It is a slow and easy game that is good as I no longer like loud, flashy, twitchy games. I play as a single-player, on the huge map with only a few AIs, as the Roman and always go for the religious victory. I most always win and that is starting to get old.
Nonetheless, we can all agree the finest game ever was Duke Nukem 3D; Atomic Edition.
I’ve got VI on the Switch. It’s okay with touch controls once you figure out where everything is. The tutorials don’t really tell you how to access all the things and there’s just too many screens you have to bring up. It would be a nightmare without touch.
~Max
These?
~Max
Yeah! I love those guys.
I’ve only seen them for ten seconds and they are already better than the advisors in 3 through six. That guy on the right looks like Jason Bateman trying to be Elvis in a toga.
One of those minor features I always liked is that palace minigame in Civ III.
~Max
I enjoy Civ. Until VI I only had played the odd-numbered ones. (1,3,5). I liked 3, and played a bunch of that. When I got V though, it felt very different to play and how to go about winning various ways. And VI was another shift. Not as obvious, but things play differently.
Having just recently done a faith victory in VI, what helped me was thinking about my missionaries and apostles like army units.
Instead of worrying about gold and resources, you need a good income of faith to build/support your religion. Unless the AI doesn’t have a religion, you need to not just convert a city, but also keep it from reverting from pressure. And side from upgrading your religion, Apostles are best kept for attacking other religious units instead of converting imo.
Even trying to focus on religion for victory, I had to be careful about not getting it through diplomacy too.
The change in map grid isn’t a big change; if other aspects of the game were good, I wouldn’t mind. But it’s still, I think, a change for the worse, and a pointless change for the worse.
My playstyle in any of these games is to go for tech dominance, and usually the tech victory condition. Basically, I put almost everything into technological and industrial improvement, and mostly only build military once a city has nothing else productive to build. Early game, I mostly survive by, whenever I’m attacked, using my tech and money advantage to bribe all of my neighbors into fighting on my behalf. And if the enemy are at the gates of one of my undefended cities, I gift it to one of my allies, before it falls: This both saves me the happiness hit of losing a city, and puts a basic defender in it to bleed the enemy, while still leaving me free to eventually recapture it.
By about the late medieval or early industrial era (assuming I survive that long), most of my major cities have finished everything else productive they can do, and so they do start building military… but since they’re now so productive, and they’re building nothing but up-to-date units, I very quickly end up with the strongest military in the world, too. And once I get railroads, it’s all over, because being able to instantly bring your entire military to bear against every incursion is a huge force multiplier. After that, it’s just a couple of centuries of mopping up. At which I usually take my time, because I like going for a high score.
I played the ever-loving heck out of that game. I will always think of an 8-bit version of the Goldberg Variations as the German national anthem.
CIV Iv BTS here.
And I play it often.
I’ve played all of them from I to VI, including SMAC and Colonization.
Civ I was genre-defining. Sure, it would look clunky and dated now, even if you spiffed up the 8-bit graphics, but at the time it was like nothing anyone had ever seen. It wrote the book on 4X games, and unlike a lot of pioneers, wasn’t immediately overshadowed by a second wave that did it all better. The fact I can still remember events in Civ I games is a measure of how good it was. Every other game in the series has basically taken the Civ I single-settler-to-mighty-empire concept and polished it just a little bit more. Someone called it “the best story-telling game ever”, despite it containing no dialogue and not a single scripted event.
Civ II was probably the one I played most. It looked great (compared to I), played smooth, was very moddable and it was just great fun to play big map and build a 100-city empire, even though the AI was childishly easy to beat once you’d worked out the city-sprawl strategy.
Civ III was the one I didn’t really like. They tried to nerf the city-sprawl with the corruption mechanic, but that just meant that by the mid-game any city outside the bubble centred on your capital was on permanent 100% corruption, which made expanding pointless unless you needed a special resource. And the trick to it was to rush the Forbidden Palace so you had two bubbles where your cities could actually build stuff.
Civ IV was a step back towards II. I remember it as the first one to bring in things like religion, culture and borders, which gave a bunch of new options at the price of some added complexity. It was also less railroaded in the early game - you could go for tech/wonders, land-grab or try an early rush. Later on, of course, it was all doomstack-from-hell.
Civ V had some things I liked and some things I didn’t. I didn’t mind the switch to hexes, I did mind that the strict one-unit-per-hex rule turned maneuvering armies into an exercise in tedious micro. The new religious and culture victories were a change form endlessly bashing cities in the endgame, but they tried too hard to nerf early expansion. To me “I’ve located a wonderful city-site, but I can’t send a settler there because my entire empire would erupt in uncontrollable revolt” just isn’t Civ.
Civ VI has never really gripped me. It’s friendlier (at least to my playstyle) than V. I like some of the things they’ve tried to do, like making cities specialise rather than everywhere-build-everything, but ultimately, it’s a bit same-old, same-old.
I think that the Civ concept - and maybe the whole 4X genre - is finally getting just a bit played out. They’ve been up and down and back and forth but they’ve never really solved three big issues:
So I’m not holding my breath for Civ VII. But boy has it been a fun journey.
(Oh, and I have no idea why they dropped the palace/throneroom mini-games, which were always great fun. And ranged naval units have been stupidly overpowered since forever.)
I happened to play a few games of Civ VI with my best friend this weekend.
First of all, I have to say that my favorite cersions were Civ I and II. III I loved too. I don’t have anything particular to say about those games except that I was profoundly addicted to them; I have wonderful memories of playing the original game with my Dad until the wee hours of the morning. Whatever else was true of them they were insanely fun to play, and I would play for hours, and so they must have been great games.
Civ IV to VI have been cool but they aren’t the same. A few observations about VI, specifically;
Civics are almost as bad. There’s scores and scores of civics by midgame you have a ludicrous number to choose from, and honestly most of them you’ll never use. Governors are the same thing; the cartoonish nature of them takes me out of the game and, again, they have abilities you’ll never get around to using, because it’s almost always better to hire another than it is to develop an existing one.
On larger maps, war becomes pointless. We played our first game on a normal sized map and until the information age I had no reason to fight a war except for with barbarians. I never went to war at all until the end of the game. I had lots of room to keep expanding, and by the time the information age came around I had achieved a level of technological and economic might no other country could stop; the game was basically over. There is, on a medium to larger map, rarely a good reason to fight, unless you’re in a very unenviable geographic position - and if you are, you’re going to lose, because the cost of fighting a war puts you way behind even if you win.
Continuing from point 2, cities are simply too hard to take until the build bombers. They are just insanely strong, and it generally takes a lot of turns and a huge expenditure of resources to capture one. One you have bombers, though, they fall easily; two passes from a B-24 and you can stroll right in. It’s preposterously imbalanced.
Money and research are everything. Faith? Pfft. I will steamroll you. Culture, whatever. I just concentrate on research and money, and by the later stages of the game I win. With coffers full of cash and a tech lead, I can buy whatever I want when I want it; by midgame I’m buying settlers and expanding with speed and increasing my lead and you’re dead. You want to put up a fight? I’ll buy five tanks and two artillery and a bomber in the next two turns.
If money and research are everything, well, why not make them everything? Why bother with faith, and why is culture so easily overwhelmed?
This leads to a problem merrick notes, which is that in these games everything is exponential. In our New Year’s Day game, I got off to a better start than my buddy or any AI, so victory was inevitable once the midgame was reached. I was bigger and more advanced, which meant I would inevitably get even bigger and more advanced. The game doesn’t have any mechanic or rule to counter that problem. Most 4X games don’t.
There are in theory ways to stop that. Earlier versions penalized you for expanding too quickly, but they overdid it, to be honest, especially Civ III.
I get the sense Civ VI, and all its expansions, wasn’t all that carefully playtested for actual balance. The game looks great and it should work, but every game I play seems… soulless, somehow.
Borders, culture, and cultural victory were all in III (and in fact borders were in SMAC). Though admittedly the Civ III cultural victory was poorly-implemented: It basically consisted of rushing to getting universities and cathedrals in as many cities as possible by AD 750, and then waiting a millennium while nothing else important happened.
Civ IV was the first to have religion, though, which in retrospect is kind of surprising: How was that not in the game right from the beginning?
Shows how the memory fades. I don’t recall any culture side to III, though I sorta-maybe remember borders. I remember it as the one that introduced special resources. Of course, if the culture win involved twiddling thumbs for 1000 years, I probably got bored and went for the just-kill-everyone victory instead.
And as well you should. It’s supposed to be a video game, not a video wait.
Games need to present you with decisions and crises to solve. In Civ VI, and to be honest Civ V, if you don’t have a crisis early on, you likely never will.
I was playing Shogun II the other day. There is always a problem when you’re playing that game. If you get off to a huge early lead (relatively easy to do if you play as the Shimazu or Chosokabe) things can still take a horrible turn for the worse if one of your big armies loses one battle, and even if you’re ahead, that can happen. Instantly you find yourself scrambling to rebuild your strategic position, and it isn’t easy. A military alliance against you can shatter your income and put you in a position of needing to conquer a few provinces RIGHT NOW so you can loot them. There is very little waiting; sometimes you’re briefly at peace and just building but you always, always have a problem to worry about, in part because if you’re not winning battles, someone else is, and that guy is gonna be a problem sooner or later. It’s great.
Watching. I just bought civ VI for the switch, on a whim, and I’m curious how people interact with it. I haven’t played any of the others.
The cultural victory wasn’t relevant, but culture itself was, because it was what determined the borders. Each city, when founded, had cultural borders that just covered the 3x3 square centered on the city (and you couldn’t even work tiles outside of that range). At 10 culture, the borders expanded to the 21-tile “fat cross” that a city can work, and then it expanded again at 100 and 1000 culture. Culture made your cities a lot more defensible, because enemies don’t benefit from roads within your borders, and so with big enough borders, even fast units would use up their move before reaching the city itself (allowing for counterattacks from your own units, which worked better than defending against attacks, for multiple reasons). Culture was also involved in the calculation for cities to spontaneously change sides, and I think that having strong culture also made other civs friendlier to you.
The reason why you needed to have the pieces in place for cultural victory by 750 was that old buildings doubled the culture they produced after 1000 years. So for instance, a library was worth 3 culture per turn, but once it got to 1000 years after that library was built, it was instead worth 6 culture per turn. And this age effect was one of very few things that depended on years, rather than turns (each turn is worth 50 years at the start of the game, gradually decreasing to 1 year per turn at the end). So a culture building that was finished in 750 would turn 1000 in 1750, and so have 200 turns of doubled culture, but one finished in 950 (20ish turns later) would get only 100 double-culture turns, and one finished in 1050 would never have any. I mean, yeah, you could get a little bit of culture from later buildings like research labs (and if you ever get 1000-year-old research labs, you’re doing something very right), that might push the date of your cultural victory forward a few turns, but mostly it’s decided by those old cathedrals and universities.
I started with 1, and my favourite is 2, but I’ve mostly played whichever is the most recent. I also dabble in Freeciv:
which lets you play basically Civ 2 in a very mod-able way, but not as much as I probably should.
Back in the day, Microprose made a Civ: Call To Power game which I spent a fair amount of time in - that one had different ‘layers’ you could exploit, and also different genres, including a Fantasy one which I spent most of my time with. Sadly, it suffered from not being very good.
My problem with III was that it introduced the special resources, which meant you suddenly couldn’t make Swordsmen unless you had a source of Iron, and that never seemed to fall right for me. It’s a system that’s got better over the years, although recently they’ve started limiting how many of a unit you can build with each resource you control, which I’m not fond of.
That’s partially the nature of the beast. All 4X games tend to fall into 3 phases.
In Phase 1 you’re basically playing solitaire, building your initial base. It’s you against the game system, with minimal interaction with other factions. This is obviously limited, though it can also be where the game is won or lost (see: snowballs).
Phase 2 is where you face off against the other factions, and you have to worry about what they’re up to and what they can do to do.
Phase 3 is often the longest (and least fun). You’re too powerful to care about the AI factions, so all that’s left is to grind to your chosen victory condition or (in newer games) build up to tackle the Final Boss.
Total War or Paradox games tend to drop an X or two to start you in Phase 2, with the enemy in your face and threats all around. I can see the attraction of this, though I quite like playing Phase 1, so I’m happy either way. The problem is when you arrive in Phase 3 too early, and you realise you still got 100 turns to play and nobody can touch you.
From a game-design perspective, balancing this is really hard, because you need AI factions that grow just fast enough to still offer a challenge in the late game, without completely killing the player in the early game and without it feeling like punishing the player for playing.
Shogun 2 is one of the few that handle this really well - at the start you’re a little shark among all the other little sharks and just when you think you’ve grown up to be a big shark Realm Divide hits and the whole damn school comes for you.
But I was playing quite a bit of Three Kingdoms (before the latest patch broke it), and getting thoroughly annoyed that every time I was actually in a position to make a move against Dong Zhou or the Yellow Turbans some random neighbour would randomly attack me for no reason and I’d have to drop everything to stamp out the new fire. And I gave up on Total Warhammer because it was just too punitive (“Ooh, look! Another doomstack has just appeared out of thin air right next to my weakest city.”)
I’m having some difficulty fully understanding the Three Kingdoms interface - it wants me to assign a few more people to ministerial positions and I cannot figure out how to do that - but my desire to learn it is rather reduced if a patch broke it.
If I’m going for domination or an otherwise huge number of cities, I’ll beeline communism + FP + SPQH. Communism is necessary if you have a large number of cities - it removes the distance penalty (leaving only the number of cities penalty), makes the palace more effective at reducing corruption and waste, and lets you build the SPQH which reduces them even more.
~Max