Civilization VI Announced, Releasing in October

[Pseudonym]

I really like the new graphics. They remind me of AoM and AoEIII. And the feature list seems to improve many of the things that were lacking in civ 5. The new semi-stacking will hopefully allow for more units on the map and thus units that are less expensive to build than entire buildings so that there is something in between a large early game army and no early game army. Having the buildings on the map puts the focus even more on city placement and looking at the map. One of the advantages of the non-stack armies was that the map mattered militarily beyond "chop down the forrests near your frontier cities". This new feature will hopefully put even more emphasis on city placement. If firaxis does this right I am willing to pretend Civ BE never existed.

I do hope they go back to the intricate tech three of civ IV. Civ V was basically a science rush 80% of the time. Though civ IV was kind of a unit rush, (especially in mp games, rifles for victory) there were multiple ways to go down the tech three depending on your resources (stone, marble, plantations), the units you wanted first or the way you were hoping to tech. (specialists or commerce or both) I also hope they buff up great people points. The seperated gpp of civ 5 made great merchant points effectively worthless, making merchants worthless until you had secularism and that is assuming you have a tall empire where you'd want merchants because I ussually want production specialists or even better: scientists.

I also hope they make wider empires more viable than in civ V because firaxis did what they could to make wide empires weaker. I played a lot of liberty and a wide empire can work, but they ussually just can't tech allong with the tall ones until research labs come allong (which is too late), especially since firaxis decided that allong with having more expensive policies, far more expensive national wonders and higher gold costs, they also needed to nerf liberty so you got your free settler 15 turns later and they had to make every extra city make tech more expensive, and add a static number of trade routes that made more money in large cities. The only thing that wide empires had were better religion bonusses and better production.

I will be checking this out in oktober.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

Anyway, RPS and PC Gamer have a bit more info on the exact mechanics, so...

Oh cool, I'll check those out.

Not that it exactly helps with maps feeling smaller, but you can have 12 'districts' in a city. Each district has different buildings that get built in it [Say an academic district would have libraries, schools and research labs as an example], and provides different bonuses to the districts around it. Additionally, districts gain bonuses from adjacent terrain. For example, the academic district before could gain science bonuses from rainforests and mountains in its vicinity - giving it wildlife to study, and the ability to build great observatories for the sky. Or your religious district might want that mountain for more faith, worshipping god from on high.
The aim of the game as a whole it to both remove a fixed 'meta' strategy that dominates every game, and to have you pay more attention to your geography, so that it affects your civilization more.

It sounds good, especially with the terrain bonuses (that is something I liked about the Civ 5 - the interaction between terrain and buildings).

I do want bigger maps though, and hope they're a part of it.

Agreed... we'd better hope they are moving on from 32 bit. Otherwise this 'epic civilisation building game' will end up looking like it's entirely taking place along the East Coast of the USA.

Anyway, this system is basically a series of mini 'quests' inside the tech tree, which when completed catapult you along the tree. So if you want to research masonry, you can do it the long and slow way, or you could complete the 'quest' of building a quarry, and you'd get a reward of half the progress to Masonry outright. Same goes for boating techs, where you would have quests along the lines of getting a maritime city, which would propel you to sailing, and then you could send out work boats to gather resources and find out more about the sea. Instead of passively researching technologies with a "Tech" score, they want you to instead head out and get new technologies primarily by acting upon the world, actively researching them through these 'quests'.

Sounds like someone at Firaxis has been playing a lot of Endless Legend... which is good. This a better idea. I much prefer being able to just fire up a game and let my strategy evolve organically based on the terrain the RNG deals you. It's going to be a lot of work to balance though. You don't want players completely railroaded into a play style based on the starting location they get.

 

[Joccaren]

Sounds like someone at Firaxis has been playing a lot of Endless Legend... which is good. This a better idea. I much prefer being able to just fire up a game and let my strategy evolve organically based on the terrain the RNG deals you. It's going to be a lot of work to balance though. You don't want players completely railroaded into a play style based on the starting location they get.

Yeah. To some extent, if they were intelligent, they'd use a system similar to what they used in Civ V to help out with that; Starting Location biases.
Zulus always start away from Jungle.
Egypt near Deserts.
Someone else near plains and tundra.
Adding resources to this as well could allow a player to have some influence over the play style they get dealt. Not enough to give them a constant hold over every strategy, but say you wanted a Mongol Horse Rush - play the Mongols, and they have a bias to starting near Horses. There you go, you get horse riding, but nothing else is really guaranteed.
Want to capture the seas? Start as England, with an island starting bonus. Doesn't help you elsewhere, but gives you some direction to start playing in.

Another option, naturally, is in having most resources being viable for a handful of different quests, but different things need to be done. Build an observatory near a mountain to progress navigation, or build a temple to progress aesthetics. Everything could offer 2 bonuses, allowing you to still have some choice over your play style, but I guess the intent is for your terrain to "Rail Road" you to some extent towards a certain play style, to have you play based on your starting terrain, rather than based on some global meta strategy that is always the best. Either way, it'll be interesting to see how they handle it.

 

[4Aces]

Wait for the inevetible shill-awarded GOTY edition with all the missing gameplay repackaged as DLC. Or just in case they put timers on everything for the "excitement" factor.

 

[GothmogII]

Sounds like someone at Firaxis has been playing a lot of Endless Legend... which is good. This a better idea. I much prefer being able to just fire up a game and let my strategy evolve organically based on the terrain the RNG deals you. It's going to be a lot of work to balance though. You don't want players completely railroaded into a play style based on the starting location they get.

Yeah. To some extent, if they were intelligent, they'd use a system similar to what they used in Civ V to help out with that; Starting Location biases.
Zulus always start away from Jungle.
Egypt near Deserts.
Someone else near plains and tundra.
Adding resources to this as well could allow a player to have some influence over the play style they get dealt. Not enough to give them a constant hold over every strategy, but say you wanted a Mongol Horse Rush - play the Mongols, and they have a bias to starting near Horses. There you go, you get horse riding, but nothing else is really guaranteed.
Want to capture the seas? Start as England, with an island starting bonus. Doesn't help you elsewhere, but gives you some direction to start playing in.

Another option, naturally, is in having most resources being viable for a handful of different quests, but different things need to be done. Build an observatory near a mountain to progress navigation, or build a temple to progress aesthetics. Everything could offer 2 bonuses, allowing you to still have some choice over your play style, but I guess the intent is for your terrain to "Rail Road" you to some extent towards a certain play style, to have you play based on your starting terrain, rather than based on some global meta strategy that is always the best. Either way, it'll be interesting to see how they handle it.

They kind of did that in Beyond Earth, as far as the events went or when constructing a building you would get a prompt with two or three options that would give you certain permanent bonuses or extra resources etc. Though, a lot of the choices ended up being more beneficial than others and you'd pick the same ones most of the time. The only variation is if you wanted to go Harmony/Purity/Supremacy. I did kind of like that aspect as depending on what route you picked you needed access to certain resources, so if you had a lot of Firaxite for example near your starting area is was usually better to lean toward Supremacy techs.

Though, only having three paths rather stripped the factions of their personality or any kind of uniqueness, though this is only really in comparison to Alpha Centauri.

 

[lionsprey]

"COMBINED ARMS:
Expanding on the "one unit per tile" design, support units can now be embedded with other units, like anti-tank support with infantry, or a warrior with settlers. Similar units can also be combined to form powerful "Corps" units."
the "corps" worries me. it sounds like they are incing closer to the old stacks of doom and the move away from that was the best thing about civ 5 imho. i can handle how it can get kinda awkward late game just please do not bring those fucking stacks back.

 

[GothmogII]

I was wondering if it was going to be hexes again, which it seems likely given the screenshots, but...why? It's a throwback to Civ's boardgame roots, would allowing turn and point based free movement make it less civ-like? I'm imagining something akin to how the strategic map works in the total war series, i.e. different units would have a limited distance they could travel in a single turn but you are relatively free to position your units exactly where you would like.

I'd even say the army stacking the Total War games use is worth stealing. Although I am interested in the corps and armies features they are supposed to have, was sick of my settlers getting pounded by a lone barbarian jumping out of the fog of war.

 

[Joccaren]

They kind of did that in Beyond Earth, as far as the events went or when constructing a building you would get a prompt with two or three options that would give you certain permanent bonuses or extra resources etc. Though, a lot of the choices ended up being more beneficial than others and you'd pick the same ones most of the time. The only variation is if you wanted to go Harmony/Purity/Supremacy. I did kind of like that aspect as depending on what route you picked you needed access to certain resources, so if you had a lot of Firaxite for example near your starting area is was usually better to lean toward Supremacy techs.

Though, only having three paths rather stripped the factions of their personality or any kind of uniqueness, though this is only really in comparison to Alpha Centauri.

Yeah, I kind of liked that, but you're right, there was almost always a best option, which kind of removed some of the positives of the system.
Rising Tide made it kind of 6 paths to pursue, and removed the need to stick to only what you had the resources for, which was nice, but honestly my biggest problem with that side of things was the map generation. These things always just got dumped anywhere they could get dumped, and their way of balancing that was with much smaller deposits. I'd have rathered rarer, larger deposits, that appeared predominantly in certain areas; Floatstone near the seas and canyons, firaxite near mountains and xenomass in the miasmic wilds. It'd drive conflict in the game to get these resources, rather than just plopping another city down near one of the thousand 2 giving resource, and with a handful of outlying resources, you could still have everyone get one or two resources to use anyway.
The upgrade paths units have for each of the ethics was also nice, with differing options, but again, there was usually one or two 'best' options.
Honestly Rising Tide is a great improvement to the game on most of its failing fronts, but it also introduces a bunch of new issues as well. They at least accomplished the mission of giving each leader a personality I can predict at least though, and they all seem somewhat unique at least.

"COMBINED ARMS:
Expanding on the "one unit per tile" design, support units can now be embedded with other units, like anti-tank support with infantry, or a warrior with settlers. Similar units can also be combined to form powerful "Corps" units."
the "corps" worries me. it sounds like they are incing closer to the old stacks of doom and the move away from that was the best thing about civ 5 imho. i can handle how it can get kinda awkward late game just please do not bring those fucking stacks back.

In some ways its sort of like a bunch of people's solution for an inbetween; 3 unit stacks. Rather than allowing unlimited stacking, and rather than forcing the annoyance of only one unit per tile and the late game logistics bloat that causes, allow 3 units per tile.
Mechanically they do sadly merge, rather than stack, however a merged unit is 40% stronger than an unmerged one. So if you merge two units into a "Corps", you'll get one unit with 140% of the original strength. Its not as good as two individual units, but if you've got a big army and you're not going to be able to bring both units to bare its a pretty decent option. Armies of 3 units I'd assume are another 40% more powerful still.
Corps also become only available in the Napoleonic Era [I'm assuming this is the Renaissance], whilst Armies come in in the early modern Era, when applicable technologies are researched. So they're not going to be widespread, and they're far more situational than stacks of doom. Still remains to be seen how it actually plays out, but they're not stacks of doom. It does emphasise production a bit more over tech again, and makes the two a bit more comparable [In Civ V tech ruled. Once you hit a certain number of troops, there were vastly diminishing returns due to the logistics if you wanted to pump out more, and usually a single higher-tech unit could defeat two lower-tech units. With the ability to merge excess units into a stronger one, a single lower tech unit seems potentially able to hold out against a higher tech one slightly better, and you don't run into the logistics block as early.

I was wondering if it was going to be hexes again, which it seems likely given the screenshots, but...why? It's a throwback to Civ's boardgame roots, would allowing turn and point based free movement make it less civ-like? I'm imagining something akin to how the strategic map works in the total war series, i.e. different units would have a limited distance they could travel in a single turn but you are relatively free to position your units exactly where you would like.

I'd even say the army stacking the Total War games use is worth stealing. Although I am interested in the corps and armies features they are supposed to have, was sick of my settlers getting pounded by a lone barbarian jumping out of the fog of war.

Eh, it throws a bunch of complications into the mix. For one, how do you place cities? They're pre-placed in Total War for a reason, it makes their job a lot easier. It also makes terrain defensive bonuses harder to signal and convey, army combat harder to handle, zones of control would work a lot differently, as would blocking terrain, and how would placing improvements work? and...
Total War's system works because the entire game is built to support it, and it supports the feel of the battles you have in Total War. Civ's system works better for it, as its mechanics all support that style of movement. You COULD turn Civ into Total War, but that seems a little redundant when Total War exists. People go to Civ for that more board game feel a lot of the time, and other games like Total War or Europa when they want something closer to a simulation.

As for the settler issue, ALWAYS send them out with a Warrior. Warriors and settlers, or really any military units and settlers, do stack. They CAN be a pain to move, but if you pay attention to them, its usually fine. You should do the same for workers TBH. Don't do it in a multiplayer game, and leave your worker undefended, and be prepared for an enemy scout to declare war, steal it, then make peace. Because how are you going to retaliate when you're not geared for war? And they get a free worker. Barbarians love doing it too, and its one of the biggest pluses to starting near city states; declare war, steal worker, make peace. Its so almost exploitable we actually banned the practice in the games my friends and I run. Undefended civilian units are just a bad move.