Thing is, Civ VI has almost all the mechanics Civ V had with 2 expansions. Helps they didn’t change everything this time around. Later in the game there’s tourism, culture, religion, espionage, war, diplomacy, city states … a lot of mechanics in play. Not even sure what sort of expansions they will be adding to this, it doesn’t feel like it is missing anything crucial.
I just won a domination victory as Rome on Chieftain - or a 12 hour tutorial match, really. Now I can rest a bit before playing on Prince and maybe getting some challenge from my enemies. Barbarians were a bigger threat than enemy AIs. They are more aggressive and numerous again and what really can get annoying is that their fast scouts can destroy your civilian units, including traders. I guess it’s realistic that if you don’t occupy some godforsaken mountainous hellhole the locals will turn to banditry and loot and pillage your soft, civilized underbelly.
I was all hyped up to play Rome because of free roads, but those weren’t a big deal after all given how easy they are to get in Civ VI. The free monuments helped a ton though, and Bath while not very exciting is a very easy +1 Amenities which always helps. I never built anything with my Legions though that might be because of the easy difficulty, not because the forts they can do are useless.
I’ll have to try something a bit more religious next time, never got my own faith in this game and was a bit annoyed Protestantism wasn’t considered my religion even after all my cities had been converted and I had conquered the holy city. So in the end I couldn’t really do much with that part of the game, just watched missionaries run around bashing each other with books. I can imagine not being able to defend at all against that can be a PITA on harder difficulties if somebody is getting close to religious victory.
Damn, 3 use builders cramps my style bad. I love my army of builders swarming over the land forming it to my needs as I build my empire.
It randomed me to America(USA! USA!), and of course I immediately ran into Gandhi, who declared war on me and got his ass kicked for his efforts. I’m playing only on Warlord,I think,and no Barbarians. No need to get smoked too bad in the first try.
There’s some policies later on that give them +2 uses but even then you won’t get that army of them. I do love the instant gratification when you get one of them standing on a coal seam or oil puddle and BOOM! there’s your mine or oil well.
ETA: Of course, a lot of the land is now covered in districts and wonders so there’s less hexes for workers to improve too.
I’ve played for a few hours on Prince. I just retired my Peter the Great game. I got bored with it. I’m going to play US on King to make it a little better. Plus, I’m going to go back to marathon. I think the eras in Standard go by way too fast. By the time I get things they’re already obsolete.
I like the graphics, except for the fog of war.
I wish they had a better civopedia for concepts like Tourism and Armies.
Overall, I’m digging it so far.
Also, is anyone else finding it really slow? My computer is beefy but it seems like the turns take forever to process. Plus, the units move across the map slowly. I’m the that last thing I can change in the settings.
I played Civ IV the first time almost 30 hours straight. I played Civ V not quite so much, but only because I was working when it came out, and couldn’t afford to take the time off.
To me, a really good game grabs you instantly. Alpha Centauri was a really good game. Not feeling the grab, yet. :dubious:
I’m trying it out. It’ll take me a while to get a feel for how districts change things up.
I’m kinda weird in Civ games in that I intensely dislike dead tiles and overlapping city radii. I always space my cities far apart and have them eventually grow into massive metropolises. In Civ V I used a combination of mods and the map editor tailor the game to better fit my criteria. It’ll probably be possible for me to do the same thing in Civ VI, but for now I expect that I’ll end up razing most of the cities I capture. I’m glad at least that in my first game, the city states and rival capitols are spaced apart reasonably well. I’m also optimistic about how mountains give bonuses to nearby districts; I won’t feel so ripped off when I found a city near a mountain range.
I’m playing as China, and digging their abilities so far. The extra charge on each worker is handy, as is being able to use workers to rush early-era wonders (it appears to actually be cheaper to build a worker before starting on a wonder). I’ve got the Hanging Gardens in my capitol Xi’an, which is nice. I’ve got the Oracle in the newish city of Beijing, which has a few very good tiles for holy sites in its radius (can you have multiple holy sites attached to the same city?). Hopefully I’ll be able to found a religion before too long. Up north, Taiyuan is a tiny steppe outpost. I don’t expect much from it any time soon, but there’s a second source of horses there. As soon as I get a worker up there, I’ll start recruiting some cavalry.
I only have room to found one more city (according to my criteria), in the far north; I’m otherwise boxed in by France to the south, Germany to the east, and Scythia to the northeast. Scythia doesn’t like me, and they’ve just conquered a city state. I’m hopefully very close to being able to build an iron mine in the as-yet-unclaimed outskirts of Xi’an, which should boost me into discovering iron working. Then it’ll be time to expand my borders by force.
I just completed my first conquest of my first game: The Scythian capitol. I thought it was quite a slog. I’m playing on Settler difficulty like a big wuss for my first game, but even so I had to blast my way through hordes of horse archers (whatever the Scythian unique is called) and heavy chariots. I say “blast” because the backbone of my assault force was several Crouching Tiger units. This Chinese unique unit is currently state-of-the-art: their crude, short-range cannons can one-shot the more primitive enemy cavalry units most of the time. They attack with strength 50, so that’s a bit stronger than a knight, and they don’t take damage when they attack. Their defense is 35, so they’re far from helpless when on the defensive. I don’t think they can capture cities, though.
Even with these beasts at my command, it took forever to whittle down the enemy army. They seemed to rush build units every turn; I don’t know where they got the money (does the AI just cheat?). They also seemed to be calling in tons of reinforcements from the east (they are/were the suzerain of Jerusalem, so maybe they had troops over there). Maybe it’s a Scythian thing in that they like to have a vast horde of cavalry.
At any rate, I think I’ve broken the back of their military. Capturing their other city should go faster (knock on wood). I might even snag Jerusalem while I’m at it. Everyone thinks I’m a warmonger anyway. Also, I need to grow my tax base before I go bankrupt. My army is expensive, and it’s got my budget in the red. I suppose I could push for a quick peace and disband some units, but where’s the fun in that?
Does anybody know of any way to cycle through all military units? I think I have a few strategically fortified guys I can’t find on the map, but I can’t figure out how to look them up either.
PSA: A lot of people are experiencing an issue that causes the game to not launch properly. In my case, I just got a black screen after pressing the “Continue” button on that screen after the splash screens. The problem seems to arise from a recent Windows Defender update. You can resolve it by either disabling Windows Defender, or just going to its settings and creating an exception for your Civilization VI folder.
Also, did you know that you can rotate your camera by alt-left-clicking?
I’ve only just started a game on release day, but didn’t get “grabbed” and I haven’t got back to it.
My initial observations/complaints:
you apparently can’t tell a unit to be on Alert (sleep until threatened); this is a Big Deal for me, and if true is a terrible oversight. With barbarians being more aggressive in Civ6, having a few units loitering in your outlands is highly desirable.
hitting <space> to Skip Turn doesn’t seem to work for me. Anyone else?
Civ5’s advanced game setup let you turn off things like espionage; Civ6 has no such option, nor does it have the option for “new random seed on reload”.
fog-of-war animations are too cutesy.
I suspect I’ll be fine with the underlying game mechanics, but the missing elements of the UI/menus is leaving me cold.
I have not found any way to obtain the right to transit city-state territory, short of going to war (with the associated war-monger penalty). If you cannot get past city-state territory, that’s a huge negative change from Civ V.
For oldsters like me who can’t read the #@$$$$@!!! tiny text, this hint to increase the font size is great. It does mess up some of the spacing, but not so much that you can’t play. Great workaround until they get the UI size checkbox working.
If you are the suzerain they’ll open their borders for you. This can be achieved by as little as 3 envoys if no other civ is trying to get their attention. At that point you can even control their armies for 30 turns for a bunch of gold.
I’m already hooked. I bought it on Friday and it worked fantastic on my Surface Pro 4 (I was worried it wouldn’t) - its on a really high resolution, but all the textures are low. I ended up playing until 4:30 in the morning. And then a few hours on Saturday. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing at first with the civics tree and new tech tree (and what to do with city states), but I figured that playing a few games through would help.
I started with a random game, which gave me Rome on Prince level on a Continent map (medium size maybe?). First thing I noticed was that damn barbarians are annoying in this game (in a good way). I found out soon that I was next to China, who decided to randomly declare war on me. I was a bit like “OH CRAP” because I had kind of neglected my military. I had a few warriors and slingmen hanging out, but if China had troops on my borders ready to storm me, I’d be a goner. Thankfully they didn’t and a few turns later I finished researching the tech that got me Rome’s legions. Soon after I took one of their cities and decided to accept the peace terms. Only after that I realized, oh crap, the only iron on this side of the continent is next to China’s remaining two cities. So, I kept making legions and battering rams, and after a few terms (and a denouncement by China), I declared war and took the two (Gandhi decided to denounce me for being a warmonger as a result though). Of course during that second Roman-Chinese war, the Chinese city I took in the first war devolved into rebellion (because of a -5 due to war weariness… oops, gotta look at amenities more) - but they spewed out knights… and legions are no match for knights. So… I kind of had to wait them out a bit until I had enough legions that I could surround them and take them out.
So… I’m really liking the game. I didn’t play last night after watching Westworld because I knew I’d be up until like 2 and that’s not good for work on Monday morning. But the game totally was enticing me. Like whispering in my ear - you can only play half an hour. It’ll be already. Damn you Civ addition…
I’m curious - what did you need the Iron for? It’s usually used for Swordmen, but the Roman Legions that replace them can be built without Iron so it has no use for Rome as far as I remember.
Oh, interesting on the Iron. I was just going to post that Iron seems to be in short supply compared to previous Civs, but if it’s not as important, then no biggie.
