who can be blamed for thVIs mes6 ? [civ6 review]

[Sava]

I'm updating my review slightly. 11/5/2016

I don't believe any patches or changes have been made. This review reflects my opinion of the game now after playing for one hundred hours and completing every victory mode but scientific (which I'm working on now).

I find myself saying, "one more turn" a lot. Take that as you will. I'm motivated to complete the game a lot of different ways. I find smaller maps to be more entertaining than larger maps.

Unit cycling annoys the piss out of me. That's gotta get fixed. I don't understand how people can play this game and not get frustrated to high heaven. It makes no sense. One second I'm issuing orders to one of several units on the front lines of a war, the next I get whisked away to tell a builder halfway across the planet to build a mine. Okay? Got that mine built? Great, back to the war.

This mechanic really disrupts the immersion. I wish you could turn it off without resorting to INI editing.

The game feels sluggish. Delays everywhere add to the frustration. It isn't performance. Some designer just thought it would be clever to add +1 second delays to every action. This leads to errors if you try to play fast. Considering multiplayer can be set to run on a timer, this is somewhat of a game breaking "feature".

It needs to get fixed ASAP.

What do I enjoy about Civ 6?

District planning is fun. That's really where the meat is here.

A few things need to be changed with districts. They can't be permanent, for one. Can you imagine the implications if you could never demolish or move a building. What's that piece of crap over there? Oh some holy site from 2800 BC. Yeah, they built it over there... so... everyone's got to worship there I guess. Forever.

It's stupid. Change it. Allow me to raze/destroy/demolish a damn district for ass's sake.

Get rid of the production scaling. There's no reason it should take a millennium for a new city to build a harbor/campus/holy site/etc. Give me enough handy dudes and heavy machinery, cut the red tape and I'll build one in a month.

Trader and spy units. Ugh. Let me make orders "permanent" until I want to change them. That's all. You could fix the single most annoying aspect of the game by doing this.

Religion and espionage. Pffft. Hopefully the DLC's will expand these. Right now, it's just not interesting. Religion is just a domination-style victory on another dimension only diplomacy doesn't apply beyond fruitlessly asking people to not convert your cities. After that, you're left resorting to unintended defenses... like placing units around the tiles adjacent to city centers just so the damn missionaries can't get along side them.

AI diplomacy/warfare. The AI is written to provoke you with city placement. They build cities right next to you... even if there capital is far away. This is apparently intended to get the player to attack (or submit) to the AI. I don't like this. Make the AI expand their empires organically outward. Good news is, once you ***** slap the AI and raze that annoying city, they'll capitulate and offer up any great works... usually you have to sweeten the deal with a luxury resource, but they give it up like drunken prom dates.

If you're obsessed with Civ, you probably already have this game. I'd only recommend buying it if you are obsessed.

Otherwise, wait for the Steam sales and/or DLC's.


So... not as harsh I think... but I still can't tell people to buy it. I at least have to wait for the first round of patches.

Right now, I cannot recommend this game.

I had to stop playing because the late game turns into a slog of issuing and reissuing orders to trader and spy units. Turn times are still long... even with the game installed on an SSD.

The UI is designed poorly. Bright/cartoony map colors and art styles blend in with every bit of information or indication that you need to play the game. It's hard to see what you need to see.

Units auto-cycle at a slow pace after getting orders, leading to many misclicks. You may even plan to move two units. They're right next to each other. Seems intuitive you'd move one right after the other. Nope. Move one. Expect to move the other (there's a delay... everything in Civ 6 comes with a delay). Next thing you know, the game lumbers across to the other side of the world so you can switch to planning a trade route in the middle of a battle.

You do a lot of trade route planning. Sid Meier's Trader Planning Simulator 2016 would be a more appropriate title. Right now I got 10 trade routes that I have to reassign to the same cities... at a pace of about once per ten turns. So every ten turns, I have to issue one hundred trade route orders. That's a lot of orders. Each one takes a bit of time as the game processes your clicks, a second or two at a time. That is, if you don't misclick during these delays.

Many of the game features seem simplified compared to past titles. Potentially deep and meaningful things like espionage and religion are very shallow and don't seem compelling or useful. Civilization is a game about numbers and data. These two modes could be shut off entirely with little impact on the game itself. Missionary combat is another layer of warfare. However, it's just two melee units vying for what amounts to a miniscule bonus. But hey, they seem to put a lot of work into the animations... which I turned off because turns take forever if everyone has to show me their little song and dance.

The game doesn't suffer from any performance issues as far as I can tell. It just is designed to move at a slower pace. A one second delay here, a one second delay there... it adds up.

Sluggish, unresponsive, and at times, buggy UI frustrates. Tedious reassignment of trader and spy units bogs the late game almost as much as the turn times. You can move through 250 turns pretty easily. The next 50 will start to frustrate you more.

The AI still doesn't know what it is doing. Only now you get the benefit of hunting for the data you want. Why is a leader suddenly unfriendly towards you? Search in the submenus. You'll find it. Well, you won't find what you want to know. You'll find some numbers without explanation. Some leader "agendas" that often contradict each other. China's leader was threatened by the number of world wonders I had, but yet also looked down on me because my culture was low.

There are also some weird unit design quirks. Catapults and archers can shoot twice as far as machine guns and rangers. I tried to research the effective range of ancient weapons. The ballista seemed like it had the longest real world range at 800 meters. Guns can shoot further. It might fit in with some idea of balance in the game, but it doesn't make sense.

Combat also seems to move at a slower pace due to a new design in movement points. You now need a full two points if you hope to move on to those hills. Don't expect a unit to move into a grassland and then into a forest unless you've got special upgrades. From a balance perspective, ranged units are now much more powerful due to the lack of mobility. Your melee unit can get stuck moving one square at a time as archers obliterate it. Or, you can roll across a continent picking off the enemy AI's suicide runs. They throw weak melee units at you all day with little tactical planning. Their archers are formidable. But they don't use any kind of coordination. With support units, combat is now more about the bonus from adjacent tiles. I think this just makes the AI ever weaker.

If you do want to wage war, prepare for your entire game to be about warfare. The AI seems to remember everything bad thing you do and forget the good things. Lucrative trade deal for +10 relationship bonus? Gone in a few turns. Raze a city in 2600 BC? Well, everyone hates you in the modern era because of it... even the AI on other continents.

30 hours in and I find myself rage quitting because of these nagging issues. The game looks great on paper and even feels great when you start to play it. But the "new Civ smell" wears off. Hard.

Save your money. Wait for some DLC's.

[ZEE]

lol Civ 6 sucks.

[ZEE]

Also, I am proud to say that I have not given a penny of my money to Firaxis since Civ 4 BTS.

And I won't until 2K drops them on their ass and Brian Reynolds takes over the company.

[Elok]

Wait. "Missionary combat"? They have clergymen duking it out with dueling sermons? Can you soften them up with an artillery strike from a rape scandal first? Do they get promotions like "Prosperity gospel: +20% in high-wealth cities" or "Casuistry: +10% withdrawal chance"? Or is it not sermon combat at all, and you just have a rabbi and an imam bare-knuckling each other in the face?

Either way, it sounds really stupid, and I'm actually religious. As to what they expect their millennial cynic button-masher target audience to get out of symbolic theological smackdowns, I have no idea.

[Elok]

Sorry, I want to be positive about this game, but that's just ****ing idiotic.

[giblets]

Wait. "Missionary combat"? They have clergymen duking it out with dueling sermons?

Maybe they have a rap battle

[Proteus_MST]

Wait. "Missionary combat"? They have clergymen duking it out with dueling sermons? ...

Actually only Apostles and Inquisitors can do clergy battles.
The poor simple missionary can only be the victim/target of a clergy battle.

I for my part visualize such clergy battles as one clergy man standing in front of local townsfolk and instigating that the other clergy man is an apostate/traitor/unbeliever of the "only true religion" (tm).
If he succeeds he may get the local townsfolk to stone the enemy clergyman (or drown them, or nail him to an oak, or whatever method of execution they prefer at the location).
If he fails, he himself may be the target of such a practice

[Sava]

Games are subject to improvement. My review should be considered a snapshot of this moment in time. From 0 to 30 hours, playing Civilization VI has been great. I've enjoyed the game. However, most people aren't like me. I buy everything and maybe play half the games I have. Many of you are on different entertainment budgets and/or have other obligations.

I started a new game.

Turns 0-100 are great. The game plays very smoothly.

Each of us has a different relationship with gaming. Mine is an emotional connection. Internally, I'm going crazy most of the time. Games help settle me. I'm probably wrong about a lot of stuff I said. Or at the very least, I'm probably making a mountain out of a molehill. Or not? I don't really know. I just want to give everyone my reaction to the game as I'm playing it. That way, you guys can make better decisions for yourselves.

Maybe you don't game like I do. Maybe your tastes are different. Maybe my reaction means you'll like it. Maybe I'm just crazy and you shouldn't listen to me.

I feel like I was hard on (lol) Civ VI. It's fun. I'll have over 100 playing hours by the end of the month.

[Lorizael]

Maybe I'm just crazy and you shouldn't listen to me.

Was gonna say this but thought it was kinda mean.

[Dinner]

I knew better than to buy the game at release.

[Jon Miller]

It sounds like just some minor bug fixes are needed and nothing fundamentally is wrong. That is better than 5 or 3.

JM

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Do I sense you are afraid of change, embrace it.

[Elok]

Well, he said diplomacy, espionage, trade and religion all had serious issues. And that combat is imbalanced in favor of ranged units.

[Jon Miller]

Note I only watched people play for over an hour on Saturday and Sunday.

Autocycle has always been a problem. UI is worse than normal. Trade route planning doesn't seem to be so great as to be terrible, but it is more than in any game since 2. Religion looks like it needs some balance fixes... nothing serious. I am not clear about espionage. AI does seem terrible. Units aren't suppose to be realistic but rather to reflect the time; I am not sure there needs to be any balance change there. Movement and war seem very reasonable for a 300 turn game.

It is obviously true that there are really significant balance issues, SAVA didn't even mention the ones about selling units.

JM

[rah]

I've read of too many people that won on deity on the first or second try while claiming they still didn't understand the game completely.
That so far is the most damning thing for me.

But at least Sava likes certain things so maybe there's hope for it eventually. I really want to believe.