Sid Meier's Civilization Series (Main Titles)

The way district costs scale, any cities past 4-6 will basically never get up and running before the game ends. So it's not that you're punished for going wide so much as there are heavy diminishing returns. Which I guess means you shouldn't feel obligated to go wide. I've had the best success so far by focusing on my core cities while setting up little colonies here and there just for resources.

Then again, it's been like 2 days so what do I know?

My Mac's not meeting the system requirements due to an inadequate graphics card. I guess that makes me boned out of playing the game?

Some things never change

Yeah, I didn't quite understand the escalating district cost mechanic at first, but it seems clear that you'll simply never get your later cities developed in any significant way.

Frederick Barbossa decided to declare war against me — little bastard. Of course, having a higher tech level than him, having more gold to purchase units, fighting a defensive war, and not being the stupid AI allowed me to annihilate him in short order and capture one of his cities in turn. It doesn't seem to matter if you have triple the units if they're all horsemen and your opponent stacks up crossbowmen. Suitably chastized, he sat around sucking his thumb for a while before declaring war against India, which let me stop worrying about border defense and instead concentrate on my Religious victory.

Which I got, around 1775 AD, thanks to ridiculous Apostle spam. It didn't feel very challenging; the AI put up zero resistance to my religious units and didn't even attempt to combat them with Inquisitors, which feels like a serious gap. I can only hope they're better at it in higher difficulties — I played Warlord for a first go. Also, Rome's trade route bonuses are just sick. Gold poured in like water and let me buy most of what I wanted.

In terms of mistakes, I did not optimize my districts as well as I could have, but it didn't seem to make a huge difference. I did put in more emphasis than I needed to on shipbuilding, which was kind of laughable since none of the AI players bothered to field a navy. It helped me once, with a city capture, and that was about it. It seems that, as long as you focus on your core strategy and keep enough military power to stop midgame aggression, you can cruise to a Cultural or Religious victory.

War Weariness is the big obstacle to a Domination victory, of course — Barbossa got absolutely hammered by revolutionaries in his cities after his protracted war with me, but I also had a lot of happiness problems for a while. DoW'ing someone to wreck their morale seems like a nasty way to play the game. Like in V, a Science victory feels like some sort of default when nobody can get a sufficient cultural, religious, or military advantage.

Overall, Civ VI feels less focused than other games in the series. Unlike earlier games, it's not feasible to build everything in every city, and so I'm forced to ignore certain opportunities in order to focus on my victory conditions. There are so many choices available at any given time that just aren't relevant. It requires a rethinking of core strategy.

Another odd thing is that unit upgrade paths just don't make sense sometimes. The melee path seems to skip an entire era, or else Rome's just special with its Legion unit, but I couldn't upgrade mine to Musketmen for ages because there was no niter resource convenient. And you'd think Knights would upgrade to Cavalry, but nope.

Lastly, the game seems to hide its mechanical information in odd ways. I was trying to remember what bonuses certain Wonders and improvements gave, but the city buildings view doesn't have tooltips, nor does it let you click through to the Civilopedia. I couldn't find any way to see how my Amenity bonuses were distributed across each city, nor get a breakdown of what specific Amenities each city was receiving. For a strategy game that is based around micromanagement, Firaxis has gone out of its way to make that micromanagement harder.

Overall, I'm liking what I'm seeing, but I need more time with it to be sure. I suppose I'll try for a Cultural victory next, since it seems like the easiest one next to Religious.

edited 22nd Oct '16 10:43:58 AM by Fighteer

That's because light cavalry and heavy cavalry have different upgrade paths. Knights become tanks while Cavalry become helicopters.

So, after playing a bit more, I would say that some AI issues will need to be adressed so the game becomes more enjoyable. I got two majorly annoying things.

• First, and I got it twice: the neighbouring AI creating a huge carpet of warriors just near your lands. The option to ask for them to get away is still an AI privilege, and it's freaking annoying. In the latest game playing Cleopatra, Phillip just spammed Warriors that stood outside of my lands, without declaring war (in V, the AI always carpeted at home, and when the carpet moved a DOW ensued), and while becoming super late with tech (he got into medieval when the first AI were into industrial). He never founded a second city. He just spammed warriors...and did nothing. Which means that I had to spend a lot of resources getting a defense up and running, instead of focusing on whatever else I wanted. He denounced me twice, but never attacked - at least I could have cleared the carpet if he had done so, but no, not even that.
• Second, the War weariness system. It's a fine idea, but in practice I just got suprise DOW'd by Montezuma who sent a bunch of Horsemen to my lands. I cleared that, he didn't want to make peace. So I advanced towards his lands with an army that was one era more advanced than his - he didn't want to make peace. I liberated the city-state he had conquered early on - he didn't want to make peace. I only managed to get a peace deal when I was literally 1 turn away from killing him, as I had besieged his capital city with units he could barely graze due to the tech difference. It took so much time (I wanted to play peacefully ffs!) that my cities got crippled by war weariness, and I even got barbarian Knights appearing near one. And there was literally nothing I could do to avoid that, except somehow finding multiple sources of amenities.

So it would be nice if war weariness was reduced when you are the one getting DOW'd, especially when there is literally zero danger anymore. You basically end up in a lose-lose situation, where you have to choose between no growth and warmonger penalties. Plus the war weariness doesn't get away immediately once you make peace.

So good idea, but would have needed more testing to become viable.

edited 22nd Oct '16 10:46:46 PM by Julep

Oh good, not just me then. Peter did the same to me on my first play through. One city, only a couple of districts (not including a campus) and just spamming ancient era units. They just clogged the choke point to my capital. I kept giving him open borders just to clear give me some space. When he finally declared war I just steam rolled him because I was sending Musketmen against warriors.

In my experience, you don't really have to go out of your way to defend against it. They're just warriors, and the AI loves to continue to use obsolete units without ever upgrading them. A single swordsman can stand up against an arbitrary amount of warrior if they're fortified in your own territory.

Notes so far: Trade route spam is *amazing*. Especially internal trade routes. This makes Rome's bonus completely borked, since it amounts to "Remember how broken internal trade routes are? Well, mine are even better" I build harbors mostly because I want more trade routes! Housing is a major, major limiter, which made me realize I picked entirely the wrong religious traits.

My longest game so far was Germany, which is really strong, despite it having leader boni that are completely useless. I don't want to fight city states.. Ever.

But a better industrial district that doesn't count against the cap and just a flat out one higher district cap? That is amazing.

Trade routes back to a highly developed center will let you get more cities built up right damn quick, but on a standard map, the main limit becomes finding enough places with fresh water.

My two cents would be that Tomyris is absolutely broken if you wish to go for Domination. All her abilities synergize perfectly well, and the most prominent are the Scythian "one free light cavalry every time you produce one" (which allows you to spam Horse Archers - they don't require horses anyway) and her own "heal 50HP when killing an enemy". It works with boats and ranged units. I am almost certain it is going to be nerfed, because it makes your armies pretty much invincible as long as they have something to kill.

Sure, she gets no other bonuses than killing stuff...but when it comes to that, she has no rival. And the early barbs become XP factories as it is really easy to chain them without ever waiting for your units to heal.

edited 23rd Oct '16 2:54:04 AM by Julep

Is there an exp limit on barbs like there was in Civ V?

Yes. I think that once you get promoted, barbs only give 1 xp, which is not very significant considering what you need for the next promotions. But the first promotion makes your units significantly better.

Plus the barbs can be genuinely dangerous this time around if they swarm a city - and they love to pick up vulnerable archers for example. But since Tomyris gets the life drain, you don't need to produce as many units to deal with them, and the production you save can go somewhere else.

I've found that proactively hunting down barbarian camps rather than waiting for them to send raiding parties helps a lot. You only need like a warrior and a slinger.

I've heard early theories that in this game Production is the supreme resource (it Civ 5 it was food), which makes Germany the best Civ simply for having cheaper Industrial districts.

Ah, so it's like Beyond Earth, then,

Problem is when the barb camp is far away and it starts spawning horsemen before you destroy it. Horsemen barbs were annoying in V, but if you knew how zones of control worked they were manageable, but here, they ignore the ZOC. So if your Slinger/Archer is a bit lonely, it will get downed almost instantly - especially as horsemen camps love to also spawn horse archers, or other horsement to double team you.

So you can still, somewhat, train your dudes on barbs even late in the game. Alright.

How are they dangerous? Is there more of them or perhaps they have a better AI? (for some reason, it feels like Vanilla V's Barb AI is better than that of BNW, incidentally)

Sure sounds like a pain. Do all Barbs ignore Zones of Control?

edited 23rd Oct '16 5:39:28 AM by FergardStratoavis

Anti Cavalry units gets a good promotion.

"Double combat strength when you share a Hex with a support unit."

The final upgrade Modern AT has 80 combat strength but with that promotion and having a support unit linked to the Modern AT they will have 160 combat strength.

edited 23rd Oct '16 5:46:57 AM by Halberdier17

Sure sounds like a pain. Do all Barbs ignore Zones of Control?

No, it's a special property of all cavalry units, regardless of who owns them.

Anyway, they way barbarians work in this game it that all camps are guarded by a spearman (which are high level for super early game, but weak against basic melee since they get a bonus against anti-cavalry), and mostly just spawn scouts. Scouts will walk up to your cities and then run back to the camp that spawned. When they get there, they'll spawn a bunch of stuff that comes to attack the city they found. So basically, if you kill the scouts, they'll never spawn any of the more dangerous stuff.

Now, it's not quite that simple because it's pretty hard to chase down the scouts, since they move the same speed as you so you'll never catch up. But if you have your warrior out there already, you might be able kill their home camp before they get back. Or just kill scouts who you meet in the wilderness, before their AI tells them to beeline for their base camp.

Anyway, the point is just that sitting there waiting for barbarians to come to you ends up hurting your economy way more than sending a couple warriors out to kill camps.

edited 23rd Oct '16 9:30:34 AM by Clarste

One thing I am glad to see they haven't changed is their inability to hire voice actor who speak the same language as the world leader they are voicing. Catherine De Medici's accent is impressively American for an Italian speaking French.

The Italian accent sounded pretty convincing to me, if compared to my Italian colleague's when she spoke French.

However, she also has fully Italian lines, and I don't know how he accent of these ones is.

Can't judge her Italian, but her French is awful and sounds nothing like the italians speaking french I know. It really sounds like someone who speaks english reading French out phonetically but who doesn't actually speak French. It's at the very limit of intelligible.

edited 23rd Oct '16 12:01:50 PM by Ghilz

For me it does. I guess Italians have different accents in French.

Among the other things to patch...why isn't there a hard timer on the first barbarian horsemen? I just tried a game, where I had 2 Horsemen and 1 Horse Archer surrounding my capital turn 20. And the fucking camp was 10 tiles away from the city! The Scout probably spawned turn 1, was on my capital on turn 5, back to the camp turn 10, then on turn 16 three units had popped (seriously, the spawn rate is stupid, every two turns - a new horseman), then turn 20 I was just blocked because I couldn't do anything.

That's the kind of things beta testing is supposed to make obvious.

Apropos accents and languages: I heard a pretty fun suggession for an alternate English ruler if they ever add one.

Richard the Lionheart - but if you meet him the first time he just talks French at you.

I don't think Richard Couer de Lion spoke much English at all, save that used on the battlefield. French being the first language of the nobility at the time.

That's why I said he should only talk in French.