What would be, for you, the perfect baseline difficulty level of Civilization games?

[Krajzen]

What am I talking about is not this stupid eight - difficulty - levels - line (which is stupid and should be thrown out anyway, because in practice almost nobody plays first 3 - 4 outside of tutorial level learning of the game) but something more fundamental:

Do you think Civ games in general should be designed around the idea of being easy or hard?
The motto of the series is "Can you build the civilization that can stand the test of time". Taking this literally, that would mean that the very act of build a civilization which reaches endgame is an achievement in itself. Civ6 doesn't work in this way, obviously; it is very clearly built around low difficulty level (well, partly 'purposefully designed' and partly 'we are unable to design good 1upt combat AI').

The reason why my poll doesn't contain the option of 'let's just make difficulty levels in - game incredibly varied' is because I reject this very understanding of difficulty - in the end you do design the game around a certain concept and level of baseline difficulty, and only then you apply varying diff levels on top of that. Besides, that would defeat the point of the question.


Personally, I know this will never happen, but I'd love if this series literally understood "Can you survive the test of time" as "factions rise and fall during game session and you are not at all easily guaranteed to survive, you have to struggle and fight and use all tools at your disposal". I do think that challenging games are in the end simply better, more engaging, more interesting, more emotional, deeper games overall. Such Civ game would still have difficulty levels, and maybe even a special relaxed sandbox mode, but it's core concept would be about actually TRYING TO STAND THE TEST OF TIME. I don't think this could ever happen due to the massive casual appeal of recent Civ games, but I don't think it had to be too destructive either - there are so many very popular games, massive hits, with purposefully high difficulty level.

 

[civfan_999]

I'd like to see them change the way they think about difficulty settings. I understand the struggle of writing better AI code to make them not suck at combat, but there can be improvements even to the current structure where basically some difficulties buff and others nerf the AI. Buff them a little at a time instead of a ton of buffs from the beginning of the game.

The current difficulty settings give the AI a lot of perks from day one so that you spend the first few eras playing catch up. This makes it difficult to secure early game wonders and still gets you to that cross over point where once you have passed them, you can leave them in your dust. I would recommend giving the AI extra things each era rather than a lot of extras all at once at the beginning. For example, instead of starting them off with 5 civs and 5 techs (I might have those numbers a bit off), they could start the game with 1-2 civs/techs and get 1-2 additional civs/techs each time a new world era begins. That way, instead of us being behind early game and pushing to catch up, the AI wouldn’t be quite as strong in the ancient era, but would be better able to keep pace with an experienced human player throughout the game.

 

[Revanchist]

My problem with the AI is that they get settlers on higher difficulties. I would prefer if they had higher production bonuses instead as I tend to outpace them very early. It also doesn't help that forward settling is one of the few things that pisses me off in this game. Endless legend has a great system where you can specify the boost you want AI to receive, instead of using arbitrary numbers.

 

[AsH2]

..
Do you think Civ games in general should be designed around the idea of being easy or hard?
The motto of the series is "Can you build the civilization that can stand the test of time". Taking this literally, that would mean that the very act of build a civilization which reaches endgame is an achievement in itself. Civ6 doesn't work in this way, obviously; it is very clearly built around low difficulty level (well, partly 'purposefully designed' and partly 'we are unable to design good 1upt combat AI').

The reason why my poll doesn't contain the option of 'let's just make difficulty levels in - game incredibly varied' is because I reject this very understanding of difficulty - in the end you do design the game around a certain concept and level of baseline difficulty, and only then you apply varying diff levels on top of that. Besides, that would defeat the point of the question.

To me, it feels like they designed the game to satisfy sandboxing singleplay-gamers and multiplay-gamers in general on as many platforms as possible. The lot of mechanics set the difficulty, try to avoid distractions and keep focusing on things that matters for your victory. I think it's (still) half-baked as you need to be dedicated to learn how things work - the UI is not helping as it should.

Personally, I know this will never happen, but I'd love if this series literally understood "Can you survive the test of time" as "factions rise and fall during game session and you are not at all easily guaranteed to survive, you have to struggle and fight and use all tools at your disposal". I do think that challenging games are in the end simply better, more engaging, more interesting, more emotional, deeper games overall. Such Civ game would still have difficulty levels, and maybe even a special relaxed sandbox mode, but it's core concept would be about actually TRYING TO STAND THE TEST OF TIME. I don't think this could ever happen due to the massive casual appeal of recent Civ games, but I don't think it had to be too destructive either - there are so many very popular games, massive hits, with purposefully high difficulty level.

Civ is a 4X (abbreviation of Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) game. That concept has been around now for a while. As being tech driven, it's fitting quite well in letting gamers play through history from ancient mediterranean empires to modern westerness empires. I think that concept could still work, but (ATM) it's derailing (especially) in the Exploit part - to avoid derailing this thread, I'll evolve those thoughts somewhere else (probably in Ideas for The Perfect 4X Historical Game).

Spoiler from The perfect 4X historical game :

The perfect 4X historical game (according to me) should attract almost everyone (and then my spent time would be less of an issue for me). How to make it happen:

Lure and catch with an arcade game feeling
in a reasonable big web of options,
to put and keep in a deep dungeon of possibilities (*1)​

- kind of what Firaxis already is trying to do (but bad UI, AI, et c and halfbaked concepts will never make a total success *2).

Spoiler 1*Lure and catch, to put and keep :

arcade game feeling - You know, that intuitive feeling when trying a new game that don't need to be explained.
reasonable big web of options - You know, just enough to get and keep focus.
deep dungeon of possibilities - You know, just one more turn and then just one more game..

Spoiler 2*Firaxis faults :

User Interface - Are Firaxis letting script kids putting things together? To move things in Production queue: Click and then click again; To move things in Great works: Hold-click, drag and release. There's no excuse for inconsequential chosing techniques.
Artificial Intelligence - 'Nuff said, but they'd better get back to basic and make sure AI is working as intended.
et c and halfbaked concepts - Don't get me started.. Just hope they will give civ6 a great finish.

From Sid Meier's Civilization: The game's objective is to "Build an empire to stand the test of time".

Here I would like to have a nomadic start and let us define our civ through game instead of using presets. That is,

an empire founded and built on organization and leadership to deal with more than just threats to cities,
while exploring the world and what perks it may attribute you​

- let presets of civs in campaigns/scenarios hint players of what cultural identities (and ethnicities) are in the (main) game and what they are about, just to attain some specific (hidden) accomplishment to be able to add that to the player/AI civ's defined identity (You know, so we can wonder about who's the netherlander, the hollander and the dutchman).

 

[Bactrian]

The motto of the series is "Can you build the civilization that can stand the test of time". Taking this literally, that would mean that the very act of build a civilization which reaches endgame is an achievement in itself.

This would by my preferred design orientation as well. I would strongly favor a time/score victory--better, mere survival to the end--being the expected victory condition with the others only serving to short circuit a game that has one extreme runaway competitor. I'm pleased to see Humankind moving in this direction and I'm hopeful that it will spur Firaxis to shake up the Civ formula.

That being said, I recognize that this is a difficult problem. People don't like to lose, so the trick will be finding a way of managing the difficulty so that people always feel threatened but not frustrated.

 

[Naokaukodem]

I'm not sure if I got it all, but talking about difficulty is for sure interesting, as I often judge a game on it, especially when it's dumbly hard.
I got 1 Deity victory with Korea, pre-NFP patch. It wasn't too hard, since I played on Normal map with only 6 civs, and no one got out of control.
Now I'm struggling to repeat it with another civ, even another scientific civ, and see the Apocalypse from my very own eyes.
It seems that difficulty in Deity is highly variable : one civ can snowball far from you (in one game Scotland had 30+ GS points while Sumer and me only 6), you can be harrased by barbarians (up to one camp in each direction and going each on "raging") or the civs themselves (got surrounded once by two civs : one seemed to want to declare war to me (troop movements) but in the end that's the other one who declared, unless it was me thinking the other civ could help me, but it didn't, at all eventhough we declared together)
Youtubers seem to not have those problems, they always win from the first shot, unless they publish only the good outcomes, which I doubt. I really don't know how they do. PotatoMcWhiskey got declared early by Rome, but he was prepared with at least 3 powerful archers and had iron if i'm right. (lucky him) Marbozir didn't seem to make science his priority, although nobody seemed to do so either, so he was never so backwarded than i can be sometimes. (everytime ?)

What i would want is a less random diffculty in the same difficulty level. I blame the map generator (terrible in civ6), the strategic resources, the good and the really bad spots, etc...

Otherwise i'm not too concerned about difficulty. I wish the game is interesting even on Prince. Difficulty should not be the main salt, how the game plays should be it. The travel rather that the destination. Cool stories to remember. That's why I would go more into something like this, if you're not already aware (sorry if you are) : https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-vii-later-or-other-project.649104/