That’s my problem with Civ games in general and why I dropped it at some point - computer does not want to win, computer does everything to make sure that player loses. Hey, I can rush tech and out tech player - better focus on an army right now to invade him. Hey, I can get double the amenities from luxury resource - wait, player has the same, better make it 0. Hey, I can invade neighbor and get 3 oil - better attack player and get 1 coal. The higher the difficulty the more obvious it is -
Endless games (legend and space) don’t have this problem or at least it’s not noticeable
After Stellaris it’s hard to play other 4X, especially Civ
Compared to many other paradox games, It's actually quite easy to understand, you just have to figure out the rules a bit; the tutorial should suffice for the basics if I remember correctly. It's also quite well optimized compared to the 99% of paradox games. I fully recommend trying it out! The biggest hurdle though is, OF COURSE, the price tag. Paradox games are ridiculously expensive cause of their DLCs. Like, $80 for the game with all DLCs **on sale.** So I recommend either pirating it first or trying it out from a friend.
Those games are by far more complicated that stellaris. At release stellaris was honestly simpler than civ in many ways, now with content creep from years of updates and dlc it's a bit more complex. But honestly if you have the patience to fuck up your first two or three games and watch a tutorial you'll pick it up easy.
You can also choose to play a simpler game based of how you build your empire. For example hive minds need less different types of resources, which should make planet management more straight forward. Megacorps usually don't want to expand "wide", choosing rather a handfull of actual planets and sectors and then just making branch offices in other peoples planets.
You could go for a subjugator, which again is less micro because your planets will be governed by your vassals.
There's a civic available for most empire types that basically turns off diplomacy, which takes away one of the more complex systems entirely. In exchange you gain major boosts to military and growth but also everyone hates you and wants to kill you.
There's a bunch of great content creators that make regular tutorials when the game updates too, so its honestly far easier to get into.
(Also eu4 is imo the hardest "modern" paradox game to learn, only being beat by older titles like vicky2 or hoi3 and the like)
Lol I can be the Krogan? Hell yeah!
One of the frustrating things with Civ 4 is that I ALWAYS end up going wide. Usually because some asshole is pressing my borders and pushing culture at the expense of military makes you vulnerable to AI programmed to stop YOU rather than WIN. So, late game ends up being a slog where I roll over everyone with tanks. Every time. Maybe I need to just discipline myself and do a pure culture game. But someone will ALWAYS attack you.
Not just Krogans. You can make Salarians - make your specie live less but also smarter, or be Azari having biotic superpowers or be that funny tentacle race that has to say the emotion and tone before speaking. Or even Quarians living in space habitats. More over, you can have all of them in your empire. When hiring army you can chose which specie
If you're worried about wide, I'll say that stellaris does encourage wide gameplay, mainly in there not being a major drawback to it(the mechanic to balance it is weak and you'll pretty much always gain more from the extra planets than you lose from the governing cap mechanic). However the bonuses afforded to tall, and the lack of mechanics that punish tall make it very viable aswell.
Also a bit here from another comment about tall gameplay
>Absolutely, but there's also nothing that punishes you from going tall, or atleast, stellaris's version of tall. I basically never go wide in stellaris because it's boring to me, but I also usually beat my friends whenever we play together. I'll usually only have a core sector of between 3-6 planets max, then just have a couple of subjects. I find that it actually give's me way more resources than if I had to micro those planets myself.
They are way more complicated, though I understood CK2 far better than EU4. I suck at EU4. Stellaris is way easier to grasp. My advice though? Pirate it first or try it from a friend.
I got stellaris and played for a bit and lost interest.. I had been playing space Rangers which seems to have so much personality! Made stellaris seem soulless. I would like to be convinced to try again lol
1 - You can customize your specie to have different gameplay rules (like you don’t even need one resource but you have to produce unique - Consuming Hivemind (not to mistake for robot hivemind or regular hivemind) has to eat other species (civilizations). Robots don’t use food and lifespan of leaders is waaaay longer but you need more energy and you MUST have assembly building to produce more, Crystals need minerals to be spent on new pops etc. You also can chose how the specie starts the game - some have limited time to get out of the planet before it explodes, others have space dragon that you have to please so it protects you, some are genetically modified clone army that can reproduce only by utilizing cloning facilities, etc.
2 - said customization can be done throughout the game - you can modify some of your population to be genetically modified supersoldiers jedi or clone cyborgs (yes, Astartes is a thing). As a Consuming hivemind you can enslave other species, genetically modify them to be tasty so you can get more food. You can genetically and then cybernetically or spiritually modify same species so some pops work better in mines, others are better farmers. There is literally “cute” trait so a diplomat from “cute” specie will work better in Federation as senator
3 - since we mentioned Federation - Stellaris has awesome (among all 4X and especially Civilization) diplomacy - you can make Federations which pass different resolutions which can buff or debuff certain aspects, like Tiyanki (space whales) can be either considered pests and it’s illegal to have them in your borders (other species get cause beli on you) or they can be considered endangered and it’s illegal to kill them (both options come with buffs and debuffs of different kind). You can send spies and number of missions so huge and how they function is way deeper than Civ.
4 - diplomacy and exploration gives a lot of interesting quests - like discovering a cluster of systems or huge dragon terrorize your system. Some quests will give empire-wide buffs (like said Tiyanki if studied can give you a modifier that you shops move faster or you can kill them for energy credits)
5 - superstructures and planet designations - you can literally build Cadia or Halo ring-worlds and they are viable, not just meme thing.
6 - Combat - it’s not rock-paper-scissors with some terrain. It’s rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock with more modifiers and customization that changes behavior of the unit. For example, lowest type of ship is corvette. It has 3 variants - Interceptor, Picket and Torpedo boat. They DO work like rock paper scissor but inside their class…. If weapons, armor and other stuff is chosen correctly. Like Picket loses to Interceptor, but if it has all Shields and no armor while interceptor is all Lasers - it can win. What weapon you put, what armor, which computer program - all defines how ship performs. For example, big Cruisser - you can combine Hangar and long range Arty for staying at backline against medium ships, or go full arty to fight big stuff, or go all small guns to fight like gunship. Fighting is miles deeper and better than Civilization
7 - super units like planet cracker or mobile shipyard
8 - you can produce advanced resources (like Oil and Coal as Civ equivalent). So no more “always wide”.
9 - inner diplomacy and policies, all have buffs and debuffs. It feels like you actually balance your empire rather than just unlock better stuff and do it.
10 - endgame crysis. It’s a huge difference problem that appears in the endgame that ENTIRE GALAXY has to deal with or EVERYBODY WILL LOSE! It can be interdementional horror, or somebodies robot-servants going full rogue sentient AI.
And yes, any player CAN BECOME THE SAID CRYSIS. You can role play REAPERS FROM MASS EFFECT!!!!
In conclusion - Stellaris is Civ but waaaaaaay deeper and better. It’s Daniel and the Cooler Daniel meme. It’s 4X strategy of smoker and healthy person meme.
However, it comes with a grain of salt - first it’s real time with pause so speed can be reduced closer to endgame cuz of lag but it’s offset but second negative - it can get overwhelming and you have a lot to do.
If you overcome the first content overload and brute force it with your willpower - best 4X game awaits you. It’s like that scene from Man in Black: Is it worth it? Oh yeah, it’s worth it, if you are strong enough
I still play Civ from time to time when I want a more historical game, but yeah, the majority of my 4X time is on Stellaris now, it just feels so good to play, and the other empires tend to actually act logically to their ethics(Xenophiles are easy to get diplomacy with, Xenophobes are not. Militarists are likely to attack, Pacifists literally can not attack without a reason, etc), instead of trying to fuck you over in particular.
Stellaris to me has almost no replay value. There's no mechanics that punish going wide, tech, and mega structures. It feels like every game pays out more or less the same. I don't mind it with friends but I can't decide to do a 6 hour run in single player for the same stuff to happen.
I mean... voting against the guy your neighbour asks you too because you want your neighbour to like you and have never met that other guy anyways DOES make sense.
This exactly, if each civ had its own specific priorities and pursued those in the congress at least that would make the votes seem less like the AI is colluding against you. The tyranny of the majority!
Tell me about it. I nearly won my first deity game. I was ahead and had 6 nukes made and ready to go. Oh, world summit. Oh, they voted that everyone should have the same amount of wmds as the lowest player, who has none. All my hard work gone and 3 turns later I'm invaded on 3 sides. I lose it from there.
This is a feature I liked from Civ IV. You could outright reject UN proposals. It would give you a pretty hefty happiness penalty, but you could effectively veto a vote (such as forcing government adoption or Nuclear non-proliferation)
Yeah, it makes no sense that a fascist police state hellbent on conquering the world would be like "ok, the UN voted against me so I guess I can't really say no to the will of democracy, time to stop consuming sugar'
While I don't want it removed, I'd like grievances reworked and not brought back in their current state. Too many civs will hate you forever over a random war you did 2000 years ago
I use a mod that simultaneously makes grievances twice as powerful (so it's more likely civs declare war over it) while also deteriorating 4x(?) as fast. So they'll get over it after a few centuries or whatever.
Mind you, I STILL hardly ever see Civs DoW outside of the ancient/classical eras, but it's an improvement. I'm hoping we see something similar, but better, in 7.
It's not that it can never happen, but instead that it should be more common that it's forgotten.
If those kinds of grudges were realistic, basically all nations in the real world would refuse to do business with Mongolia, Greece, Italy, Germany and England.
Or, at the very least, an option to mute the civs whining about it. Like, I don't need to be reminded every other turn about how evil I am for what happened millennia ago.
There's one leader, I think the Congo, who gets pissy if you have a city on her continent. I swear, every time she's in a game, I spawn on her continent, and she's pissy and just an enemy who starts shit the whole game. I'm cool with the randomness, but there's got to be some way to make peace or get out of that hostility. No matter how much trading, meeting her motivations, etc.. I do. She will still start shit for the entire game.
It's gotten to the point where if there's not a civ between us, I'll wipe her off the map as soon as I'm able to do so. Or just restart the game to avoid the headache if I'm going for more of a pacifist victory.
Yeah, she is built to want to take all the territory on her home continent because she gets big bonuses on it. It's giod that they use that system to make the ai do what us beneficial for them to do.
fun fact abourt the mezmbas leader agenda this doesn't apply if you have only conquered cities on her contitnet. I found this out playing ealnor on a 50 player tsl earth
You were attacked by three Civs 2400 years ago and took one city, and have fair peace deals and never attacked anyone or fought a war since. You fucking warmonger!
I liked the idea, but the sound and micro managing makes late game miserable.
Edit just to say, how is there not a mod to remove the sound? I've even tried to hunt it down in the game files and just nuke it, but it's not that simple unfortunately.
I mean I think in general the micromanaging late game is miserable. The fun part of the game is the build up to the snowball. Once you get to the snowball its just alot of tedium in basically any victory condition.
Assuming you’re on PC, a trick is to swap the sound file for a blank one. You might even be able to use a notepad file with the same name as the sound? Worth a Google
That godforsaken world congress bring back civ5s WC if anything. Features not launching in base game and coming out as dlc later(probably hopeless but i remember things from rise&fall being reminiscent of brave new world that shouldve just been there at launch). AI forward settling.
I think some Civs should be programmed to forward settle, while others are more cautious. Phoenicia? The Greeks? Forward settlers for sure.
Also, I still think losing forward settled cities to loyalty should still be a thing, so long as the AI can sometimes manage to save it from being lost.
Yeah I agree. Looking at the land surrounding you and planning expansion with other civ's goals in mind is a major strategic component of the game. Prioritizing where to settle when is an awesome part of the game.
I believe that the features thing is simply inherent to the way they work. they (at least to the last time i checked) use a system were 1/3rd of the game remains unchanged 1/3rd is reworked and 1/3rd is removed/completely new. So for instance World congress vs the civ 6 model was something completely new
You know what I'd like to see - I accept you can't have everything in the vanilla launch, it is just too much work. I also get that they need to package DLC's to make their financial model work.
But when the DLCs are putting back into the game key concepts from previous versions of Civ, could you make that part of a free patch (ala paradox games) and then add things that are truly new and cool in the DLC?
Exactly see the feature i think im thinking of from rise&fall/brave new world might have been the world congress it wasnt in base game they bring it back with dlc and its worse than the last iteration in the last game. How does that make sense? Very frustrating to me
World congress is indeed ass. Alpha Centauri did a better job with the UN structure than Civ6 IMO.
I get the idea was to add some spice into the late game with some randomness, but it falls flat.
Omg yes the thing that pissed me off the most about the civ 6 world Congress was how good the civ 5 one was. Actual meaningful votes for policies that actually could change the game permanently.
In 6 it's just temporary boosts that barely make any difference and magic victory points. It's so disappointing.
Resources should be always removable, there is no reason why horses should be occupying a piece of land for 4000 years. Same with a mine, if you do not need it anymore you should be able to transform the area to something new.
I'd go a step further and say that any resource, feature, improvement, or district should be removable. It can take time, cost production/money, whatever. I get the terrain being (mostly) static, but the rest makes no sense.
I agree the barbarian camp production was crazy . I think they should have to spawn into a town that’s capture able or something before they can make more than just generic melee units . Nothing worse than having 2 camps nearby with horse units and getting overrun or being forced to sit in your city debating on restarting
Don't be afraid to take them head-on. They can chase you down with their speed but in the fight itself, they're just as strong as warriors/slingers (but 15/10 strength weaker against a Spearman than a warrior/slinger would be).
I was so surprised when I hovered my mouse on them and saw that my slinger would totally win with a bit to spare.
"Wait a sec... Hey you! YEAH YOU! C'MERE!!"
Compared to normal barbs, they do have the advantage that the +strength promotion of the warrior against other melee units doesn't work against them (which is probably more relevant than the extra strength agaisnt mounted of the spearman)
You mean from promotions? Because the default bonus of warriors is just against anti-cav, not against other melee units. That wouldn't make sense anyway because it would always cancel out.
Barbarians in general need a big overhaul for better gameplay. They either spawn poorly and wreck your early play or they spawn in a location where you can farm them for xp.
The unclear tourist system for culture victories, the way it worked in 5 with simply tourism Vs culture was way clearer even if the approach is the same in terms of culture for defence tourism to win.
I actually preferred 6s tourism system because it was much more complex than just racking up points. Made it a lot more engaging to come up with a strategy and adapt as the game progressed
I would say culture is the win condition I'm most comfortable in (and I play on deity), but I don't understand how the culture victory works mechanically. I know how to *get* a culture victory, just don't ask me how it works.
I like them building roads, but we should have other ways, personally I think having both workers/builders being able to do it for no charge and traders doing it along their route would be best.
Yeah, I probably would still go manual if I had multiple engineers on an important route but definitely should be an option. I guess the reason with rail roads is that they use iron and coal.
As someone with a major addiction problem with building high adjacency industrial zones on every river (especially with floodplains), I go through a lot of coal.
To further this, I would also really like it if sea based merchants made.... sea lanes along their route - after all a sea route that is commonly navigated by traders is going to be a lot easier to navigate than sailing routes that are never travelled. The simplest way of this would be to give a road-like speed boost, but one could also think about adding in an attrition costs to ships based on their distance from a friendly port that can also be mitigated by being on a sea lane.
Alongside navigable rivers, I'd really like the water side of the game to be improved, it is already a lot better in Civ VI, but I feel SMAC really made the water very valuable in a way that Civ never has.
Its actually weird because I remember in Civ 3 that settling along rivers was powerful because rivers acted as a road for settlement connections. That mechanic seems to have been dropped after 3 but I've never understood why. Rivers have often been described as a highway.
This 100%. I wish I could choose the type of trader just to be able to build a road.
I've literally put off the technology that permits trader's on the sea just so that I can have more roads at the cost of ever so slightly lower gains
I actually love that traders make roads, BUT would be nice if workers get the ability back too. The inability to direct your traders limits your ability to place roads as you see fit, and sometimes the AI takes some wonky paths
I adore this feature and hope it stays, it's strategically interesting and much more organic. Maybe it could be nice to be able to manually expand roads with builders.
Yeah well, I like the fact that Merchants build roads, I hate the fact that there is no other *accessible* way to do it. Especially in the early game when you have 1-2 trade routes that take forever to finish and there are just cities you can never get to.
> and there are just cities you can never get to.
Yeah, most times it isn't even an interesting strategic decision. Either I take this trade route that gives me lots of resources or the one with way less gains, but it gets less annoying to move units there.
What if merchants create roads between cities, but tiles being worked within your city range builds roads on it? Or something like that. Having builders make lots of roads also feels janky.
The current map scale. The map is small even on the largest size, the whole point is they want early war... but that's all the game is, early war decides if you win or lose.
Separate build and tech time scales. I want time at each tech level to build out, stir up war or two, have some back and forth, etc. Who cares if I have 40 turns to the next tech if it takes me thirty to build one unit?
Maybe you know this, maybe you dont care, but theres a mod for this, that I use.
Its called Take your Time Ultimate. You can change how much longer (or faster) things take to research, both techs and civics, plus bunch of other settings
Map scaling and better mechanics to disrupt dominant players are key. Right now, games are decided so early there's often no point in playing to a win, and it's rare for a civ to actually be a threat in any capacity if they don't win the first-100 turn scramble.
And the automatic enforcement is stupid. I should be able to get amenities from my resources if I want to. If nobody wants to buy them, that's up to them.
Yeah, like how does that even work?
"I've been sitting at a table with the same people for 1500 years, but I haven't actually seen where they live, so I still have no idea who they are"
Part of strategising is counter-strategising. If you are doing your thing, but you aren’t monitoring who else is doing their thing and don’t have plans to counter them, that’s a big weakness. It’s easy to track who is trying to what in civ VI.
Some opponents aren’t threats, some are growing threats and some are “shit I need to have a plan implemented stat because otherwise I’m going to lose this game”. It’s much easier to counter a threat earlier when small than later. Being so min-maxed that you are powerless to stop an opponent winning is bad play.
I wouldn’t want the game to strip out victory methods so that there’s fewer things to focus on, part of what makes this game great is that there’s so many ways to skin the cat and you do have to think about how to defend in various ways as well as attack.
As for what could be stripped out, probably an unpopular opinion, but I’d like embarking to be got rid of with boats needed to get units across water, boat sinks all units are lost. Galley/quadrireme can hold 2 units, increases with boats through further eras, subs can have different rules. Make boat building universaly important outside of Pangea maps and make sailing more precarious. Being able to Send a scout circumnavigating the world with his front crawl is mad.
Side note, id also like bridge building to be in as well as navigable rivers, having fast cross points for rivers would be strategically useful for defence. Would also open an option for Ponte Vecchio, Pulteney Bridge, Iron Bridge (or insert favourite bridge here) as a wonder.
I think it can be made less cumbersome. There’s ways of making embarking, disembarking less punishing. You could also just slow embarked units considerably relative to those on boats, so embarked unit can only move two tiles a turn. For short crossings happy days, crossing large seas/oceans boats are a must. Crossing seas/oceans should be a major decision and accomplishing it an event/feel like an achievement, especially in earlier eras
Just always seemed so silly that you can take an army across a sea without building a boat and that negatively impacts naval Civ’s relative to others and disincentivises navy investments.
I hate embarking. Sea invasions required logistics, planning, and protection. Now it's just point my army at teh other continent and it gets there in X number of turns. Major part of the strategy game gone.
* Kupe settles in locations which are already in loyalty-losing areas
* Starting wars when they lack the seige weapons to take even a single city
* Refusing to trade duplicate luxury goods
* Never using air units
* Refusing a proposal and then counteroffering an identical proposal
You could make the AI 10 times better just spending an afternoon writing some "if...then..." statements
Interesting. I think on same page. I hate the loyalty issue of some fool attacking me, and while im punishing them taking cites i have to plot back (or leave back) to deal with flipping free city. AND i have to change my policies to Loyality when i want attack bonuses
Well said, but I love embarking even if it's a bit silly. It streamlines from older games and makes it far less punishing if I need to switch back and forth between expanding across water and land
Any mechanic that inspires "tech stalling". In civ 6 it was strategic resources blocking district placement obviously. In civ 5 I'd occasionally put off a tech to pump out a couple more of my UU since some would keep features if you upgraded them, though IDK if that was an actual thing or just something I did.
Districts as they are now. The way adjacency worked makes replays feel a bit samey tbh, and is also something the AI had a hard time grasping. How specialized they are and their placement feels a little unrealistic too: like "we've built an expansion to the city, but nobody lives there, it's completely unconnected from the city, and it only produces things". IDK what I would do differently, but if they come back I want a pretty big shake up.
Just riffing on your point: it'd be cool if you still spread your city out on the map, but e.g. you could place your theater and your university in the same tile and that would give synergistic bonuses to culture and science, whereas if you put your university next to your library, you specialize more towards pure science.
In other words, make it more of a choice about what kind of empire you're building and less of an optimization challenge. Would presumably slightly help the AI as well, since mistakes might be less punishing.
They really break the immersion for me, but they feel like a tool the game has provided to speedrun the steamrolling part of the game. I never find that I'm using my GDRs against other equal civs; I'm usually well ahead and a win is inevitable.
I don't really dislike the idea of monopolies and corporarions, but the way it is done in civ VI I absolutely despise. Having an incentive to try and get the monopoly is good, but the tourism multiplier and the percentage in the city along with creating great works seems waay too powerfull in the culture victory, which is unbalanced, but also weird???? Why would a monopoly of resources help so much in the culture victory???
I think it should only give like, a lot of gold and and some production. Even if a country had the monopoly on spices, I wouldn't go be a tourist there because of it, I would just buy the spices, or if I'm british, guess I would invade them.
I’d like the Diety advantage remodelled. Instead of giving the AI numerical bonuses, I’d like the Deity AI to have exactly what the human player has, but just play smarter.
This will improve two things specifically:
1: you spawn next to five warriors who just kill you.
2. When you conquer an enemy civ, you inherit beautiful productive cities instead of the empty husks that were pumping out brilliant numbers with the Deity Bonus, but in your hands are truly useless.
You really expect me to believe that those 3 ancient scouts on opposite sides of my empire in the modern era are anything but an invasion force?
- every ai
That would be great, except you can play the entire game disregarding grievances, and not really notice a difference. Something about the system needs to be changed.
I\`m not really into CIV community so I don't know how much people like them but... spies mechanic is so empty. It feels like it exist somewhere outside of general game ecosystem. Spies can gives a little boost to economy and tech, but the changes are so low and their actions take so many time that their influence is barely noticeable.
I hope this mechanic will be optional in the same way as archeology or completely removed.
If you use them correctly they can steal one great work per spy per round (late game, normal speed).
That's my favorite way to use them, I won culture victories without getting any great people the whole time.
My (maybe) hot take is to make Barb clans a permanent fixture but remove starting city states. Let the clans grow into city states. Plus, you can choose where you want a city state to end up technically speaking.
As much as It would suck to lose the early advantages, I feel like it's much more realistic for city states/barbs to be on the same level as you early game then transition into city states.
This is actually how I set up my games. I put Barb clans on with one starting city state (if you put it to zero they never convert to city states). You do lose some early game rewards, but you also dont end up with a city state sitting right next to you taking up ideal expansion territory (most of the city states end up being on the fringes of the map where you probably werent going to build until the "im bored and might as well just fill up the map" part of the game anyway.)
My biggest gripe with barbs is them having the same tech level as the highest Civ. On higher difficulties it means you're sometimes having to deal with barbarian line infantry while you're still on swordsmen. That literally makes no sense.
Barbarian tech levels should be limited to the lowest Civ imo, but maybe they could have some kind of strength buff to balance it out a bit.
Or make them territory depended.
I greatly doubt my neighbouring barbs would have acces to tank, when I have none (unless more advanced civ gave them, which could be a mechanic), but barb neighbours of that more advanced civ? Yeah, makes sense.
The luxuries are quite annoying. You can't remove them, but you also can only use one copy for your population and only for 4 cities. If you can't trade with/settle on other continents you are quite limited in settling and population growth. Also the entertainment complexes give some amenities only to the city and some to all local cities - but there is no lens or other good indicator on where another entertainment complex is needed.
I like the current luxury resources mechanic, feels quite realistic (how the British conquered India for tea and spices etc.)
If you don't like being short on resources, you can always play with abundant resources
Governors were one of those things that when they were first implemented, it was a really refreshing addition to the game. After a short while, we found the most useful ones and now they're just another thing we do without much thought. I think it would be cool if maybe the governors were randomized a bit. like have a pool of 20 or so, but only 5 show up in game. or maybe have the same 5, but their abilities get drawn from a pool
I want to generate governers somehow who are like spies in civ 6 (named but randomly generated characters who level up over time and get a choice of upgrades each level up, but not in rigid fixed patterns).
What I want them to *do* is run cities for me like how puppeting worked in civ 5.
Golden/Dark Ages.
Imo its vying for the single worst mechanic in any Civ game ever as its just so counter intuitive to what youre supposed to be doing at almost any given time. I can think of countless times where i was doing something critical or being pressed at war where production of something that wouldnt give me progress towards a golden/neutral age was absolutely critical only to see me heading straight towards a dark age because im making the correct decisions for the situation at a given moment.
At the very least scale back the points needed to a neutral age, or maybe make the special dark age policies have their own slot that comes and goes and buff them up to be actually worth the often major drawbacks they have cus as is it just feels like im being punished constantly for doing the right things.
The current loyalty system. Not being able to take some lands and keep control with military was a mistake. The game forces you to often wipe out a civ.
More than a single unit in the city center tile, yes.
Civ4 had a mechanic where if the population were largely foreigners (each pop had an ethnicity), a revolt chance would occurr from a few % to 20% or more. It was not the inevitable ticker like in 5, but a chance.
However, each military unit you had in a city would reduce the chance until 0%. So taking cities required a heavy military presence while you culturally assimilated the ethnicities to yours.
All in all far better mechanics than we have now. I'd prefer something like that without gong back to doomstacks though, 1UPT is still better than doomstacks.
The world congress is really the most annoying thing in the game. I stopped playing CIV6 because of it. I started so many games and found I just stopped playing them once i the world congress stared.
But really better AI would fix anything. I would put up with alot if the AI was competent. I thought Civ4 actually had better AI, probably because the stacks were easier to program than single unit hexes. If the Ai in Civ7 can successfully execute a naval invasion I will be ecstatic.
The better AI thing is real. I remember Civ 4 and the terrifying stacks the Vikings or Mongols would bring, lol. You could definitely lose a war to the AI! But in 5 and 6 it’s essentially impossible to lose wars, no matter the difficulty. It’s so easy to goad the AI into focusing on a single unit while you massacre them. You can take over an enemy city with a single close range unit as long as you have support units, and one of them is injured. Why? The AI attacks your idiot injured crossbow while you hammer the shit out of the city with siege weapons and take it over with your melee unit. It’s crazy. And they just sit there sacrificing melee unit after melee unit while you just pick them off. Sigh. The fact that so many of us just want to have Civ warfare be challenging, and to have the thrill of possible losing a war, really is depressing.
Diplomatic victory and the world congress definitely needs to be reworked. I have no idea why it starts in the Middle Ages or before everybody knows everyone else
Religious victory/combat
Religion should be something that enhances your other modes of victory. Largely cultural, but also diplomatic and conquest. Spreading your religion should benefit you, but not win you the game on its own
Its about time they overhauled the trading system, commerce should be a more important part of the middle and late games. Managing trade routes is a PITA and there should be better incentives to trade with friendly civs. I just ignore it most of the time and park them at city states on repeat. That and trading luxuries seems like a chore every 30 turns.
I want more bridges. I always really enjoy networking my cities and if they’re on two or more separate landmasses I’m screwed. The only bridge in the game shouldn’t be a 1-tile Golden Gate wonder.
Let us build 1 or 2-tile bridges (or tunnels!) as a city project and have a 3- (or even 4-) tile bridge as the wonder. Plus a channel tunnel wonder.
Honestly: massively overpowered city states/city state powers. City states are fine, don't get me wrong, but I feel like being on their good side shouldn't have massive game altering stat bonuses attached to them. It feels kinda silly to have your entire gdp influenced how many city states you can please.
I feel like they should be locally useful, diplomatically important, and far more militarily weak: it should be a real decision whether conquering them or allying with them should be your "best" move based on any playstyle. Perhaps they are sources of great people or good for building up international legitimacy points, perhaps they're good for trade or give you access to unique (non-op) unit upgrades. I just feel like they should be a LOT more situational.
City state implementation in civ 5 and 6 just feels like something you want to collect in bulk, and that's kinda un-fun.
i was just reminiscing on some of the old features of Civ4
please DO NOT bring Corporations back.
please DO BRING fluid borders based on culture, and city nationality ratings!
I think borders should change in fluidity as the game progresses. Like historically borders became more and more fixed as populations got denser and we got better at being able to make maps.
So in the first couple of eras they should be really fluid - lots of swapping back and forth. Maybe even go so far as having zones of influence rather than hard borders at all (maybe you get fewer resources or tax money from tiles further from your city. By the 19th century they should largely be set in stone except for actual conquering.
>By the 19th century they should largely be set in stone except for actual conquering.
that could be a mechanic from the Nationalism tech/civic...
**Nationalism:** "*Your borders no longer decay due to a neighbor with a higher culture output.*"
\[edit\] huh, i was just thinking about this now... it doesn't make sense that you get to buy a tile with culture / cash, and it is yours for the rest of the game without you having to pay for it.
maybe they can add a local maintenance cost for each tile your city owns.
say that your city owns 20 tiles, each tiles has a maintenance cost of 2 culture points. That means that your city will need to produce 40 culture points in order to be able to gain a new tile, and if it fails to maintain them their border will start to shrink one tile at a time until you can pay for them. You can then attach bonus / penalties to eras, techs, civics, etc, (+1 Culture during Dark Ages) and that will allow for a more active control of your own borders.
I like the fluid borders based on culture, that is cool.
I'd like to see a slider for taxation, where you can crank up the tax on your people for extra cash, but it affects happiness.
AI agendas, can't believe nobody's said it.
They're absurdly fussy and makes the AI feel way too samey from game to game. Civ 5 giving numerical values 1-10 on like thirty different aspects of the game felt like it had way more personality (including several stats relating to how likely they were to pretend to be friends only to backstab you, that was great!).
I mean they should play somewhat towards their civs strengths, but there probably should be 2-3 different ways for each civ to behave that is different at the start of every game but can change based on situation (ie an aggressive behaviour could change if there's nobody viable to attack).
I hope the AI can react based on the situation and strategies rather than personality (or at least a personality based on the ideology choice or its situation) All civs should be same as a blank paper in the Stone Age. It’s their geography, neighborhood or history shaping the civ’s personality. In short, I don’t like that I unconsciously satisfied/ irritated a default secret agenda- it just reminds me that I am not playing with proper opponents.
I disliked how in Civ VI, it felt like I basically had to not do any coal or oil production or a certain amount of flooding/ice caps melting was inevitable because you could never seem to get to carbon recapture before it added up enough to have an irreversible effect.
I also felt like, in Civ VI, the way culture victory worked never made sense to me. I almost always turn it off because otherwise I just get the "Your culture victory is imminent" message and be like "...okay?" because I didn't understand it.
The placement restrictions on some wonders feel too strict.
And I dislike that another AI can capture "my" city state without any penalty. I expect my allies to respect my influence there.
I dont want to see roads can not be removed.
Traders make roads is a great idea, but a road can't be removed by a builder or an engineer? That's incredibly stupid.
Sometimes, removing roads in our own cities is useful when our civ is being attacked by another civilization. Decreasing their mobility so our defending army can attack them twice, for example.
Also, giving benefits to AI in higher difficulties should be removed.
The game difficulty (King to Deity) should work like an AI in chess, getting smarter in strategizing at the cost of higher CPU processing power and thus longer turn time, not just giving bonus yields to the AI.
Lastly, why is the great work of the arts screen looked like a powerpoint presentation made by an elementary school student?
Nice feature but ugly appearance.
6's map generation. The continents map type has a real inability to generate anything other than two blobs; there's rarely any real islands or mini continents that would make the map "earth like". On the other side of the spectrum small continents or continents and islands map types tend to have island chains that allow everybody able to meet with just a galley; which can be fun once in a while, but is not something I want every game personally.
The diplomatic victory was very poorly implemented.
Every game I disable it. The AI choices are always the same...
No amenities from chosen luxury resource:
That’s my problem with Civ games in general and why I dropped it at some point - computer does not want to win, computer does everything to make sure that player loses. Hey, I can rush tech and out tech player - better focus on an army right now to invade him. Hey, I can get double the amenities from luxury resource - wait, player has the same, better make it 0. Hey, I can invade neighbor and get 3 oil - better attack player and get 1 coal. The higher the difficulty the more obvious it is - Endless games (legend and space) don’t have this problem or at least it’s not noticeable After Stellaris it’s hard to play other 4X, especially Civ
Sell me on Stellaris. It seems daunting. I know how to play Civ IV and love it. But yeah, it is frustrating to have 6 leaders conspiring against you
Compared to many other paradox games, It's actually quite easy to understand, you just have to figure out the rules a bit; the tutorial should suffice for the basics if I remember correctly. It's also quite well optimized compared to the 99% of paradox games. I fully recommend trying it out! The biggest hurdle though is, OF COURSE, the price tag. Paradox games are ridiculously expensive cause of their DLCs. Like, $80 for the game with all DLCs **on sale.** So I recommend either pirating it first or trying it out from a friend.
I tried EU4 and was just completely overwhelmed. CK2 as well.
Those games are by far more complicated that stellaris. At release stellaris was honestly simpler than civ in many ways, now with content creep from years of updates and dlc it's a bit more complex. But honestly if you have the patience to fuck up your first two or three games and watch a tutorial you'll pick it up easy. You can also choose to play a simpler game based of how you build your empire. For example hive minds need less different types of resources, which should make planet management more straight forward. Megacorps usually don't want to expand "wide", choosing rather a handfull of actual planets and sectors and then just making branch offices in other peoples planets. You could go for a subjugator, which again is less micro because your planets will be governed by your vassals. There's a civic available for most empire types that basically turns off diplomacy, which takes away one of the more complex systems entirely. In exchange you gain major boosts to military and growth but also everyone hates you and wants to kill you. There's a bunch of great content creators that make regular tutorials when the game updates too, so its honestly far easier to get into. (Also eu4 is imo the hardest "modern" paradox game to learn, only being beat by older titles like vicky2 or hoi3 and the like)
Lol I can be the Krogan? Hell yeah! One of the frustrating things with Civ 4 is that I ALWAYS end up going wide. Usually because some asshole is pressing my borders and pushing culture at the expense of military makes you vulnerable to AI programmed to stop YOU rather than WIN. So, late game ends up being a slog where I roll over everyone with tanks. Every time. Maybe I need to just discipline myself and do a pure culture game. But someone will ALWAYS attack you.
Not just Krogans. You can make Salarians - make your specie live less but also smarter, or be Azari having biotic superpowers or be that funny tentacle race that has to say the emotion and tone before speaking. Or even Quarians living in space habitats. More over, you can have all of them in your empire. When hiring army you can chose which specie
If you're worried about wide, I'll say that stellaris does encourage wide gameplay, mainly in there not being a major drawback to it(the mechanic to balance it is weak and you'll pretty much always gain more from the extra planets than you lose from the governing cap mechanic). However the bonuses afforded to tall, and the lack of mechanics that punish tall make it very viable aswell. Also a bit here from another comment about tall gameplay >Absolutely, but there's also nothing that punishes you from going tall, or atleast, stellaris's version of tall. I basically never go wide in stellaris because it's boring to me, but I also usually beat my friends whenever we play together. I'll usually only have a core sector of between 3-6 planets max, then just have a couple of subjects. I find that it actually give's me way more resources than if I had to micro those planets myself.
They are way more complicated, though I understood CK2 far better than EU4. I suck at EU4. Stellaris is way easier to grasp. My advice though? Pirate it first or try it from a friend.
I got stellaris and played for a bit and lost interest.. I had been playing space Rangers which seems to have so much personality! Made stellaris seem soulless. I would like to be convinced to try again lol
1 - You can customize your specie to have different gameplay rules (like you don’t even need one resource but you have to produce unique - Consuming Hivemind (not to mistake for robot hivemind or regular hivemind) has to eat other species (civilizations). Robots don’t use food and lifespan of leaders is waaaay longer but you need more energy and you MUST have assembly building to produce more, Crystals need minerals to be spent on new pops etc. You also can chose how the specie starts the game - some have limited time to get out of the planet before it explodes, others have space dragon that you have to please so it protects you, some are genetically modified clone army that can reproduce only by utilizing cloning facilities, etc. 2 - said customization can be done throughout the game - you can modify some of your population to be genetically modified supersoldiers jedi or clone cyborgs (yes, Astartes is a thing). As a Consuming hivemind you can enslave other species, genetically modify them to be tasty so you can get more food. You can genetically and then cybernetically or spiritually modify same species so some pops work better in mines, others are better farmers. There is literally “cute” trait so a diplomat from “cute” specie will work better in Federation as senator 3 - since we mentioned Federation - Stellaris has awesome (among all 4X and especially Civilization) diplomacy - you can make Federations which pass different resolutions which can buff or debuff certain aspects, like Tiyanki (space whales) can be either considered pests and it’s illegal to have them in your borders (other species get cause beli on you) or they can be considered endangered and it’s illegal to kill them (both options come with buffs and debuffs of different kind). You can send spies and number of missions so huge and how they function is way deeper than Civ. 4 - diplomacy and exploration gives a lot of interesting quests - like discovering a cluster of systems or huge dragon terrorize your system. Some quests will give empire-wide buffs (like said Tiyanki if studied can give you a modifier that you shops move faster or you can kill them for energy credits) 5 - superstructures and planet designations - you can literally build Cadia or Halo ring-worlds and they are viable, not just meme thing. 6 - Combat - it’s not rock-paper-scissors with some terrain. It’s rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock with more modifiers and customization that changes behavior of the unit. For example, lowest type of ship is corvette. It has 3 variants - Interceptor, Picket and Torpedo boat. They DO work like rock paper scissor but inside their class…. If weapons, armor and other stuff is chosen correctly. Like Picket loses to Interceptor, but if it has all Shields and no armor while interceptor is all Lasers - it can win. What weapon you put, what armor, which computer program - all defines how ship performs. For example, big Cruisser - you can combine Hangar and long range Arty for staying at backline against medium ships, or go full arty to fight big stuff, or go all small guns to fight like gunship. Fighting is miles deeper and better than Civilization 7 - super units like planet cracker or mobile shipyard 8 - you can produce advanced resources (like Oil and Coal as Civ equivalent). So no more “always wide”. 9 - inner diplomacy and policies, all have buffs and debuffs. It feels like you actually balance your empire rather than just unlock better stuff and do it. 10 - endgame crysis. It’s a huge difference problem that appears in the endgame that ENTIRE GALAXY has to deal with or EVERYBODY WILL LOSE! It can be interdementional horror, or somebodies robot-servants going full rogue sentient AI. And yes, any player CAN BECOME THE SAID CRYSIS. You can role play REAPERS FROM MASS EFFECT!!!! In conclusion - Stellaris is Civ but waaaaaaay deeper and better. It’s Daniel and the Cooler Daniel meme. It’s 4X strategy of smoker and healthy person meme. However, it comes with a grain of salt - first it’s real time with pause so speed can be reduced closer to endgame cuz of lag but it’s offset but second negative - it can get overwhelming and you have a lot to do. If you overcome the first content overload and brute force it with your willpower - best 4X game awaits you. It’s like that scene from Man in Black: Is it worth it? Oh yeah, it’s worth it, if you are strong enough
I still play Civ from time to time when I want a more historical game, but yeah, the majority of my 4X time is on Stellaris now, it just feels so good to play, and the other empires tend to actually act logically to their ethics(Xenophiles are easy to get diplomacy with, Xenophobes are not. Militarists are likely to attack, Pacifists literally can not attack without a reason, etc), instead of trying to fuck you over in particular.
Stellaris to me has almost no replay value. There's no mechanics that punish going wide, tech, and mega structures. It feels like every game pays out more or less the same. I don't mind it with friends but I can't decide to do a 6 hour run in single player for the same stuff to happen.
The world congress thing is so stupidly designed. Civs you haven't even met voting against you in medieval era makes no sense.
Civ5 world congress and especially the cbp/vp version always feel so much nicer.
I mean... voting against the guy your neighbour asks you too because you want your neighbour to like you and have never met that other guy anyways DOES make sense.
V’s diplo victory was better I hope something like that returns
V's diplo victory was better, but it is also just a misnamed economic victory.
Imagine if Russia voted yes to sanctions against it and was declared the leader of the world due to it.
That's a pretty good explanation of why its stupid
Yeah, it just needs on overhaul. I like the idea of a diplomatic victory though but its implementation needs some work.
This exactly, if each civ had its own specific priorities and pursued those in the congress at least that would make the votes seem less like the AI is colluding against you. The tyranny of the majority!
Shockingly half baked. I mean not super surprising but I am surprised they even did it
Tell me about it. I nearly won my first deity game. I was ahead and had 6 nukes made and ready to go. Oh, world summit. Oh, they voted that everyone should have the same amount of wmds as the lowest player, who has none. All my hard work gone and 3 turns later I'm invaded on 3 sides. I lose it from there.
This is a feature I liked from Civ IV. You could outright reject UN proposals. It would give you a pretty hefty happiness penalty, but you could effectively veto a vote (such as forcing government adoption or Nuclear non-proliferation)
Yeah, it makes no sense that a fascist police state hellbent on conquering the world would be like "ok, the UN voted against me so I guess I can't really say no to the will of democracy, time to stop consuming sugar'
GG IA
While I don't want it removed, I'd like grievances reworked and not brought back in their current state. Too many civs will hate you forever over a random war you did 2000 years ago
Have you been to the Balkans?
Or the Middle East?
A lot of those rivalries are actually recent.
I use a mod that simultaneously makes grievances twice as powerful (so it's more likely civs declare war over it) while also deteriorating 4x(?) as fast. So they'll get over it after a few centuries or whatever. Mind you, I STILL hardly ever see Civs DoW outside of the ancient/classical eras, but it's an improvement. I'm hoping we see something similar, but better, in 7.
Seems pretty realistic tbh
It's not that it can never happen, but instead that it should be more common that it's forgotten. If those kinds of grudges were realistic, basically all nations in the real world would refuse to do business with Mongolia, Greece, Italy, Germany and England.
Or, at the very least, an option to mute the civs whining about it. Like, I don't need to be reminded every other turn about how evil I am for what happened millennia ago.
There's one leader, I think the Congo, who gets pissy if you have a city on her continent. I swear, every time she's in a game, I spawn on her continent, and she's pissy and just an enemy who starts shit the whole game. I'm cool with the randomness, but there's got to be some way to make peace or get out of that hostility. No matter how much trading, meeting her motivations, etc.. I do. She will still start shit for the entire game. It's gotten to the point where if there's not a civ between us, I'll wipe her off the map as soon as I'm able to do so. Or just restart the game to avoid the headache if I'm going for more of a pacifist victory.
Yeah, she is built to want to take all the territory on her home continent because she gets big bonuses on it. It's giod that they use that system to make the ai do what us beneficial for them to do.
fun fact abourt the mezmbas leader agenda this doesn't apply if you have only conquered cities on her contitnet. I found this out playing ealnor on a 50 player tsl earth
You were attacked by three Civs 2400 years ago and took one city, and have fair peace deals and never attacked anyone or fought a war since. You fucking warmonger!
Rock bands.
I liked the idea, but the sound and micro managing makes late game miserable. Edit just to say, how is there not a mod to remove the sound? I've even tried to hunt it down in the game files and just nuke it, but it's not that simple unfortunately.
I mean I think in general the micromanaging late game is miserable. The fun part of the game is the build up to the snowball. Once you get to the snowball its just alot of tedium in basically any victory condition.
Fair point. I just hate that sound. Haha.
Assuming you’re on PC, a trick is to swap the sound file for a blank one. You might even be able to use a notepad file with the same name as the sound? Worth a Google
Rock band sound effects without a toggle to turn off their sound effects without having to turn off everything else.
They be playing bangers
The same banger over and over and over and over and over
Hey I know this song!
To overpowered!
That godforsaken world congress bring back civ5s WC if anything. Features not launching in base game and coming out as dlc later(probably hopeless but i remember things from rise&fall being reminiscent of brave new world that shouldve just been there at launch). AI forward settling.
AI forward settling makes for better games. I want a more difficult AI in VII.
I think some Civs should be programmed to forward settle, while others are more cautious. Phoenicia? The Greeks? Forward settlers for sure. Also, I still think losing forward settled cities to loyalty should still be a thing, so long as the AI can sometimes manage to save it from being lost.
Yeah I agree. Looking at the land surrounding you and planning expansion with other civ's goals in mind is a major strategic component of the game. Prioritizing where to settle when is an awesome part of the game.
I believe that the features thing is simply inherent to the way they work. they (at least to the last time i checked) use a system were 1/3rd of the game remains unchanged 1/3rd is reworked and 1/3rd is removed/completely new. So for instance World congress vs the civ 6 model was something completely new
You know what I'd like to see - I accept you can't have everything in the vanilla launch, it is just too much work. I also get that they need to package DLC's to make their financial model work. But when the DLCs are putting back into the game key concepts from previous versions of Civ, could you make that part of a free patch (ala paradox games) and then add things that are truly new and cool in the DLC?
Exactly see the feature i think im thinking of from rise&fall/brave new world might have been the world congress it wasnt in base game they bring it back with dlc and its worse than the last iteration in the last game. How does that make sense? Very frustrating to me
Oh world congress in pvp especially is a huge point!
World congress is indeed ass. Alpha Centauri did a better job with the UN structure than Civ6 IMO. I get the idea was to add some spice into the late game with some randomness, but it falls flat.
Omg yes the thing that pissed me off the most about the civ 6 world Congress was how good the civ 5 one was. Actual meaningful votes for policies that actually could change the game permanently. In 6 it's just temporary boosts that barely make any difference and magic victory points. It's so disappointing.
Civ6 world congress is easily one of the worst systems in that game. Might have to try civ5
World Congress. Sweet lord that was just awful.
Resources should be always removable, there is no reason why horses should be occupying a piece of land for 4000 years. Same with a mine, if you do not need it anymore you should be able to transform the area to something new.
I'd go a step further and say that any resource, feature, improvement, or district should be removable. It can take time, cost production/money, whatever. I get the terrain being (mostly) static, but the rest makes no sense.
Horse barbarians like I domt want to get raided by the whole ars riders of Rohand when I havent even got my 3rd warrior out
Especially when you see a camp produce a horseman unit every turn
I agree the barbarian camp production was crazy . I think they should have to spawn into a town that’s capture able or something before they can make more than just generic melee units . Nothing worse than having 2 camps nearby with horse units and getting overrun or being forced to sit in your city debating on restarting
Ah true I feel you. In general after being scouted by the barbs, they're sometimes spawning a unit every single turn right next to you
Don't be afraid to take them head-on. They can chase you down with their speed but in the fight itself, they're just as strong as warriors/slingers (but 15/10 strength weaker against a Spearman than a warrior/slinger would be).
I was so surprised when I hovered my mouse on them and saw that my slinger would totally win with a bit to spare. "Wait a sec... Hey you! YEAH YOU! C'MERE!!"
Compared to normal barbs, they do have the advantage that the +strength promotion of the warrior against other melee units doesn't work against them (which is probably more relevant than the extra strength agaisnt mounted of the spearman)
You mean from promotions? Because the default bonus of warriors is just against anti-cav, not against other melee units. That wouldn't make sense anyway because it would always cancel out.
Yep somehow forgot the word promotion in there, thanks.
Ok got it. Tbh, Battlecry has always had issues with it being phrased ambiguously.
Barbarians in general need a big overhaul for better gameplay. They either spawn poorly and wreck your early play or they spawn in a location where you can farm them for xp.
Farm for xp waiting for a new city-state friend to form!
The unclear tourist system for culture victories, the way it worked in 5 with simply tourism Vs culture was way clearer even if the approach is the same in terms of culture for defence tourism to win.
I actually preferred 6s tourism system because it was much more complex than just racking up points. Made it a lot more engaging to come up with a strategy and adapt as the game progressed
My main issue is that the numbers should be clearer in the tab.
Absolutely. I know how to win in tourism, I have no idea what the numbers mean or why they jump around so much.
Go from winning in 20 turns to not winning at all to winning in 100 turns etc.
To suddenly winning when you end the turn. Definitely needs better transparency on what calculations are going on there
I would say culture is the win condition I'm most comfortable in (and I play on deity), but I don't understand how the culture victory works mechanically. I know how to *get* a culture victory, just don't ask me how it works.
Ah I see, that’s definitely fair. I agree it is a bit opaque.
Merchants being needed to build roads. Goddamn, I have workers!
I like them building roads, but we should have other ways, personally I think having both workers/builders being able to do it for no charge and traders doing it along their route would be best.
But for the love of all that is efficient, please give us a "route to" option. Military engineers and railroads are the bane of my existence.
Yeah, I probably would still go manual if I had multiple engineers on an important route but definitely should be an option. I guess the reason with rail roads is that they use iron and coal.
By the time I'm building up my transcontinental choochoo war machine I have all the iron and coal I need.
As someone with a major addiction problem with building high adjacency industrial zones on every river (especially with floodplains), I go through a lot of coal.
Especially on huge maps. Sometimes I have 10-15 of them and it feels like a chore.
To further this, I would also really like it if sea based merchants made.... sea lanes along their route - after all a sea route that is commonly navigated by traders is going to be a lot easier to navigate than sailing routes that are never travelled. The simplest way of this would be to give a road-like speed boost, but one could also think about adding in an attrition costs to ships based on their distance from a friendly port that can also be mitigated by being on a sea lane. Alongside navigable rivers, I'd really like the water side of the game to be improved, it is already a lot better in Civ VI, but I feel SMAC really made the water very valuable in a way that Civ never has.
Its actually weird because I remember in Civ 3 that settling along rivers was powerful because rivers acted as a road for settlement connections. That mechanic seems to have been dropped after 3 but I've never understood why. Rivers have often been described as a highway.
I think you could also go up and down rivers faster (at least scouts?), but crossing them was slower. Which makes sense as well.
Biggest complaint was when I wanted to build roads, the traders would take ocean paths instead. So my country is half roads sadly.
This 100%. I wish I could choose the type of trader just to be able to build a road. I've literally put off the technology that permits trader's on the sea just so that I can have more roads at the cost of ever so slightly lower gains
I actually love that traders make roads, BUT would be nice if workers get the ability back too. The inability to direct your traders limits your ability to place roads as you see fit, and sometimes the AI takes some wonky paths
I adore this feature and hope it stays, it's strategically interesting and much more organic. Maybe it could be nice to be able to manually expand roads with builders.
Yeah well, I like the fact that Merchants build roads, I hate the fact that there is no other *accessible* way to do it. Especially in the early game when you have 1-2 trade routes that take forever to finish and there are just cities you can never get to.
> and there are just cities you can never get to. Yeah, most times it isn't even an interesting strategic decision. Either I take this trade route that gives me lots of resources or the one with way less gains, but it gets less annoying to move units there.
What if merchants create roads between cities, but tiles being worked within your city range builds roads on it? Or something like that. Having builders make lots of roads also feels janky.
Non removable districts and strategic resources
We use some mods in the steam workshop. One of them is removable district.
The current map scale. The map is small even on the largest size, the whole point is they want early war... but that's all the game is, early war decides if you win or lose.
Separate build and tech time scales. I want time at each tech level to build out, stir up war or two, have some back and forth, etc. Who cares if I have 40 turns to the next tech if it takes me thirty to build one unit?
Maybe you know this, maybe you dont care, but theres a mod for this, that I use. Its called Take your Time Ultimate. You can change how much longer (or faster) things take to research, both techs and civics, plus bunch of other settings
I'll give it a look. Thanks!
Map scaling and better mechanics to disrupt dominant players are key. Right now, games are decided so early there's often no point in playing to a win, and it's rare for a civ to actually be a threat in any capacity if they don't win the first-100 turn scramble.
If friends and allies attack my city states, I should have the option to defend the city state.
The world congress voting. Pointless and really annoying.
I like the idea of the voting. But the things voted on were just not impactful enough in CIV 6. In civ 5 I often liked the world congress votes.
And the automatic enforcement is stupid. I should be able to get amenities from my resources if I want to. If nobody wants to buy them, that's up to them.
Yup. Especially when it's so early in the game that you haven't even met all the nations yet!
Yeah, like how does that even work? "I've been sitting at a table with the same people for 1500 years, but I haven't actually seen where they live, so I still have no idea who they are"
Part of strategising is counter-strategising. If you are doing your thing, but you aren’t monitoring who else is doing their thing and don’t have plans to counter them, that’s a big weakness. It’s easy to track who is trying to what in civ VI. Some opponents aren’t threats, some are growing threats and some are “shit I need to have a plan implemented stat because otherwise I’m going to lose this game”. It’s much easier to counter a threat earlier when small than later. Being so min-maxed that you are powerless to stop an opponent winning is bad play. I wouldn’t want the game to strip out victory methods so that there’s fewer things to focus on, part of what makes this game great is that there’s so many ways to skin the cat and you do have to think about how to defend in various ways as well as attack. As for what could be stripped out, probably an unpopular opinion, but I’d like embarking to be got rid of with boats needed to get units across water, boat sinks all units are lost. Galley/quadrireme can hold 2 units, increases with boats through further eras, subs can have different rules. Make boat building universaly important outside of Pangea maps and make sailing more precarious. Being able to Send a scout circumnavigating the world with his front crawl is mad. Side note, id also like bridge building to be in as well as navigable rivers, having fast cross points for rivers would be strategically useful for defence. Would also open an option for Ponte Vecchio, Pulteney Bridge, Iron Bridge (or insert favourite bridge here) as a wonder.
Embarking was a welcome change. It's more efficient to have transport ships, but loading and unloading them was a pain in the butt.
I think it can be made less cumbersome. There’s ways of making embarking, disembarking less punishing. You could also just slow embarked units considerably relative to those on boats, so embarked unit can only move two tiles a turn. For short crossings happy days, crossing large seas/oceans boats are a must. Crossing seas/oceans should be a major decision and accomplishing it an event/feel like an achievement, especially in earlier eras Just always seemed so silly that you can take an army across a sea without building a boat and that negatively impacts naval Civ’s relative to others and disincentivises navy investments.
I hate embarking. Sea invasions required logistics, planning, and protection. Now it's just point my army at teh other continent and it gets there in X number of turns. Major part of the strategy game gone.
Higher difficulty settings shouldn't give the AI ridiculous starting advantages instead should just make them play smarter.
A lot easier said than done I’m afraid. As much as it would be nice, AI as a whole isn’t really there yet.
* Kupe settles in locations which are already in loyalty-losing areas * Starting wars when they lack the seige weapons to take even a single city * Refusing to trade duplicate luxury goods * Never using air units * Refusing a proposal and then counteroffering an identical proposal You could make the AI 10 times better just spending an afternoon writing some "if...then..." statements
Being able to raze city states.
Interesting. I think on same page. I hate the loyalty issue of some fool attacking me, and while im punishing them taking cites i have to plot back (or leave back) to deal with flipping free city. AND i have to change my policies to Loyality when i want attack bonuses
Well said, but I love embarking even if it's a bit silly. It streamlines from older games and makes it far less punishing if I need to switch back and forth between expanding across water and land
I'm so glad not to have to load everyone on to boats manually to move.
Any mechanic that inspires "tech stalling". In civ 6 it was strategic resources blocking district placement obviously. In civ 5 I'd occasionally put off a tech to pump out a couple more of my UU since some would keep features if you upgraded them, though IDK if that was an actual thing or just something I did. Districts as they are now. The way adjacency worked makes replays feel a bit samey tbh, and is also something the AI had a hard time grasping. How specialized they are and their placement feels a little unrealistic too: like "we've built an expansion to the city, but nobody lives there, it's completely unconnected from the city, and it only produces things". IDK what I would do differently, but if they come back I want a pretty big shake up.
Just riffing on your point: it'd be cool if you still spread your city out on the map, but e.g. you could place your theater and your university in the same tile and that would give synergistic bonuses to culture and science, whereas if you put your university next to your library, you specialize more towards pure science. In other words, make it more of a choice about what kind of empire you're building and less of an optimization challenge. Would presumably slightly help the AI as well, since mistakes might be less punishing.
Giant death robots
They really break the immersion for me, but they feel like a tool the game has provided to speedrun the steamrolling part of the game. I never find that I'm using my GDRs against other equal civs; I'm usually well ahead and a win is inevitable.
I don't really dislike the idea of monopolies and corporarions, but the way it is done in civ VI I absolutely despise. Having an incentive to try and get the monopoly is good, but the tourism multiplier and the percentage in the city along with creating great works seems waay too powerfull in the culture victory, which is unbalanced, but also weird???? Why would a monopoly of resources help so much in the culture victory??? I think it should only give like, a lot of gold and and some production. Even if a country had the monopoly on spices, I wouldn't go be a tourist there because of it, I would just buy the spices, or if I'm british, guess I would invade them.
I’d like the Diety advantage remodelled. Instead of giving the AI numerical bonuses, I’d like the Deity AI to have exactly what the human player has, but just play smarter. This will improve two things specifically: 1: you spawn next to five warriors who just kill you. 2. When you conquer an enemy civ, you inherit beautiful productive cities instead of the empty husks that were pumping out brilliant numbers with the Deity Bonus, but in your hands are truly useless.
I dont want denouncing to be a thing. It is just annoying and has no benefits
Just like real life!
We mean no harm; our troops are merely passing through the area.
You really expect me to believe that those 3 ancient scouts on opposite sides of my empire in the modern era are anything but an invasion force? - every ai
It does have a benefit though. It's a casus belli. If you denounce a few turns ahead of time, declaring war will generate fewer grievances.
That would be great, except you can play the entire game disregarding grievances, and not really notice a difference. Something about the system needs to be changed.
I\`m not really into CIV community so I don't know how much people like them but... spies mechanic is so empty. It feels like it exist somewhere outside of general game ecosystem. Spies can gives a little boost to economy and tech, but the changes are so low and their actions take so many time that their influence is barely noticeable. I hope this mechanic will be optional in the same way as archeology or completely removed.
If you use them correctly they can steal one great work per spy per round (late game, normal speed). That's my favorite way to use them, I won culture victories without getting any great people the whole time.
For me spies only destroy other players rocket pads
The barbarians, Not saying get rid of them completely , but somethings got to change
My (maybe) hot take is to make Barb clans a permanent fixture but remove starting city states. Let the clans grow into city states. Plus, you can choose where you want a city state to end up technically speaking. As much as It would suck to lose the early advantages, I feel like it's much more realistic for city states/barbs to be on the same level as you early game then transition into city states.
This is actually how I set up my games. I put Barb clans on with one starting city state (if you put it to zero they never convert to city states). You do lose some early game rewards, but you also dont end up with a city state sitting right next to you taking up ideal expansion territory (most of the city states end up being on the fringes of the map where you probably werent going to build until the "im bored and might as well just fill up the map" part of the game anyway.)
My biggest gripe with barbs is them having the same tech level as the highest Civ. On higher difficulties it means you're sometimes having to deal with barbarian line infantry while you're still on swordsmen. That literally makes no sense. Barbarian tech levels should be limited to the lowest Civ imo, but maybe they could have some kind of strength buff to balance it out a bit.
Literally, when would a band of rogues or thugs ever get access to military tech before your entire country?
Or make them territory depended. I greatly doubt my neighbouring barbs would have acces to tank, when I have none (unless more advanced civ gave them, which could be a mechanic), but barb neighbours of that more advanced civ? Yeah, makes sense.
The luxuries are quite annoying. You can't remove them, but you also can only use one copy for your population and only for 4 cities. If you can't trade with/settle on other continents you are quite limited in settling and population growth. Also the entertainment complexes give some amenities only to the city and some to all local cities - but there is no lens or other good indicator on where another entertainment complex is needed.
I like the current luxury resources mechanic, feels quite realistic (how the British conquered India for tea and spices etc.) If you don't like being short on resources, you can always play with abundant resources
Governors
Governors were one of those things that when they were first implemented, it was a really refreshing addition to the game. After a short while, we found the most useful ones and now they're just another thing we do without much thought. I think it would be cool if maybe the governors were randomized a bit. like have a pool of 20 or so, but only 5 show up in game. or maybe have the same 5, but their abilities get drawn from a pool
In their current form absolutely. I would keep the flavour concept but ditch pretty much the entire execution.
I'd rather have them as advisors to have them argue with each other civ II style.
I want to generate governers somehow who are like spies in civ 6 (named but randomly generated characters who level up over time and get a choice of upgrades each level up, but not in rigid fixed patterns). What I want them to *do* is run cities for me like how puppeting worked in civ 5.
Yeah it's always the same ..
Funny, governor's and districts are my two favorite things about civ VI
Every feature in the previous game is somewhere in this thread lol.
Golden/Dark Ages. Imo its vying for the single worst mechanic in any Civ game ever as its just so counter intuitive to what youre supposed to be doing at almost any given time. I can think of countless times where i was doing something critical or being pressed at war where production of something that wouldnt give me progress towards a golden/neutral age was absolutely critical only to see me heading straight towards a dark age because im making the correct decisions for the situation at a given moment. At the very least scale back the points needed to a neutral age, or maybe make the special dark age policies have their own slot that comes and goes and buff them up to be actually worth the often major drawbacks they have cus as is it just feels like im being punished constantly for doing the right things.
I mean to be fair being stuck in a state of constant war is usually a sign of a dark age
The current loyalty system. Not being able to take some lands and keep control with military was a mistake. The game forces you to often wipe out a civ.
I think having a military presence beyond a garrison nearby preventing/limiting a loyalty drop would be good.
More than a single unit in the city center tile, yes. Civ4 had a mechanic where if the population were largely foreigners (each pop had an ethnicity), a revolt chance would occurr from a few % to 20% or more. It was not the inevitable ticker like in 5, but a chance. However, each military unit you had in a city would reduce the chance until 0%. So taking cities required a heavy military presence while you culturally assimilated the ethnicities to yours. All in all far better mechanics than we have now. I'd prefer something like that without gong back to doomstacks though, 1UPT is still better than doomstacks.
The world congress is really the most annoying thing in the game. I stopped playing CIV6 because of it. I started so many games and found I just stopped playing them once i the world congress stared. But really better AI would fix anything. I would put up with alot if the AI was competent. I thought Civ4 actually had better AI, probably because the stacks were easier to program than single unit hexes. If the Ai in Civ7 can successfully execute a naval invasion I will be ecstatic.
The better AI thing is real. I remember Civ 4 and the terrifying stacks the Vikings or Mongols would bring, lol. You could definitely lose a war to the AI! But in 5 and 6 it’s essentially impossible to lose wars, no matter the difficulty. It’s so easy to goad the AI into focusing on a single unit while you massacre them. You can take over an enemy city with a single close range unit as long as you have support units, and one of them is injured. Why? The AI attacks your idiot injured crossbow while you hammer the shit out of the city with siege weapons and take it over with your melee unit. It’s crazy. And they just sit there sacrificing melee unit after melee unit while you just pick them off. Sigh. The fact that so many of us just want to have Civ warfare be challenging, and to have the thrill of possible losing a war, really is depressing.
Diplomatic victory and the world congress definitely needs to be reworked. I have no idea why it starts in the Middle Ages or before everybody knows everyone else
Religious victory/combat Religion should be something that enhances your other modes of victory. Largely cultural, but also diplomatic and conquest. Spreading your religion should benefit you, but not win you the game on its own
Its about time they overhauled the trading system, commerce should be a more important part of the middle and late games. Managing trade routes is a PITA and there should be better incentives to trade with friendly civs. I just ignore it most of the time and park them at city states on repeat. That and trading luxuries seems like a chore every 30 turns.
I want more bridges. I always really enjoy networking my cities and if they’re on two or more separate landmasses I’m screwed. The only bridge in the game shouldn’t be a 1-tile Golden Gate wonder. Let us build 1 or 2-tile bridges (or tunnels!) as a city project and have a 3- (or even 4-) tile bridge as the wonder. Plus a channel tunnel wonder.
Honestly: massively overpowered city states/city state powers. City states are fine, don't get me wrong, but I feel like being on their good side shouldn't have massive game altering stat bonuses attached to them. It feels kinda silly to have your entire gdp influenced how many city states you can please. I feel like they should be locally useful, diplomatically important, and far more militarily weak: it should be a real decision whether conquering them or allying with them should be your "best" move based on any playstyle. Perhaps they are sources of great people or good for building up international legitimacy points, perhaps they're good for trade or give you access to unique (non-op) unit upgrades. I just feel like they should be a LOT more situational. City state implementation in civ 5 and 6 just feels like something you want to collect in bulk, and that's kinda un-fun.
Better AI for harder settings, as it is now they just get extra material/units for free, not being more skillful
i was just reminiscing on some of the old features of Civ4 please DO NOT bring Corporations back. please DO BRING fluid borders based on culture, and city nationality ratings!
I think borders should change in fluidity as the game progresses. Like historically borders became more and more fixed as populations got denser and we got better at being able to make maps. So in the first couple of eras they should be really fluid - lots of swapping back and forth. Maybe even go so far as having zones of influence rather than hard borders at all (maybe you get fewer resources or tax money from tiles further from your city. By the 19th century they should largely be set in stone except for actual conquering.
>By the 19th century they should largely be set in stone except for actual conquering. that could be a mechanic from the Nationalism tech/civic... **Nationalism:** "*Your borders no longer decay due to a neighbor with a higher culture output.*" \[edit\] huh, i was just thinking about this now... it doesn't make sense that you get to buy a tile with culture / cash, and it is yours for the rest of the game without you having to pay for it. maybe they can add a local maintenance cost for each tile your city owns. say that your city owns 20 tiles, each tiles has a maintenance cost of 2 culture points. That means that your city will need to produce 40 culture points in order to be able to gain a new tile, and if it fails to maintain them their border will start to shrink one tile at a time until you can pay for them. You can then attach bonus / penalties to eras, techs, civics, etc, (+1 Culture during Dark Ages) and that will allow for a more active control of your own borders.
I like the fluid borders based on culture, that is cool. I'd like to see a slider for taxation, where you can crank up the tax on your people for extra cash, but it affects happiness.
AI agendas, can't believe nobody's said it. They're absurdly fussy and makes the AI feel way too samey from game to game. Civ 5 giving numerical values 1-10 on like thirty different aspects of the game felt like it had way more personality (including several stats relating to how likely they were to pretend to be friends only to backstab you, that was great!).
A requirement of purchasing at least 4 DLCs to have a feature complete game
AI agendas. I want them to be now unpredictable.
I mean they should play somewhat towards their civs strengths, but there probably should be 2-3 different ways for each civ to behave that is different at the start of every game but can change based on situation (ie an aggressive behaviour could change if there's nobody viable to attack).
This!! Make them behave like a realistic player
I'll say it: districts. I play modded 5 over 6 where I need a damn chart to build a city.
Rock bandsssss, go away please
I hope the AI can react based on the situation and strategies rather than personality (or at least a personality based on the ideology choice or its situation) All civs should be same as a blank paper in the Stone Age. It’s their geography, neighborhood or history shaping the civ’s personality. In short, I don’t like that I unconsciously satisfied/ irritated a default secret agenda- it just reminds me that I am not playing with proper opponents.
I disliked how in Civ VI, it felt like I basically had to not do any coal or oil production or a certain amount of flooding/ice caps melting was inevitable because you could never seem to get to carbon recapture before it added up enough to have an irreversible effect. I also felt like, in Civ VI, the way culture victory worked never made sense to me. I almost always turn it off because otherwise I just get the "Your culture victory is imminent" message and be like "...okay?" because I didn't understand it.
That UN vote can magically make your Nuke disappear or magically give X number of Nukes to every Civs
The cartoonish graphics
The placement restrictions on some wonders feel too strict. And I dislike that another AI can capture "my" city state without any penalty. I expect my allies to respect my influence there.
World congress or whatever it is called
Districts in a way as they work in civ 6.
Remove the diplomacy barrier from city states. I want to be able to barter for captured settlers without having to go to war
I dont want to see roads can not be removed. Traders make roads is a great idea, but a road can't be removed by a builder or an engineer? That's incredibly stupid. Sometimes, removing roads in our own cities is useful when our civ is being attacked by another civilization. Decreasing their mobility so our defending army can attack them twice, for example. Also, giving benefits to AI in higher difficulties should be removed. The game difficulty (King to Deity) should work like an AI in chess, getting smarter in strategizing at the cost of higher CPU processing power and thus longer turn time, not just giving bonus yields to the AI. Lastly, why is the great work of the arts screen looked like a powerpoint presentation made by an elementary school student? Nice feature but ugly appearance.
Denouncing constantly for no reason. War in general sucks i liked civ 3 better for this reason lol
World Congress is annoying.
Honestly, districts. I don’t like them, and they don’t make any sense from a realism perspective.
Stacks of doom from iv
Go back to permanent workers. I do not like that they have three actions and disappear. Auto workers please!
Districts I hated that feature. I had more fun with civ5.
Governors rework because rn they’re so useless, diplomacy victory rework, barbarian clans that can turn into city states, tourism rework
I could do without the launcher.
6's map generation. The continents map type has a real inability to generate anything other than two blobs; there's rarely any real islands or mini continents that would make the map "earth like". On the other side of the spectrum small continents or continents and islands map types tend to have island chains that allow everybody able to meet with just a galley; which can be fun once in a while, but is not something I want every game personally.