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Civilization 6

Started by hedgehog90, October 28, 2016, 07:24:37 PM

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hedgehog90

It's an improvement on 5, but like every other Civilization game I get way into it for a week or so before going off it completely. Usually manage 1 and a half games before I realise the sheer pointlessness of it.
Right now I'm in the phase where it's taking over my life and I want to stop, but every night I get the itch and foolishly fire it up.
Now I'm sleep-deprived and unhappy.
Good game though.

hedgehog90

I was close to reaching a culture victory but as I reached the 1940s it started crashing every other turn. Even in a peaceful simulation the world goes to fuck come the 20th century!
I bet if I took up fascism and went on a genocide rampage the game wouldn't spaz out.
And after enslaving everyone, Sid Meier appears and gives you a thumbs up.

kittens

downloaded this today. expect to play it to absolute fuck after the pub quiz
more thoughts incoming

kittens

maybe i just don't like civilization anymore
i kept trying to get into it but it just seems to move so slowly. like you're never achieving anything, just thinking 'okay, if i do this, then in a few turns i can do this thing i do want to do' but never actually doing anything worthwhile or good.
i'll give it a few more tries. hope i can get into it, i used to lose days to this game

wasp_f15ting

How long are the play sessions supposed to take?

I am new to it, and I spent about 30hrs and I just went to space.. I have an itch to nuke everyone around me.. but guess that'll be frowned upon.

hedgehog90

Haven't played this since my last post.
I went crazy at it for 3 days and now I can't stand the thought of playing it again.
's good tho... if you take your time with it and don't do what I did.

Eight Taiwanese Teenagers

I realised I couldn't play this on any of the computers in my house so I spent 6 quid odd on buying all of the Civ5 expansions on Steam and am playing that instead. How different could it be?!

Viero_Berlotti

Quote from: Eight Taiwanese Teenagers on November 26, 2016, 09:04:09 AM
I realised I couldn't play this on any of the computers in my house so I spent 6 quid odd on buying all of the Civ5 expansions on Steam and am playing that instead. How different could it be?!

You'll be fine for a while yet with Civ 5 and all the expansions. I picked it up cheap last year and I think they made a good game of it in the end. I'll probably do the same with Civ 6 and pick it up in a few years when it's fully patched, updated and with expansions.

kittens

i find the only fun bit of this is the very beginning so i'm constantly restarting. also i realised i have no idea how to actually play the game and in the past have just been playing it on the easiest setting. when i actually try it on a normal difficulty i have no fucking idea what's going on

Ham Bap

Just got this at Christmas plus the 2 expansions for the PS4.
First ever time playing a Civilization game. Still finding my feet.
I'm at the stage where I've restarted loads of games. Not sure I've even made it half-way through a game.

Back into work tomorrow so I'm gonna spend all day reading about it.
I think I've got the gist of it but it's all a bit mind bending but I suppose that's a good thing.

Anyone still playing it?


falafel

Yes.

I wouldn't necessarily keep restarting. I have always found it's better to get to an actual fail state and learn from it. And maybe you will accidentally win. It's hard to know realistically how you are doing against other civilisations until you are a bit more experienced so you may be surprised. Just piss around and see what happens. I always avoid conflict which probably makes me a bit of a weirdo but in VI I have found it's fairly easy to get by without being belligerent and just researching technologies and government types that look interesting.

Been playing Civ on and off since I was 10. Recently tried to get into Paradox games and they blew my mind with their complexity. I wonder if attempting to play modern Civ for the first time as an adult feels like that, although surely less so.

Dewt

Love Civ but always end up hankering for Civ II.

Ham Bap

Quote from: falafel on January 05, 2020, 10:42:40 PM
Yes.

I wouldn't necessarily keep restarting. I have always found it's better to get to an actual fail state and learn from it. And maybe you will accidentally win. It's hard to know realistically how you are doing against other civilisations until you are a bit more experienced so you may be surprised. Just piss around and see what happens. I always avoid conflict which probably makes me a bit of a weirdo but in VI I have found it's fairly easy to get by without being belligerent and just researching technologies and government types that look interesting.

Been playing Civ on and off since I was 10. Recently tried to get into Paradox games and they blew my mind with their complexity. I wonder if attempting to play modern Civ for the first time as an adult feels like that, although surely less so.

Yeah I need to see through a game.

I have most of it nailed down but probably rushing through things a bit at the minute. I have a blank or 2 where e.g. I couldn't build missionaries to send out despite having the Faith and a holy site with a great person.
I probably missed something rushing through.

Apart from that need to get out of the Age of Empires mentality where I'd usually just turtle and build a massive army.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

#13
Quote from: Dewt on January 05, 2020, 11:43:58 PM
Love Civ but always end up hankering for Civ II.

Yeah, I haven't played the last couple but the sequels to CivII were pretty disappointing. Instead of improving the crude dynamics of II (eg. The fairly shit cpu diplomacy) they faffed around with the graphics and made the turn by turn gameplay more cumbersome.

Pink Gregory

Really lile Civ VI, think it's my favourite so far; religion is still relatively perfunctory and they've at least made an effort to improve diplomacy, even if all their best ideas were nicked from Endless Legend.

Thing is, it always comes down to war and unit-unit combat.  And there's the sticking point.  It's boring.  No matter what you do, war and battles are the least interesting part of the game.  But it has to be there, I don't know how you'd improve it.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Total War seems to manage combining a turn by turn campaign mode with real time battle strategy. Yes the world building is more rudimentary but in comparison to Civ it is offers miles more content. And you can just press resolve battle if you can't be arsed being the general at every conflict.

Appreciate you would need a broader range of combat given the eras Civ covers vs TW which selects a snapshot in history with a limited tech arc.

MojoJojo

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on January 06, 2020, 11:00:48 AM
Yeah, I haven't played the last couple but the sequels to CivII were pretty disappointing. Instead of improving the crude dynamics of II (eg. The fairly shit cpu diplomacy) they faffed around with the graphics and made the turn by turn gameplay more cumbersome.

Nah, Civ IV was pretty ace. Streamlined a lot of the grind away and brought some real strategic choices in.

I do miss the throne room though.

bgmnts

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on January 06, 2020, 12:23:51 PM
Total War seems to manage combining a turn by turn campaign mode with real time battle strategy. Yes the world building is more rudimentary but in comparison to Civ it is offers miles more content. And you can just press resolve battle if you can't be arsed being the general at every conflict.

Appreciate you would need a broader range of combat given the eras Civ covers vs TW which selects a snapshot in history with a limited tech arc.

Problem is though, the resolve battle mechanic is utter shite later on in the game as you'll always lose. I am just crap at the game but it's tough.  Also, if you only have a laptop with a trackpad at hand, trying to play those battles is a nightmare.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

#18
I think that's conflating things a bit.

Whether the resolve battle function is well designed or not wasn't really my point, more the principle that it's there. Civ players who prefer seeing the bars decrease with each 'dice roll' could still have that if they wanted, whereas people like myself who are now used to games where you can control important outcomes in finer detail can be the general at the battle. If you ask me how to improve Civ I would generally say improve the diplomacy so it genuinely functions, get rid of the gimmicky battle animations, debloat the main gameplay screen and introduce a real time strategy for battles.

The track pad thing isn't really any developer's issue.

Dewt

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on January 06, 2020, 11:00:48 AM
Yeah, I haven't played the last couple but the sequels to CivII were pretty disappointing. Instead of improving the crude dynamics of II (eg. The fairly shit cpu diplomacy) they faffed around with the graphics and made the turn by turn gameplay more cumbersome.
Civ II graphics/gameplay with improvements to the AI etc. would be good. That's probably what FreeCiv is, but it looks too utilitarian. I want real Civ II frontend with open source logic. Maybe it exists! Will investigate.

falafel

Quote from: Pink Gregory on January 06, 2020, 12:09:36 PM
Really lile Civ VI, think it's my favourite so far; religion is still relatively perfunctory and they've at least made an effort to improve diplomacy, even if all their best ideas were nicked from Endless Legend.

Thing is, it always comes down to war and unit-unit combat.  And there's the sticking point.  It's boring.  No matter what you do, war and battles are the least interesting part of the game.  But it has to be there, I don't know how you'd improve it.

Not a single war as such, in my last game. A couple of skirmishes. Cultural victory.

Inspector Norse

Quote from: falafel on January 05, 2020, 10:42:40 PM
I always avoid conflict which probably makes me a bit of a weirdo

No I always did that too. Found it pretty hard sometimes but I also found it tiring when I was trying to accomplish Great Things and some tosser in a toga kept pillaging my fields.

I basically always cheated a bit and went with massive island-based maps so I could get a good while into it before anyone else tried to have a pop at me.

Ages since I've played, I still seem to have Civ V in my Steam library so might install it for a bit. It wasn't the best in the series but I liked the soundtrack to the medieval era.

Zetetic

#22
Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on January 06, 2020, 12:23:51 PM
Yes the world building is more rudimentary but in comparison to Civ it is offers miles more content.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this.

If you take, for example, TW: Shogun 2, there's a decent amount of 'world-building' there - it tries very hard to give you a sense of being in that place and time - and certainly considerably more than any Civ - which always pushes very hard on feeling quite abstract, basically presumes that the player shares a particular view of history) and never really commits to the idea that 'civilisations' differ except by a few bonuses and maluses (attached to their supposed culture or religion or ideology).

At the same time, Shogun 2 has basically the same content as all TW titles - units of certain set of roles, albeit with particular skins, in fairly similar real time battles and a strategy layer that is, at best, uninteresting (and at worst mind-blowingly tedious with very little real choice but an awful lot of busywork). I like those battles, but there's not really anything else to the game. Shogun 2 has some weak RPGish/general-promotion mechanics I think? Maybe IIRC? But it's largely irrelevant.

The battles mostly stay the same over the course of a game, if getting a bit bigger and mostly easier. Yes, yes, some tech stuff but there's not much of a game in that.

While something like Civ V + Brave New World has a whole bunch of fairly interesting, somewhat interacting systems and changing gameplay over the course of a game (settlement, expansion, conflict, race to victory) that emerges from the state of the map etc. (Although I'm almost always quite disappointed by the late-mid-game onwards in practice...)

Zetetic

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on January 06, 2020, 12:48:02 PM
get rid of the gimmicky battle animations
I think this is an option in most of them, but I couldn't swear it.

Quoteand introduce a real time strategy for battles.
I don't think you could do this without unpicking what units are meant to represent, and the moment you start actually picking at Civ's foundations, it's all a bit too stupid I think.

I'd rather see something about ideology and culture actually mean something a bit more ... human, I think, first. But that's really difficult to do without making players feel a bit powerless, I reckon.

Edit: Rhye's work had some interesting stability mechanics.

Ignatius_S

I found Zigzagzigal's guides for Civ 6 incredibly useful - https://steamcommunity.com/id/Zigzagzigal/myworkshopfiles/?section=guides&appid=289070&p=1 – they've produced ones for the vanilla version and expansions.

One of the guides summarises all nations and something I found particularly useful, is that they're placed in four groups depending on their complexity. For newer players, it shows the nations more straightforward to play. I'm not in that camp but it's been a great resource for getting a heads-up which nations you need non-generic strategies for. Also, it's encouraged me to try out nations that don't fit my preferred strategies – I'm currently playing as England and oh boy, it's been so much fun to play.

Individual nation guides has stacks of information, including suggesting counter-strategies.

Ignatius_S

Quote from: kittens on November 26, 2016, 12:25:42 PM
i find the only fun bit of this is the very beginning so i'm constantly restarting. also i realised i have no idea how to actually play the game and in the past have just been playing it on the easiest setting. when i actually try it on a normal difficulty i have no fucking idea what's going on

As suggested, keep playing. I would definitely recommend looking at the Zigzagzigal guides above as well.

Quote from: falafel on January 05, 2020, 10:42:40 PM...I always avoid conflict which probably makes me a bit of a weirdo but in VI I have found it's fairly easy to get by without being belligerent and just researching technologies and government types that look interesting...

My experience is that having more military units than I normally would in earlier versions is often necessary. To degree, it's the luck of the draw but have noticed that aggressive civs will pick up on weak armies and barbarian raids can be an issue as well.

The Rise & Fall expansion also makes domination a little trickier.

Quote from: Ham Bap on January 06, 2020, 10:47:01 AM
Yeah I need to see through a game.

I have most of it nailed down but probably rushing through things a bit at the minute. I have a blank or 2 where e.g. I couldn't build missionaries to send out despite having the Faith and a holy site with a great person.
I probably missed something rushing through...

Check the religion that the city follows. I suspect that another civ has converted it to a different faith, which will prevent you from spending faith on missionaries etc.

Also, apostles tend to be a better investment than missionaries. When apostles are on their last charge, don't spread religion with it – that way, they will remain in play and will be able to defend your cities from rival religious units or allow you to aggressively expand.

Quote from: Pink Gregory on January 06, 2020, 12:09:36 PM...Thing is, it always comes down to war and unit-unit combat.  And there's the sticking point.  It's boring.  No matter what you do, war and battles are the least interesting part of the game.  But it has to be there, I don't know how you'd improve it.

Not in my experience. Most of the games I've played, it's been relatively easy to avoid conflict – but as mentioned above, a decent force is needed as a deterrent.


Quote from: Zetetic on January 06, 2020, 05:48:00 PM....At the same time, Shogun 2 has basically the same content as all TW titles - units of certain set of roles, albeit with particular skins, in fairly similar real time battles and a strategy layer that is, at best, uninteresting (and at worst mind-blowingly tedious with very little real choice but an awful lot of busywork). I like those battles, but there's not really anything else to the game...

I would go along with the world-building comments – I find that element quite fun but it's pretty superficial.

However, in my experience, content does vary across the titles more than you say – Napeleon, for instance, is very different that Shogun 2 or, for that matter Empire, which it was an offshoot of. I would agree that the grand strategy element of S2 felt rather lacklustre, but in Empire, found it tremendous.

falafel

Quote from: Ignatius_S on January 06, 2020, 10:12:33 PM
My experience is that having more military units than I normally would in earlier versions is often necessary. To degree, it's the luck of the draw but have noticed that aggressive civs will pick up on weak armies and barbarian raids can be an issue as well.

Yep, I have always aimed to plonk a fair few units in strategic spots to act as 'sentinels' (or defence towers, I guess) but try not to have to use them too much. You don't have to swing your dick/clit all over the place but you do kind of need to have one.

MojoJojo

I'd be quite tempted to get this on the Switch if it wasn't for Nintendo's cunt pricing.

Ignatius_S

Quote from: MojoJojo on January 07, 2020, 11:08:28 AM
I'd be quite tempted to get this on the Switch if it wasn't for Nintendo's cunt pricing.

eShop prices are set by publishers, rather than Nintendo. However, in any case, the Switch version is cheaper that the standard Steam price and comes with more content (e.g. a few nations and scenarios that are paid DLC on other platforms). It's been on sale at least a couple of times and the physical version is easy to pick up for around £27.

Also, the DLC is cheaper too. The two expansions come as a bundle on the Switch at £33 – going from memory that's nearly half the price as the PC version.  iOS, the Gathering Storm is just shy of £40...

Dewt

Is it sluggish on Switch?