No, it's Civilization, silly.

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Mongrel
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Re: No, it's Civilization, silly.

Postby Mongrel » Sun Dec 11, 2016 6:12 am

After a couple more solid days play, I have to say I've soured on this game a lot.

I stand by saying the underlying concept and structure is possibly the best yet in the series, but the execution is just destroying this game. The main things really annoying me so far have been:

- Let's face it, the new city UI really is terrible. It's almost impossible to get a visual at-a-glance look at a given city. Sure you can read reports but they won't show things like adjacency bonuses or improvements. Given all the new multilayered dependencies this seems like such a huge oversight.

- It seems we're back to the bad old Civ III days where strategic resources are desperately, vanishingly rare, sometimes as few as one per two continents. I've seen Eurasia-sized double continents on huge maps with no oil, or only one nitre. Even when there were four or five of a given strategic resource, it was a coin toss as to whether they would all be clustered hard in one spot. I don't mind scarcity to encourage conflict and trade, but that's so low as to just hand one player an insurmountable advantage during one age or another.

- Special abilities which let you bend the rules from previous games which are both fun and useful are now vanishingly rare one-offs tied to a wonder or (more usually) single great person. For example buying tiles outside your normal territory buy radius can now only be done with The Great Merchant Crassus specifically, and not with a class of great people as a universal ability (like in Civ 5 Great Generals could do it). This particular one was is especially frustrating given the rarity of strategic resources.

- Mid-late game consolidation is agonizingly slow even if you pour everything you can into production, even by Civ standards. Not only does building stuff appear to be slower overall compared to previous versions (like, roughly twice as slow for everything except wonders which are only maybe 20% slower than in Civ 5), but the prerequisite of having the relevant district (all of which take quite a while to build) adds a burden of a couple hundred more turns before you can really get a city going on all cylinders. Never mind when enemy spies decide to sabotage your industrial district. Believe me I used all the stacked production bonuses - bonus tiles (mines, etc.), an upgraded industrial district with some adjacency bonuses and a workshop/factory/powerplant, tons of trade route bonuses, policy bonuses, city-state bonuses, encampment bonuses, goddamn, I mean... what the hell else do they want stacked up before a city can build things decently quickly? It's an incredibly boring grind.

- I've actually lowered my opinion of the district idea, because it doesn't actually force true choice and only makes the previous problem much worse. Districts just adds a huge additional burden in terms of time spent building infrastructure. Some of it is so silly as to be absurd! Such as when I got excited I had aerodromes. Oh boy! Airlifting! Oh but wait nope, need to build a hangar first. Oh wait, nope again, have to build an airport. Fffffffffffffffffffffffiraxis! When you consider just how unforgiving district placement is, it's not actually fun. I think the IDEA was sound, but fuck me this is just another barrier.

- I mentioned it before but everything is barebones, outside of maybe the civics tree. There's missing techs, lots of missing units, a bare minimum number of Civs and leaders, few wonders (both natural and buildable), and so on.

A lot of these are fixable problems. A few more units and options can come with expansions. Even simple numbers tweaks would go a long way.

After I finish the current game, I'm leaving this until the expansion or a big rebalance patch. I have zero interest in playing multiplayer when it seems that for now at least big advantages would be WAY too swingy and prone to lucky rolls.
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Mongrel
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Re: No, it's Civilization, silly.

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jan 16, 2018 8:18 pm

The first expansion's coming out soon and information has started to hit the internet about the new Civs and features (the biggest one is there will now be dark ages). Unfortunately it seems this expansion addresses NONE of the problems with the base game, so I'm probably not going to bother picking it up even though it's only $12.

In related news, apparently the Poundmaker Tribe plains Cree are pretty unhappy that no one from Take Two so much as called them to ask about using their namesake in Civ 6.

As a result, I have had to spend some time today explaining why mocking comments like "dear France, is it okay if we put Napoleon in our game?" are not an accurate analogy, after mentioning it to several friends dscussing the new Civ expansion.
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Esperath
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Re: No, it's Civilization, silly.

Postby Esperath » Wed Jan 17, 2018 6:30 am

I got Civ 6 from the Humble Monthly and I've gotta say, it's pretty trash.

Religious victory is just worthless at high difficulty. Religious pressure is cumulative, and since you have to bomb every other Civ that started a religion (or conquer them, but then you may as well be going conquest), you can just throw missionaries and apostles at their cities and get nowhere. Inquisitors more or less completely shut down this victory path, since you can just purge enemy religions from your Civ.

As Mongrel mentioned, wide vs. tall is completely broken, and the only disincentive to building out is the amenities system, which is gamed easily enough. Civics no longer scale with empire size, and there are no national wonders that require specific buildings in every city. Wide bogs down the game like crazy because of all of the management you need to do, which is very *not* streamlined compared to Civ 5. (As Mongrel also mentioned, the city screen is garbage).

Score is completely bunk, entirely dominated by your Empire score, which further incentivizes playing wide.

Then there's the AI difficulty bonuses. The AI has to cheat because the AI is stupid, sure. However, you'd expect the Civ AI to improve with each iteration of the game, which would mean less need for cheating. This is not the case. In Civ 5, the AI doesn't get an extra settler until Deity. In Civ 6, they get a free settler at Emperor, and another at Deity. Deity is friggin' 3 settlers, 5 warriors, and 2 builders. Compounded with the incentive to build wide, the AI just gets a free huge landgrab and triple research/production/gold/culture/faith to start, and that's *before* factoring in the percentage bonuses also given to the AI.
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Mongrel
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Re: No, it's Civilization, silly.

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jan 17, 2018 12:03 pm

It's funny that even though you're 100% right about those and I actually think they're major major issues, the one thing that pisses me off and makes the game miserable to play more than anything is still the district system.

I would LOVE a mod (I asked around on Nexus, even) that made Districts 1) WAY cheaper - I mean like a quarter the cost, a fifth the cost, or less, and 2) let you destroy districts. It would make future planning so much less punishing and speed up what is an agonizing time to build anything even if you optimize heavily for production (because you must build district -> building -> improvement/unit, vs all previous games where it was just building -> improvement/unit, and sometimes even just "build unit"). As it is you're punished for not buying into a system where you're supposed to predict exactly what shape your city and civ will be in in say, 200 turns.

Also, the idea that neighbourhoods never ever move in a city 5000 years old is just dumb. But I guess that's mostly an aesthetic quibble (NUUU, MUH IMMERSHUNS).
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