... Well, I wouldn't call them poorly designed, but I admit to having great difficulty understanding how to play China.

Here's your quick and dirty how to rock with China:

• Go Tradition
• Get every WLTKD bonus you can get your hands on (MoH - always always always rush this wonder), synagogues, the other belief that does WLTKD I can't remember)
• Enjoy your endless and crazy growth.

I am actually doing a china game right now. The trick is, infinite WLTKD days are very easy with China, I expect China to be in a WLTKD at least 90% of the time, and by the mid game 100% of the time. So consider any WLTKD bonus just an innate part of China's UA.... that's her real strength. Yes the +1 food and gold are nice at the beginning to get you going, but honestly that tapers off quick, its really the infinite WLTKD that is so good in her kit.

 

[Stalker0]

Just a quick reminder that this thread is not a power assessment of the civ, we aren't trying to figure out the 3 weakest civs.

Design is more about how the pieces work together. Even if the civ is strong, does it UU, UB/UI, and UA all work together well? Does the civ feel thematic? Does the civ play in game as you would mostly expect that civ to play in real life?

 

[JamesNinelives]

I love the Shoshone myself, my only gripe would be that the UU comes too late to feel particularly relevant to me. It's fun when it turns up but it's not game-changing and seems more like a flavour addition to me than a significant part of their kit. Whereas other UUs really do change how I play when I play that civ. That said I adore their UA and UI, I think those are really excellent and well designed myself.

 

[Imalich]

I'm surprised to see Indonesia mentioned so much. I personally love the randomness of the spice game and their ability to make almost any place worth settling. Of course, their lowkey bias toward religion, given the Candi bonuses, probably leads to a lot of frustration in higher difficulty games where you can't found consistently.
4UC helps them lots. I think 4UC Indonesia is one of my favorites right now.

On topic: There's a bunch of civilizations I dislike on Vox Populi design-wise, but there's a lot of personal bias in this statement, as I think corraling players into single-possible strategies is a bad design approach (and there's a lot of it in the game right now). I feel any civ that's get corraled into two obligatory social policy trees from different eras is already in a bad place, as It's okay to play them once, but you're probably not coming back. That said, I'll respect this design approach and rather mention civs that i feel can be improved without changing the game too much. Those that feel "almost there but not quite" and always make me quit mid-game.

Poland - Casimir is bland. He gets social policies, good stables and good cavalry? Oh, that's strong, but that's also as bland as it gets. There's no synergy with game mechanics anywhere, just flat bonuses. It needs synergy with something, somewhere. I dunno? Fealty synergy by giving him more pastures? (Ducal stable weaker but spawning horse resource?); maybe artistry synergy giving him golden age points per social tree completed? Or maybe you get to choose a bonus for every social tree filled? I'm just guessing here, but there's definetly room for work.

Shoshone - His land grab was cool in the base game, but has very little sense and synergy with vox populi mechanics. Also his defensive war focus and 'good begginer civ' design imported from the base game feels off in vox populi. Idk what to suggest. Either overhaul or give him some direction for his land grab

Ottomans - What others have said. trading and warmongers boni don't stack together that well. Aren't there enough "petra+colossus" civs? This strat is already good for any Statecraft game, any diplo civ, plus Venice and Arabia. Do we really need the Ottoman trade mini-game? It's just a conditional flat bonus towards playing the trade mini-game. Maybe it's better for him to get said flat bonus by playing another mini-game?

 

[mrpilhas]

Poland - as boring as you can get. I know they are super strong and Hussars are amazing, but everything on their kit just feels boring.

 

[tu_79]

I don't mind Poland. It does not have character, but on the other way, it gives a taste of how any civ could be played. Great for learning.

What I dislike is civs that feel awkward. In that I hate Indonesia most. Supposedly, it gives one good unit for conquest or one good building for economics, and you choose what you are going to play, because you can't benefit from both bonuses in the same game. If you go the unit path, fine, but you better have some good gold income not coming from your uniques. If you go the building path, fine, but by the time you can produce your unit in bulk it is too late, you get some good promotions, but the unit CS has lost some luster. In theory it is flexible, but in practice I feel like not being able to do anything proficiently.

Iroquois is another feels bad civ. Why, oh why, can't the pathfinder (or whatever their unique unit is now) grow forests? I can pick strong pantheons that don't scale late game, but in that case I can switch religions by usurping a holy city. With Iroquois UA you can't switch, you simply get fewer and fewer forests as the game progresses. I have to start conquering very very early if I want to preserve some of these forests, but the game is designed to not being able to expand very aggressively in the early game. Then you have to make room for GPTI, excavations, resources, ...
I feel bad every time I have to chop a forest, I feel bad every time I conquer a city without forests. I even installed a mod to be able to grow forests, but it kicks in industrial age.

Inca was another feels bad civ, whenever I started out of a mountain chain range, but hopefully azum4roll has fixed it.

Shoshone is awkward too. In theory the UA gives new cities access to better tiles, with a stronger early game, claims the territory and then provides the UI to hold it. It is a kind of passive-aggressive civ, in that it pisses off neighbours and lure them to attack your well protected territory. But when my army is large enough to ripe off any incoming enemy, they don't attack, and when they attack, my army is barely enough to hold positions. So, every time I play Shoshone, it's either full warmonger (and the defensive bonus is useless because I'm fighting in enemy territory), either peaceful (and then I regret not being able to benefit from the toolkit).

 

[Ziad]

People have already described why Poland, Ottomans, and Shoshone feel a bit weakly designed so I won't repeat. That's my answer for the most part.

I do have a comment about Carthage though which lies in some weird twilight zone of being simultaneously great fun and weird design.

Despite playing it the most, I dislike Carthage's free Lighthouse over a free Harbor. Ignoring the fact that a "unique early Harbor" is a lot more thematically appropriate both in terms of its naval/trade route bonuses and historical feel, it makes me feel a little bad teching Sailing or building the Great Lighthouse despite the presumed synergy in the kit. The gold on settle becomes rapidly obsolete too since they're all about money and it just throws even more money at you.

I ended up making small modifications that give Carthage a free Harbor instead of a Lighthouse while removing the free gold on settle. It hasn't made the game any easier as I lose the early city connections and have to build more in the early game, but I find this design suits me more. I also get the Production bonus from the Great Cothon when it's still relevant so that's a plus.

If I actually reworked Carthage in some mod I'd just replace the Harbor with Cothon as a UB (that doesnt have the supply as that part is the only major downside) and make the Cothon upgrade to a Great Cothon in the Capital when the tech is researched or something, but eh.

 

[Melchizedek]

I think the situation of powerful bonuses without synergy is actually interesting. For example, the complaints that Shoshone don't have direct help toward a VC or that Ottomans' benefits are stepping on each others' toes could be seen as challenges instead of complaints. Getting Ottomans to work both ways at once or getting the Shoshone headstart to add up to winning can be fun. For example, Ottomans might want to conquer cities that are well placed for trade routes to a friendly civ, or Shoshone might want to take advantage of the easy start to focus a VC earlier than you usually can, either conquering a neighbor or building some of the wonders that will be valuable later.

My point is just to push back against the idea that synergies are essential to a well-designed civ. That's one fun way to design a civ. Somewhat stronger bonuses that have to be held in balance against each other is another.