Will Civ 6 scale well when played with 20-50 civs?

[historix69]

By now most to all features of Civ 6 have been revealed. My favourite game type in Civ 3 - Civ 5 was to play True Starting Locations (TSL) Giant World Maps with around 20-50 different Civs. (Unfortunately the games usually became unstable around modern ages.)

It is a huge difference to design a game to be played with 4-8 civs or 50 civs,
e.g. Civ 5 : The diplomacy overview is a list where for every civ relations to all other civs are displayed. When playing with 43 civs, this might result in a list of ca. 42 x 41 (= ca. 1.700) entries which is uncomfortable to use. Trades are listed but cannot be sorted after civs. Trades expire automatically and have to be manually renewed instead of keeping permanent trades and allow cancelation without negative effects after some turns. Beliefs and religions are limited. Great works are limited so that the game runs out of Great Works rather quickly (unless you add more Great Works via mod). ...

I noticed that in Civ 6 Great People seem to be globally limited, which might not scale well when playing with 50 civs. Are there more points where you think that the game will not work well when played with 50 civs?

 

[anandus]

I wouldn't count on it. 20 might even be a stretch.
Like you said, designing a game for 4 to 8 players is completely different than one for 20 or 50 players.
And from what we've seen the game focusses on the former, not the latter.

But to be honest, we haven't heard anything about it yet.

 

[Lord Shadow]

I don't think the maps would be big enough for 20 civs, let alone 50.

 

[need my speed]

I don't think the maps would be big enough for 20 civs, let alone 50.

Which is a real pity, because it was a lot of fun in Civilization IV - and it is, indeed, the main thing I play; huge maps with 40 or so civilisations.

 

[Larsenex]

Well the good news is that memory allocation is there in a 64 bit engine which in turn will support immense/gigantic maps.

I state this as the fact that in Gal Civ III i(was at launch) the only native 4x game which supports 64 bit. It has insane size maps and can support 30-50 civilizations and minors. However for stability you should be rocking 16 gigs of ram.

Now, will the game offer and support such maps and have so many civs at launch? Likely no but I am fairly sure our modding community will be on that rather quickly.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I sometimes ran 22 civs on a huge map in Civ V . It leads to a lot of conflict.

 

[gunnergoz]

If modding in Civ VI is as robust as they promised it will be, I have little doubt the modding community within a year or so have all the mods to make what you want, possible, including UI fixes and extensions. But the cities are different creatures in Civ VI and that is worth thinking about when considering actual play with more than say, 20 civs on modded TSL map. First thing it seems modders need to work on is AI improvements if it is possible.

 

[MistyRonin]

I tend to play with a good amount of civs too, 10-22. So I also hope to be able to play with these numbers.

So far, we know that 10 civs games are possible (they are allowed in the preview version).

 

[joncnunn]

It's likely that on Huge map that 16 civs will be default; but you should be able to select all civs in Vanilla via advanced option on Day 1 (including Aztecs if you preordered). May be somewhat tight.

It would be a simple to make a mod to allow a map size bigger than huge though. It would be a good idea to play existing huge all the way thru to space race victory though to ensure that performance would be acceptable on your machine; (more precisely your graphics card)

 

[Zaarin]

I had no idea this was possible in Civ5, but it sounds like a lot of fun... (Until I remember how long turns took with just twelve civs... )

 

[God of Kings]

It should be possible given the game's 64-bit architecture. However, that would require a computer much better than the ones Firaxis use or waiting at least a decade to get such a computer.

 

[narmox]

I sometimes ran 22 civs on a huge map in Civ V . It leads to a lot of conflict.

I used to do that on a Standard sized map, until I realized that most city-states would be unable to found their city and just keep their settler in place for the whole game... Lots of fun otherwise though!

 

[God of Kings]

There's also a chance of getting Ozymandias upon starting if there are no suitable areas to spawn a settler: http://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/lost-on-turn-0-beat-this.458643/