Civilisation VI

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Grimmie
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Civilisation VI

Post by Grimmie »

So hey, I follow the guys that used to be Game Trailers, and support their Easy Allies patreon project.

One of the guys, Ben Moore, had the opportunity to play 60 turns of Civ VI and here are his first impressions.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-SObXGDJnY[/youtube]
Joose
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Re: Civilisation VI

Post by Joose »

I like the look of that. It is visually a bit "mobile game", but the opposite approach is Endless Legends: super pretty but reeeaally hard to parse.
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Re: Civilisation VI

Post by Dog Pants »

Fourteen hours after I started, I've completed (and won) my first game. Not much of achievement - score victory on Settler (easy) difficulty with a small map. Still, a win is a win, and considering how different Civ VI is from Civ V I think it's an achievement. Six in fact, if you go off Steam. Here's the rundown on the differences:

* It's maybe easier to list what hasn't changed much. The tech tree is still there as expected, tourism and religion don't seem to have altered much, same for espionage, and the graphics are pretty similar despite earlier screenshots looking mobile-y.

* The biggest change is districts, as anyone who has read anything about the game will probably already know. Essentially, most buildings must have a corresponding district to build them in. A district occupies a tile, and must meet a few criteria - usually an increasing population level and sometimes some geological ones such as coastline or river. It contributes to making the geography around your city of more strategic importance, and it horses you to specialise them. It also means that you have a smaller pool of buildings for each city, so building units is less of a distraction.

* The second most noticeable difference is the civic tree. This replaces the culture and government system from Civ V with a second, parallel tech tree. These, like the science tech tree, occasionally unlock practical things like buildings, but primarily are for government types and policies.

* Governments give you a couple of inherent bonuses but are mostly defined by the number and distribution of policy slots. Policies are segregated by type and each government type will allow certain quantities of each. Communism, for example, gives you 3 Military, 3 Economic, 1 Diplomatic, and 1 Wild Card slot. The policies, earned by unlocking civic techs, will be generally slightly advantageous to that particular cause.

* Combat is mostly the same, but units can be partially stacked. With certain tech unlocks you can combine like units to form Corps and then Armies, which are effectively stacks of two and three units. On top of that you can put support units like siege towers (which let you ignore walls) or AA guns (which protect against air attack).

* Other subtle unit differences include builders, which now have finite uses so don't end up clogging everything up in the late game, and great people, who are more useful and often have unique bonuses.

* City states are less of a burden to court. You get envoys to assign to them, and whoever has the most gets the loyalty of that city. I haven't really paid any attention to how you get those envoys other than the little missions you get (which are now easier to achieve than in Civ V), but I never really found myself to be in desperately short supply. City states otherwise aren't changed much, although they seem a little more active.

* Trading ties in nicely with city states. That hasn't changed much, although seems easier to manage and a little more useful. The main difference is that trade routes create roads, rather than manually building them with workers. That's a nice touch which relieves a little of the tedious micromanagement. You can still build them manually with military engineers though, unlocked in the medieval era.

* Populations are now limited primarily by housing (and food, as before) rather than happiness. This brings a welcome return to larger empires, something I lamented the loss of in Civ V. Certain buildings increase the housing level of the city, and later on entire districts can be given over to it. Between that and having less land for farms I found it to be a much more intuitive way of stopping your cities turning into sprawling metropolises. Happiness is still a factor (now called amenities), but in my game I only had to consider it later once I had large cities and war weariness to contend with, and even then it was reasonably easily remedied with an entertainment district.

* Diplomacy has been polished up rather than overhauled, but the art of understanding the motives of your opponents is much easier. Diplomacy and espionage allows you to learn about their likes and dislikes, which are semi-random, and specifically what you're doing to please them or displease them. It seems to be a fine balance on the military side; I had been an ally of England until the 1900s until, and so when another nearby civ declared war on them I jumped in to help with a small but advanced paid-for army. I took a couple of enemy cities (incidentally, it's somewhat viable to keep those now, depending on peace negotiations) and sued for peace. Not long afterwards England declared me to be a warmonger and attacked me with Spain, another formerly friendly nation. I annihilated their armies, so maybe they had a point. It sullied my reputation for the rest of the game either way, although nobody else had the balls to attack me again. Since there are now about half a dozen ways to go to war, with varying levels of international condemnation attached, I don't think this will be a blocker to domination victories. It's just a bit more political than before.

All in all I wasn't taken with the changes at first, but now I've played it through I much prefer it this way. There's more to do, it feels more intuitive, and there's less fiddling.

EDIT: Oh yeah. As much as it's nice that the instruments the music is played on gets more modern as you go along, if I hear Scarborough Fair once more I'm going to stab myself in both ears.
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Re: Civilisation VI

Post by Dog Pants »

Ooh! Interesting thing! If you get Boudica her one-time ability is to convert barbarians. This means that when she's selected she highlights hexes which are viable for its use. Which means you can sit her at home and use her as a radar to see where all the barbarians are on the known map. An exploit I suppose, but useful.

Another one is that you still get the resource boost from deforestation even if it isn't in your territory. Useful for those frontier towns, as it goes to the nearest city. If you have China and Pyramids you can actually get back more production than it cost you to build the builder in the first place.
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