Will Civ ever conquer its late-game malaise?

[EgonSpengler]

I have no expectation that the late-game problems or the poor AI will ever be addressed. I believe this game will remain more or less what it is today. C'est la vie.

 

[Xur]

It's not impossible in principle, but Firaxis doesn't seem to understand the issue at all, given how they implemented victory conditions and controls.

I think it is because much of Firaxis' focus lies in fast game speeds on smaller maps. When you play on giant maps with marathon setting (like I have always done), then the game rules start falling apart. I used to play civ games like a simulation where I decided how to play - but now it seems more like a rollercoaster game on tracks. Every game seems the same and you just go though the motions with a massive amount of pointless menu clicking. You'll be lucky if you ever see a level 4 unit.

The AI doesn't seem to know how far away their enemy is. This might not be a problem on small maps, but on giant maps it is ridiculous. They will sue for peace before they get any units close (if they even send any). Another reason why I doubt firaxis even test the game on larger maps.

The game needs automation of cities, workers, trade routes and spies. I want a spy to remain on counterespionage until told otherwise - why do I have to order him around all the time? I want trade routes to remain on the current traderoute until told otherwise - why do I need to order them around all the time? I want the option to autoimprove tiles with a worker, because late game I just stop building workers otherwise. I want to automate a city's building when said city is a tiny useless outpost - that, or bring back production to gold/science like it was in civ5 (you dont have to continuously order the city to build this).

I want automation in diplomacy too. I want a checkbox on items that I wont be trading on any circumstance, and I dont want the AI to ask about it every 10 turns.

In previous civ games, I could really feel a difference when I got factories - now your production just seem to be aligned with unit cost throughout the game. You will never be spitting out units faster. Unless you got a perfect city with massive production you could end up taking more time to build units late game than early game. Furthermore, moving large armies on a giant map with 1upt is a nightmare.

It's a good game though... just doesn't feel like a civ game to me.

 

[OmegaDestroyer]

Dude, seriously, I will give you +2 GP/turn and Iron for Jade, Salt, Diamonds, Olives, the Holy Grail, 2 of your cities, and your first born child.

 

[Zaarin]

I remember Endless Legends' end game being pretty entertaining due to longer winters and quest system. But I don't recall it being truly amazing.

I haven't played much Endless Legends, but Endless Space (2) isn't quite so bad in the end game--but a game of Endless Space (2) is also much, much shorter than a game of Civ.

 

[Abraxis]

Most certainly. They will build seaside resorts with cultural victory off. I routinely disable cultural victory because it comes too early in my games, and I don't want the game to end quite that early. I find myself aiming for cultural victory nearly every game to defend against the AI going for it. Once they start getting close to 25% or 33% tourists needed, I really ramp up my efforts. Seasides resorts do provide some gold for the tile even with cultural victory turn off, but that's almost never a decent tile improvement on its own

The Score criteria has this ambiguous "Empire" factor which seems to be the largest contributor to overall score. I can't find a further breakdown on what that entails though and I've never payed much attention to it before. It would be weird if score incorporated wonders, religion, great people, era points, technology and civics... -but not tourism. I guessed Empire is an amalgam of all your yields like gold, tourism, production, population -evaluated by some formula to simplify into this "Empire" factor, but I have to wonder now.

Maybe I'll just test it myself then. There should be a notification when you have top secret status with people telling you when they switch victory aims. That would be a one way to prove that they do not react to activated/deactivated victories. And I suppose a good way to measure any impact of tourism on "Empire" would be to keep an eye on it and see if it drops as AIs hit enlightenment.

If I figure any of it out I'll post, but I'm also rather lazy, lol. has anyone else (*cough* Victoria *cough*) tested for any of this before?

 

[Equilin]

For Civ6 specifically, it might have to do with the designer's (Ed Beach? maybe someone else in the team?) preference of heavy micromanagement and doing mini-quests, that's why we get eurekas, CS quests, no build queue, appeal/placement/loyalty etc. It's good that you'll have to look after all that but it's also problematic. What I'm going to say is automation in most forms will not be in 6 because that's not the way it is designed (to be heaviliy micromanaged).

 

[blackbutterfly]

Endless Space (2) isn't quite so bad in the end game--but a game of Endless Space (2) is also much, much shorter than a game of Civ.

I haven't actually completed a game of Endless Space 2 yet, despite being incredibly impressed by the gorgeous user interface. (If only Civ VI could be that simple...though with the iPad release I see it was designed with touch interfaces in mind but at the expense of keyboard+mouse UI).

It is so damn hard. I've been playing ES2 at the easiest level and the AI kicks my ass...while I play deity in Civ. As many have pointed out you can now sneeze and win a game of R&F at deity

 

[Zaarin]

For Civ6 specifically, it might have to do with the designer's (Ed Beach? maybe someone else in the team?) preference of heavy micromanagement and doing mini-quests, that's why we get eurekas, CS quests, no build queue, appeal/placement/loyalty etc. It's good that you'll have to look after all that but it's also problematic. What I'm going to say is automation in most forms will not be in 6 because that's not the way it is designed (to be heaviliy micromanaged).

Personally, I like the micromanagement. If anything, I'd like more of it in the late game when most of my cities are running projects because they have nothing else to do. More late game wonders would also help.

I haven't actually completed a game of Endless Space 2 yet, despite being incredibly impressed by the gorgeous user interface. (If only Civ VI could be that simple...though with the iPad release I see it was designed with touch interfaces in mind but at the expense of keyboard+mouse UI).

It is so damn hard. I've been playing ES2 at the easiest level and the AI kicks my ass...while I play deity in Civ. As many have pointed out you can now sneeze and win a game of R&F at deity

Try playing against the Sophons and turn off pirates; that's what I do. (And yeah, ES2 has a gorgeous interface.)

 

[TheMeInTeam]

For Civ6 specifically, it might have to do with the designer's (Ed Beach? maybe someone else in the team?) preference of heavy micromanagement and doing mini-quests, that's why we get eurekas, CS quests, no build queue, appeal/placement/loyalty etc. It's good that you'll have to look after all that but it's also problematic. What I'm going to say is automation in most forms will not be in 6 because that's not the way it is designed (to be heaviliy micromanaged).

It's a shame that Ed seems to believe that 3x the necessary inputs to accomplish the same basic task is acceptable micromanagement padding. Micro isn't inherently bad to a game, but making it extremely cumbersome to no gameplay purpose whatsoever is strictly bad.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

For Civ6 specifically, it might have to do with the designer's (Ed Beach? maybe someone else in the team?) preference of heavy micromanagement and doing mini-quests, that's why we get eurekas, CS quests, no build queue, appeal/placement/loyalty etc. It's good that you'll have to look after all that but it's also problematic. What I'm going to say is automation in most forms will not be in 6 because that's not the way it is designed (to be heaviliy micromanaged).

Yes, this is from Beach. He's on record in interviews from the time when Civ 6 was launched as indicating he didn't want any automated systems like "auto explore" and I expect build queues fall into that category. His view was that all decisions should be interesting things the player wants to be engaged in and so there shouldn't be any "set and forget" aspects to the game (my term, I can't remember his exact words). He also acknowledged that the team tried hard to get him to budge on this and eventually he relinquished on some topics.

And, yeah, if you watched him on some of those early intro plays, you'll see that Beach loves his micromanagement and agonizing over immaterial decisions.

 

[NukeAJS]

I think emergencies could be expanded upon in a very big way. And there wouldn't necessarily have to be a target civ. They could be rebranded as existential crises. Sure, the chances of most of them actually happening in real life is laughable, but we're looking to have fun and keep things interesting, right?

The main idea of existential crises is that they affect everybody and, if you're unlucky, could seriously mess up your game (or a rival's if you're lucky). In an extreme implementation, they can result in the entire collapse of civilizations. Meaning that whoever can survive the best or be the last man (civ) standing wins. In a softer implementation, they'd be something interesting to deal with that could slow your progress ... another challenge to overcome basically.

As for specifics, climate change is the first to come to mind. Namely because it's one of two existential crises that could realistically mess up the planet. Anyways, it triggers when more than half the players are in the atomic era and xyz factories have been built. Anyone who joins the emergency gets +science and -gold (which reverts to normal over time) and can run a special policy card (Environmentalist); anyone who doesn't join the emergency immediately enters a dark age, gains production, and gets a sizeable diplo penalty with those that did join the emergency. I'm pretty sure it's still impossible, but if it's not -- bring back the Civ4 tile change due to climate change. If it's possible, the more players that don't join to counteract climate change will increase the chance that a tile's features change to desert or tundra. This tile change needs to be common enough that it could possibly be something to worry about. If a tile changes in a civ that joined the crisis, all civs will blame those that didn't join the crisis. Also, small cities will start losing population to large cities and farms will become less productive over time. You can actually play "the Great Mistake."

The other possible RL existential crisis already is in the game -- nuclear weapons. However, large scale use of nukes doesn't do anything other than put fallout on tiles and make people hate you. In addition to those consequences -- if too many nukes are used in a small period of time, tiles could start changing to tundra and ice representing a nuclear winter. If nukes keep getting used -- it could get real bad really fast. This could further trigger a "ban all nukes" emergency. If all players join, everyone's nukes are deleted, they can never build new ones, and all negative diplomatic penalties between all civs is reset (the post-atomic pax). If players don't join, all players that did join declare war on those that didn't. To add some spice/balance -- if one player joined AND had already completed the Manhattan Project, all other players that joined immediately complete the Manhattan project. When the players that didn't join are either destroyed or capitulate and sign the agreement (can be signed at anytime), all nukes are destroyed, nobody can ever build nukes again, and any negative diplomatic relations are completely reset.

There are other existential crises that would be fun, if extremely improbable IRL: Skynet, super-viruses, incoming massive asteroid, killer nanobots, super volcano eruption, finite resource depletion, trans-civilization.

They could be toggled on or off and have two flavors -- acute and chronic.

Acute existential crises would be something like an incoming asteroid. If the players were unable or unwilling to band together to stop it from hitting Earth (think of projects from Civ5), all hell breaks lose and pops start dying really fast as the planet changes into an ice-world and only the most technologically advanced and/or Machiavellian have a chance of surviving -- but only in small cities.

Chronic crises would be something like resource depletion or climate change where things get slowly worse over time, but generally wouldn't result in sudden change. Still -- if the crisis went on long enough (say, because only a time victory was enabled), you could start getting the results I mentioned above to substantially change the game -- migration, food production, tiles being destroyed, multiple cities flipping, unrest, pops dying etc.

I think existential crises really have the potential to give a sense of urgency to the victories. Suddenly, it comes really important to lift-off to Mars just three turns earlier or influence the last civ culturally. It would also have the nice side-effect of making people better at playing the game. I've noticed that a lot of people suck at late game simply because ... who cares? What's 5 extra turns or ten minutes when you've already put in 4-20 hours? You don't really see that in the early game because the early game is so important in 4x games.

EDIT: I only realized after I posted that I basically just recommended what Stellaris has already done. I even called them crises ... Oh well. Stellaris is an awesome game and the crises are fun, dangerous, and a good idea.

 

[blackbutterfly]

Beach loves his micromanagement and agonizing over immaterial decisions.

Micromanagement is fine for single-player. But it is a nightmare for multiplayer.

One of Civ V's strengths was that it was designed primarily for single player. (Remember it came out after the "fiasco" that was Civ Rev, Firaxis' attempt at Civ for MP and portables. I recall a 2K or Firaxis exec. in an interview saying Civ has single player "in its DNA". That was very insightful. It made Civ V the runaway success that it was).

While in Civ VI they tried to make a game for both single player and for multiplayer.

The maps and scenarios in particular are all designed for balance in contrast to those in Civ V: 4-Leaf Clover, 6-Armed Snowflake and every single scenario. (In Civ V's scenarios like Into The Renaissance, the different religions played differently. In Scramble For Africa, the Euro civs played differently to the Sub-Saharans and them to the North Africans).

Meanwhile the regular game is chock full of micro and grind. Yes, some people love that but it's antithesis for multi-player.

FYI My clan DI have stopped playing Civ VI and many Civ gamers left. We've started playing BERT recently to tide us over but there isn't much point cos Civ VI MP seems a lost cause RN.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

As for specifics, climate change is the first to come to mind.

Can you win the emergency by claiming it doesn't exist?

 

[Xur]

Yes, this is from Beach. He's on record in interviews from the time when Civ 6 was launched as indicating he didn't want any automated systems like "auto explore" and I expect build queues fall into that category. His view was that all decisions should be interesting things the player wants to be engaged in and so there shouldn't be any "set and forget" aspects to the game (my term, I can't remember his exact words). He also acknowledged that the team tried hard to get him to budge on this and eventually he relinquished on some topics.

And, yeah, if you watched him on some of those early intro plays, you'll see that Beach loves his micromanagement and agonizing over immaterial decisions.

Pretty sure it is his love for board games that shine through. It is just a backward way of thinking in my opinion. Great for small and fast games, but terrible for complex and time consuming games.

I hope we get someone else in charge of civ7... automation is a MUST.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Pretty sure it is his love for board games that shine through. It is just a backward way of thinking in my opinion. Great for small and fast games, but terrible for complex and time consuming games.

That's a very good point. A board game with inconsequential decisions can and should just cut those decisions out as it slows down gameplay for everyone at the table. An empire building game like Civ should allow players to find their own preferred level of management at any given time and point in the game.

 

[blackbutterfly]

... automation is a MUST.

Puppets too. (I really miss these from Civ V and BERT). Perhaps allow cities with Governors to act like puppets? (i.e. automate production).

Automation of workers, etc used to be optional so IDK how that could be a problem. However giving credit where credit is due, in Civ VI you don't have to manually create roads! (Thank you Ed)

This is maybe the only way in which Civ VI betters Civ V in terms of micromanagement.

If the AI built more air units and/or nukes the late game would definitely be more exciting

 

[Xur]

Puppets too. (I really miss these from Civ V and BERT). Perhaps allow cities with Governors to act like puppets? (i.e. automate production).

Automation of workers, etc used to be optional so IDK how that could be a problem. However giving credit where credit is due, in Civ VI you don't have to manually create roads! (Thank you Ed)

This is maybe the only way in which Civ VI betters Civ V in terms of micromanagement.

If the AI built more air units and/or nukes the late game would definitely be more exciting

I loved building roads, so I'm sad that it is gone. If civ5 ever did anything correct, then it was roadbuilding. The problem is lack of options to play the game like you want to - and not like Ed Beach wants to.

 

[Arent11]

This is the one question that from the heady days of playing Civ 2 has always burned in the back of my mind. Each Civ title gradually improves the title - trying out new concepts, or ripping up previous ones for something better - but arguably Civ has never managed to conquer its inherent late game malaise, where interest wanes either through the boredom of managing a large empire, or the "I've won already" feeling.

I keep thinking that the most desired development for me as a consumer is a riveting late game, but it seems this hope is entirely misguided. After all, we're now at Civ 6 and this still hasn't materialised. We did have the UN in Civ 2 and Corporations in Civ 4 and these made good inroads to improving the late game, however, somewhat surprisingly these concepts haven't been developed in subsequent versions of Civ and instead have been stripped out...

The irony is the late game has so many cool options with advanced units and victory conditions to pursue, and yet the AI consistently fails to utilise any of these. We're now a year into Civ 6 and they still can't use or even build an airforce, can't deploy spec op parachutes, or for that matter successfully manage any of the late game units.

Maybe Civ 7 should be labelled Civ 7: The late game, a whole title dedicated to delivering the late game experience we've all been diligently waiting for since Civ's inception?

In my opinion, the only way to combat the late game "too many cities/units, I grow bored" effect, is to introduce some kind of limited actions an emperor can take per turn. But then you wouldn't have control over all your cities/units & I would probably grow frustrated what the AI does to my nice empire.

 

[Xur]

In my opinion, the only way to combat the late game "too many cities/units, I grow bored" effect, is to introduce some kind of limited actions an emperor can take per turn. But then you wouldn't have control over all your cities/units & I would probably grow frustrated what the AI does to my nice empire.

I always thought a single centralized build queue would be ideal. Let every city contribute to the capitals production etc - why not? Science/culture is centralized. Add corruption mechanic back, so cities far away are less effective - win win for tall and wide.

To some extent this is actually how hearts of iron does production.

 

[blackbutterfly]

I loved building roads, so I'm sad that it is gone. If civ5 ever did anything correct, then it was roadbuilding. The problem is lack of options to play the game like you want to - and not like Ed Beach wants to.

D'oh!

Well, they say you can't please all of the people all of the time. LOL

From a design point of view, choices should be made with a particular goal in mind. E.g: make a better multi-player game. After the success of Civ V, it seemed like Firaxis decided to make a better MP game of Civ VI but this was only half-hearted. Cos many of the design decisions (re: micromanagement) are at the expense of the MP experience.

At least for MP the late game isn't all that relevant, cos rarely ever do you make it into the atomic or information era.