Your TOP THREE most wanted gameplay changes

1: Output of single cities irrelevant in face of sheer numbers. Doesn't matter if you have one really good city you can more than make up for it with multiple cities at a far more efficient cost. Wonders don't really matter either.

2: Can be done if Civ 6 stops rewarding short term activity at the cost of long term investments. Making harvestables scale exponentially with Eras for example, makes harvesting a no-brainer compared with investing in productive potential etc.

Making Eurekas and Inspirations give almost half the costs makes superior Cultural/Science output only half as advantageous.

3: Not denying possibility, denying competitive power relative to conquest.

 

Other than too heavily-pushing 'go tall' a la Civ V, which was unpopular (judging not just from comments here but from the direction chosen with Civ VI - while Civ V may still be the most popular game in the series by its player numbers, Civ VI's design wouldn't have abandoned tall altogether if it was seen as a major selling point), it's hard to avoid this in a Civ game. Civ IV allowed a degree of city specialisation essentially absent in Civ VI, which added some identity to cities, and Wonders were of more importance, but then you just spammed the map with cookie-cutter cities that all fit into one of the three stereotyped specialisations. You almost might as well have had a dropdown menu when you settled asking whether you wanted a Great Person (=food) city, a production city or a commerce city and have the AI governor automate the rest.

As I say, that would require rebuilding the game from the ground up. The very existence of eurekas and inspirations is pure short-term advantage - changing the size of the bonus they provide doesn't change that. Similarly to a large extent with harvesting, and the fact that Civ VI allows you to harvest pretty much any landscape feature other than luxury or strategic resources, so that you needn't find focus on woods but can just settle any site with bonus resources that will always be good tiles.

Much of the game's pacing is predicated on the existence of these systems - without them the tech and civics trees would need reworking entirely, for a start. We have the change-on-a-whim policy system - that could be made a bit more long-term by removing the 'free switch when you get a civic' and add a maintenance cost akin to Civ IV, but it still ultimately rewards short-termism. The victory conditions are mostly designed to be achievable from a very late start if you pivot into them - you can get a cultural victory purely on tourism accrued from the Industrial era onwards, without needing specific (or even any) Wonders as in older games, while the absence of specialised branches in the tech tree naturally pushes you towards everything you need to transition into a science victory whatever your original intent.

There's never yet been a Civ game in which competing peacefully was less optimal than conquering the map. For most of the series' lifetime domination and diplomatic victories were just variants of the same thing. It's pretty hard to see how you even make a Civ game where peaceful play is better than aggression given the basic maths underlying the series: the game rewards having more population and more cities rather than fewer, and conquest is the easiest route to both, while at the same time being the major tool the series has for interacting with and disrupting the AI's strategy.. Civ V's 'favour tall' approach was widely disliked, and even there conquest was rewarded.

Overall, it sounds as though you basically want Civ V with districts - more irreversible decisions with long-term consequences, fewer and more individually distinct (yet specialised) cities, and the closest the series has come to making peaceful victory more attractive than warfare. That's not the direction they've chosen with Civ VI, whose design philosophy appears to be to ape the basic structure of Civ IV but with none of the depth.

 

I'll disagree on peaceful competition being equally optimal to pure warmongering in majority of circumstances. If you have land to expand to yes (Highly improbable given that starting distances is 9.), if not the army you need to get that land is far better spent eating everyone else than just getting more land.

You are half right on me wanting Civ 6 to be like Civ 5 with districts. The part on consequences particularly. I don't agree with Tall Play per se in that I don't like the unnatural limitation on expansion either but having no limits at all is a different topic altogether. I also don't intend for peaceful play to be more attractive than any other play style either, I just want them to be equal so my choices are meaningful and all strategy is equally respected.

You're right a lot of the game needs reworking but the stuff I mentioned can be tweaked with numbers alone.

 

Make free cities sort of like "poor man's city states", and not essentially barbarian cities that attack everyone.

Give AI the ability to harvest resources and chop down growth.

 

My phrasing may have been poor thanks to a double negative - what I intended to say was that warmongering is more optimal than peaceful play in every Civ game, not simply Civ VI.

Which would be an improvement but wouldn't change the fundamentals of what Civ VI is. I've found the secret to enjoying Civ VI with Rise and Fall, and it's this: to stop pretending it's a strategy game, or ever will be. There's no long term planning (past the 30 turns needed to plan era score, at most), poor decisions rarely have consequences and can almost always be reversed with minimal penalty, there's no need to identify optimal lines of play or use resources particularly efficiently unless you're aiming to beat a (remembered, thanks to the no hall of fame) previous turn time, as opposed to simply win the game. It's a roleplaying/storytelling game - yes, sometimes you can make a mistake so egregious it will cost you a game, just as you can in an RPG, and the level of strategy involved in Civ VI is closely equivalent. A wish list that involves improving the strategic element of Civ VI is really just asking for the game to be something it's not really trying to be.

That's not altogether a bad thing. It seems Civ VI's designers learned their lesson from the reception to Endless Legend, a paper-thin 4x with excellent storytelling and all but devoid of strategy. In a world where traditional 4xes have long struggled, that's the model that's emerged as the route to success.

 

ai build airforces

ai use airforce

 

I think you mean Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

 

I think his reasoning was that it makes retreat from an enemy more strategic. I often try to get the AI player to run into the hills or forest so I can get away and heal etc. I love it when I am on the defensive and hate it when I am on the offensive.

 

• I would like to see free-cities become more than just recolored barbarians. They're also too exploitable and an easy way to waste your enemies energies.
• I still think tourism/culture needs to be fleshed out. It just feels too bare-bones and the victory conditions are too rubber-bandy.
• So many luxury resources and gold go to waste - I would like to see something done about that.
• Some agendas need to be fixed. The flirty ones are bad and Norway apparently has no idea where you are, ever. Landlocked? Aren't you worried about your coasts? Sort of breaks that immersion.

 

Considering the time scale involved, how much long term planning would be reasonably thematic? I mentioned in another post how it felt wrong from a roleplaying standpoint to see a potentially wonderful location for a National Park in the Ancient Era and leave it alone because I was planning to build such a park a few thousand years later. *I* know what I can do within the context I'm playing, but the 'leader' I am playing certainly doesn't.

As far as getting back to a more dedicated strategic game, I think that would require a much stricter set of victory conditions and fewer paths to get there, especially given the limitations on the AI.

 

I'm aware of the reasons for it but it's still stupid and tedious.

I know it feels good for a player to "outsmart" the AI which cannot use the movement and combat systems at all but it's incredibly annoying to have to waste so many turns because your unit can't climb a hill. I make the most of it, I play around it and use it to my advantage, but I still despise it with a passion. More than anything else about the game that one singular thing I would change before anything else.

 

1. Notification banners handled differently so that they don't fill up the middle of the screen between turns.
2. More color on the parchment map -- too bland and too hard to differentiate terrains.
3. Diplomatic option to renew trade deals (open borders, resources, etc.)

 

I'm thinking of trying Quo's Rocketboots again, I want to see how the AI will do with it now too.

 

Alpha Centauri had terrible storytelling - good worldbuilding in the sense of a strong basic setting and reasonable faction portrayal, but not much of a story that emerged through gameplay.

If you play Endless Legend you'll see the difference - it's literally a follow-the-breadcrumbs quest game with an excessive focus on the combat system and unit customisation (that bit at least it shares with SMAC) and heavily simplified city placement/expansion, resource exploitation, tech progression and building options. It's closer to an RPG with some limited 4x elements than a 4x.

 

UI is still beta trash. I'll put that 1-3. Other issues are comparatively minor.

 

1) be able to declare liberation war over any captured city state at any time (perhaps limited to X turns after capture), unless captured by an ally. No declaring on a city state if ally is suzerain, forced peace if ally becomes suzerain. Number of envoys on liberation depends on era (one per era).

2) alternate uses for great prophets (e.g., as great general for religious combat, as apostle with several promotions, give permanent extra pressure to city, etc), more of them into later eras

3) specialist citizens give great people points (and add more great people to take advantage of these points)

Honorable mention: hall of fame! Seriously, Firaxis, what's up with its absence?

 

This, but also ships. Otherwise, I'm not that excited about some of these suggestions (and some of them I dislike, such as changing the movement points back to Civ IV/V).

 

1) Make Agenda's more sensible. The Agenda system was introduced to add flavour to the game's diplomacy. Unfortunately, "everyone is an unreasonable psychopath" is not the Diplo flavour I enjoy most in my computer games. Relative modifiers would be preferable: e.g. relations with Harald improving by +1 for every boat you have, but dropping by -1 for every boat he has. Also, increasing the time between meeting an AI and them denouncing you. (Getting denounced nigh on sight for "different governments" in the Classical Age is S T U P I D).

2) Fix Emergencies. They're insipid and add nothing. The AI hardly joins them. What's the point?

3) Make the AI use Casus Belli more often. I can't remember the last time, if ever, an AI DoW'd me with a non-Joint War CB. Haven't played enough to see whether Tamar/Chandy/Robert declare them, but they should be the rule, not the exception anyway.

 

1) Adding a dialogue with option to declare protectorate war if a client city states becomes under attack.

2) Declared allies cannot attack city states of their allies.

3) Add diplomatic dialogue for “do not attack my city state” if diplomatic visibility tips you off that someone is planning an assault.

 

1 - Making war and peace tradable commodities like in Civ V. Barring that, at least the ability to invite another Civ to declare war on a Civ that you're already at war with (basically like a joint war but against a civ you're already at war with).

2 - Free cities to be peaceful unless provoked, as opposed to essentially being barbarian civs.

3 - A World Congress / United Nations. Not necessarily a diplo victory because that was easy to rig. But one of the things that made late game BNW interesting was the effect that resolutions had on the game as a whole and on the other victory conditions (e.g. world ideology for a cultural victory). The tension as you try to get those last few era points at the end of an era in R+F would be nicely complemented by the tension in the run-up to a world congress vote where you find out whether you're going to lose all your trade routes because of sanctions or whether your religion becomes the world religion and brings you one step closer to a religious victory.

I could have sworn Firaxis had said around the time of Civ VI's launch that they would be implementing a world congress but that they wanted to see how people played the game first. Is this still a desire? Is it likely to crop up in the second expansion or has it been replaced by emergencies?