What are your pros/cons/questions after watching the previews?

[thecrazyscot]

Alright, so we're all digesting the deluge of preview videos. After watching a few (and still have more to watch), I'm overall very excited and itching to play. However, I still have some questions and there are a few things that I feel they still haven't quite stuck the landing on.

Pros

• Gameplay looks like it "feels Civvy" to me
• Age transitions look like a really exciting moment to build up to
• Commanders and army management look great
• New resource system looks super impactful
• Diplomacy + Influence looks like a much-needed improvement and very interesting
• Agendas look like just one of many factors impacting diplomatic stances
• Independent Power interactions look fun - I like how they fill the role of hostile barbarians too
• Revamped trade system looks meaningful
• Espionage is integrated into Influence right from the beginning
• Looks like the meta progression will result in fun theorycrafting
• City build queue from the get go!
• Tooltips are very informative
• Lots of the management screens look very informative
• Graphics are beautiful

Questions

• Civs are pretty complicated now...hard to wrap my head around all the new stuff - will they feel distinctly different?
• Will you be able to upgrade ALL units to their next tier or do you have to individually click on them?
• City population growth looks more confusing that I initially thought. Why do buildings add population?
• Is there a trade route management screen which shows all your active trade routes?
• Will larger map sizes be available on release or will be they added later?
• What will be moddable and what won't be? It doesn't make sense to me for the meta progression stuff to be moddable (but it might be) and given how tightly it's intertwined with things...does that impact moddability?
• How fun/tedious will the Modern Age actually be?
• Haven't yet seen the option to limit a game to a single age during setup...????
• Are there Mementos to INCREASE challenge? That would be super fun.

Cons

• Yield inflation looks to be higher than ever, makes each individual decision regarding yields less meaningful as the game progresses
• Minimap is overly basic with little information
• Managing the new resource system looks like it will become tedious with lots of clicks and shuffling between cities/towns - needs some additional work I think for usability
• No setup option to have random leaders pair with the closest cultural/historical choice
• No setup option to disable disasters (I know I know, this would impact abilities that interact with disasters)
• Maps still look rather uninteresting from the videos I saw...mostly blobby landmasses
• Crises should scale in intensity based on how well you are doing to still provide a challenge (i.e. if the Crisis centers around happiness, the Crisis Policies which reduce happiness should reduce it MORE if you have a ton of happiness yield otherwise it is, as Marbozir said, a "nothingburger"). Alternatively, there could be an intensity slider at setup rather than just a toggle.
• Spreading religion in the Exploration Age still looks like it's mostly just annoying.
• You should be able to choose to either end or continue your game in an age transition.

 

[stealth_nsk]

My main worries are:

1. Progress reset on age transition making a lot of things redundant. In previous civ games there was this situation where you're close to victory and a lot of things don't matter anymore. Now, I'm afraid we'll have this 3 times. Starting buildings, researching techs, etc. could become pretty pointless near the end.

2. Natural disasters and city revolts always were a very annoying part of the game, I'm negatively surprised to see them in vanilla.

3. Memento system affecting gameplay more than it should. I'd be ok with purely cosmetic bonuses.

For the rest, I don't worry that much and generally like what I see.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

City population growth looks more confusing that I initially thought. Why do buildings add population?

I think it is the other way. Your population grows normally. When your city adds a new population, then you get to place that pop in a tile which automatically becomes a tile improvement or district. You build buildings like normal but when they are complete, you get to select what district to place them in.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I've only watched two videos, but from the better of them (Marbozir), I have two or three main takeaways:

Pro:
He builds a (geographically) huge empire--and quickly. By turn 60, between settling and incorporating IPs, he's got an empire that includes seven or eight cities. (In civ 5, I'd be lucky if I had three cities by then). Geographically large empires are a big part of my fun in Civ games, and the livestreams had made the map feel cramped to me, like there wouldn't be the possibility for this kind of expansiveness.

Con:
The Crisis hardly seems to trouble him at all. First of all, it's not represented on the game map, so it feels distant and abstract. Secondly, it is (as we speculated) just a matter of his choosing the least disadvantageous of several cards, and enduring some slight downturns that come from them, and such as those are don't seem to trouble him much. He's sewn up his legacy gains by that point, and so it just feels as though he coasts through it.

His video also didn't make it seem like there was any urgency in your dealing with other civs. He just happily expanded and pursued his own victory conditions, and occasionally one would get a glimpse of the other civs' legacy points, but that's it.

Some of these things could just be a function of his particular play style. I guess I'll have to watch more of the videos.

 

[PauI]

Buff the hostile greeting button!

Right now there is very little incentive to use it imo.

 

[AD1730]

Are there Mementos to INCREASE challenge? That would be super fun.

No setup option to disable disasters (I know I know, this would impact abilities that interact with disasters)

These sorts of options remind me of games where difficulty is a function of bonuses, penalties, and other options you select during setup rather than distinct difficulty levels. In games like this, difficulty is more of a sliding scale that goes from 0 - 100. It would be interesting to see how this sort of system would work in Civilization.

 

[chaosprophet]

I'm not checking on the videos cause that is reaching an amount of detail bigger than I want to have at release (while I'm excited for major info, still want a level of trying things when I first get my hands in the game, which means I will probably soon break from the forum instead just on release as the details flood here a lot). But nice to see a list like that. If you don't mind, trying to answer or speculate on some of your questions:

City population growth looks more confusing that I initially thought. Why do buildings add population?

A Population of a city is: amount of worked tiles + specialists. If you add a new urban district or a wonder, then that is a new tile that will be worked on = one more population. They could have made some things like when you add a urban district it means you lose a rural one so pop stays the same but that would be confusing though with your city expanding and then going back some tiles because you built some buildings. So I can see why they went with this instead. So basically it is a consequence of their new system where the city works every tile it improved or added some buildings to.

Will larger map sizes be available on release or will be they added later?

I believe that has pretty much been confirmed as something they will work to add on the future but not on release as Ed(?) said they will prioritize in giving the same experience for all the platforms first. If you want I can try look up when it was said.

• Haven't yet seen the option to limit a game to a single age during setup...????
• You should be able to choose to either end or continue your game in an age transition.

I wonder if single Age games for them just means you start an age and when it ends you ecit the game, and think of who the winner would be by the screen showing legacy progression at that age end.

 

[Eramas]

UI is still so bad that I can't wait for a mod revamping it.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

The Crisis hardly seems to trouble him at all. First of all, it's not represented on the game map, so it feels distant and abstract. Secondly, it is (as we speculated) just a matter of his choosing the least disadvantageous of several cards, and enduring some slight downturns that come from them, and such as those are don't seem to trouble him much. He's sewn up his legacy gains by that point, and so he just feels as though he coasts through it.

To be fair, Marbozir is an elite civ player. So the crisis not hurting too much could just be a result of him playing really well. Obviously, if you play well and have a big, strong empire, you will likely be better equipped to get through a crisis than a smaller, weaker empire.

Buff the hostile greeting button!

Right now there is very little incentive to use it imo.

I think the only real incentive to using the hostile greeting is if you are planning an early war against the civ. The hostile greeting will reduce relations allowing you to do a formal war sooner. If the AI uses the hostile greeting against you, it might indicate that they are planning to attack you very soon.

 

[Siptah]

I've only watched two videos, but from the better of them (Marbozir), I have two or three main takeaways:

Pro:
He builds a (geographically) huge empire--and quickly. By turn 60, between settling and incorporating IPs, he's got an empire that includes seven or eight cities. (In civ 5, I'd be lucky if I had three cities by then). Geographically large empires are a big part of my fun in Civ games, and the livestreams had made the map feel cramped to me, like there wouldn't be the possibility for this kind of expansiveness.

Con:
The Crisis hardly seems to trouble him at all. First of all, it's not represented on the game map, so it feels distant and abstract. Secondly, it is (as we speculated) just a matter of his choosing the least disadvantageous of several cards, and enduring some slight downturns that come from them, and such as those are don't seem to trouble him much. He's sewn up his legacy gains by that point, and so he just feels as though he coasts through it.

His video also didn't make it seem like there was any urgency in your dealing with other civs. He just happily expanded and pursued his own victory conditions, and occasionally one would get a glimpse of the other civs' legacy points, but that's it.

Some of these things could just be a function of his particular play style. I guess I'll have to watch more of the videos.

I've watched his video in the lunch break. It's maybe the best I've seen if someone is interested how the game works and is played. Especially a game that focuses on peaceful expansion and IPs.

I fully agree on the Crisis not being important in his game and the lack of challenge by the AI. However, looking at the AI progresses, it seems to me that he played on a low (maybe even the lowest?) difficulty. Maybe crises cards should also scale by difficulty? E.g., 6 on level 1, 10 on level 3, 12 on level 5. Most cards that I've seen would allow scaling, as they were about happiness, combat strength, maintenance. But yes, I always feared that Crises would be too easy, and his and Writing Bull's video kinda confirmed it for the centralization crisis. Not sure about the barbarian crisis: apparently, if you don't prepare (= have troops around), this is more of a threat.

 

[Wielki Hegemon]

I know I will never get used to separating leaders from Civs. Augustus leading Egypt while Rome is in a game is too much for me. I still don't like the idea of swapping Civs but it might become indifferent over time for me (especially with a larger number of Civs), but leaders... sorry but no. It confuses me. It's like a walk with a pebble in your shoe.

 

[Inotrobot]

Alright, so we're all digesting the deluge of preview videos. After watching a few (and still have more to watch), I'm overall very excited and itching to play. However, I still have some questions and there are a few things that I feel they still haven't quite stuck the landing on.

Pros

• Gameplay looks like it "feels Civvy" to me
• Age transitions look like a really exciting moment to build up to
• Commanders and army management look great
• New resource system looks super impactful
• Diplomacy + Influence looks like a much-needed improvement and very interesting
• Agendas look like just one of many factors impacting diplomatic stances
• Independent Power interactions look fun - I like how they fill the role of hostile barbarians too
• Revamped trade system looks meaningful
• Espionage is integrated into Influence right from the beginning
• Looks like the meta progression will result in fun theorycrafting
• City build queue from the get go!
• Tooltips are very informative
• Lots of the management screens look very informative
• Graphics are beautiful

Questions

• Civs are pretty complicated now...hard to wrap my head around all the new stuff - will they feel distinctly different?
• Will you be able to upgrade ALL units to their next tier or do you have to individually click on them?
• City population growth looks more confusing that I initially thought. Why do buildings add population?
• Is there a trade route management screen which shows all your active trade routes?
• Will larger map sizes be available on release or will be they added later?
• What will be moddable and what won't be? It doesn't make sense to me for the meta progression stuff to be moddable (but it might be) and given how tightly it's intertwined with things...does that impact moddability?
• How fun/tedious will the Modern Age actually be?
• Haven't yet seen the option to limit a game to a single age during setup...????
• Are there Mementos to INCREASE challenge? That would be super fun.

Cons

• Yield inflation looks to be higher than ever, makes each individual decision regarding yields less meaningful as the game progresses
• Minimap is overly basic with little information
• Managing the new resource system looks like it will become tedious with lots of clicks and shuffling between cities/towns - needs some additional work I think for usability
• No setup option to have random leaders pair with the closest cultural/historical choice
• No setup option to disable disasters (I know I know, this would impact abilities that interact with disasters)
• Maps still look rather uninteresting from the videos I saw...mostly blobby landmasses
• Crises should scale in intensity based on how well you are doing to still provide a challenge (i.e. if the Crisis centers around happiness, the Crisis Policies which reduce happiness should reduce it MORE if you have a ton of happiness yield otherwise it is, as Marbozir said, a "nothingburger"). Alternatively, there could be an intensity slider at setup rather than just a toggle.
• Spreading religion in the Exploration Age still looks like it's mostly just annoying.
• You should be able to choose to either end or continue your game in an age transition.

Pros:
-Sailable Rivers
-Win Domination by settling Cities
-Army Commanders
-Legacy Path
-Railroads

Cons:
-(Petty) I wanna see the little Train ride along the Railroads between stations.
(Not a complaint but..)Maybe even an ability to hijack trains like the cowboys did.
-Lack Of Black Male Leaders...

 

[jdevo]

Pros

• Unit commanders remove a lot of the clicks from managing tons of units
• Removal of workers removes tons of unnecessary clicks but keeps strategic depth
• Independent people seem like a good addition
• City management seems fun and intuitive
• I appreciate the overall effort to remove the pointless click fest and decision fatigue of the late-game

Cons

• Civ switching leads to confusion about who you're playing against.
• Governments only come into effect during celebrations.
• Too many of the same mechanics are repeated over and over. For instance, there are so many trees; tech, civil, custom civil, military, etc.
• Narrative events just aren't fun. They're a nuisance.
• Too many decisions that just boil down to '+5 culture or +5 science?'.
• Age resets punish players for performing well.
• Cities convert to towns at the start of each age.
• Civ abilities are too complicated. They need to be simplified. It's too hard to keep track of multiple paragraphs of abilities. I'd much rather see each civ have one simple ability, one building, one military unit. More is not better.
• Crises seemed forced and will lead to games feeling the same.
• Cities changing names.
• UI has always been bad in civ games, but this is taking it to another level. It looks unfinished.
• Disasters. Anything that breaks something that you build over and over isn't fun
• No pangea and forced exploration. Ages seem like they're hand-holding you into a predetermined path.
• Minimap is incomplete.
• Map is overly busy. City sprawl really throws off the scale.
• Religion seems more of the same from civ 5 and 6.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

It generally looked good, but here are my concerns:

1) apparently, settlers are pretty cheap and hardy. So, the AI pumps out a bunch of them and they forward-settle like crazy. I saw it across multiple videos. We either have to do a lot of war to maintain contiguity or get used to the map looking like a mosaic.

2) yield inflation, particularly in quarters with Specialists. If you're pumping out 1000g or 1000 science or culture by the end of exploration, how impactful are uniques that reward you 100g for discovering a natural wonder, for example? And the small momento bonuses, as another example?

3) Standard is the largest map size, limited to 5 civs in Antiquity and 8 in later Ages. As a Huge Map player, that's disappointing.

4) Peace Deals. It's either white peace or someone's giving up a city. I'd like to see alternatives, like Gold or Influence as an incentive to peace out. You don't necessarily need to bargain quantities, just have an offer.

5) Similarly, the AI seems reluctant to agree to peace terms on wars that players initiate. Then you and/or they get wrecked by war weariness.

 

[chaosprophet]

I fully agree on the Crisis not being important in his game and the lack of challenge by the AI. However, looking at the AI progresses, it seems to me that he played on a low (maybe even the lowest?) difficulty. Maybe crises cards should also scale by difficulty? E.g., 6 on level 1, 10 on level 3, 12 on level 5. Most cards that I've seen would allow scaling, as they were about happiness, combat strength, maintenance. But yes, I always feared that Crises would be too easy, and his and Writing Bull's video kinda confirmed it for the centralization crisis. Not sure about the barbarian crisis: apparently, if you don't prepare (= have troops around), this is more of a threat.

I would expect crisis to end up having a luck related to them. For example, if you don't have much of a military, the barbarian ones will crush you. If you don't have much overflow happiness and/or exapnded a lot over your cap, the loyalty one could torn you, etc.

In any case, would be nice if they don't take long to add an option at game setup to increase or decrease the potency of the crisis. While I don't know if I would use such a system as I have yet to test the game for myself, it would be nice to have it as something separated from the normal game difficulty just like disasters intensity.

It generally looked good, but here are my concerns:

1) apparently, settlers are pretty cheap and hardy. So, the AI pumps out a bunch of them and they forward-settle like crazy. I saw it across multiple videos. We either have to do a lot of war to maintain contiguity or get used to the map looking like a mosaic.

I wonder if something that could help with it is if they change back the culture border expansion to not be just the cities expanding their rural districts. That way cities at least cover more ground of the map for you even if you won't have those usable in the sense of being worked on when farther than 3 tiles from center (as it was common in previous civs).

3) Standard is the largest map size, limited to 5 civs in Antiquity and 8 in later Ages. As a Huge Map player, that's disappointing.

I hope it don't take long for them to add this to pc. I wouldn't even mind if it is added faster than the amount of default civs for that size. I like playing huge maps with less civs than default.

 

[ehecatzin]

I pretty much agree with all the OP pros I'd like to add

Pros:

• Urban/rural tiles and town/city relation really clicked once I saw gameplay of it, It's really elegant and I like it.
• The transition from city sprawl to tall specialist avoids infinite city sprawl (see Humankind)
• Independent people seem really fun to interact with.
• the new diplomacy system (tho it could use some tweaking to favour aggresive diplo)

Cons

• The Blocky continent shapes, they really need to tone this down, its just blocks
• yes UI needs more love, it can be really confusing
• Civ special unlocks need to be harder, some streams had half the civs unlocked by exploration, if not they are hardly "special unlocks"

The loading screen between eras could convey more information about the world to make the initial information dump of the new era easier to follow, for example, let us see what the other leaders are switching to during the loading screen, and how they unlocked it.

 

[PauI]

To be fair, Marbozir is an elite civ player. So the crisis not hurting too much could just be a result of him playing really well. Obviously, if you play well and have a big, strong empire, you will likely be better equipped to get through a crisis than a smaller, weaker empire.



I think the only real incentive to using the hostile greeting is if you are planning an early war against the civ. The hostile greeting will reduce relations allowing you to do a formal war sooner. If the AI uses the hostile greeting against you, it might indicate that they are planning to attack you very soon.

Talking about interesting decisions:

Imagine the following scenario. (Hostile greetings give 20 influence instead of costing 20)

You meet an IP (Samarkand). You lack 20 points to befriend them. Now on the same turn you meet Augustus.

What do you do now?

A: Invest in the relationship (friendly greeting) and benefit from future endeavours?
or
B: Be greedy and take the points (hostile greeting) to get an earlier start in the suzerain race (might be even more important in mp) while damaging the relationship and delay future endeavours with Augustus.

Now THAT is an interesting decision for me. And might save us from a thousand friendly greetings in a row without a thought in mind.

Plus in the scenario where you don't have enough points (20) to friendly greet, you would have to make a decision between neutral (no cost) and hostile (get 20). While in our current world we would ALWAYS have to chose neutral, as we don't have points for anything else. Ugh.

Also in multiplayer this would make interactions less predictable, as players wouldn't immediately interpret hostile greetings as a sign of impending war.

Yea I am in Team Buff Hostile Greeting.

 

[Acid.Crash]

Hi All,
Will share my 5 coins here.
Mostly of they are from cosmetic perspective.
- Map shape has little variety, I was among those folks who adore Yet (not) Another Maps Pack
- Minimap looks unfinished, I see no reason NOT to show the zone of control. Also why there are squares instead of hexes.
- Low number of civs, guess this will be resolved via DCLs
- To little customization: Team color is tied to a leader, as result there are cases like this one above (everything is purplish-yellow OR yellow-black).
There should be a customization that allows to define a primary-secondary color based on the Player slot OR few options of colors per leader to reduce cases where multiple civs have too similar colors

 

[Uberfrog]

I’m getting the general sense that the game is unfinished, which I guess it is, but there isn’t much scope for them to address all of these issues prior to the game’s release.

It feels like UI aesthetic design took a real backseat, which is disappointing.

Balance looks out of whack as well, which doesn’t surprise me. The game could have done with an extended play testing phase.

But in general the good aspects I were looking forward to are there and I am still excited to get my hands on it. I just don’t understand how a game that has been in development as long as this can look so rough.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I’m getting the general sense that the game is unfinished, which I guess it is, but there isn’t much scope for them to address all of these issues prior to the game’s release.

It feels like UI aesthetic design took a real backseat, which is disappointing.

Balance looks out of whack as well, which doesn’t surprise me. The game could have done with an extended play testing phase.

But in general the good aspects I were looking forward to are there and I am still excited to get my hands on it. I just don’t understand how a game that has been in development as long as this can look so rough.

One of the YouTubers (VanBradley) commented that the UI looks and feels like it was designed for ease of use with controllers, so Steam Decks and consoles.

That explains why it's so dull and blocky, I guess.