Would you want Civ 6 to follow the paradox model?

[Biz_]

the model of releasing a bunch of overly complicated systems without an actual strategy game attached?

no thanks

 

[need my speed]

No, I don't think firaxis should engage in false advertising and creating problems in patches that dlc lets you bypass.

Could you give examples of this? I'm honestly intrigued in how Paradox does this 'patch in something to fix it with DLC' thing.

 

[Grumpbeard]

See, I took the Paradox method as being more of the "rules changes for free, other things cost" and "frequent small DLC rather than less frequent large DLC" - both of which I support.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Could you give examples of this? I'm honestly intrigued in how Paradox does this 'patch in something to fix it with DLC' thing.

In 1.0, you could sell provinces to vassals freely and annex them. This stayed for a few versions, then got removed despite being stated WAD, only took cores then. But in AoW times, suddenly you can transfer occupation and feed large vassals to annex! For a real-life fee, that is.

Then they introduced liberty desire patches later in "free" patch, but if you want the options that make liberty desire trivialized (grant province and placate rulers), you have to buy DLC.

One-off issue? Hardly. They globally tanked the ticking -LA rate on all government types, then granted estates (DLC only) the ability to ignore autonomy of their type in a given province. If you buy DLC, your income growth post-conquest is faster than it was previously. If you don't, your provinces take over twice as long to become viable in the early game.

Why stop there? Previously, there was a building model that allowed you to spend monarch points and money to make provinces significantly more effective, to the point where small empires that invested in these could be more competitive. Those buildings got severely altered and much of their benefit moved to "development", a DLC-only feature.

Delayed exploration in a patch moving idea groups to ADM 5? No worries, buy Mare Nostrum and now you can buy or steal maps to explore earlier than ever before!

Everyone has access to espionage, including ideas-level crippling actions like sow discontent and sabotage reputation, all for "free"! How to stop rivals from spamming you with this? Counter-espionage...which is DLC-gated.

Speaking of ticking -LA, they tied that to government ranks starting with common sense...but you can only upgrade your government with nation form decisions at best if you don't have the DLC. If you do, any nation with 1k development and prestige can enjoy extra benefits...benefits previously available via other methods before DLC was introduced.

The balance changes to the game surrounding these and more all assume you have all DLC. If you don't, you will feel the effects, especially as an experienced player going to a new patch. It's hard to feel like that DLC-boosted empire "reward" of better LA reduction and an extra leader is much of a reward when both of those were free parts of earlier patches in different forms...and the espionage thing is flagrant.

In a sense, this behavior by Paradox is ingenious. Many players with 100+ hours STILL can't grasp the enormous implications of "grant province" being a complete game-changer. In practice, however, the ability for DLC boosted players to feed a 1000 development vassal and annex it freely, while someone without DLC will frequently struggle even going over 100 is enormous.

As for false advertising...to this day Paradox advertises cross-platform support for EU IV MP. However, that is not true and has not been true since patch 1.5...back in Summer 2014. It has been over 2 years and cross platform MP hasn't so much as been addressed in any of these "free" patches DLC supposedly support.

All this is to say nothing of myriad UI bugs (to be fair, Firaxis UI has sucked pretty fiercely too) or game-altering bugs the devs refuse to fix in favor of generating the new content.

Needless to say, Firaxis going to this model would be a serious disappointment. For all the fun in Paradox games, their DLC model is a stain to their development and has led to creeping shady practices, questionable choices of what gets "patched out then back in", and almost necessarily suffering of product quality in the way of bugs, design consistency, and balance. Civ 6 needs to work better than Civ 5, not worse.