What can Firaxis learn?

They should read forums and reddit posts and if there's something that people are actually agreeing on, THEY PROBABLY SHOULD GIVE IT SERIOUS CONSIDERATION.

I'll trust Firaxis game designers more than myself and other players in general, but there are concerns that are recurrent among the player base and it would be a serious mistake to ignore those.

Off the top of my head: dropping Specialists from the game was a mistake. What we got in Civ 6 was a step back, and the absence of little things like unique icons representing the different specialists makes a huge difference.

 

I'm liking the idea of the interplay between the two. Maybe a golden age gives you increased yields for a period but no changes to your UA. Dark ages cut your yields but allow you to change (add) a UA at the end of them. Something like that. Maybe 'normal ages' (if they keep the world era system) allow some sort of minor UA improvement/addition (your +15% next to rivers can be increased to +20%).

 

My biggest concern if they go full mobile game .... and then release that version as some sort of PC-PS5-Xbox port.

If they do that, thats end of Civ.
If they develop it normally like they always do, I trust them to make good product. Maybe little less AI super-dumbness at launch would be nice, but with expansions and DLC's game always end up being playable.

 

OH NO!!!!! I hate how Humankind map features have nothing to do with what you directly build. That is the main reason I haven't bought it so far. That 3d building models are well visible on the map and represent the exact feature being built is one of the best part of Civ6.

 

A lot of great points in here. I'd like to add on that I was recently watching PotatoMcwhiskey's series using the Urban Complexity mod, and while it looks terribly complicated figuring out the interplay, I did enjoy the fact that it had much more interplay. I think Civ definitely could use that some more. Like, there's currently only a couple times where you have a legit decision between a couple buildings, I would love to see that in a few more instances. Stuff like deciding what building to build in a district because it converts appeal to adjacency is a fantastic way to give you even more variety based on terrain. Watching someone make decisions and thinking, "well, this area isn't very good. But then again, if I plant a forest here and build a fairground there, suddenly this becomes a curious decision" just adds to the decisions.

And for the rest, I think a lot of your ideas above also revolve around making sure that you have decisions to make and to make sure that they matter. Like, do I want to found a city, or just keep a territory as an outpost? Should I work citizen slots in a district, or work the terrain? What dedication should I choose? Too many times in the current iteration of civ 6, you just have so few decision points that truly matter, and too often the few decisions you have are simply not balanced enough, that it means you effectively don't have to make a choice. You click what you know and move on.

Like, one of the areas of civ that I actually like the most is picking your pantheon. Why? Because it's simple (get 25 faith), you have the choice every game, you have a lot of options to choose from, and overall, they have actually spent multiple iterations in balancing them. Are some more valuable than others, and some useless in 99% of games? Sure, always happens. But at least it forces you to make a decision, and in many ways, can direct how you approach your empire. Sure, I'm not going to plan my entire empire around getting 1 culture from plantations, but it can add up in some cases. I've had games where I have a ton of quarries, pick the pantheon around that, and suddenly I find the yields of my quarries are strong enough that I'm not chopping them as aggressively. Religion choices are similar in that you play the game very differently if you have a religion with Work Ethic vs Feed the World.

And I do think that secret societies was another good decision matrix, in some ways, as you have to make a choice early that has a direct impact on how your game moves forward. Now, granted, the fantasy elements make me cringe, and it's too powerful in too many cases so I feel it completely dominates whatever your civ's abilities are, but I think it was a good attempt to essentially shape your empire and give you more choice. Rome/Voidsingers vs Rome/Vampires games play very differently. If they moderated the impacts of the decision a little bit, it could be a fascinating way to play the game and focus on a different part of a civ's ability in different games.

Of course, all of that comes with a cost. You can't make things so complicated that it takes you 15 minutes to choose your pantheon. And I do think that sometimes those decisions can be unbalanced and leave room for role play - I'll often choose a pantheon that I know is not the best choice, but it just makes something look cool or something. But I just want more of those choices to be able to craft my game.

 

I definitely agree 100 % with your observations about the Age system in general.

I think one way of hybridizing Civ and Humankinds culture development could be to have a set of general trades for each era, where you can pick one for your civ when you advance to that era, one a first-come-first-served basis a bit like in Humankind. Each era could have one or two trades related to military (combat), civilian (expansion), food, production, science, culture, gold, faith, ... which you could then pick for the current era based on what your needs are.

I also like the idea of different civilization unique traits that you can select as game progresses to develop your civ, and which stays with you for a longer time or even permanently. This could even tie into the era system: Maybe earning a golden era will allow you to add a new unique trait to your civilization, whereas earning a dark era will force you to lose and remove one of the unique traits you have earned for your civilization.

I agree 100 %, alternative buildings is definitely something I think should be the norm and something I forgot to put on the list but has a very strong wish for.

I have played a fair deal myself with the urban complexity mods myself, but I must admit that while I'm greatly in awe of the effort and skill put into constructing it, I'm not 100 % enamored with the design decisions in this mod. For one, I'm not keen on the buildings that have their yields based on a governor being present, because this seems to work against the idea of moving governors around between your cities (a design that I'm actually against, but that's how it is, like it or not). Secondly, I feel the choices are often very hard to evaluate, which is probably a matter of the opaque UI (and my lack of will and/or ability to do detailed min/max-ing) as much as the mod design, but I do feel that often I'm guessing more or less blindly what the effect of the different buildings will be, particularly when it comes to the cases where three different options are available.

 

- districts should only go adjacent to other districts. these maps in Civ 6 look so ugly by the end of the game.

- ages are stupid. junk them entirely. are people in my civilization happy? yes? then I should be rewarded for that, not for doing X number of things the game thinks I should be doing.

- people seem to hate one unit per tile, but I don't mind it. Maybe allow armies to stack while they're traveling along roads or other paths (i.e. rivers) or something, just to speed things up.

- don't mimic Humankind the Game too much. Civ's foremost strength is playing as a one civilization. That civilization should be able to augment with new abilities for each era of history.

 

What can Firaxis learn?

First and foremost, how to truly engage with its audience. Marketing stunts where they smile and say "you're the best fans in gaming" are not enough; you don't say that, you show that. How? In many ways, but starting with listening to the audience, not only for new content, but also about how to make the existing content better.

And regarding this, the dreaded competition is eons ahead. Look at their response to reports, suggestions and yes, complaints... a constant stream of updates, one larger than the previous, all of them containing real improvements to the game, many of them requested/reported by the audience, frequent betas with pre-fixes, etcetcetc.

That is how to do it. It's time Firaxis learns. No more funny cat videos where they say we are the best fans in gaming. Now start showing it, please.

 

That Sid Meier's understanding of what makes those games great was special, and they should not drop it

 

I think Firaxis has two options here. The first is just as you say: turn districts into urban sprawl. The second is to make the devs' original intention that districts are smaller urban centers more visually obvious and less abstract--and for heaven's sake make them match the culture. Half the districts look Greek and the rest look generically European; this is really jarring when playing as China or Aztec or Cree.

I'd say rather, like so many things in Civ6, the idea was good but the implementation was bad. The idea is sound, but they really need to go back to the drawing board about how it's implemented in the game. They need to reconsider what triggers a golden/dark age, how long it lasts, what it affects, and so forth. I also feel like there need to be some pros and cons of both. Civs in golden ages have a tendency to become complacent, which leads to decline; dark ages often see a breakdown of military and civic power but a blossoming of commerce, industry, and innovation and a shakeup of the social order. If implemented correctly, this could add a lot of dynamism to the game and break down the runaway snowballing most 4X games experience.

I've always been under the impression that this is something 2K needs to learn, not Firaxis. I have no special inside knowledge, but it's always felt like the Firaxis devs would like to be more communicative but 2K was restraining them. It is the publisher, not the devs, who establish the marketing and communication parameters, after all. (But yes, Amplitude is exceptionally responsive and communicative, SEGA has given them a long leash to continue to be so since acquisition, and many companies could learn something from that.)

 

I don't like most of the ideas bandied about on these forums at all. They are very often overcomplicated. There doesn't appear to be much upside in listening to the community on that front. Using the community for testing or input from the modders seem more worthwhile. But as long as 2K doesn't commit the resources to have basic bugs fixed it's a bit moot.

 

I think, that it is time to acknowledge: they uncompromisingly target the mass market now.

Many on CFC analysed the situation after Gathering Storm too and were surprised by their answer.
NewFrontierPass is what they felt civ6 needed most and we got it. There is no misunderstanding or oversight. They intended and scored a bullseye. They don't want to deliver a great game but just high sales. They make games for big numbers of Casual players on all platforms, who play a handful of times and find quickly satisfaction -- "see, I win on deity already" and am ready to be hyped for one more game with catastrophes, then one with vampires, one with mighty heroes, rinse, repeat. Replayability in the sense of learning first and then mastering is for losers. Instant gratification!! Pling, pling.
Dedicated developers aiming for perfection in complicated and polished games, which become better the more you play them not worse, are niche. But fortunately available -- even on this forum.


I stumbled today over a video from FilthyRobot featuring OldWorld. Whow! I liked very much his civ6 videos before he dropped it years ago and find this one very entertaining:

That link goes straight forward to the correct point in time 1:51:51 Start OldWorld part
of this video (a bit confusing, amidst in Humankind):






PS @Zaarin: mitgefangen, mitgehangen // Cling together, swing together (?)

 

On the whole I definitely agree. As an obvious example, why exactly do we need another way to claim territory that isn't founding a city? What does this actually add to the game? I don't see any benefit. The best strategy games are universally the ones with simple rules that interact with each other in complicated and interesting ways. Not games that add complexity for complexities sake.

Let's be real. Civ IV was the last Civ game that was targeting fans of the genre rather than the mass market. I don't even particularly dislike Civ VI on the whole, it's a fun game even if the replayability is relatively low thanks to the difficulty, but it's indisputable that V and VI are both very dumbed down games compared to IV. You can't make city placement matter too much because then people will settle bad cities and lose and not play again. You can't move away from 1UPT to a functional combat system for the genre because then people who should really be playing Total War or Age of Empires will complain that they can't beat the AI that has 3x as much production as them/actually invested in military in war. This would maybe be less of a problem if they took notes from amplitude and had you initiate combat zones by walking into an enemy unit rather than just doing combat in the overworld, at the very least I assume that's the big thing that makes humankind's combat AI so much better than V/VIs, but for now the AI just can't handle combat period. I was personally shocked when I looked and saw that deity AI bonuses have been pretty much uniform across series history. 1UPT isn't the only problem with the AI, Civ IV AI was good enough at empire building to out tech even the best humans in a long game after bonuses, but it's a big part of it. It also just has to be a computational headache. Good pathfinding is a notoriously computationally expensive thing, and I imagine 1UPT making that a much harder problem has a lot to do with why map sizes are nowhere near as big as they used to be in IV. I don't actually expect them to ever go back, but it's pretty mind boggling to me that they made the change in the first place. It's just a worse system in every way imaginable.

Realistically what I expect from Civ VII is:

1. The end of total wars. The genre as a whole has spoken and apparently what people want is a bunch of small skirmishes that get you small advantages for winning (eg stellaris and humankind war system) rather than smashing entire empires in one fell swoop.

2. Some other way to cap expansion. ICS is a problem with Civ VI mechanics. It's not true ICS where you quite literally add as many cities as possible to your empire, but it's not far off.

3. Reworked diplomacy. I have no idea why they went away from the Civ IV system here honestly, AIs had notable personalities without being the same every game thanks to religion playing such a big role, but I think the feedback about people hating agendas and being world enemy for winning a war is pretty clear.

4. Civ specific eras bonuses rather than civ choice just being a UA and UU choice. I'm thinking something along the lines of the current golden/dark age, but rather than those bonuses being the same for everybody in a given era, different civs get different choices. It just seems like an easy way to add variety and flavor to your specific civ.

There will definitely be new mechanics and probably other fixes I'm not thinking of, but I think number 1-3 are very safe bets and I wouldn't be surprised if 4 is in there as well.

Also, not sure where a lot of you guys get the idea that the other game studios respond to customer feedback so well. Amplitude is generally the poster child here, and they straight up sold everyone an Alpha in humankind. That game is BUSTED and I haven't seen any of their patches address the main balance problems. Mostly just fixing complete oversights like it being literally impossible to capture island cities. Maybe this is just me, but that kind of thing feels way more performative than what Firaxis does. I also hope for the love of god Firaxis doesn't listen to people complaining about the art style and goes for something like humankind that is completely not functional as a map even if it arguably looks better. I shouldn't need to mouse over a tile to know if it's a district, forest, plain, or grassland. I also really hope they don't drop victory conditions. The glorified score victories that have become popular recently are just not interesting.

 

There is something the fourms and reddit all agree on?

What does that even mean, truly engage? What level of engagement is truly? You are saying they don't listen but seems to me that they look, read, and, at times, engage with the fan base all over. Just because they don't act on every single "suggestion" or the suggestions that you prefer doesn't mean they aren't engaged at making things the audience wants.

Fanatics/Reddit are a part of the demo, not the only demo.

 

Even as a peaceful player, I think this would be a great change. From a gameplay perspective, it would incentivize even a peaceful player to go to war occasionally if the goal was something other than Total Annihilation. From a historical perspective, total war was an invention of the twentieth century and is not characteristic of historical warfare.

I agree. Few 4X games have really interesting diplomacy, but Civ has suffered particularly from weak diplomacy and Civ6 may be the shallowest in the franchise. I've said several times I don't want Civ to imitate Humankind too much, but Civ7 could definitely take a page from Amplitude's book in the diplomacy department--especially from ES2 more so than HK; I think ES2 has some of the best diplomacy features I've seen in a 4X (though you rarely get to use them because the AI is so standoffish).

In terms of AI personality, which you address later in the paragraph but which I consider a somewhat separate issue, I also agree with you. I honestly don't remember Civ4's AI personalities, but Civ5's system worked well: leaders had predictable personalities but within a randomized range of parameters, and they weren't neurotic about a single fixation that they irrationally pursued at the expense of all sanity. "There are a lot of reasons we should be friends, but your landlocked empire doesn't have a navy so I hate you." Agendas need to not return.

100% this. The fact that stylization has increasingly dominated the market for the past decade leads me to believe the "color hurts my man-pride" crowd is a very, very loud minority. I think Civ7 will choose a different style, but it's not going to be the Civ5-style beige, brown, and grey map that some people seem to be hoping for.

 

Total War being a 20th century only thing would certainly be news to Carthage as well as countless others.

The problem is Civ6 as well as most other 4X games seem to treat a military conquest as basically an instant assimilation of the conquored population into loyal drones after perhaps a token turn of “disorder” or whatever

And the snowball keeps a rolling

And no, that stupid Loyalty system is NOT an adequate way to represent the difficulties inherent in integrating a conquored population.

I really want to know how the frack you justify this flipping nonsense. The overwhelming military force that a civ’s conventional military couldn’t keep from taking a city is magically teleported to Narnia because…reasons?

I mean by Civ6 Mechanics WW2 would have been Germany’s panzers curb stomping the French Army, but unable to hold Paris because of…baguettes and wine?

Go ahead, rationalize this nonsense, I double dog dare you

What should happen, is that when you take another civ’s city, it retains it’s original ethnic identity, but you get control of it’s output (perhaps at a lower rate of efficiency). Depending on the size of the city you need to maintain at least a certain number of military units in it as a garrison or it rebels, generating that number of military units and rejoining it’s founding civ.

So Rome conquors far and wide. Then it’s milifary is gradually consumed by barharians and internal strife and spamming districts and suddenly France and Spain and Greece and various other conquored civs regain independance

While we are on the topic, often the most common brake on endless expansion is COMPLETELY ABSENT from Civ; internal strife and civil wars. It absolutly wrecked Rome as the most famous example

There needs to be a mechanic for this.

 

Then I'm not sure you understand what a total war is because Carthage certainly never experienced one. Wars of conquest are not new; total war, where the entire population is mobilized for war, first appeared in the twentieth century. Some historians have pushed claims that the American Civil War was a total war, but this is not widely accepted. The population was not mobilized, and civilian targets were strictly off limits (yes, including during Sherman's greatly exaggerated March to the Sea). The Civil War was unusually ideologically motivated, in which sense it might be thought of as a proto-total war, but it was fought strictly conventionally.

 

Which was already in Civ 3, almost word by word... but yeah, Firaxis "learns"...

 

Because it is a game, it was not in the original version but the forums pushed specifically for a flipping mechanism. Without this mechanism people were truly walking all over other civs with impunity, here was a mechanic that could get around people that have a 5 hundred year science advantage and stopped people being able to use “COMPLETELY ABSENT” which you did. Using caps to emphasise something that this mechanic fixes made me smile, and also explained your rationale a bit. It also got rid of the AI walking up to your civ and placing a city in between your cities.

It is in no way realistic. But what game is? I did not play colonisation or civ II because it was realistic, it’s a turn based game piggy backing off history. The more like reality it is, the longer and more complex it will become.

Most things have a rational answer, it just not the one you want.

 

Not per se. It worked quite well already in the original PanzerGeneral under MS-DOS (i486CPU!). What matters much are the available movementpoints per turn; in that game: infantry on foot 2 and 3 / vehicles typical 8-10 (afair) / a quick Antiair unit surely 14 ... possibly restricted by terrain & weather.
See also:

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Despite OldWorld is comparably weak here on CFC you can simply use the search function:
click on 'More' for advanced search, no Keywords, in All Forums , enter Dale, Solver, alexman, Soren Johnson or Velociryx in the Posted by field in order to find a lot of substantial responses.