Your Ideal Civ 6 or 7?

[brewgod]

Hello Civ 6 Fans:

So many comments and threads here which I enjoy reading over all these years. So many gripes and complaints and positives on so many fronts regarding gameplay and mechanics and design.

If you were on Team Ed designing Gathering Storm or working on Civ 7 what is your ideal new expansion / next generation of Civ. Which "Tweaks" would you make and why and which Civs would you change get rid of create new..add new to Civ etc.

Which cards would you keep and get rid of and which new cards would you create. Which Governors would you get rid of and keep and change around for new policies.

The majority of players and members on this board / forum play and love this game very much yet I always get the feeling that the level of disappointment is always high. That Ed and his team missed the ball again on this one. Should have done this should have done that.

Just my "2 Cents"

Thanks

Brew God

 

[SupremacyKing2]

If we are talking about another expansion to civ6, I would love to see siege units like catapults be allowed to attach to melee units. I feel like this would be more realistic and further improve 1upt combat. I would also want to see a maintenance cost to cities based on number and distance from capital ala civ4 to slow down too big empires. Wide is good but there should be some mechanic to prevent never ending expansion. See my thread about this in the ideas and suggestions forum. I would also love to see amenities be a little harder to get or maybe more things that add negative amenities so that unrest is something that players would need to worry about if they neglect it.

 

[Arent11]

If you were on Team Ed designing Gathering Storm or working on Civ 7 what is your ideal new expansion / next generation of Civ. Which "Tweaks" would you make and why and which Civs would you change get rid of create new..add new to Civ etc.

(1) Apply the strategic combat system of fantasy general to civ
(2) Give each population unit a nationality, ideology/religion & education, implement migration & ethnic conflicts, rebellion & wars of independence

 

[BenitoChavez]

I think Civ VI in R&F is a really good game and I think GS has interesting features that will hopefully add to the game. While additional features are great and all, what I most want are fixes/balance changes to the current game. What I would fix falls under the categories of either improve the AI or make tall cities more viable.

The AI has been talked about so much so I'll try to keep it brief.
Basically fix the AI so it is better at combat in general but with a particular focus on naval and air combat. Also the AI should feel different for each civ instead of every AI picking the same victory path, choice of governments, the districts it builds, etc. Difficulty should be based on how aggressively an AI picks and focuses on a victory condition, not based on early game advantages.

Currently wide is by far and away the best way to play. You can play tall but it lacks a lot of the incentives that wide does. In Civ V BNW tall was the best way to play and wide was given some harsh penalties. There should be a middle ground where both wide and tall are roughly equal. There are a myriad of ways to do so. Changes to policy cards or governor promotions to give yields based off of the population, specialists generate additional great person points, etc. It doesn't really matter the specifics as long as you can be rewarded (and not punished) for whatever path you take.

 

[Sostratus]

Post GS... my ideal civ6 : mechanically, a game that doesn't really have any innate forces pushing you to one playstyle or another. You have to play the map and your civ to get the most out of a game.
I'll break down 3 key areas and hopefully focus on a guiding philosophy more than specific changes:

-Empire level
IMO, the best thing about civ6 over civ5 is that building an empire is way more fun, with the new districts and wonders and how you can work with terrain. It feels good to see a city site and imagine where you'd put things to make it a good city. Petra, ruhr, St basils, Huey- players get excited when they see this.
Taking that idea into the fact that yes, civ6 is currently a wide empire game, I would make a few tweaks.
The overarching idea is that you really aren't punished or rewarded for number of cities, you'll be punished for having total population. How you choose to do that is up to you. You may want to go the "siberia: approach and leverage the fact that you can have more terrain, more resource deposits, etc. You may want to take the "manhattan" approach and concentrate your citizens, because you can maximize the efficacy of your infrastructure that way. To make the manhattan approach valid, the game obviously needs some adjustments. My five points for tall:

• Revamping t2/t3 district buildings to be more dynamic and reward taller cities (for example: instead of giving innate science and powered science, the innate bonus becomes +1 science per specialty district in the city.)
• Expanding neighborhoods and city center buildings. For example, adding more neighborhood buildings and mid/late game city center structures. The idea would be to boost the power of cities with neighborhoods (large ones) and the CC structures would be useful, but ICS strategies simply would be spending too much production building so many copies of them.
• National wonders. For each specialty district. Some would come early, some would come later, but they would have both powerful effects in the home city and most would have regional auras so that players willing to invest (these would be expensive!) could make a very powerful core of super cities if they wanted. Maybe have some fun and throw in a late game "Arcology" NW for super growth/housing in one city!
• Specialist economy- many people talk about it, but the essential problem of districts being one per city could be alleviated by letting larger cities slot specialists to effectively "give them more campuses" etc.
• Policy cards. Every policy card except for god-king and autocratic legacy is a wide card. New cards, especially to support some of these features, need to be added so that the gameplay is balanced and more importantly so players see them- and start thinking about how they could stack them! "If I built 3 neighborhoods and the public transit building, slotted that card, and got in range of the ironworks, this city would be so powerful!" Type of thoughts.

The idea of all this is that once you get into the middle ages and you've hopefully planted a few cities down, you have a strategic choice: should I invest my resources in building more cities, building up the cities I have, or building an army and going to war? See 'combat' for the third option. But if these are loosely balanced, with early game being a little better to expand and late game being a little better to build up, I think we could have a full ecosystem of viable strats. Also, taking away the free amenity every city gets (first 2 pop are free) and replacing it with giving the palace extra amenities. Life is hard. But I would say a smaller empire should be around 6 cities for it to be competitive on a small map.

-Combat
Obviously right now war is amazing. But a big part of that is that the Ai is bad at defending. That's not what I will focus on here. Instead, I'd like to look at the unit classes. My personal opinion, but each unit class should have a compelling raison d'etre, and for the most part unit gaps are tamped down a little. This is because it's almost impossible to have unique unit classes when sometimes your 'counter' is an era ahead and sometimes an era behind.
By highlighting class characteristics, which from my point of view would be inspired by RTS games over pure realism, then we can finally get what the devs wanted with the system in the first place: forcing players to consider diversity in their units.
What am i talking about? Well, let's look at mounted units. Currently, Heavy cav is the best unit type: they cost the same or barely more than a contemporary unit, they hit harder, and they move faster. Why use light cav outside of horsemen, especially in GS, where the huge gaps in upgrade lines will be plugged for mounted?
An example of tweaks here might be:
Heavy cav: The big boys on the block, they are the strongest unit class, and they have good mobility. They are the premier unit to crush enemies in the field. However, they are expensive to build (in prod and resources) and maintain. The nation that can afford to field such a force will be feared indeed!
Light cav: focusing on speed, these units are faster than heavy cav. While they don't have the same strength in direct combat, they excel at pillaging enemy civs and taking out ranged and siege units. A good commander will need to protect his back line from flanking cavalry- lest they chew up his vulnerable units. Light cav can all move after attacking to highlight their mobility.
Mounted generally: All mounted units face the lack of defensive terrain bonuses, and a tough penalty when attacking cities (-10 to -17.) They certainly can rip through an enemy army- but once you've ground them down to their garrisons, you'll need to bring in more suited units to take all their cities.
Some unique attributes are emphasized with innate bonuses, some are in their promotion trees.
And so on with other units- touching costs, where they appear on the tech tree, maintenance, strength, etc.

The theory is that in any given era, it actually makes sense to build any particular unit available if that unit class is needed on the field. None of this spearman being beaten by horses nonsense, or pikes costing more than knights do.

To mitigate conquest without changing combat, I might make it more expensive to hold on to occupied cities. Not by making them loyalty flip, but require more amenities and gold to keep up and running. It's expensive to be King of all the known world! This way, warmongers need to think about their economic base, giving a vulnerability outside the battlefield.

-Fundamental Imbalance fixes

• Spamming science and culture is extraordinarily strong because of all the advantages you get. I think this is not ideal mechanically. So I would ramp up penalties for players researching things ahead of the current world era, and give large discounts for players trying to research things behind the current world era. The idea is that as long as a player doesn't neglect any area too much, they can focus on different things and never be totally screwed. For example, right now, mali can go all out gold and faith, but it won't matter if they play a good korea. You simply cannot afford to buy twice the units because the koreans are an era ahead of you. Ideally this system would keep most players with the same overall population within an era or so of each other. (being reduced to one city will really screw over a player, being absolutely massive will still be good.)
• Upgrade costs are completely out of line and make upgrading existing units immensely cheaper than building new ones. Upgrades would become a touch more expensive than now (from ~2:1 ratio to more like 3:1,) and the upgrade card would be removed: instead offering a discount on strategic resource consumption to upgrade. (So upgrading a knight to a cuirassier might only require 10 niter instead of 20, but you still have to pay the gold.) It would be cheaper to upgrade than buy but it wouldn't be so cheap that you should build more units than you need early just to save on upgrade costs later.
• To chop or not to chop: chopping is amazing, even with the fix to overflow. It just keeps ramping up while resources stay the same. I would add a smattering of city center buildings like some of the ones in civ5 to give a shot in the arm to bonus resources (think the old stable, forge, mint, etc.)
• Lastly, coastal cities currently are not so good. Hopefully some of the GS changes help fix that, but I might be tempted to extend some of those bonuses sea routes get into domestic trade routes for them.

Nitpicks: no stone unturned- little details like oil wells counting for IZ adjacency, carrier fleets getting more air unit capacity, stuff like that. And fixing the remaining typos in the game.

Ultimate, in-a-nutshell takeaway:
-Any empire size can work: if you can afford to hold onto it! (This may mean how to control half a continent or how to deal with overcrowded cities!)
-Military units are balanced but have their advantages and disadvantages. Spamming knights won't be the game winner it is now.
-Any focus can work: food, production, gold, science, culture, religion, war- there are ups and downs of emphasizing each area. Yes, this includes science.

I love civ, this is just how I see things.

 

[Live trash can]

I have my fingers crossed for Civ 7! There are so many good ideas. I can't imagine that they deliver something which isn't better than 6!

 

[awesome]

I'll just echo that tall play needs to become viable. Civ5 seemed to do a good job of this with certain victory types being easier with less cities, so that might be a good direction to go in.

 

[civplay]

I don't know about civ 7, but my Civ 8 game would be really centered around Diplomacy. So as civ is now, everyone in your nation is pretty much your unquestioned slave, where in my ideal civ you'd basically have "lords" or "governors" who if unhappy will rebel.This should be the constant struggle of the game, trying to unite different people through military, religion (and culture) or diplomacy (and trade), while maintaining stability of your nation. Like what do you do if one governor wants you to declare war on a neighboring Civ, while the other wants you to focus on maintaining trade? Who do you back?

It would be additionally fun if conquered civs become subjugated under you. Like try keeping Genjis happy. Or on the flipside, if instead of losing upon, you become subjugated. It would be pretty fun to play a game of thrones type deal, where you're trying to overthrow those who have power over you.

Another thing that really needs to be addressed, is the lack of a comeback. Like within the first 50 turns or so, you've already lost or won the game. Which is just silly... I think the answer to this issue, is what I stated above with stability. Larger, more powerful civs become more unstable, giving other civs a chance to come back into the fold.

Also you should be constantly asking yourself the same questions: 1) Do I fight, Do I compromise, or Do I run?. 2) Do I focus on infrastructure, military, or expansion?

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I think my ideal civ7 or maybe it would be civ8 would be a more "grand strategy" civ, still turn based of course but with an intuitive UI to make it easy to do things. It would focus more on macro-management and empire-building. And there would be a lot more diplomatic tools for empire building. You could pay barbarians to attack a specific target. You could also use gold or culture to convert a barbarian camp or city state to join your empire. You could make a defeated empire your vassal. You could have non-aggression pacts. You could also form federations that would act like super alliances and invite other empires to join your federation or be associates to the federation. You could have special trade partners. Empires would split off if they get too big and unstable. There would also be revolts, rebellions or civil wars if you are not careful. Big empires would be good but it would be challenging to hold them together, the bigger they got.

 

[679x]

I want to see an even larger roster of civilizations, some of which should have drawbacks in addition to powerful bonuses in order to encourage a unique gameplay strategy, like how Kongo can't build Holy Sites, or - even better - how the new Mali suffers from a production penalty but generates lots of gold to make up for it, so that you are inclined to flat-out buy stuff instead of building it.

Difficulty should only alter the AI's depth of strategy and its focus on win conditions (and maybe also its intelligence in certain aspects), rather than giving it more settlers at the beginning or whatever. In an ideal world, a Deity-level Spain begins with just a settler and warrior like everyone else and has no silly advantages over the human player, but is much more aggressive in terms of expansion and religious conversion than, say, a Prince-level Spain, and is more likely to create colonies on foreign continents to use as a landing point for religious units to convert the native civs on that continent. An intelligent Deity-level Spain could recognize when its attempts at religious conversion are futile, and instead send Conquistadors over to gain influence of the continent by force, but only if it knows that it has a solid chance at successfully conquering and holding cities. What I'm also getting at here is that the AI should also have a more drastically different strategy when it plays each individual civ, choosing a specific victory to aim for and have its own district preferences, settling patterns, situation-specific or era-specific tactics and goals, etc.

A deeper level of diplomacy with vassals would be nice, too, and I'm fine with having to quell the occasional riot in a conquered city or one with low amenities, but I don't want rebellions to be a significant problem to deal with. I enjoy Rise and Fall, but I often play with a mod that reduces the range of loyalty pressure so that I can safely settle my first few cities without the worry of them losing loyalty and me not being able to do anything about it.

More of a minor point, but I want coastal cities to be more viable. There should be some sort of bigger incentive to settle right on the coast to make up for the fact that you have less land for districts and are vulnerable to naval invasions. Plus, water tiles aren't even as good as land tiles currently.

Ultimately, my ideal Civ would not be too drastically different from what we have now. I think it mostly comes down to AI improvements for me, really.

 

[dagriggstar]

If you are making civ 7 you need to be thinking "what cool feature are we going to introduce that will require a radical redesign of the game...

I've been watching some lets plays of at the gates lately and I think the answer is a better way of implementing nomadic civilizations in the game in a less micromanaging way...

 

[SupremacyKing2]

If you are making civ 7 you need to be thinking "what cool feature are we going to introduce that will require a radical redesign of the game...

For me, the cool new feature that would require a new game engine, would be going from hexes to regions. I've proposed this idea awhile back but I think regions would add a ton of new possibilities for a civ7. It would allow players to lay claim to an area of the map which would open up new diplomatic options ("don't settle in region X, it's mine!"). You would have more consistent borders instead of the patch work of disconnected tiles. But you would also need to do away with workers on tiles and do a new economic system that is more region based than city based. It could open more possibilities for macromanagement instead of micromanagement.

 

[PhoenicianGold]

For me, the cool new feature that would require a new game engine, would be going from hexes to regions. I've proposed this idea awhile back but I think regions would add a ton of new possibilities for a civ7. It would allow players to lay claim to an area of the map which would open up new diplomatic options ("don't settle in region X, it's mine!"). You would have more consistent borders instead of the patch work of disconnected tiles. But you would also need to do away with workers on tiles and do a new economic system that is more region based than city based. It could open more possibilities for macromanagement instead of micromanagement.

I don't think this would add anything at all mechanically. Cities and city states are effectively regions already.

I suppose they could use more sophisticated map generation to create desirable "regions," but that would amount to a lot of hand holding. Part of the fun of civ is locating a good spot that wouldn't obviously be a bread basket and then building it up yourself.

And I personally love hexes. They are scientifically beautiful and reflective of the general patterns of how populations tend to aggregate.

 

[Jenniza]

A few main issues that I would like to see [in no particular order, some have been mentioned, some not so much]

1) An "easy to use" scenario editor [i.e. you can make some from scratch] with "easy to use" tools to upload them to the Steam Workshop
2) Similarly, "an easy to use" mod builder and "easy way" to upload them to the Steam Workshop.
[yes, 1 & 2 may be simplistic compared to some of the stuff that the truly gifted individuals out there are capable of doing with "full featured" tools; but, this would give people a start into this exciting world]
3) Not just crappy overwhelming stats for the computer opponents.... not just some dopey "rule-based" virtual intelligence stuff.... but ACTUAL machine learning algorithms [yes, Watson, HAL-9000, EDI, etc.] There is actual software out there in early stages of development and it would be exciting to see some of this stuff make its way into a game such as the Civilization series. The game difficulty setting could determine how much knowledge it starts with and how fast it learns. That could make or some truly terrifying opponents at Deity settings with a lot of opponents. lol
4) As mentioned above, better encouragement of ALL styles of play and NOT BIASING any particular style of play. That's a hard one to do properly. One way to do that is to get a lot more feedback from Alpha and Beta testers as well as forums as to what all the different styles are, and suggestions of how to tweak that stuff. There are some truly informed geek fanatics that have a lot of knowledge how all the systems interplay with each other More transparency of the formulas might aid that feedback? I'm no high level expert; so, I'll stay out of this one.
5) I like the suggestions that people have made about civilizations interacting more fluidly with others in a "Game of Thrones" fashion. a lot more wheeling and dealing in diplomacy would keep everyone much more on their toes. South Park lampooned it with their toon-bit when they kept taking a walk through the "Garden of Betrayals". It was classic. Of course, this might turn the game into some slightly RPG-based scenes; but, that could be kept to a minimum if preferred. lol