Your Experience Starting New Game with Spring 2017 Patch

Regarding diplo... another thing I noticed was that after a given amount of time, Norway lost the modifier for occupying Oslo. I had thought that modifier permanent.

 

Well. Scythia denounces me for attacking Vilnius although he is herself attacking Vilnius.

 

That is OK, I would do the same - I mean, how come you want something I am after?

 

Have they chosen to slow down the tech rate yet or do you still rush through the ages? (Please don't mention the slower gamespeeds, I'm fully aware that they exist).

 

I got an interesting bug in my current game with Australia: It's a standard size map, but there's only 6 civilizations and there appears to be only 1(!) city-state. I've just decided to abandon the game after exploring a lot to try to find more city-states.

I do not recall any "a civ has been destroyed" messages - I might have missed one or two, but certainly not that many. And in any case, the missing civs and city-states have not been conquered, they just vanished without a trace.

 

Look for a sizable crater.

 

Heh, didn't find one. But I did find a lot of untouched land, so I maybe it was some stone age pandemic.

 

Tried out the patch on king standard normal speed, haven't noticed any threats from AI, 2 neighbors > 2 pathetic DoWs, they did have a garrison in a city that I bothered to conquer, but it wasn't used. So if there are any "significant" changes, or the AI being "far more capable" (and what else been mentioned in the thread), it certainly isn't on king. In the end it doesn't matter one way or another because turn times are still unbearable.

 

What map size? Have you tried strategic view?

 

I've personally experienced notably better times than in 5, so if people are having difficulty with that, I'm not really sure how they're complaining in comparison to the Past.

 

Tried a game as persia on emperor, egypt invaded brazil shortly after I did and took Rio and messed up my archer rush, was able to take over the continent pretty easily with immortals though, another benefit is they don't require iron. Persia's UA is really awesome, not just useful strategically but a really nice bonus to all your settlers/workers/missionaries running around behind the lines. I got really unlucky with diplomacy though, met America just before capturing Egypt's last city so they spread word of my conquests to the world, still the light penalties aren't too bad, only Alexander hates me.

Turn times are still bad yes, I'm playing on large.

The AI is noticeably a lot better though, mostly in using ranged units. There were a couple times they left ranged units idle in cities similar to how sometimes they don't city attack units that are in range, but they were using them for the most part, kind of the opposite of how it used to be. They are still pretty incompetent.

Harbors are a lot better now. Swordsmen are balanced. Warmonger penalties are still pretty ridiculous, they should degrade at some kind of rate, it is just absurd when it's the 1900s and I haven't fought a war since 200AD and gandhi denounces me for being a warmonger.

I maxed out the civics tree a long time ago but I'm still struggling with tourism, I have like 1100 and I've gotten Sarah Breedlove and Mary Leakey but I'm only at like 125/500 tourists somehow, I'm not going to beat the Aztecs to Mars unless I get lucky with spies and idk what else to do for tourism, I've never really figured out cultural victories.

 

I'm actually loving this new patch. I had a chance to try it last night and pretty much everything felt more 'balanced'. I attacked my neighbour (Japan) early and had to fight for quite some time to get past him. The AI was much better at picking off my troops and defending.

Later in the game, I had just under 1,000 military strength and Victoria Surprise War'd me TWICE. About two ages apart. Both times, it took her less than three turns to completely surround my capital with armies (not units...ARMIES). The second time, she was a full era ahead of me and I stood no chance at all. I let my capital fall and lost the game by 10 turns.

I also noticed that Rome was the clear winner all the way along and pretty much the entire world stayed at war with him. He had four Spaceports and repaired them properly. All of his cities had multiple districts. His flavour agenda was all about science as well.

Overall, I was really impressed with the way all three AIs I really interacted with played. I think the Surprise War is a little too common now, but it was clear that Victoria had rolled a DV flavour, because after she took my capital, she negotiated an even peace bargain.

When the patch notes first launched, I lamented barbarians and UI changes not being listed, but I've eaten those words now that I've played a full game. I left a barb camp just outside my territory most of the game, and it barely attacked me. Revolts were much more manageable and my spies had chances to recruit partisans (never seen it before). The UI changes (specifically the tech tree icons) are awesome. I still think the UI needs work, but I found these tweaks to be exactly what I personally needed from the UI to play comfortably.

Also, finally getting confirmation into how I lost is nice.

10/10 Firaxis. I'm usually critical, but this was a SOLID patch.

[Edit]: I also noticed leader screens are way smoother than they used to be. I would guess my FPS in leader screens has doubled.

 

No one will mention that, because it doesn't solve the problem. If you're playing on Marathon, you still can barely build two units in a city before they're obsolete, because the building also takes a lot longer.

Do like most people do and just use a mod that slows it down. There's several such mods out there, and tech/civic tree overhauls typically include it too.

 

Oh, right, the other thing I noticed, I knew I was forgetting something.

They 'fixed' the exploit/necessary tactic/whatever of prebuilding the foundations for your districts by making the scaling costs increase while you are building the district.

So you can actually have your build times on districts increase while they are in progress.

They didn't actually do anything to address the actual problem of out of control district cost scaling, though. It's pretty ridiculous at this point, any city you build post-middle ages is pretty much never going to be useful or productive, you can get maybe 1 district out of it.

 

After one day of the patch my main take away is that Barbarian camps are spawning at an insane rate.

 

@Tacgnol leakey no longer gives a tourism bonus. Instead she gives 500 per artifact in a city.

Yeah I have noticed some type of long decay on it. I guess its time to start trying to make more sense of diplomacy?

I'll make a thread in a while about any experiences with it. Trouble is there is so much.

 

This thread has almost convinced me to get back into Civ6.... I really don't have the time for it now!

 

AI civs have been using archers much more effectively which makes the game significantly harder, particularly on deity.

I have also been noticing that Barb camp spawning seems to have increased and pretty much every game I've played, multiple barb camps spawned within VERY close proximity of my cities. Last 3 games I played barbs were becoming a substantial part of keeping me from conquering a neighbor civ. Either the barbs were attacking my city and forcing me to defend, or they attacked my troops whole I was assaulting AI civ. As I've said before, I think this is a very cheap trick to increase difficulty by just converting barbs into the AI civ auxiliary defense force.

 

I'm really enjoying the new patch so far. AI is much better and everything else is falling into place pretty well. I hope they do add some techs or make adjustments in the future because I really don't like seeing AT troops in the Renaissance (it kinda breaks the immersion lol).

Other than that, I think the new aggression/combat capabilities of the AI have really made the game challenging and tight again. I would hate to see the game go the route of Civ5 and neuter the AI's war-making tendencies. I greatly enjoy Civ5 with G&K but BNW put me to sleep...I was rarely if ever attacked even when I had a pathetic military. The DOWs are necessary to keep the players from 'booming' too much and neglecting military.

 

Dude... you gotta come back. Patch was the best yet.

Victoria... you do that. I try some unorthodox diplomacy (read: something beyond a hatchet toss at the head) so I'll try to make some notes too.