Yeah, I miss the whole "outpost" system from Civ3 (?). It feels weird to me that I use the same unit of a settler to go claim some arctic oil as if I were going to settle Kansas, for example. Or, for example, it still feels weird to me how you can be getting to the medieval or industrial eras, and there's still large pieces of land with no settlements on them. Now, I don't necessarily think that every piece of land needs to be claimed in a game, and the barbarian tribes mode I do think helps a little bit in filling out some unclaimed areas, but I don't think it quite goes far enough. I wish at times there was a sort of mechanism where if you have a group of unclaimed tiles in an area, there's a chance that it would simply "spring up" into a city. Even using the free cities method - if you had a large tract of land that was unclaimed, maybe instead of going barb camp -> city-state, there should just be a new free city that pops up. And then naturally if they are culturally close to another civ, they would join up or could in theory be conquered by someone else.
What can Firaxis learn?
- Thread starter ZimZum514
- Start date
Yeah, I miss the whole "outpost" system from Civ3 (?). It feels weird to me that I use the same unit of a settler to go claim some arctic oil as if I were going to settle Kansas, for example. Or, for example, it still feels weird to me how you can be getting to the medieval or industrial eras, and there's still large pieces of land with no settlements on them. Now, I don't necessarily think that every piece of land needs to be claimed in a game, and the barbarian tribes mode I do think helps a little bit in filling out some unclaimed areas, but I don't think it quite goes far enough. I wish at times there was a sort of mechanism where if you have a group of unclaimed tiles in an area, there's a chance that it would simply "spring up" into a city. Even using the free cities method - if you had a large tract of land that was unclaimed, maybe instead of going barb camp -> city-state, there should just be a new free city that pops up. And then naturally if they are culturally close to another civ, they would join up or could in theory be conquered by someone else.
aieeegrunt
Emperor
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If your hardware can handle it, put the max number of city states and at least 1.5 to double the number of civs that the map calls for.
The world will pretty much fill up by the medieval era
You’d think there’d be endemic warfare, but lol this terrible AI
uhu
Warlord
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Patience! Until the age of exploration in chess the queens (& bishops) were limited in range too ... in ModernWorld we'll see vehicles of all kind, swiftly doing away with limited fatigue system.
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I seem to be in a really niche minority that is really triggered by civ6 AI oeaceful nature, which combined with its inability to conquer stuff (I'm not surprised with the hell that is movement and sieges in this combat system, plus loyalty) means civ6 worlds are much more static, oeaceful and boring than civ5 ones...
I hate warmongering penalties, I wrote a large post in a subforum arguing how they are very unrealistic on too of being frustrating and doing nothing to stop snowballing. And I think the design idea they had in this game, that warmongering tendencies and tolerance of AI linearly decrease with eras, is one of the dumbest design decisions for this game.
- It is terrible for gameplay because it fossilizes early snowballing and makes the lategame boring even more.
- It is terrible on basic level of historical observation, yeah because twentieth century was so goddamn peaceful, you know it's not like there were two world wars, a cold war and like 153 other wars in the meantime.
- It is terrible on the level of macro history and ohilosohy in that it believes in some autonomous magical force of orogress which makes humans always less warlike with time in every simulation.
Can we just get back to history and get some endemic interstate wars, great emoires, civil wars, world wars, cold wars instead of either a boring hugfest or boring oassive agressive oarty?
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aieeegrunt
Emperor
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It’s so absolutly ridiculous it has to be by design right? Nobody could possibly be this incompetent?
*remembers he’s currently in the Covid19 timeline*
Sigh…
Ya this game was probably designed with pinata AI as a mass market appeal thing.
Then again the hilarious Campus Spam Typo is still uncorrected….
Aristos
Lightseeker
Something happened to your P key... civ 6 AI took over perhaps?
WM penalties where a childish attempt at limiting warfare runaways. Grievances may have worked, but it was poorly implemented (like most civ 6 systems). I like HKs approach of warscore/support/whateveryouwannacallit, it still needs adjustments and balancing but it is eons ahead of FXS attempts.
uhu
Warlord
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I attach pictures to illustrate the situation of some units having long moves, but not all: The slinger reaches out and kills the settler in one turn.
First it uses its 3 fatigue points to cross the river, through trees & scrub onto the scrub hill adjacent to the settler. This costs the leader 3 Orders (19->16).
The kill costs one more Order
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To circle back towards the original post, what Firaxis can learn is that there are definitely parts of the current combat system that don't work very well. I don't think they'll get a lot of agreement - personally, I think going back to unlimited stacking would be absolutely horrible. But I do think that there's pieces of the current mechanism that definitely need a big overhaul. Maybe it's something like putting siege/ranged units on their own plane, like we currently have for religious units/civilian units/support units/etc... Or maybe it's something bigger. But yeah, finding a system that is both good for the human and good for the AI I do think would go a long way to helping. While the AI has gotten better over time - they are a lot better at picking off stray units now than they used to, and I have seen them come at me with a force that actually threatens me, there's still some serious limits when I know that I can basically float my army across the ocean and not be worried about what I'm facing on the other side, especially once you get that foothold and can magically summon new tanks to the battlefront.
I like peaceful, I think it’s fine so the player doesn’t get their head chopped off! But, this is why wars for a reason need to happen, not just it’s war because I dislike you and are going to conquer you til you are gone.
also, new civs emerging through peaceful means so it isn’t just 8 blobs. I’d be scared to give the AI more war because already I struggle and don’t want to build military units all game.
Naokaukodem
Millenary King
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Alas, according to a recent poll I made in this forum, the fan base doesn't want to communicate with Firaxis in such a way.
There's a difference between not wanting Early Access and approving of the 99% radio silence that Firaxis gives us.
Naokaukodem
Millenary King
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Because thousands of heads are better than a dozen heads when it comes to finding flaws, advantages, 'must-haves' and What Were You Thinking? elements in your game design.
"in such a way". What Early Accesses are for otherwise ?
"in such a way". What Early Accesses are for otherwise ?
Bactrian
Chieftain
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What I want Firaxis to learn is that designing Civ to play quicker should not mean making us rush through the eras so quickly that we don't get to enjoy them.
Related: that "science" alone should not be the prime driver of progression, but rather its implementation or influence within a society (assuming we uncritically accept such a deterministic understanding of history, which Civ certainly has up to this point).
Related: that "science" alone should not be the prime driver of progression, but rather its implementation or influence within a society (assuming we uncritically accept such a deterministic understanding of history, which Civ certainly has up to this point).
kaspergm
Deity
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But ... is that really what we want?
I mean, currently each age is limited to a minimum of 40 turns, if I'm not mistaken, and with 8 eras, that's already past the 300-turns mark if you want to reach the end of last era (and that's not counting future era). We could increase the minimum number of turns to 50, which would drag the game past the 400 turns mark, but when many players currently complain that late game is boring and a drag, that hardly seems like an optimal solution.As I see it, the problem is not only the length of the eras, but the matter of how much you can do in each turn. I see two issues here: Production and unit movement. Production costs in Civ6 are way high, which means that at least in early game, producing anything in a city can easily be 10 turns or more, which already eats a major part of an era. Wonders are obviously worse, if you don't chop or rush, producing a wonder can easily be 20+ turns even in a productive city. That's already half an era. Similarly, the low movement allowance for each unit means that getting units across the maps an in position for, say, besieging a city, can easily take 10+ turns, which is again a major part of an era.
So I'm not sure the problem is how fast we advance through the eras, but rather how little we get to accomplish in each era. Again, while Humankind is far from perfect, at least it allows me to produce buildings an units much faster, which makes it feel less like a click-next-turn marathon than Civ6 sometimes does.
Bactrian
Chieftain
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But ... is that really what we want?
As I see it, the problem is not only the length of the eras, but the matter of how much you can do in each turn. I see two issues here: Production and unit movement. Production costs in Civ6 are way high, which means that at least in early game, producing anything in a city can easily be 10 turns or more, which already eats a major part of an era. Wonders are obviously worse, if you don't chop or rush, producing a wonder can easily be 20+ turns even in a productive city. That's already half an era. Similarly, the low movement allowance for each unit means that getting units across the maps an in position for, say, besieging a city, can easily take 10+ turns, which is again a major part of an era.
So I'm not sure the problem is how fast we advance through the eras, but rather how little we get to accomplish in each era. Again, while Humankind is far from perfect, at least it allows me to produce buildings an units much faster, which makes it feel less like a click-next-turn marathon than Civ6 sometimes does.
Well, there are multiple ways to tackle the issue of the game becoming a grind, and I know this forum is full of threads discussing ideas for that. We need to not assume that a greater number of turns would equal more grind if the gameplay loop managed to avoid that more generally. But, in any case, eight eras of equal length is not something that is set in stone. One could extend the era of classical antiquity, for example, and eliminate the future era.
Less eras would probably work better.
@kaspergm The high production costs are a necessary consequence of 1UPT combat. Design needs to ensure the map does not get hopelessly cluttered. This argument does not work for buildings but cheap buildings and expensive units would shift the balance to favor peaceful development too much.
@kaspergm The high production costs are a necessary consequence of 1UPT combat. Design needs to ensure the map does not get hopelessly cluttered. This argument does not work for buildings but cheap buildings and expensive units would shift the balance to favor peaceful development too much.
I think you could devise a system where unit costs were cheap but you still didn't clutter the board, if you made maintenance costs super high. For example, right now, I couldn't even tell you what a cavalry costs in upkeep (looking it up it says 5gpt). But if you changed it so that a cavalry was 1/4 of the current cost to build, but needed, say, 1 horse per turn and 50 gold per turn in maintenance, then that has a serious consequence for how I approach them. Right now, I can be in the industrial era, have a standing army of 10-15 troops, and it's costing me 50-100gpt in maintenance. And in that era, if I have a moderately sized empire, I can easily be making a net 300 gpt on top of that.
But if those same 10 troops are now costing me 500gpt, then suddenly my empire is now losing 100gpt to maintain that army, so you really need to be pillaging a lot and truly need those troops. It would turn much more into a "I am going to war, so let's recruit a bunch of troops" and "I just signed a peace treaty, DELETE DELETE DELETE".
Hellenism Salesman
Emperor
While I'm pretty sure this was part of the reasoning when they made expensive units, but it also points to another design intention, both of which being a factor of what I'll call unit scale. Unit scale means how valuable a single unit is. If a single unit is cheap to train but weak, then that means the game's unit scale is pretty small. But if a single unit is costly and strong, then that means the game's unit scale is rather large. I'm pretty sure that Firaxis was aiming toward a large unit scale with expensive, strong units. When a game's unit scale is large, that means that a "full army" can be comprised of fewer units, resulting in both less map clutter as you mentioned, and less micromanagement. But because this attempt at a large unit scale was not reinforced by heavier maintenance costs, it instead pointed players toward the optimal strategy of maximizing production and printing out tons of units, creating a nightmarish micromanagement slog.
And @UWHabs, I think your idea of limiting an army's size primarily based on maintenance costs could work, but taking into account the problems that you mentioned and the fact that it would likely not dethrone Production as an all-important resource and just replace it with Gold... I think there are better options.
If we're sticking with 1UPT, then maybe what we need is to have some third system/resource to reduce unit clutter. Whether that be an existing mechanic or a new one entirely, I believe having unit clutter be restrained by three resources is the best idea. As it stands currently, it's a bit too easy (and even optimal) to overcome the small Production and Gold hurdles that are set in place to keep a reasonable limit on army size. This results in the best course of action being to train a horde of units that becomes a huge drag to manage as the game progresses.
To tie this to the thread's original question, I'd say that Firaxis can learn how to better limit army size and balance unit scale to create a more satisfying, less cluttered military experience.
Zegangani
King
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I think you all have good Arguments about the Issues of pacing and the production of things.
regarding Units, @Hellenism Salesman made good Points why you can solve a single Issue but not the main Problem. You can reduce the Cost of Units and increase the Maintenance Costs, thus we have a less cluttered Map, but 1UPT as how it currently works in Civ6, would still be an Issue, as besieging and attacking a City, or War in general, would be much more difficult, so we need to reduce the Walls' Defense Strength. And increasing the Maintenance Cost would be a major detriment for Civs that aren't economically strong, and Civs that can maintain a good Amount of Armee would have an easy Game with weak Walls to attack (and now we have a Snowballing Issue)...etc. So solving one Issue inevitably causes new Ones to appear.
This is One of the Things where good Game Designers show themselves. Because even if the overall Issue is "Balance", the possible Solution might be a complete redesign of many Systems in order to fix it.
But I totally agree with you all, Units and Infrastructures that take +10/+20 Turns to get finished, and having things already unlocked that you can't fully make use of because newer ones are soon to be unlocked, thus having a feeling of constantly being rushed really breaks Immersion. I've tried to find a Solution for this (for a Mod) but it always end up in other arising Issues.
regarding Units, @Hellenism Salesman made good Points why you can solve a single Issue but not the main Problem. You can reduce the Cost of Units and increase the Maintenance Costs, thus we have a less cluttered Map, but 1UPT as how it currently works in Civ6, would still be an Issue, as besieging and attacking a City, or War in general, would be much more difficult, so we need to reduce the Walls' Defense Strength. And increasing the Maintenance Cost would be a major detriment for Civs that aren't economically strong, and Civs that can maintain a good Amount of Armee would have an easy Game with weak Walls to attack (and now we have a Snowballing Issue)...etc. So solving one Issue inevitably causes new Ones to appear.
This is One of the Things where good Game Designers show themselves. Because even if the overall Issue is "Balance", the possible Solution might be a complete redesign of many Systems in order to fix it.
But I totally agree with you all, Units and Infrastructures that take +10/+20 Turns to get finished, and having things already unlocked that you can't fully make use of because newer ones are soon to be unlocked, thus having a feeling of constantly being rushed really breaks Immersion. I've tried to find a Solution for this (for a Mod) but it always end up in other arising Issues.
