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Old 06-13-2016, 04:31 AM   #1
McSweeney
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Civilization 6

Civilization 5 was regarded by many as worse than Civilization 4, and Beyond Earth (what was supposed to be the next Alpha Centauri) was a failure. Firaxis is now trying to redeem itself with Civilization 6.

I actually think that Civilization 5 in its final form, Brave New World, was superior to Civilization 4 in most aspects. I just want them to make city management fun again. It was boring in Civilization 5 because the optimal strategy was to just make the bare minimum amount of buildings in each city to keep maintenance costs low, then spam food trade routes to the capital city to make it a gigantic mega city that housed all the world wonders and accounted for 80% of all the science and money produced by your whole civilization. Civilization 4 had much more interesting city management because of the strength of making specialized cities based on the surrounding terrain. There were so many innovative strategies like the Specialist Economy that were not invented until years after the game came out because there were so many possibilities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qzC5cUQcFk

-Workers have now been replaced by builders, who function in largely the same way, except they now have a limited amount of charges until they disappear. This will change the classic Civilization formula of: make a bunch of workers that build up the land until they run out of stuff to build, then have them sit around doing nothing until railroad technology is discovered, at which point you make them spam out railroads, then they go back to sitting on their asses mostly doing nothing for the rest of the game.

-The land around a city is now more integrated into the city itself. You can build city districts, like a military district and a financial district, but it's not realistic to build every kind of district in one city, meaning that you must choose carefully. A good sign that city building will be more interesting than it was in Civ 5.

-Wonders now fill up a city tile, meaning you can't spam 20 wonders in one mega city anymore.

-Social policies have now been replaced by a civics tree that functions like a tech tree

-The Great Wall is no longer a world wonder, it's now a unique ability for Chinese builders. "We are going to build a Great Wall ... and Mongolia is going to pay for it!"
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Old 06-29-2016, 05:08 PM   #2
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWCytzRdRnQ

More details emerging:

-Roads are now carved out automatically based on trade routes (mimicking how roads came about historically).

-Cities are now truly spread out across the whole city radius, rather than the city centre square having disproportionate importance as it did previous games. I mentioned in the previous post that Wonders now take up a whole city tile, but regular buildings also must be placed in city district squares. For example, military buildings must be placed in a military district, and units are actually produced there instead of in the city centre. This may lead to some interesting Battle of Stalingrad-like scenarios where invading forces control one part of a city, and the defenders control another part.

-The importance of farms in the early game will be phased out in later ages with the need for industry. Which is nice, because it was pretty dumb how your biggest metropolises in Civ 5 were filled with farmland. By that logic, the hugest population centres in Canada and America should be located in Saskatchewan and Iowa!
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Old 01-01-2017, 02:17 AM   #3
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So how is Civ 6, now that it's been out for a few months? I've played four complete games so far. As I fully expected, it suffers from various bugs, but they're releasing a new patch about once a month, so they will slowly but surely fix everything. I like the game, it has potential.

The new Eureka and Inspiration mechanics give you a boost in tech/civics if you do certain "quests". For example, if you kill a unit with a slinger, then 50% of the Archery tech gets instantly researched (your people have figured out that it might be a good idea to shoot people from afar, hence the "eureka moment"). This makes teching up in the early game a lot more fun, because you do it in an active way through quests like this, rather than in a boring way like in Civ 5 where you just beelined to libraries, National College, universities, and built them in every city. It creates interesting dilemmas where you need to decide if it's worth going for a certain Eureka which may for instance require building 6 farms, or if that would be too much of an inconvenience for your current plans.

I'm not sure if city management is as interesting as it was in Civ 4, but it's definitely better than it was in Civ 5. For example, an industrial zone gets a +1 bonus to its productivity for each mine or quarry that you build it next to, and building a factory in this zone gives the production bonus to all other cities within 6 tiles of the factory, so carefully planning your city locations and buildings to produce optimal results will be greatly rewarded.

Religion I'm still on the fence about; it largely works the same as it did in Civ 5, except they've introduced a new element called "theological combat" where religious units can fight units of other religions by shooting lightning at each other (no I'm not joking). These battles can take place between religious units belonging to two countries that are not even at war, so it's like a game within the game. The loser of the battle has his religion's influence fall in all cities within a 10 tile radius, so this is a different way that you can affect the influence of religions in cities, unlike in Civ 5 where it was crucial to get to a country first and convert its cities before anyone else got there (because once a religion became established somewhere, it was extremely difficult to convert it to a different religion). This new system is okay, but the AI spams a ridiculous amount of religious units on high difficulties and the map just becomes congested with apostles and inquisitors looking for heretics to burn.

Conclusion: you should probably get this game but it's okay to wait for a patch or two.
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Old 01-01-2017, 02:21 AM   #4
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For those who've played it, how is Civ VI compared to Civ V?
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Old 01-01-2017, 02:24 AM   #5
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Civ 6 will definitely be better than Civ 5 once all the bugs are worked out. Civ 6 has everything 5 has, and more. The debate about Civ 6 vs Civ 4 will continue to rage on though, I'm sure.
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Old 04-25-2017, 04:22 PM   #6
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A few patches later and the game is mostly fixed now.

My biggest complaint about the game is that the new district system didn't bring back hyper-specialization of cities like in Civ 4. It was so fun to stake out the land for a new city and think to yourself, "Oh yeah, look at all these hills and coal resources. This is the perfect spot for my super production city!" and then you'd proceed to build all factories and mines while ignoring science and money. Civ 6 is still mostly Civ 5 style where all your cities are just boring copies of each other, with some being better than others. There's nothing that makes each city unique and cool. I suspect that the root cause of this is flat + bonuses to district buildings rather than % based bonuses. Since Civ 4 had a lot of % bonuses, this encouraged players to hyper-specialize cities in order to run up the multipliers to ridiculous levels. Flat + bonuses encourage players to just build one of everything in every city, depending on what victory they're going for. Sure, the new adjacency bonuses are nice, but it's not enough. If I want to win a space victory, I'm still going to build a Library and University in every city. Even if I can't get a good adjacency bonus for an extra couple science points, does it really matter when I'm going to be getting +6 anyway with a library and university?

Right now, Civ 6 is: "I want to win a cultural victory, so I'm going to build a Theatre District in every city."

What I actually want it to be: "I'm going to work really hard on making this city the cultural hub of the world, like Florence was during the Renaissance."

Unfortunately I don't think we'll get any huge fundamental changes to the game until the first expansion. It's still an improvement over 5 though and I would recommend picking it up.
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Old 05-15-2017, 10:28 PM   #7
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Mcsweeney is a true bro and sent me a copy of Civ 6. Look out, world!

Spoiler: show
wait I have to let it download first
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Old 05-16-2017, 12:30 PM   #8
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I couldn't believe it when they introduced the freakin Australians as a Civilization in a new DLC, but their music is great. The whole soundtrack to the game is just fantastic, easily the best in Civ history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIPMKOgqwFA

I actually didn't know until recently that Sid Meier is Canadian. How dare he never make The Canadians a civilization in any Civ game! :p
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Old 05-25-2017, 09:18 AM   #9
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Great, thanks. I've had "Waltzing Matilda" stuck in my head for days now. I do like how they made it sound so epic, like what they did with Sweden's "Du gamla, du fria" in Civ 5.

Some of the Modern era BGM are real gems. The Vikings' Modern soundtrack is downright menacing and reminds me somewhat of Requiem For A Dream.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3MyXn3Xa2s

I do like the new mechanics. It's not furious micromanagement like Civ 4 was, but I feel like they fixed my chief complaint with Civ 5, which was how watered-down and simplified everything was. There's a lot to think about now. For example, I used to put cities down in the location where they would add the most resources to my territory. Now I have to also think about whether I can fit any districts in there. I also find myself cutting back on Great Person points so that an AI can take the current one and let me snipe the one after that. And then I sometimes put off researching something when I think I can get the boost later and reduce my overall tech cost. Not sure if that's a great approach, but it hurts to lose out on the tech boosts. :<

Now the unpleasant part... There are a LOT of bugs. Some messages get stuck and can't be dismissed. Others get drowned out and sometimes missed completely. Sometimes units assigned a movement route go to sleep and stop moving every turn. I have to check on every unit and manually move each one every turn, which makes each turn take so much longer. You can also end the turn while units are awaiting orders. I actually have abused this when there are envoys available. Normally you're supposed to assign them before you end the turn, but sometimes I'll see that I'm about to get a civic change in a couple of turns and will force ending the turn and bank them so I can switch to the policy that makes them count double. It gets me back, though, since I'm used to the Enter key cycling units before ending the turn, but now it just ends the turn without moving anyone.

The most jarring piece of all is that the UI is FULL of grammatical errors and textual inconsistencies. This is a big contrast from Civ 4, which had a proper English interface but a hacky Italian interface (Hai completato la Le Piramidi!) Civ 6 has a proper Italian interface and an awful English interface. I understand why this happens, though; it's because the English interface text gets written by the developers while they are building the game, and then it gets translated once they are done. I feel this reflects on the state of the game industry today more than anything else. It's not just that the developers this time around are inconsistent and have bad English. It's more that nobody seemed to care. Why wouldn't some tester file a bug when, for example, the tooltip for X government is in all caps? It's not like they missed it, since everyone who plays the game will see it. They all noticed, so why not fix it? I can only imagine an office full of uninterested developers shrugging and saying "Not my problem" day after day. I mean, when I played Alpha Centauri, I would think, "This is a game made by nerds for nerds." And when I play Civ 6, I think, "This was made by workers to receive a salary." I can feel it. It's in the soul of the game.
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Old 05-27-2017, 04:18 AM   #10
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I didn't realize that you knew Italian. I vaguely remember you saying that you were Italian or something but I had no idea you were that far into it. You might be pleased to know that it's almost certain that The Italians will be one of the new civilizations in a DLC. That's why there aren't any Italian city states in the game.

The user interface does need a ton of work. They've actually made a few fixes already which you wouldn't have noticed, since you didn't have the game when it first came out. I haven't noticed many typos, but I also don't read the Civilopedia that much. Speaking of lack of effort from the devs, apparently a lot of the tech quotes are fake lol. They probably assigned the task of gathering tech quotes to some intern at Firaxis, who proceeded to Google "Iron working quotes" and copy and pasted the first result that came up. The skeleton of the game has a lot of promise but it needs an expansion. Civilization 4 and 5 vanilla were also rough. The late game tech tree in 6 is so barren and open for improvement. It's nothing but military units and spaceship parts. Where's the optimism for the future? Where's all the new technologies that fix the problems of the Industrial Revolution like recycling centres, mass transit systems, and solar power plants? Computers, one of the most important technologies in history does nothing except ... increase tourism by 100%. I mean, hotels.com is great and all but come on! And why is it that you research "Stealth Technology" and get some 1970s looking Cold War bomber, the most modern one in the game?

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And then I sometimes put off researching something when I think I can get the boost later and reduce my overall tech cost. Not sure if that's a great approach, but it hurts to lose out on the tech boosts. :<
It is definitely important to do that if you don't need the tech right away. Consistently paying half the cost of techs with eurekas adds up to a huge amount of science. Also bear in mind that completing techs inflates the cost of districts, so you should avoid researching things entirely if you don't need them. I often skip Military Tactics because pikemen suck.

Quote:
You can also end the turn while units are awaiting orders. I actually have abused this when there are envoys available.
I don't think banking envoys is a bug. Here's another useful trick: remember I mentioned that district costs inflate with the number of techs you've researched? You can avoid this to some extent by placing districts you want to build as soon as you can; this will freeze the cost of the district in place. You can then switch to building something else if you want, then resume work on the district when you're ready. This was thought to be a bug, but they haven't fixed it yet so it's probably intentional. This can't be abused to a huge extent anyway since you can only place so many districts with the population that you have, and you also might not own the tiles yet where you want to place the districts. If you found new cities in the late game, especially island cities with poor production, the cost of districts are so outrageous that the only way to complete them is to assign a lot of domestic trade routes to boost production.
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