I’m pretty confident the different ways of winning can be switched on and off. Although I don’t think that necessarily stops the religion mechanic it does mean religion (or whatever you switch off) cannot be used to win the game either by the player or one of the AI states. But religion being an annoyance makes it no different from the real world.
Last year, someone put me onto the internet theory that Gandhi was mis-programmed in Civ 1 to be extremely fond of using nuclear weapons when threatened and that as a nod to this they kept this tendency in the subsequent releases. Sid Meier debunked this in his recent autobiography but it’s an interesting read nevertheless:
I don’t actually know if it’s a patch problem, or the Windows environment or corruption somewhere, but recently my copy of Three Kingdoms has become unplayable due to crashes. You win a battle and the game crashes before you can save. The enemy attacks and the game crashes in the pre-battle sequence. You reload the game, the same enemy attacks and the game crashes again.
Other games have kept me up late – Hunt for Red October, Bard’s Tale, the gold-box AD&D games, Diablo II, &c – but the original Civ was the only one that ever managed to keep me up all night.
Don’t really remember if I played II or III, though the boxes look familiar and I’m sure I must havve played at least one of them. I’ve put many hours into Call to Power and IV, but haven’t tried V or VI.
One thing I really liked was the undersea portions of Call to Power. I usually play IV with both add-ons, but with spies turned off, and always on the largest map size.
Strangest game: Expanding too rapidly can bog your civilisation down, slowing growth and causing you to lose money. In one game, twelve of the first thirteen native villages I entered gave me settlers…
I’m apparently the only one who likes Civ 5’s hex/one unit per hex rule. It turns what was a boring/useless mechanic of just having infinite armies into a little tactical wargame that requires some planning with unit positioning and terrain.
In previous civ games, it barely even matters where units exist. You just put them in a giant stack, and once you’ve got railroads, you can basically instantly teleport them to wherever you need. There’s basically no tactical choices in the combat. You might as well just resolve combat like RISK at that point - who has the biggest stack? roll some dice.
Civ 5 is not a great tactical game, but it’s much more substantial in the combat complexity than the others in the series.
Communism is good for corruption if and only if you have exactly 24 cities. It doesn’t so much remove the distance penalty, as apply it equally to all of your cities. Overall, the corruption level of communism is greater even than that of despotism, meaning that if you have any sort of decent-sized empire, none of your cities will be productive. With the other government types, sure, your outposts on other continents (to claim a resource, and provide a toehold if you need to invade) won’t be doing anything useful, but at least your core cities will be producing.
The effect was most noticeable as AI civs switched over to communism (mostly when war weariness got too much to maintain democracy). I never once saw any of them develop any tech after that point.
Civ 6 is on sale on Steam. Tempted to pull the trigger after this thread has gotten me feeling the Civ itch.
A responsible person would just play one of the Civ 4 expansions I own but have never played or to play a Civ 5 scenario and see if I can learn how to win for a change. But I am not that person.
I can see its advantages, and it would be fine if the unit movement was a little faster or the stacking limit enforced a bit less harshly (e.g. letting you swap two units in adjacent hexes). As it is, it turns moving an army of any size into a sliding-block puzzle, where the main challenge isn’t the enemy, it’s getting your own troops out of each others’ way. Plus the autopathing can’t handle it at all, which means you have to move everything manually.
The automation has always been super janky. I really adjusted to the hexes without any issue. I can see how the battle logistics become challenging but as a player who didn’t often make war I generally found the hexes an improvement. It seemed to make the city views and borders and such much cleaner and more logical and generally allowed a bit freer movement when exploring.
I wanted to add some thoughts about my first post, when I said Civ VI “is too complicated.”
Strategy game series always get more complicated, it seems, and in every case I can think of, it’s too complicated. Europa Universalis is now more complicated than it needs to be, for instance.
The complexity of a game has nothing to do with how good it is. FTL: Faster than Light is a less complicated game than Civ VI, but is much better. Minecraft is less complicated than a lot of games, but is better.
Hell… chess is a simple game, but it’s perfect. Monopoly is more complex than chess (in terms of rules) but is a fundamentally broken game. Scrabble is simple and wonderful, but any number of board games than are ten times more complex suck.
I don’t know why they keep adding shit to Civ games while missing obvious problems in interface and play balance and pacing. Well, I have a suspicion; I think they’re responding to fans. Fans love to go on message boards and comment sections and demand MORE!!!1!!!1! Add this and this and this! Which is understandable, if you love Civ you want more, but that’s not good game design.
I’m no game designer, but it seems obvous to me that Civ VII should actually be simplified in a few obvious ways:
Remove religious units. Keep religion, but have its effects better blended into strategic management.
Find ways to correct the exponential power victory problem.
More action. Force the player to make decisions besides just founding new cities.
Fewer civics.
Get rid of the tourism mechanic, which was stupid from the get go.
The World Congress thing is just asinine. Many of the resolutions are bizarrely stupid. Improve it or eliminate it.
And while I realize it’s a pipe dream, this thing where they come up with a few new civs every six months and charge you $20 for it is ridiculous. The game should ship with 100 civilizations right off the top; that can’t possibly cost much to do. They probably had all the civs ready to go to start with.
I’ve played all the versions, and they all seem to have the same issue for me.
Unless I’m doing something totally wrong, there is basically no way to ever start a war with someone without basically being at war with everyone (or at least everyone hating you) for the rest of eternity. Even if I’m just fighting back against an aggressive neighbor, I feel like I get tagged as overly warlike by the AI, and they hate me. And once they hate me, they hate me for the rest of the game no matter what I do.
So, I basically decide early in the game whether I want to have a peaceful game where I try to win by science, or an all out war game where I try to win by domination.
I have played them all since Civ 2 (and SMAC) though from Civ 3 onwards only a few months at most. I like them and I think they have improved steadily. Civ 5 and Civ 6 are a pleasure to look at and I find that the newer games have at least one interesting innovation, for example the district system in Civ 6. What keeps me from playing more is that the games become rather tedious towards the end especially if you are going for a domination win which I usually do. I find that the case even on the smaller maps I usually play. Just too many units to move around. Perhaps I would enjoy the game more if I stopped in the middle but I don’t like doing that either.
BTW I didn’t know Sid Meier had written a memoir. Is it any good? May get it on Audible.
I played a decent amount of Civ I when it first came out, but shared the computer with my younger brothers, so not as much as I might have otherwise. On the other hand it was one of the few games we had where watching and giving advice actually was fun. I revisited it a few times later, but then someone told me about some powerful cheats and I lost interest.
I only really paid attention to Civ II, but never had it myself, and after that it was all off my radar until I got VI for the Switch in January.
I find it to be perfectly fine to play just using a controller, though there were some actions I didn’t catch the instructions for initially and had to Google. I’ve played a variety of civilizations to all the goals except points at increasing difficulty, and a couple of the bundled scenarios, but then I burned out a bit.
As others have said the end game can get quite tedious. When playing for domination I occasionally resort to just razing most enemy cities to avoid having to manage them, which just feels wrong. And at high difficulty it becomes very much a “restart over and over again”-game, because the initial position and local resources is so essential, even if you are likely to survive most games to the end even if you get boxed in and left behind technologically.
I feel the ranking system when you win is annoying.
What do you think about the loyalty mechanic in R&F? Makes it quite difficult for me to get a foothold on a distant and already populated continent, especially if I’m taking a port by force.
I wouldn’t mind the complexity if I didn’t have to micromanage all the time. If I had a religious advisor who came to me with a number of plans for automatic religion spread, and let me pick one with an option to micro, that would be great.
I remember that. I just basically assumed that everyone was at war with me all the time because the other civilizations would randomly declare war or peace with me anyways.
Yeah–the penalties really kick in if you are the one to declare war. I always try to make friends with a few of the other civs then denounce someone when they do. And I never backstab. That will get everyone to hate your guts. When fighting back against an aggressor, if you take most of his cities or completely wipe him out from the game, you will rack up huge penalties.
But some civs will hate you no matter what–like Shaka–who will denounce you right after meeting you and if you are neighbors with him, you are pretty much guaranteed to be attacked. Atilla is the same way. But–I’ve had good luck being friends with Mongola for entire games, as well as Netherlands, Sweden, and India.
I don’t trust Elizabeth at all as she will denounce you at the drop of a hat.