There are some bugs and oversights, but it’s a little cleaner than the Civ V launch.
And it’s a blast! They kept almost everything I liked about Civ V, and added some cool and interesting stuff. The main theme is a lot more is circumstantially determined–in particular there are big boosts to your research and civic development depending on what has happened elsewhere in the game, most of it under your control. There is also a ton more stuff that depends on terrain.
I also love that great people are unique. For example, Darwin gives you a bunch of science depending on how close you can get him to natural wonders.
I haven’t enjoyed a civ game as much at launch time since Civ II.
It definitely gIves you the freedom to screw up tech advancement. I made it to battleships, but can’t build one because I haven’t discovered coal. Now I have to go way back to traverse through to get to the coal discovering tech.
Sleep and hitting Space to skip turn don’t work in the first semi-tutorial game but they do work when you start another game.
Advanced game set-up does have Random Seed – you have to scroll down to it. There are also some other options like No Barbarians; don’t know if No Espionage is there.
My question: Is there a way to return units you levy from a City-State? I did it once and they never went back home; I ended up deleting them.
I think there are a few things about the UI that bother me that will subside in time. For instance, where is a combat unit’s XP bar? I just noticed that it’s a teeny tiny light brown (read: camouflaged) bar near the bottom right of the screen. I’m getting used to the hotkeys for showing religion and beauty and whatnot.
I’m around WWI-era tech, and feel like I’m finally about to start building my cities “up” in earnest. My farms are super-productive now. Neighborhoods should alleviate my chronic housing shortages (I like how I can build them even on arctic tiles). I think I have enough amenities for now (or at least I will once all this war weariness wears off). I’ve got factories in most of my cities, and lots of them are placed where they can benefit multiple cities. I’ve got enough city-state bonuses that I should focus more on building districts.
I’ve been playing Civ V, getting ready to get Civ VI… and the more I read in this thread, the more impatient I get. Something tells me I might be making my purchase for the weekend.
I haven’t gotten that much played yet but by general impressions:
I love the mechanics of the game.
The interface, not so much.
I am admittedly almost irrationally irritated by the fact you can’t re-name cities, an absolutely bizarre omission that would surely have taken all of six minutes to put into the game, but it’s got other irritations too - as Max points out experience bars are hard to read. A unit in a city will obscure the name of the city. It’s not easy to determine how happy a city is. I like the look they were going for, the parchment of terra incognita and the washed out color of stuff you’ve discovered but cannot see right now, but the interface takes way more furrowed-brow study to figure out what the hell was going on than previous versions.
Played for a couple of nights. Started a couple of short games that I quit after about 50 turns do to learning oops’. Am about 200 turns into a standard game…
I like the Great Person variety, they’re individuals with different bonuses to consider now.
I love the civ policies and the ‘card’ swapping, it lets me focus on builders for s short time, units for another. I can see it being very useful for war prep, for example.
I saw seige towers but haven’t really played with them yet. They enable other units to bypass city defense rating. This looks like a very good tactical variation addition to allow early-era games to crack the city nut without slogging through tons of catapults.
City ranged attacks don’t happen until you get the walls researched and built. Neat.
Religion and prophets look much more flexible, it looks deeper and more interesting than Civ5 but I haven’t spent enough time with it.
City State envoy system is a big improvement, as are the mini-quests given.
Less penalty to ‘flat growth’ instead of ‘tall growth’, lessens the overpowered tall cities from dominating the progress curve.
The most complete and stable Civ at release time I’ve ever seen, good job devs!
Minuses and weird things:
AI doesn’t seem to upgrade their units, and builds about 50% siege units.
‘runaway tech’ still appears to be present, not sure how impossible it is to play catch-up yet. Civ5 would quickly hit the point of quitting game early before the inevitable tech-stomping.
Some muddy choices in textures and colors, a bit harder to distinguish content from the clutter.
Game stat analyses seem less discoverable, I still need to dig for various charts, graphs, etc that I can’t easily find. Just learning curve I hope.
My Little Pony Equestria mod hasn’t landed yet. Fluttershy’s words are backed with nukes!
Very annoying little thing – when your turn starts the unit the screen is centered on may not be the one that is going to move when you click – click to move in for a kill and nothing happens, then realize that some other unit somewhere across the map is on the way to where you just clicked.
I’ve abandoned a few games, lost one, and won one. The game is better than Civ V, which I didn’t like and quickly stopped playing, and while it does certainly have the addiction thing going, it really isn’t grabbing me.
I miss the stack of doom, surging at the border waiting to go on the final sweep.
Just got it last night, and I’m a Civ veteran. I know there’s always a learning curve, but I’m having trouble figuring out what the hell is going on. Any tips of the best way to get going? Is it just playing a bunch of games?
I guess this happens every time a new version comes out, but I then put in so many hours that it’s hard to remember not understanding what’s going on!
I’m finding the boosts you get for discovering a natural wonder or killing a barbarian throw me off. I’ve gone and planned x turns to reach y and then suddenly a new civic appears.
And I’d love natural wonders to be labeled on the map. Or if they are, would someone be good enough to embarrass me and tell me where?
I’m nearing the end of my first game. I’ve wrapped up the tech tree and have just one more civic to research. Maybe I’ll keep building up my civ for another century or so before really trying to win.
I combined most of my troops into corps and armies just for kicks. It’s an interesting idea; hopefully it retains the best aspects of one-unit-per-tile while still allowing a hint of the old stack-of-doom goodness to creep in. I don’t expect to go to war any time soon, though.
My civ has gone communist, but an idealistic best-case scenario type of communist. I implemented the New Deal policy; while expensive, it allowed my cities to grow much larger. I used the extra workforce to build banks and stock exchanges, so I’m making more money than ever.
It seems like the late-game tech tree is rather sparse for a peacenik civ; it’s pretty much just a round of unit upgrades and space program projects. I wish there were some sort of tangible benefit to researching future tech like in Civ IV. Come to think of it, I’m suddenly tempted to conquer the scientific city-states now that their bonuses are useless to me.
Part of it is Civ VI doesn’t have that good UI and doesn’t explain stuff like what luxuries do to your amenities or how your city borders expand at all. Some information is basically hidden (did you know clicking an unit’s name gives you a list of your units?) and some doesn’t exist at all in game. I’ve been reading Reddit and there’s quite a few things they’ve had to dig up from code or figure out by experimenting.
So if you are feeling a bit lost it might not be you, it might be the game.
Yeah, it’s the game. Once you play it a bit these things reveal themselves, but it’s not nearly as intuitive as previous incarnations.
My impression is that this is a much more complicated Civ than any previous vanilla version, and the presentation doesn’t help. Like most of you I’m a Civ veteran who’s logged more hours playing every version of this game than I’ve spent with my extended family, so this shouldn’t be hard for me to pick up, but it’s a bit hard to gather. I am still not totally clear how happiness and amenities work, to be honest.
I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s going on with luxuries and amenities. I mean, I get that the luxuries appear to be similar to Civ5, but how does that relate to amenities?
Also, I think I figured out that “builders” work differently than “workers” from previous versions. They seem to do their improvements in one turn, but have limited uses? And roads are built by trade, not workers?
I have the opinion now, after several hours playing, that the designers thought: “let’s change up a bunch of things regarding how the game looks, so we can impose our own vision on it.” Then, they failed to realize that the fact THEY knew what was going on meant everyone else would.
There are SEVERAL annoying interface aspects to this game. I will also point out that the animations on the map are some of the least interesting since the concept of showing animations was initiated. The fight sequences are corny (really, Roman legionnaires doing flip attacks, then everyone tamely returns to their starting point?), the terrain improvements are less than compelling to watch, and what in the world is it someone thought they were doing with those crabs??
Barbarian scouts are really, really annoying. Not because of any harm they do (actually, they are a good source of experience points to farm), but because there are so many of them that setting your own scouts on automated exploration is a waste of time; they always run into barbarian scouts and ask you for instructions.
I dislike the cartoonish heads of state. I’m not surprised they went that way, though. For some reason, animators shudder when they get to the point that they can make real persons look really real. (See: Disney and everything post Lion King)
I think I’ve figured out that you have to kill EVERYTHING off that a city-state or civ has for them to be eliminated (not sure if that’s an option in the game setup). I captured Vilnius, but Brazil stayed at war with them for several turns after, and even made peace with them when I attacked Brazil. Now, I have what I THOUGHT was Brazil’s only city, but Brazil keeps trying to make peace with me, and even is advancing in science (so maybe they have another city somewhere). But I don’t think so, so I don’t quite get this.
I can see this would be a great game if it was like the college days where I could take a month off and play it constantly. Getting the Eurekas committed to memory would really help efficiently progressing, but I don’t know enough to plan for them, only occasionally stumbling into one at a good time currently.
I have a horrible suspicion that at higher levels the AI players will use optimizing algorithms to take advantage of eurekas to advance and kick my ass easily.
Every new luxury you get adds +1 amenity to four most needy cities. Duplicates are useless, trade them to AIs. This isn’t explained in the game so it’s no wonder you haven’t figured it out.
Yes and yes. Traders are really good in this game, whenever you start a new city and need to get it going you can build a trader in one of your production powerhouse cities, relocate it to the new city and then send it to one of your cities with high production for big production bonus. You can also use them to make roads towards an AI civ you intend to attack so your troops can move faster.