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Playing on Nation got greedy and built a bunch of pyramids and made two three-territory cities I was making GBS threads out districts so fast my capital was near rebellion and then the Huns came and conquered one of my cities in one turn whoops! Should probably respect my opponents. Also this super annoyed me: "I can't wait to climb the many mountains here and map the stars!" "No. Just this mountain." "But the other three...?" "NO."  Did I do something wrong? If not then adjacency only applying to a specific territory is not intuitive. I went Zhou just for this!
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Aug 19, 2021 19:14
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:24 |
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It's so weird that my sprawling continent-wide city can rush-buy a settler and be like City: "OK we spent 900 gold you've got all the materials you need for an aqueduct, a lumber mill, a school, and three different kinds of markets! That's on top of the fountain, access to basic irrigation, and a complete set of forges." Settlers: "Uh.. what the heck are those?" City: "We invented them 2,000 years ago but never got around to making them because we had too many Pyramids to make." On another note - my empire in this game has no identity. I'm the Egyptians, then the Celts, then someone, then someone else, gently caress I forget who that was, then I think I'm Japanese now?" Civ did a great job giving civs identities but letting you play them. You could take the English and found a ruthless form of polytheism but they were still English and that never changed. In addition your opponents never changed - you could count on the Aztecs to be assholes and you knew if you tried to convert Spain they'd be pissed as hell. In this game the Olmecs suddenly turn into the Huns and lay waste to your empire. In Civ the "character" of the empire was always how you played it, not the bonuses / drawbacks it had. In this game you can choose the bonuses / drawbacks for every era's situation and never worry commit to any identity. It feels less like building and more like a hot-seat game where I play a cool Egypt game for 30 turns where I'm building up a solid production output with chariots for defense then my buddy hops in and goes full CIVUS ROMAN BITCHES and there's no connective tissue. Civ has the lack of choice, Humankind has too much choice, the truth must be somewhere in between. Also too much elevation blocking cliffs are dumb as hell. You're telling me you have to spend a whole turn crossing that river but now a battle is going on so you can scramble 5 tiles and shoot? Neolithic age is a great change, overall game mechanics are good, combat is a great middle ground between Civ 4 and Civ 6, art is gorgeous, but it needs a ton of tuning a ton of balancing and it needs to feel like I'm building something. If I'm Olmec I want to feel like I'm shepherding this enigmatic civilization through the ages, not that I'm the Olmecs until oh wait now I'm some forgetful Persian faction oh now this bonus on the Germans looks good but I need more influence maybe some Poland? It turns the "identity" aspect of 4x into a min-max game. The pieces that cross eras don't matter. The bonuses that hold over disappear into the excel spreadsheet that awards you 1,302 science a turn, the unique units are either obsolete or ahead on the tech tree because era stars are easier to get than tech or fame (seriously why are era stars putting me in the contemporary age when my tech is in the renaissance age? I'm doing 1 tech per turn??), and other civs change so fast I get an alert that the "Ghanian opinion of you has changed" and I'm like who the gently caress is that oh it's the empire I conquered half of the last few turns, who were they before? gently caress if I know, if their avatar isn't Edgar Alan Poe I'm forgetting them. This is a mechanically superior game telling inferior stories and that makes it a worse 4x. I'm optimistic they can improve it but the empire "swapping" every era makes it really hard since it's so foundational to the game. Being an Zhou / Mauryan / English / Dutch / German empire with a lot of science / food / industry / gold (it's not hard) does not make me feel like my empire has any identity at all. Tom Tucker fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Aug 21, 2021 |
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Aug 21, 2021 04:33
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appropriatemetaphor posted:For my second game I kicked the number of cliffs dropdown down a level, and it's much better and way less annoying. This sounds like heaven Also default is "new world" with an uninhabited continent? Weird.. Also every continent I've seen so far has been an up and down oval separated by an ocean with a few islands from another up and down oval continent maybe I need to not select "continents" if it's going to be this bisected.
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Aug 21, 2021 04:55
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So I finished my first game on Nation and I understand why the game ended - I went hard science at the end and absolutely blasted through the tech tree 1-2 techs per turn, which caused the game to end. But I still have zero idea why I won. My main opponent (I call them the Zulus because that's how I met them but by the time the game ended they were called someone else...) had conquered 90% of a continent as I had and I only overcame them in "fame" in the last era. How did they get so much early fame? Where did my late fame come from? I was just building districts and buildings trying to make the FIMS / stability numbers go up once I secured my home continent. A few turns before the game ended I settled a city to get another source of oil so I could launch a Lunar expedition as this seemed important. At that point a steamship I bought 10 turns ago finally found the last empire 1 turn before I invented satellites. Like imagine the US creates a space station and for the first time meets the Soviet Union it's thematically nonsense. The world should get SMALLER, but because the pace was accelerating so fast I had less and less time to do anything as it barreled towards a conclusion so it felt like the world got bigger. This game has a MAJOR pacing problem Still fun in the early game!
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Aug 21, 2021 06:19
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I wonder what it’s like to play the Harrapans
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Aug 21, 2021 22:22
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Yeah on Nation I got to the point where I researched a ship and sent it halfway to another continent before it was obsolete by two eras because I was researching so fast It’s also super weird that I can be in the contemporary era and researching tech from much earlier
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Aug 21, 2021 23:44
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Going on the second-to-highest difficulty for the first time so I tried to maximize my game - focused on industry, but did some good research too, I was way ahead of all AI at the end on every single metric except Teal had 1 more city than me from conquering two empires to me vassalizing one. But! I made the mistake of going Australia for my Contemporary culture. Mines? Cool! Build a bunch of em and see what happens! Oh dear all of my stability is cratering - not ideal. First few turns, plant a trillion trees, stability is normalizing a bit... Prioritize stability techs - get hospitals, and things are OK! Pollution is spreading, hmmm, I haven't even discovered how rifles work, not ideal... It's weird I can run these amazing strip mines without even knowing what oil is! Stability gets worse, plant more trees, not enough, so time to go full police state. Beeline to police stations and use my production to flood my continent with Garrisons. Stablility is normalized! Yes! Time to try a naval invasion and... oh the game is over, I managed to end the game with pollution without ever discovering how to stop pollution. At least I can do a "one more turn" to do a fun invasion in the Mad Max world I've accidentally created annnnnd - nope. Unlike other game-ending conditions I can't. Fun! What a silly oversight - an emblematic district designed to work with the tech of the era it's supposed to be in but can be built at the tech level 3-4 earlier because eras and tech levels are completely divorced from each other. Yeah you can't build your emblematic unit but sure you can build a strip mine before you understand aluminum. The game has so many strong points but there are just massive glaring gameplay oversights that ruin it.
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Sep 3, 2021 06:25
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I also like the "People will always remember you because you built a Wonder!" like bitch I built 8 wonders you panned over 5 of them in your victory shot because as far as I can tell it doesn't matter where you put them so I slap em in some forgotten desert. "You were part of the longest war!" like yeah the AI cheats out a few stacks of 2 Scout Riders / 2 Warriors every few turns on higher difficulties so the best strategy is to bait them into a war, hide behind your pallisades, and let them beat themselves to death on them and then claim 2-3 territories. I've only once had the announcer tell me I wasn't "good at everything" and he said I would be remembered for my "agrarian pursuits" I'm guessing this has to do with the stars you earn? The whole star system is busted as hell. Some are better than others. Agrarian = Pop = always good Aesthete = influence = crappy when you get all the territory you can because all laws and civics either never unlock or are some nonsense "+1 influence on territory vs. +1 faith on territory" Builder = districts = can never not do this one if you want to win Militarist = just killing poo poo so screw you if you're peaceful Science = tech = oops you got too many districts and pops from makers / farmers quarters for this to matter Merchant = I would bother to get money but industry, food, and science are ~1 million times easier and all I need it for is a few thousand in the bank when I meet a new civ to buy all their poo poo Expansionist = do you want to go to war with your neighbors = lol you thought this would scale with world size? Nah! Era stars are so stupid easy to get. I usually get a mix of Builder / Science / Agrarian to push me into the next era super fast just from trying to play effectively. This pretty much guarantees that I haven't unlocked my early modern era unique unit by the time I've unlocked my contemporary "civ" so I suddenly unlock a Gajnal and I'm like wtf is that I'm Mexican.
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Sep 3, 2021 08:19
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It comes down to the simple fact that growing food, industry, and science are all super necessary. You need these three resources to do anything. But for gold you only need enough to buy luxuries and support an army and you get that naturally through traders (which are pops you get through food so it’s again just another food metric) Combine that with food and industry literally growing on trees so you can always plop down a +20-30 makers / farmers quarters but merchant quarters need half the map to be effective and even then oof… Schools give +1 science per pop but tax officers give +3 per city it doesn’t take a genius to run far away from any money-based strategy.
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Sep 3, 2021 08:39
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After playing this a bunch on Civilization difficulty I have concluded that it is in better shape than Civ VI launch but worse shape than Civ V launch. The combat mechanism is the major saving grace as using terrain to get efficient fights is highly satisfying. They need to fix a bunch of minor issues but there are also some core issues that need to be fleshed out majorly. Major issues Identify - this is a big issue as culture-swapping is one of the core mechanics of the game but it effectively erases the identity and storytelling elements that make a 4x game so much fun. In Master or Orion or Stellaris you may be a group of scrappy humans who happen to run into blood-thirsty robots as your nearest neighbor, but you're able to join in a federation with like-minded aliens to overcome them. How would that feel if the robots suddenly turned into tree-people with no warning? And what's worse, in this game the identity simply doesn't connect to the "behavior". Even in Civ yes you are Teddy Roosevelt settling a city in 4,000 BC but you have an identity, and when you run into Gilgamesh you celebrate and then realize Montezuma and Genghis Khan are next door and you know that will be part of the story. In this game the only identity you and the other AI have are colors. Yes if you go into the diplomacy screen you get to see an avatar who is effectively meaningless but that's about it. The worst part is that identity swaps happen so suddenly. You're next to the Harrapans and having a lovely time trading with them when suddenly they invade you with a huge stack of horse archers - that's not fun it just flips the game completely. On top of it what is YOUR identity? Culture and storytelling takes a back seat to min-maxing. This is so foundational I'm not sure how to fix it but it makes every game feel the same and, ultimately, totally forgettable, while I think we all remember story-lines we created from other 4x games even years later because of the identities of the empires and the characters of their leaders. Pacing - the pace of this game just feels all wrong. Unless you prioritize tech all the way through you'll be in the contemporary era as an empire while still in the early-modern era tech-wise. This not only creates major balance issues making the emblematic district of the top cultures super important because it basically cheats out two-era ahead district tech but also can trap the player like it did to me when I unlocked strip mines but no way to clean up pollution resulting in the game just ending. This isn't a simple fix because I imagine the AI has been "balanced" against this pace. It also all comes down to the era stars. Simply increasing the stars needed for each era would seem a simple fix, but then you realize by later eras expansion and militarist are basically inaccessible for any peaceful play style. Options to fix would be to adjust the scaling and triggers of stars and allow them to be received in more varied ways by still requiring more of them to stretch the culture eras to more closely match the tech eras. End Conditions - If you're winning you're encouraged to just pollute the world to win, that's stupid. A science win is triggered if you get every tech on the tech tree which makes the last techs on the tech tree, especially the last one you research, pointless. I discovered Fusion! This is great, I can now clean up the polluted world and - oh the game is over. In Civ VI I almost always play on every win condition except religious but in this game I'm tempted to turn off wind conditions because they sneak up so suddenly and it's just not fun. The "global warming" win condition needs to be overhauled, along with pollution if I'm honest, and others need to be rethought, particularly science. Religion - what is it even for? How do I get it? How is it spreading? I've won multiple games and I have no idea. It appears to just pick a flat starting bonus (triggered by...?) based on pops or territory, then holy sites give stability, yay, then with enough faith (or followers?) you get to add 4 tenets that give you bonuses and that's it? The only thing I've seen it useful for is war grievences for oppressing my faithful because even at higher difficulties I've never seen a neighboring civ not be completely overwhelmed by my religion without me doing anything. Then you get to the mid game and are given a choice to just throw the entire mechanism in the garbage bin through "irreligion"? Weird... Civics - influence prices scale way too fast to get most of the civics, which is fine because they're almost all terrible and I've only ever seen half of them. What do those civics in the top connected to the lines do? gently caress if I know! Do I want to pay 9,000 influence to assimilate free cities, which no longer exist anywhere, for 100 influence less? What about spending 10,000 influence to get +5 gold on my main plaza, you kidding me? Events - flat cost events stink. It's almost always worth paying 100 gold here or there for a good outcome, but when a choice is between +15 science or +15 gold and I'm making thousands of both it just doesn't matter. The events FEEL small in scale too. Lift a boat out of the water? Allow a single scientist to join us? People are annoyed by my personal Rasputin? In almost every case the best outcome is tied to the "good" ideologies (Collectivism, World, Liberty, Progress) which makes it even easier to slam all the way to the end of these ideology axes and sit there which is fine because they also give the best multipliers (Industry, Food, Influence, Science, respectively, compared to Money, Combat Strength, Vision Range (??), and faith). Connect events to civics. Complicate the ideology axes and make it less of a no brainer. Make rewards meaningful so you're not just picking what pushes you to Progress or Liberty or just picking the obvious best option whose only downside is "-160 gold". Minor issues / quick fixes War Conclusion / outpost raiding - when a war ends or an outpost gets attached units are stranded there forced to end turn. I think it's fixed if I draw a line to my territory but it doesn't seem to always work, Civ solved easily (albeit clumsily) by shunting units out of opponent territory, stranding units is dumb as hell. Overpopulation - yes I get it my city has too much growth, this is an engaging gameplay element but you pop up saying my city is "starving" due to low growth. It's not! It's so super annoying. Make unemployed pops do nothing but reduce stability (and thus growth, self-solving the issue) and then let Agrarian cultures (who run into this problem most) use their migration ability to fix it. Then have social welfare programs later in the game with reduced instability from unemployed and more options to create "jobs" through expensive infrastructure. Infrastructure Balance - some are just so much better than others. +3 gold on capital? Come on... New cities being better than old cities - Start a new city and get ALL the infrastructure you've researched for free is stupid powerful and makes new cities better than old ones. Replace this tech that simply applies a flat -X% industry discount to infrastructure from earlier eras empire wide until my Public Fountain is -80% industry and my Aqueduct is -60% and my hospital is full price. This allows new cities to catch up quickly and old cities to not feel left in the dust. Luxury trading a no-brainer - add some complexity here, not sure how. Meeting new civs is one of the easiest ways to surge your game forward because of the massive FIMS / stability surge that comes from buying 10+ luxuries all at once. Diminishing returns maybe, with infrastructure to mitigate it? AI battle fixes - AI is too easy to out-maneuver give appropriate geography, it just needs to be a lot smarter in general. Starting a war just so watch the AI run two horse scouts and two warriors through my easily-ransacked territory just to break like a wave against Levies behind Palisades isn't engaging. Stability / loading time / crashes - self explanatory, this game crashes on me like crazy.
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Sep 3, 2021 22:41
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It was after about 80 hours playing that I discovered the leaders aren’t just cosmetic with random attributes but have built in biases and DIFFICULTIES associated with them
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Sep 4, 2021 18:52
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One simple thing is why did the game launch with so few narrative events? They’re so easy to make but I see the same ones all the time. Variety!
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Sep 5, 2021 01:12
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In my latest game somehow my Harrapan Shamanism spread to another Civ 5-6 districts over and, without noticing, I got an alert saying "The Celts have selected the next Tenant for Harrapan Shamanism!" Apparently my religion was so powerful (how - I have no idea I did literally nothing to boost it except choose Shamanism) the Celts adopted it fully then built a holy site before I could and became the de-facto religious head. I never got a chance to build a single holy site but I was pissed so I had to build World Wonder Canyon including a few "counts as a holy site" Wonders to get it back and rename the religion "gently caress you Celts" before the game ended. Of course by that point the civ was no longer the Celts and had gone off to be some other random Civ so the point was moot and this otherwise fun story was lost in a sea of constantly-shifting identities.  The Celts apparently spread it so effectively the entire world was following it and I got an achievement for "8 or more civs following a religion I lead" when I wasn't even the leader of the religion any more.
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Sep 5, 2021 07:15
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Heck just create randomly generated names like “The Belthyn Theocracy” or “Thassius Republic” based on the leaders ideologies and then you can click on em to see which culture is inspiring them this age.
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Sep 5, 2021 07:56
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Line of sight screws over every non indirect fire unit. I think even crossbowmen. Luckily gunners are still good because they can attack without retaliation and have full defense so they can front line no problem.
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Sep 6, 2021 00:56
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Staltran posted:Is the Mughals's emblematic quarter's +3 industry per worker supposed to stop working after advancing to another culture? I don't think any of these change when you advance. I had a super effective religion and the market quarter that gave me more gold per territory with my religion was still +88 gold at the end of the game. I've mostly gone Olmecs / Zhou / Harrapan / Egypt for my first culture. Thought I'd shake it up with the Myceneans and oh man they have a crazy bonus I didn't realize. Their district is a garrison so it can be placed anywhere in a territory, but it also counts as a maker's quarters, meaning you get to plop down the most efficient maker's quarter in the entire district right off the bat. Can you also build districts off of a garrison or not? If so it gives a ton more flexibility way before you get Hamlets but I haven't tried it yet but a +24 maker's quarters in the ancient era is nuts. Tom Tucker fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 19:33
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Staltran posted:I noticed I had only 8 (or something) production/worker in my capital that had 4 Jama Masjids. I think the district might just be bugged. The production I believe goes onto the district so it will show up as industry on the map on the district and as district industry on the city screen.
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Sep 8, 2021 03:18
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I experimented and apparently the explore decision must get locked in at start of turn because even when I stagger my tribes to auto-explore one at a time the second will go look for the curiosity the first one just popped
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Sep 8, 2021 04:27
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Anything that can shoot THEN move is busted as hell
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Sep 11, 2021 01:15
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Getting in a war and turtle game up with palisades while enemies break themselves on you is the easiest way to win wars and claim territories at high difficulty.
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Sep 12, 2021 01:11
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There are other cultures that are S tier if you want to just conquer a bunch of poo poo like the Huns, Mongols, and Soviets, but yeah it's just all the production cultures. I play a game and I feel like if I don't choose Khmer I'm handicapping myself. This game needs so much work but a balance patch would be super easy. Still fun though.
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Sep 16, 2021 21:27
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Harappa also depends heavily on how many tribes you pick up before going to the Ancient era as the spike to Runners, and the ability to out-class (or match depending on difficulty) AI is a huge deal as it can ensure you can run around pillaging outposts, out-scout for goodie huts, and just generally gently caress with the AI.
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Sep 16, 2021 22:30
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I read that some of the civics are just stupid specific to unlock, like you need a city with 3 merchant quarters and 3 commons quarters, how often does that come up? Can't imagine what's at the back of the tree I've never seen but I bet it costs 10,000 influence and gives me +1 influence on each of my garrisons.
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Sep 17, 2021 19:07
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Yeah that’s dumb. I’ve always thought games like this should have some mechanism of showing rural areas shifting food to urban areas, like trade routes in civ 6 or the convoys from civ 4. It’s silly that New York would be starving while Nebraska is doubling in population every year.
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Sep 21, 2021 00:38
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Gort posted:What do you do as Egypt? Build a pyramid in every territory and then surround it with maker's districts? You just build pyramids around places and if you can't get Egypt build your unique district then makers quarters then get food as you need it then more maker's quarters then get infrastructure if stability is in the garbage or the iterative benefit outweighs a new quarter then win!
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Oct 6, 2021 16:09
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Pushing a war for escalating stability costs makes perfect sense good change
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Jul 3, 2022 19:08
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Civ VI had a pretty solid offensive spy system based on districts but the defensive system where a spy can only defend a single hex and its six neighbors was terrible. Especially because you couldn’t just choose any center tile just ones with districts so if your industrial zone and commercial district are separated by a farm you’re out of luck. Otherwise is was pretty good. Spies got better, policies could super boost your spy game (at the expense of other powerful economic or military bonuses), and getting caught would often get you denounced and really impact relations. Plus you could even do spy swaps!
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Sep 7, 2022 19:21
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Tree Bucket posted:Attacking with spies was a really fun system. Problem was, I almost never used those abilities because I always ended up having to park my spies on defensive duty. It's no fun when your industrial zones blow up or your neighbourhoods sprout three mech infantry That’s true but you do have the option of going full police state with policies shutting down spy levels in your territory and making it super hard to do anything, but the opportunity cost is super high when that’s ~2 policy slots. If you’ve got a nice open empire with lots of enemies it makes sense your spy network is out playing whack a mole. The issue is again the drat hex system. “Sorry I couldn’t follow that enemy agent to the Spaceport where he blew up our Mars mission I’m assigned to North WEST Bananaland where the commercial zone is just fine fyi.”
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Sep 8, 2022 14:59
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drat that’s so true. Still nothing topping Civ IV though.
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Sep 8, 2022 21:51
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:24 |
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Don’t forget the oft-maligned announcer. I’m building an entire civilization from scratch and steering the course of history I don’t want snarky sarcasm. We thought the quote choices were bad in civ 6. (They are though)
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Sep 21, 2022 06:49
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