There’s a Civ 6 mod called “Extended Policy Cards” which shows you precisely what effects each card will have for you It’s such a brilliant edition that I’d forgotten it wasn’t a part of the base game until just now
That mod is absolutely great and I haven't played without it in ages. Even that mod though does not calculate the benefit from the amenities you get, it just shows you how many amenities a certain policy card gives you. There are other mod, I'm using one that shows the amenity and housing situation at the top but it's empire wide and it doesn't show how much is needed to reach the amenity break points of +3 or +5 amenities. Overall the amenity system is poorly implemented, it's a good system and people underestimate how powerful it is but the clarity and control isn't there.
I love how Civ 6 mods not break achievements the best ones are for policy cards and the trade button with lightning, quick deals? They don't change mechanics just let you see effects quicker. I also LOVE CQUI with its auto-lenses, nothing saved time AND taught me game mechanics better than these UI mods.
About City States. I used to hate the idea of City States before I played Civ V. Like what's the point of extra players that can't win. Isn't their sole purpose literally the same as Barbarians? To just prevent others from winning? But no, instead they help you to fend off barbarians. They give you bonuses if you befriend them. And the particularity juicily placed City States you can and even should conquer. Finding them gives a bit of gold but nothing too extreme and they really do fill an otherwise empty map with something that's not too hostile. Now I even wish City States that captured 1-2 other extra cities from real civilizations / other City States could even evolve into real competitors... Overall they've been a great addition to the Civilization Franchise!
Yes! Agreed. It would be nice if like, half the time, they'd plant a 2nd city. And I like the idea of them evolving! Check out Rhye's and Fall for Civ 4 if you haven't already, and if it seems up your alley. Lots of cool stuff there.
I loved "city states" as a concept in the bigger, late game scenarios I played. Remember I didn't go beyond Civ 4 in any meaningfull experience and after an hour playing Civ5, I quit because I was pissed I couldn't stack military units for my usual tactics. And than I went back to Civ 2 for old times sake. In my very early Civ career, I launched "Operation Barbarossa" style invasions after becoming at least "the Shield King" on the block. And I love huge maps, with a lot of expanding, and prefferably Manu Military. Yet I discovered that conquering anything over say 20% of the map in 3 turns was impossible in Civ3, even if you have hundreds of units roaming around, supported by massive air and workers (yes, those forgotten units of expansion, they fix infrastructure for you!). And than you had a backlog of say 10-20 hours of micromanaging to get this squared away after each half hour of heavy fighting. That's even if your economy simply doesn't collapse under the economic strain in the first place. I often ended up more bankrupt post-invasion than pre-invasion! Enter what you guys call the city states, I called them "vassals" since Civ4 actually introduced this concept, which I still kiss them thank you for! But expanding beyond a certain point never payed off, in fact the further you expand, the worse things got. There was no real mechanic to play Genghis Khan style. Even the scenarios sucked at this, except where the map was already full, like some Greek/Hellas Scenario in Civ2 and Age of Imperialism in Civ3. Back to city-states: I love the concept, simply because it's territory I don't have to worry about. I can concentrate my military where I want it, I don't need to worry about a horde of barbarians (that's their problem) marching through, or even an enemy outflanking attack. Meanwhile, with Right of Passage/Alliance agreements, I can march my armies over HIS infrastructure, and again don't have to spend 100 turns building up that "province" too. If he's in trouble, I gotta go help him out. And sometimes I actually donate land to smaller players for this exact reason: outsourcing! Also this way I keep 'em in line, by feeding them pieces too. Sounds strange perhaps, but it's the only way of keeping up the speed of expansion. And it becomes a balancing act. Maybe I ought to start playing again..?
@@thomasvandevelde8157 The first time I played Civ 5 as a 14 year old, I think, coming from Civ 3 - I also didn't like a lot of the things they had changed. Namely - Hexagons, City States, No Unit Stacking, etc. So played for 30 minutes, then quit. As a University Student I just wanted to try something new after finishing my 2nd year. I checked my Steam and saw that I owned Sid Meiers Civilization V. So I said to myself - I will give it an unbiased try. I will play 1 full game and see if I like it, whether I win or lose. I still remember that wonderful Askia Songhai Game on King difficulty. I won it. It felt pretty stressful as I didn't know how Victory Conditions worked and was worried that I would lose! But I won a Domination Victory! His Mud Mosques carried me so hard! :D 12+ hours went by in what felt like 10 minutes.
@@bulletflight Those were the best City States! Sometimes also 2 City States spawned really close and both got allied to different players and one managed to capture the other! It was wild seeing not only your Empire expand but also your City State friend grow in territory! :D
Despite hating the mechanic at the time, I actually think civ 3's corruption was the best mechanic for dealing with expansion. Civ 2's corruption could be bypassed too easily, civ 5's expansion penalties killed off expansion all together, and I never played civ 1 which brings us to civ 4 and 6. The issue I have with both civ 4's city maintenance cost mechanic and civ 6's scaling costs is that it makes waiting for the AI to settle city spots and then conquering them (which tbh has probably been too strong a strategy in every version of civ) far more appealing then settling them yourself. In civ 4, you can bypass the period of time when a city is costing you more resources than it's producing and instead let the AI to carry that burden. In civ 6, you don't have to spend hammers on the upscaled settler or district costs and instead get to spend hammers on static cost military units. The result is that in both games absorbing a well developed AI city into your empire will result in an immediate and massive upgrade to your economy. Obviously you should be rewarded for conquering cities, but the reward should either be not so massive (ala civ 3 where the city is likely very corrupt), or it should take a long time for the city to become very productive (not applicable to any version civ).
Depends a bit on what civs you and the AI are in 6, since leaders and civ can drastically change how districts and such function, making AI cities just *a* boost, not a big one, since they tend to fuck up with placing the city itself and districts, since they can't seem to plan ahead a great deal. It might even cost you, since you now need to provide amenities to that city via luxury goods, so that could drop your other, more productive cities out of the higher happiness ranks. Best example is if either they or you are Maya. Tough yeah, conquering the AI in general is usually too strong, to the point that on any difficulty in Civ6, if you can conquer 1 direct neighbour, you have already won the game. You now have more land, more production and more research than anyone else. And the AI is baaaad in Civ6, so they usually can't defend/attack very well, unless they have an overwhelming tech advantage.
This has been the problem with all civ games. When you start to crank up the difficulty level it just becomes a war game. Once the AI gets bonuses over the player it turns into a game where using your military to conquer is always the best strategy. Strictly superior, literally all the time. It's what makes the games extremely boring for me and why I always end up abandoning them once I have to play at that level. to me, such a game is pointless. If I want to play a war game I'll play an actual war game with actually interesting combat, like Age of Wonders. Civ combat sucks and it's not why I play Civ games. I don't know how people find these games fun at diety level because it always just amounts to basically exploiting AI stupidity in diplomacy, and then exploiting the AI's inability to fight, and then crushing it in a war. I'd rather watch paint dry. To me, Civ would be a million times more interesting if war was nowhere near as profitable as it is. Conquering other civs to win the game should still be in the game, but you shouldn't necessarily benefit from the cities you conquer. Or the benefit should be much, much less than had you built and developed those cities yourself. At the very least, defender advantage needs to be much higher than it is in civ 2-4. Defender advantage is actually substantial in 5 but the AI can't fight according to 1UPT so it doesn't matter.
@@sweetsour6783 I have to disagree. You can win any difficulty in Civ 3 without war and conquest, and that doesn't seem true in Civ 5 or Civ 6 from what I've played with them. Stacking bonuses the right way will break the game in Civ 6 (like Brazil + the right pantheons giving you 10 shields per turn off a single shrine.)
@@suedeciviii7142 Sorry I hated 6 and barely played it so I have no experience with it, but from 2-5 I'd say warfare is always the superior strategy and trying to win without it is always going to be more difficult. It can be done, but not as reliably.
In every game of Civ 6 I always start out by forward settling my neighbor and then placing as many cities perfectly with map tacks between my capital and that frontier city. Later in the game I either go to war with a neighbor to get at least 8 cities, or if there is space available I find some vacant land, make a cultural alliance with the nearby Civ and cruise over there with 4 or 5 settlers to jam in some extra cities without any concern for resources or strategic placement. One solution could be having designated colony cities with a colony capital that is different in some way like giving less yields, but has it's own seperate city limit. That way you can properly separate your core cities from your colonies and are incentivized towards properly placing however many cities around your Capital. Perhaps in Civ 7 this idea could be implemented during the exploration age.
@@KasumiRINA I used to just flip through the lenses and do my best to plan my cities adjacency bonuses. If you have really good game knowledge then you can estimate in your head. However I would strongly recommend getting the "detailed map tacks mod" it should be a feature in the game. With the mod map tacks show what their adjacency bonus will be, and they consider your other map tacks as well, they also warn you whether or not the tile has the necessary requirements for whatever you will want to place so you don't find out later that you can't place a wonder. This is also very good for seeing at a glance if the border of another city has gotten to close and you can no longer settle. In the vanilla game map tacks are a lot less impressive and allow you to mislead yourself, "detailed map tacks" is more then a visual aid, it's a tool.
You are wrong about Civ4. You can have as many cities as you want. But you have to get a certain amount of tech first. Even then it depends on the game settings. On large maps you can easily get 20 cities early on as they maintenance is somewhat reduced.
Great video as always, and I agree pretty much with what you said. I especially think you hit the nail on the head when it comes to amenities in civ 6. It's always the most frustrating part of my experience when playing civ 6 because even though I have a couple hundred hours on it, I still feel like I barely understand how it works. The game doesn't communicate in layman's terms what amenities do. Often I find myself browsing though the civilopedia time and time again trying to recall exactly how it works, how the amenities are distributed, etc. IMHO Civ 3 makes it quite a bit more obvious from the ui what cities have access to amenities, and what those amenities are doing for the cities.
Civ 3's happiness system is simpler, the one issue it has is visual clarity (it's hard to tell content from happy citizens at a glance sometimes!) and big block effects (reverse war weariness is probably the biggest example). Otherwise, you build a temple and gain a happy face, it's pretty easy to see.
Civ6 is pretty basic if you don't over think it. Watch the amenities tracker in city status and gain amenities to keep the cities from showing negative in the status so expansion doesn't hurt you. If you can't gain new amenities, work the policy cards to juice the number up across the board.
Realistically not too different, envoys were more relevant in civ 6 and the city states were slightly more valuable but civ 6 had better civs to work with city states such as austria and venice
@@suedeciviii7142 They also gave you quests. Some more doable, some less. Also destroying barbarians near city states made them like you, so you had ways to always keep them allied. The big bad of Civ V's city states was that they would instantly vote for you incase of a Diplomatic Victory, making it more of an Economic Victory than actual Diplomatic Victory.
Never played Civ 3 but its corruption system seems like the most realistic limiter, maintaining direct control over a large empire with pre modern communication and transportation systems was very tough
Once I first played the game I hated it with fiery passion. After all why should my far cities suck ass? I want all the money and production dammit! But now years later I see the simple brilliance of the system and it is probably my favorite "don't blob" game mechanic.
Sounds like you should force yourself in to trying CIV 0 - the original civ game by Avalon hill which inspired Sid Meier. Here, larger empires also do have disadvantages - e g. they are more often hit by famine and tax revolts and more complex calamities like civil war - AND they always go first each turn which is a big disadvantage, not being able to react quickly to enemy troops Smaller empires on the other hand always go last and often benefit from neighboring civil war (you can have half an empire defect to you etc) I have planned to do a Civ3 vs Civ0 (PC version with expansion) for a while as there are no good RUclips videos on it, but maybe someone will beat me to paying the homage to the original game
Great essay Suede. You crystallized the thoughts I've had on this topic since Civ VI released back in 2016. Civ V was largely a reaction to Civ IV's excess and spammy mechanics which had taken classic Civ's expansion problem and turned it up to 11 with doomstacks and a terrible stack versus stack rules that forced units to face their counter and the need to sacrifice artillery into a stack in order to soften it up. However, V overcorrected and the science/culture penalties and global happiness were an odious solution that completely sucked the fun out of the game. Civ VI brings expansion back to the menu, makes it fun, but doesn't make it necessary. It doesn't punish you for expanding but expanding isn't an automatic win either. I understand Civ VII is bringing back happiness of some sort but it now accumulates, I just hope they stay away from heavy-handed mechanics like global happiness and penalties; if it's closer to VI I'm sure it'll be fine.
I think it's really annoying how district costs scale in the late game, to the point where if you want to colonize relatively late, or just like to fill out the map, or have enough cities to start using other civ's names, you have to play around that desire. Like, a harbor on an highly desirable piece of land of major interest to the Empire shouldn't take 54 years to build.
It's not great but chopping scales as well, so a couple of trade routes plus a builder or two can still make that harbour take under 10 turns, or you invest in Reyna and buy the districts. The Hic Sunt Dracones golden age plus moving Reyna makes new cities very strong, very quickly. Punishing settling entire new cities to the point they take some investment is fair I think. What would be great is if there was a stronger emphasis on land features, like if there was a natural harbour you get 100% bonus production on harbours and its buildings for example.
It's both realistic (colonization became too expensive in modern age IRL) tho and a good stop gap when new resources appear, I had to go out of my way to settle and develop a colony on some remote isle that had oil. It made trading for it a more sensible choice... Which is, again, realistic.
I think the workers (or builders or whatever they're called now) with finite charges is a great improvement even though it rubbed me the wrong way at first, it forces you to actually prioritize important improvements rather than just having a gazillion workers on automate instantly zooming all over your civ 3 empire
@@suedeciviii7142 there’s literally no advantage to having a 8 pop city vs 2 4 pop cities. You get more districts (4v3), get to repeat CH and your Victory districts (which are the only ones that matter), use way less food, can stack range bonuses like factories, don’t need housing, and can stack per city amenities policies. Literally the only advantages I know are for Yongle (who should spam as many 10 pop cities as he can) and the one city you have pingala in.
@@suedeciviii7142 no... more cities are better by an exponential degree in civ6, that not placing as many as you can, as close together, as you can, is limiting your own potential to a potentially game crippling degree... 99% of the time when someone good at the game looks at a game goin badly for another player, the reason is; that they did not build enough cities...
Nah, I think civ 4's expansion limitation mechanic is the one that makes the most intuitive sense. Cities have a rising marginal cost but their marginal benefit does not fall like it does in civ 3. Every city has the potential to become lucrative but it takes time to get there. When a city is founded, it has an immediate cost and if you are expanding quickly, that initial cost will be higher than the revenue it can generate, thus the city will operate at a net loss. It doesn't take long for it to break even, though, if you develop it. You stated that you can bankrupt yourself by expanding in civ 4. That's just because you're a civ 4 noob. That only happens a couple of times before you learn why it happened. Essentially, you need to be very careful about expanding in the very beginning of the game. Once you have currency you can basically expand as much as you want. Also, certain traits like financial and organized will allow you to expand more quickly. Once you're even somewhat familiar with the game there is absolutely no reason you should ever bankrupt your economy from expansion.
Depends on difficulty, noble you can expand line a weed with code of law. Organised effected civic costs not maintenance costs. Merchant specialists rock.
I've won on high difficulties at Civ 4, I wouldn't call myself a noob. I still was having to lower the tech rate to 30 or 40% at times, or playing a financial civ and letting my core carry me. Someone else made a good point about cottages though, which I likely underutilized. It's fair to say that problems go away when the game is played at a high level, but if 90% of people are not playing at a high enough level to understand the system, and it's causing problems, then it's a flawed system. Just likely the despotism penalty in Civ 3, which is quite flawed. I'll give Civ 4 another go sometime soon though, if there's interest.
@@suedeciviii7142 ah don't worry, I was kidding about the noob part (somewhat :P). There's nothing wrong with needing to lower the tech rate if you expand rapidly, you're investing in the future. Civ 4 is very different from civ 3 in that regard because in civ 3 there is very little opportunity cost in expansion because there's not much else to do at the beginning of the game. A lot of wonders in civ 3 are rather weak and there's no decision to make between hammers/commerce. You can mine and road every tile. Civ 4 is very different in this regard because if you want expand quickly and play wide, you pretty much need to spam cottages to pay for it. A cottage economy will eventually become very powerful but early game it doesn't do much for you as it doesn't give you production. It's one of the things I love about civ 4 - ther e are different playstyles and you need to decide which one you will go for. I wasn't trying to say that expansion difficulty goes away at high difficulty levels, I was trying to say that you can rapidly expand in civ 4 without going bankrupt, it's just that you need to learn how to do it and you wil figure it out after a few playthroughs. You hardly need to be an expert to pull it off. All you need to do is get pottery asap, and spam cottages in almost all of your cities, prioritizing the cottage tiles, while you beeline to currency. If you do that, you just can't go bankrupt. It's a very powerful strategy if you learn how to pull it off.
The problem why I don't think that Civ6 actually solved expansion problem is very simple: they forgot to teach AI how to expand under these new rules. As the result Civ6 AI have no idea how to build their cities and survives purely on difficulty bonuses. Taking AI cities in Civ6 is almost always worthless to the player outside of denying AI the resources. And it is a big problem.
That's an issue with AI and the difficulty levels. The system could be copy and pasted into a game with better AI without much of an issue, and the system (I imagine) works great in multiplayer. But yes, lacking good AI is a missed opportunity here.
I’m a long time Civ 4 player and I think the expansion aspect is more or less perfect. It’s never a simple yes or no if you should settle a new city but there is also constant pressure that remaining too small will lose you the game in the long run. Early on, you need to select specific city spots with high yield tiles but by the late mid-game you can make marginal tiles very productive, very quickly. It’s a fine balance between staying small and teching quickly early on for an advantage or expanding fast and falling behind in order to secure more land for the later game.
You can't complain that a 4x video game doesn't let you expand your empire like civs have done throughout history then say that Civ6 found a solution but its hyper-unrealistic. I mean, isn't the point of having different civs and different policies and even different win conditions to give players a variety of ways to play and enjoy the game? In Civ5, you've got world-conquering Huns that burn everything they conquer and Mongols that run over EVERYONE and then you've got Ghandi who wins the game with just three cities to his name.
I think the game should start with high corruption when you have many cities and then just be reduced as your technology progresses. Endless space 2 has this as well where you can colonize a maximum of 10 planets for example, but a late game research allows you to build a structure in a system that increases this by 1. You can build this item in every system which in turn just abolishes the planet limit at the end of the game. This encourages warfare and stuff as well as expansion.
Gating things with technology is a good idea! it gives agency (prioritize techs that matter to you) while also incentivizing players to care about science. Especially since Civ 6 basically has 2 tech trees, it needs more content to fill it out.
Easiest to win on the highest difficulty? Absolutely. Easier to play at the highest level... I would assume no? Civ 6 is probably harder since it's more mechanically complex. But I don't know how much of the complexities are used. Civ 3 MP has an insane amount of depth but it'd be naive to say that Civ 6 can't match or exceed it.
It is hilariously contrarian of me, but it was for two reasons: 1) I want to understand whatever systems they end up porting into Civ 7. 2) It was on sale hahah
Nice video! I do agree with you that there is a palpable smugness in the elite Civ IV community which is off-putting and I don't want to be associated with, but I do think your conclusion about its solution to the expansion dynamic is a bit hyperbolic. You definitely have a strong incentive to expand and not doing so is terminally consequential; you just can't do it break-neck and constantly or you will go bankrupt. In essence, it's a more elegant system and requires more situationally dependent thought and planning without removing the incentive, so I find it to be a great approach personally. Anyway, thanks for highlighting how Civ 6 manages this, and I enjoy watching your videos. Cheers!
Some Civ 3 players are a bit smug too! But we have the benefit of being irrelevant in the discussion. I think it helps that a lot of high profile Civ figureheads like Sulla and Soren Johnson really love Civ 4, and frequently make unfavourable comparisons to Civ 3. Civ 3, on the other hand, had massive improvements over Civ 2 (resources! borders!) that are trumpeted as much.
@@suedeciviii7142 about PC upgrades: don't worry about bottlenecks, upgrading a graphics card fixed all my speed issues and upgrading to SSD would solve loading times. You don't need everything top of the line.
I realize this is a video about Civ VI, but one of the things they announced about Civ VII that intrigues me is the map physically growing between ages and introducing new independent peoples when it does. That seems to align with your points about mimicking the real expansion of civilizations in history well. Would also be cool if you met new proper civilizations when it did, not just independent peoples
Continents map kinda simulated that in earlier games by having no way to contact other civs and sometimes you even had some form of Australia with isolated civ on island with no resources that stays in stone age until you stumble upon it late game.
My ideal 4x game would be closer to a grand-strategy game like eu4, with no to little "uninhabited" land. Expansion should basically never be peaceful, except for expanding with cultural influence and diplomacy. The idea of just sending a settler somewhere feels weird and unrealistic. I also think a pop-system like Stellaris could help with balancing tall and wide strategies, as the main yields will be from population not territory. Yes: expanding helps you grow your population (more territory means more places to farm), but if you have a small very fertile territory (think Nile-delta), then that should be reflected in the population density and how valuable that land is.
Civ 5 doesn't let human players take all the land. You get 4 cities (if you happen to get 4 luxuries) and 6 cities if you hold them at 3 pop. The only exception is Notre Dame which lets you have one more city in the Renaissance era and is the best wonder by far. The updates and mods make it much worse, not better. Brave new world nerfs the happiness building so ever city will have 3 less happiness in modern era. Lekmod, the most popular mod, nerfs all ways to get 2 happiness from Religion so have fun building all those buildings for 1 luxuries' worth of happiness. Civ 5 really makes you feel excited to play tall like Venice or India especially early where the wide players are 20 turns behind on national college
It’s still by far the worst game in the series visually wise in my eyes. It made the game cartoonish when it didn’t need to be, that said i do like alot of aspects in cov 6 such as the wonders being absolutely amazing, the ai…sucks but it’s not possible to create an ai that can keep up with a good player who knows the game without cheating, the civs were great…still made about venice and austria not returning lmao and the civ bonuses…well mods fix those
I felt the same way at first about the visuals but they grew on me eventually, I do desperately still want the civ 3 palace editor to come back though. It had no bearing on the actual game itself but little things like that are just so satisfying. Also better postgame statistics/histograms/etc like Age of Empires 2 has are so useful for raising player satisfaction levels, and for players learning what they did right/wrong.
@@ethanpayne4116 This is petty but it bugs me that when you retire the game it won't show you what the map looks like. C'mon! I'm curious! I totally would never use it to cheat.
I think if they wanted the expansion phase to closer follow real life, they would need maps where there is an abundance of bad land and a scarcity of good land. In real life the Sahara is huge, Siberia is huge, Europe is only modest and crowded with civs. No civ game defaults to having most players crammed into a fertile corner, with 3/4 of the land tiles being of marginal quality. Expansion always being good is because unlike real life land in civ games is almost always productive.
Civ 6 maps do feel pretty big. I played a few Seven Seas games and the arctic was routinely not settled until the modern era. So I think Civ 6 has it right on that issue. I don't think land quality is what held back settlement in real life. Singapore was IIRC pretty much a swamp, but it was settled due to its strategic location with regards to trade. Meanwhile, a lot of great land in the Americas lacked the big cities you might find in similar land types in Europe. I like the idea that certain land types don't become good until later in the game, although I worry that just further punishes players who are already behind. Maybe just straight up don't let players settle certain land types. "The people who live in the desert are nomads without structured settlements until we discover X technology"
@@suedeciviii7142 Yeah map scripts have a huge effect on how expansion in civ 6 plays out. Continents and pangaea tend not to have much space and (at least on deity) pretty much all the city spots will be taken within the first 100 turns. Map scripts lakes and highlands will have city spots (even good city spots) that never get settled at any point during the game.
Desert and tundra tiles kind of suck unless you're a civ with bonuses (like orcs), but reality is Africa is resource rich and was colonized for that exact reason, deserts are pain to settle tho, saying as someone who defaults playing as Egypt.
I don't think Civ 6 ultimately "fixed" it because there's still the issue of "more cities is always better". There isn't really a debate of whether you should go tall or wide in 6, because the answer is always wide! It can be fun for sure, and military conquest is very easy in Civ 6 compared to Civ 5 as a result, but it's not the ultimate solution imo. Something I really like about Civ 5 is how the game allows you to play competitively with fewer cities if you want. Shoot, there's a whole civ that isn't even allowed to build settlers in exchange for massive bonuses to trade. Sometimes, you don't want to manage dozens of cities, but it feels like you need at least a dozen cities if not more to win in Civ 6 (even more in Civ 3). Civ 5 allows you to do that very well. Of course, the downside is that Civ 5 clamped down a little too hard on expansion. Conquering the world is very difficult due to the drain keeping cities will have on happiness. I once saw an AI continent that was at war the whole game, and the whole place was destitute with razed cities littered everywhere because the AI couldn't afford to keep them due to the happiness penalty. I really hope that Civ 7 allows players to have small, cute empires like Venice in Civ 5, but also allows you to expand and conquer a huge empire if you want like in Civ 6. (Also as others have pointed out, PLEASE install the "Extended Policy Cards" mod on the Steam workshop. It makes Civ 6 SOOO much better!)
Tall and wide are both good in Civ 6! You can definitely hamstring yourself by not growing your cities (especially since it limits districts!) just like you can hamstring yourself by not expanding. One is easier to solve than the latter, but usually there's land left over on far away islands that you can claim.
@@aname4437 It's more cities is always better*. For example look at Israel, an abysmally small nation yet with massive global influence. Diplomacy and trade should be other avenues. My only deity win on Civ 5 was with Siam, I only had 2 cities yet I won a diplomatic victory. My science, culture, faith, and gold output were insane due to my influence over the city states and partnerships with other nations. That's my favorite game in Civ I've ever played despite Civ 5 not even being my favorite Civ game. If production is your goal, then yes more cities should always be better 100% of the time. However if culture, diplomacy, research or gold is your goal, I'm not convinced even as few as 1 city should be unviable. More cities shouldn't always be better, like why is having another city automatically more culture?
Also how civ 6 limits expansion is through districts. As you churn out the settlers you will inevitably research more techs and civics. This makes the base cost of districts to rise, so your new cities take longer to become productive
The devs in Civ4 were like : "Ok, you want more little towns? Build cottages with workers" So the settler spawn in Civ3 translates to cottage spawn in Civ4. If you want to expand limitless in civ4, you can do it without selling your house, but you may fall in tech / the other AIs my attack you.
I feel like expansion in civ 5 is too slow, but expansion in civ 6 is too frantic. Maybe it's me that needs to slow down a little, but I still feel like the early game becomes a frantic land grab at higher difficulties.
Expansion should always be limited in some way. One thing is allowing you to build cities without penalties and another to build with penalties. Especially as the map has only so much room to fit cities. Civ 7 is looking promising by adding a growing soft cap as you research tech so that the question of "can i build another settler" isn't always yes. This is to reward strategic planning over spamming.
I would prefer a system of unlocking settlers the same way you unlock envoys in Civ 6, in place of the systems from Civ4/5. What you described is harsh but as long as you can make game choices that allow for more settlers, it would be ok.
I love city states, one saved my ass last game. I moved almost my entire army away from my western boarder with the Aztecs to my south west to deal with a massive barbarian horde. I thought I was safe because Aztec was weakens by an ongoing war they were having. But they made peace and rebuilt then came after me. They took one city and had a straight shot at my capital within 2 turns. Thankfully there was a city state I could be friend who also happened to have a large army. They fought off the Aztecs around my capital and weakened the city I lost. By the time my army was repositioned the city state already broke the back of the invasion and allowed me to counter attack right away.
Yeah, I love Civ V, but always thought global happiness in particular was awful and unfun. No building a cool large empire with big cities allowed! At least, not until the late game. Makes early game warfare kinda meh,: you spend on troops to raze cities you can't keep, the only purpose is to kill the enemy.
i really, really, really hate the global happiness system. at least the way it implemented. i mean i tend towards localized happiness system. but a mix of both would make sense. perhaps total happiness are both local and global factor with some modifier like distance (like how loyalty works) like in real life where cities or province with bad situation tend to rebel more than city with good situation, but on case of revolution, it might affect everyone
Yeah, in Civ 3 some things cause global effects and some things cause local effects. If you drafted a city into the ground, it will need special help for a while.
Civ4 maint is better than corruption, its only a problem until the city gets big enough to pay itself. you can have as many cities as you want it just stops you mindlessly spamming them in the early game before you unlock build wealth and courthouses
I've been amazed by the c3x mod by flintlock -- they decompiled the game to fix some of the long standing bugs and it's great. 🙂 6 is probably my favorite after 3, though, then 4. I was really not a fan of 5.
More cities is actually better even in Civ V, including with Tradition, but it requires fairly advanced knowledge of the game to pull off, which is a problem. For a so-so player the rule of thumb that you should stick to 4-5 cities is generally true. It's better if the game allows anyone to play "wide" if that's their style, and not just Deity tryhards.
I think it depends on Policies in Civ 5. Tradition is better at 3 to 4 cities at the start, Liberty is best at 4 to 5 cities. Only explaining when you have the tech for colosseums or you can capture a city with good lux or happiness wonder, often around Medieval to industrial era.
Huge fan of the scaling costs mechanic, there's a bonus bit of gameplay where by getting your district down as soon as possible (even without actually building them) means they retain their original cost, rewarding your early decision making.
I really enjoyed this kind of video! I think it's a very interesting discussion to talk about which recurring problems of the series are solved by each game and which game does best so. It especially feels refreshing to her a Civ III enjoyer talk about the positive aspects of the newer entries.
Civ 4 (CIV) remains the best version of the game. Before courthouses expamsion could kill your economy, but c'mon, you shouldnt be a continent wide civilization in 1000bc anyways. Didnt stop me from doing it. Tokugawa games were always my favorite. CS slingshot your way to samurai before christ, then just go ham. Then spend the rest of the game fixing the economy. I would still come out ahead in the long run, as my next expansion phase came with modern infantry tanks and bombers killing off muskets. Civ 6 (CiVI) is all about population numbers. More pop = more tech. You want to dominate that tech tree, then you MUST expand, and kill off some neighbors. If you didnt own your entire continent before masonry was invented, you were too slow. Now those walls are going to slow you down. I actually hate this about CiVI, all your expansion MUST be done in the ancient era to avoid the bad reputation, and to overcome the ai bonuses early game. Late game ai bonuses just dont exist, all their bonuses happen early game, and you have to overcome that or you wont buld a single wonder until radio. So a mad rush of war against every neighbor using the worst units in the game (warriors and archers ONLY), then the rest of the game just building perfect cities. Nothing even close to how good CIV was, and the constant game crashes dont help the matter.
I agree that I found walls to be too powerful. It's impossible to take cities without 3+ ranged units and land units in front if they have walls. But with walls, 3 melee units can do it even if the enemy has a defender.
You can literally win in Civ Vi without ever invading someone, even small maps got enough land and eventually AI will attack and you can absolutely crush them and take their cities with no penalties. OF COURSE people hate you if you act like russia IRL. But defending all the way to moscow? Sure. You can also win religious victory, science or cultural without fighting.
One thing I dislike in later Civ versions (past 3, but especially past 4), is how the definition of an empire just gets smaller and smaller. The map being full after just a handful of cities in 5/6 really makes the world feel tiny, and more like a collection of small city states in a fantasy world duking it out, rather than vast and sprawling empires with dozens of cities.
Civ 5 really had this problem, They tried with Civ 6 to address this to incentivize cities to be put closer together (adjacency) and the district system to add width to cities instead of everything being in one small tile.
@@linknlogs2273 Having cities be wider than a single tile is a great idea in my opinion, but imagine that same thing being applied at the scale of Civ 3/4 (can't talk about 1/2 myself, hardly played 2 and 1 never)
@@MrAbgeBrandt IMO too many big cities to micromanage is pushing it. I like playing wide instead of tall but then turns take 20+ minutes as you need to decide to build same things dozens of times, build railroads, manage power and religion (late game if I'm not at war is hopscotch with engineers and priests), and micromanage citizens sometimes too. I wish 5 had a good modpack without Vod Populi because I want to get achievements but the base game is boring with so few unique units, but as of now it's just making sure the 25th city I founded to get two barrels of oil per turn gets enough loyalty and spends less than 80 turns on a harbor.
Civ 5 and 6 have atrocious UIs. It's basically an excel spreadsheet with some graphics here and there. That's not a game, it's work. Civ 7 might be slightly better at the UI, we'll see.
![Yailin La Mas Viral, @kreizyk.official - Dale 2 (Remix) [Video Oficial]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/JaYHBzgqz94/mqdefault.jpg)
There’s a Civ 6 mod called “Extended Policy Cards” which shows you precisely what effects each card will have for you
It’s such a brilliant edition that I’d forgotten it wasn’t a part of the base game until just now
That mod is absolutely great and I haven't played without it in ages. Even that mod though does not calculate the benefit from the amenities you get, it just shows you how many amenities a certain policy card gives you.
There are other mod, I'm using one that shows the amenity and housing situation at the top but it's empire wide and it doesn't show how much is needed to reach the amenity break points of +3 or +5 amenities.
Overall the amenity system is poorly implemented, it's a good system and people underestimate how powerful it is but the clarity and control isn't there.
I love how Civ 6 mods not break achievements the best ones are for policy cards and the trade button with lightning, quick deals? They don't change mechanics just let you see effects quicker. I also LOVE CQUI with its auto-lenses, nothing saved time AND taught me game mechanics better than these UI mods.
About City States.
I used to hate the idea of City States before I played Civ V. Like what's the point of extra players that can't win. Isn't their sole purpose literally the same as Barbarians? To just prevent others from winning? But no, instead they help you to fend off barbarians. They give you bonuses if you befriend them. And the particularity juicily placed City States you can and even should conquer. Finding them gives a bit of gold but nothing too extreme and they really do fill an otherwise empty map with something that's not too hostile.
Now I even wish City States that captured 1-2 other extra cities from real civilizations / other City States could even evolve into real competitors...
Overall they've been a great addition to the Civilization Franchise!
Yes! Agreed. It would be nice if like, half the time, they'd plant a 2nd city. And I like the idea of them evolving!
Check out Rhye's and Fall for Civ 4 if you haven't already, and if it seems up your alley. Lots of cool stuff there.
I loved "city states" as a concept in the bigger, late game scenarios I played. Remember I didn't go beyond Civ 4 in any meaningfull experience and after an hour playing Civ5, I quit because I was pissed I couldn't stack military units for my usual tactics. And than I went back to Civ 2 for old times sake. In my very early Civ career, I launched "Operation Barbarossa" style invasions after becoming at least "the Shield King" on the block. And I love huge maps, with a lot of expanding, and prefferably Manu Military. Yet I discovered that conquering anything over say 20% of the map in 3 turns was impossible in Civ3, even if you have hundreds of units roaming around, supported by massive air and workers (yes, those forgotten units of expansion, they fix infrastructure for you!). And than you had a backlog of say 10-20 hours of micromanaging to get this squared away after each half hour of heavy fighting. That's even if your economy simply doesn't collapse under the economic strain in the first place. I often ended up more bankrupt post-invasion than pre-invasion!
Enter what you guys call the city states, I called them "vassals" since Civ4 actually introduced this concept, which I still kiss them thank you for! But expanding beyond a certain point never payed off, in fact the further you expand, the worse things got. There was no real mechanic to play Genghis Khan style. Even the scenarios sucked at this, except where the map was already full, like some Greek/Hellas Scenario in Civ2 and Age of Imperialism in Civ3.
Back to city-states: I love the concept, simply because it's territory I don't have to worry about. I can concentrate my military where I want it, I don't need to worry about a horde of barbarians (that's their problem) marching through, or even an enemy outflanking attack. Meanwhile, with Right of Passage/Alliance agreements, I can march my armies over HIS infrastructure, and again don't have to spend 100 turns building up that "province" too. If he's in trouble, I gotta go help him out. And sometimes I actually donate land to smaller players for this exact reason: outsourcing! Also this way I keep 'em in line, by feeding them pieces too. Sounds strange perhaps, but it's the only way of keeping up the speed of expansion. And it becomes a balancing act.
Maybe I ought to start playing again..?
I had a game where I helped a city state in Civ 5 capture an enemy capital. Capitals weren't razeable, so it ended up as a city state with 2 cities.
@@thomasvandevelde8157 The first time I played Civ 5 as a 14 year old, I think, coming from Civ 3 - I also didn't like a lot of the things they had changed. Namely - Hexagons, City States, No Unit Stacking, etc. So played for 30 minutes, then quit.
As a University Student I just wanted to try something new after finishing my 2nd year. I checked my Steam and saw that I owned Sid Meiers Civilization V. So I said to myself - I will give it an unbiased try. I will play 1 full game and see if I like it, whether I win or lose.
I still remember that wonderful Askia Songhai Game on King difficulty. I won it. It felt pretty stressful as I didn't know how Victory Conditions worked and was worried that I would lose! But I won a Domination Victory! His Mud Mosques carried me so hard! :D
12+ hours went by in what felt like 10 minutes.
@@bulletflight Those were the best City States! Sometimes also 2 City States spawned really close and both got allied to different players and one managed to capture the other! It was wild seeing not only your Empire expand but also your City State friend grow in territory! :D
Despite hating the mechanic at the time, I actually think civ 3's corruption was the best mechanic for dealing with expansion. Civ 2's corruption could be bypassed too easily, civ 5's expansion penalties killed off expansion all together, and I never played civ 1 which brings us to civ 4 and 6. The issue I have with both civ 4's city maintenance cost mechanic and civ 6's scaling costs is that it makes waiting for the AI to settle city spots and then conquering them (which tbh has probably been too strong a strategy in every version of civ) far more appealing then settling them yourself. In civ 4, you can bypass the period of time when a city is costing you more resources than it's producing and instead let the AI to carry that burden. In civ 6, you don't have to spend hammers on the upscaled settler or district costs and instead get to spend hammers on static cost military units. The result is that in both games absorbing a well developed AI city into your empire will result in an immediate and massive upgrade to your economy. Obviously you should be rewarded for conquering cities, but the reward should either be not so massive (ala civ 3 where the city is likely very corrupt), or it should take a long time for the city to become very productive (not applicable to any version civ).
Depends a bit on what civs you and the AI are in 6, since leaders and civ can drastically change how districts and such function, making AI cities just *a* boost, not a big one, since they tend to fuck up with placing the city itself and districts, since they can't seem to plan ahead a great deal. It might even cost you, since you now need to provide amenities to that city via luxury goods, so that could drop your other, more productive cities out of the higher happiness ranks.
Best example is if either they or you are Maya.
Tough yeah, conquering the AI in general is usually too strong, to the point that on any difficulty in Civ6, if you can conquer 1 direct neighbour, you have already won the game. You now have more land, more production and more research than anyone else. And the AI is baaaad in Civ6, so they usually can't defend/attack very well, unless they have an overwhelming tech advantage.
Interesting points about Civ 4 and I wish I had understood the game in depth enough to make that point myself!
This has been the problem with all civ games. When you start to crank up the difficulty level it just becomes a war game. Once the AI gets bonuses over the player it turns into a game where using your military to conquer is always the best strategy. Strictly superior, literally all the time. It's what makes the games extremely boring for me and why I always end up abandoning them once I have to play at that level. to me, such a game is pointless. If I want to play a war game I'll play an actual war game with actually interesting combat, like Age of Wonders. Civ combat sucks and it's not why I play Civ games. I don't know how people find these games fun at diety level because it always just amounts to basically exploiting AI stupidity in diplomacy, and then exploiting the AI's inability to fight, and then crushing it in a war. I'd rather watch paint dry. To me, Civ would be a million times more interesting if war was nowhere near as profitable as it is. Conquering other civs to win the game should still be in the game, but you shouldn't necessarily benefit from the cities you conquer. Or the benefit should be much, much less than had you built and developed those cities yourself. At the very least, defender advantage needs to be much higher than it is in civ 2-4. Defender advantage is actually substantial in 5 but the AI can't fight according to 1UPT so it doesn't matter.
@@sweetsour6783 I have to disagree. You can win any difficulty in Civ 3 without war and conquest, and that doesn't seem true in Civ 5 or Civ 6 from what I've played with them. Stacking bonuses the right way will break the game in Civ 6 (like Brazil + the right pantheons giving you 10 shields per turn off a single shrine.)
@@suedeciviii7142 Sorry I hated 6 and barely played it so I have no experience with it, but from 2-5 I'd say warfare is always the superior strategy and trying to win without it is always going to be more difficult. It can be done, but not as reliably.
In every game of Civ 6 I always start out by forward settling my neighbor and then placing as many cities perfectly with map tacks between my capital and that frontier city.
Later in the game I either go to war with a neighbor to get at least 8 cities, or if there is space available I find some vacant land, make a cultural alliance with the nearby Civ and cruise over there with 4 or 5 settlers to jam in some extra cities without any concern for resources or strategic placement.
One solution could be having designated colony cities with a colony capital that is different in some way like giving less yields, but has it's own seperate city limit. That way you can properly separate your core cities from your colonies and are incentivized towards properly placing however many cities around your Capital. Perhaps in Civ 7 this idea could be implemented during the exploration age.
How do you use map tacks? I mean not technically, I know that, but what are you looking for when placing them, the Settler lens?
@@KasumiRINA I used to just flip through the lenses and do my best to plan my cities adjacency bonuses. If you have really good game knowledge then you can estimate in your head.
However I would strongly recommend getting the "detailed map tacks mod" it should be a feature in the game. With the mod map tacks show what their adjacency bonus will be, and they consider your other map tacks as well, they also warn you whether or not the tile has the necessary requirements for whatever you will want to place so you don't find out later that you can't place a wonder. This is also very good for seeing at a glance if the border of another city has gotten to close and you can no longer settle. In the vanilla game map tacks are a lot less impressive and allow you to mislead yourself, "detailed map tacks" is more then a visual aid, it's a tool.
You are wrong about Civ4. You can have as many cities as you want. But you have to get a certain amount of tech first. Even then it depends on the game settings. On large maps you can easily get 20 cities early on as they maintenance is somewhat reduced.
Great video as always, and I agree pretty much with what you said. I especially think you hit the nail on the head when it comes to amenities in civ 6. It's always the most frustrating part of my experience when playing civ 6 because even though I have a couple hundred hours on it, I still feel like I barely understand how it works. The game doesn't communicate in layman's terms what amenities do. Often I find myself browsing though the civilopedia time and time again trying to recall exactly how it works, how the amenities are distributed, etc. IMHO Civ 3 makes it quite a bit more obvious from the ui what cities have access to amenities, and what those amenities are doing for the cities.
Civ 3's happiness system is simpler, the one issue it has is visual clarity (it's hard to tell content from happy citizens at a glance sometimes!) and big block effects (reverse war weariness is probably the biggest example). Otherwise, you build a temple and gain a happy face, it's pretty easy to see.
Civ6 is pretty basic if you don't over think it. Watch the amenities tracker in city status and gain amenities to keep the cities from showing negative in the status so expansion doesn't hurt you. If you can't gain new amenities, work the policy cards to juice the number up across the board.
⬇ Civ 5 and Civ 6 fans, if you want to start a flamewar, do it here ⬇
Let them fight
I've beaten both on relatively easier difficulties but they never felt as fun to me as civ 3
@@bradberkely7448 Play a harder difficulty then :)
civ 5 is good. civ 6 is suck. like if this is epic
civ beyond earth over civ 5 come at me..
also civ 6 beats civ 5 easily
Didn't Civ V also have city-states? Would be interested to hear how they differ in each game.
Realistically not too different, envoys were more relevant in civ 6 and the city states were slightly more valuable but civ 6 had better civs to work with city states such as austria and venice
They did, but instead of the envoy system you had to pay them money for them to like you (and, IIRC, it decayed, so you had to keep it going).
@@suedeciviii7142 They also gave you quests. Some more doable, some less. Also destroying barbarians near city states made them like you, so you had ways to always keep them allied.
The big bad of Civ V's city states was that they would instantly vote for you incase of a Diplomatic Victory, making it more of an Economic Victory than actual Diplomatic Victory.
Never played Civ 3 but its corruption system seems like the most realistic limiter, maintaining direct control over a large empire with pre modern communication and transportation systems was very tough
Once I first played the game I hated it with fiery passion. After all why should my far cities suck ass? I want all the money and production dammit!
But now years later I see the simple brilliance of the system and it is probably my favorite "don't blob" game mechanic.
Sounds like you should force yourself in to trying CIV 0 - the original civ game by Avalon hill which inspired Sid Meier.
Here, larger empires also do have disadvantages - e g. they are more often hit by famine and tax revolts and more complex calamities like civil war - AND they always go first each turn which is a big disadvantage, not being able to react quickly to enemy troops
Smaller empires on the other hand always go last and often benefit from neighboring civil war (you can have half an empire defect to you etc)
I have planned to do a Civ3 vs Civ0 (PC version with expansion) for a while as there are no good RUclips videos on it, but maybe someone will beat me to paying the homage to the original game
Great essay Suede. You crystallized the thoughts I've had on this topic since Civ VI released back in 2016. Civ V was largely a reaction to Civ IV's excess and spammy mechanics which had taken classic Civ's expansion problem and turned it up to 11 with doomstacks and a terrible stack versus stack rules that forced units to face their counter and the need to sacrifice artillery into a stack in order to soften it up. However, V overcorrected and the science/culture penalties and global happiness were an odious solution that completely sucked the fun out of the game. Civ VI brings expansion back to the menu, makes it fun, but doesn't make it necessary. It doesn't punish you for expanding but expanding isn't an automatic win either.
I understand Civ VII is bringing back happiness of some sort but it now accumulates, I just hope they stay away from heavy-handed mechanics like global happiness and penalties; if it's closer to VI I'm sure it'll be fine.
I'd like to do an essay on 1 unit per tile at some point. I have a lot of thoughts on it, and how the series can fix it.
I think it's really annoying how district costs scale in the late game, to the point where if you want to colonize relatively late, or just like to fill out the map, or have enough cities to start using other civ's names, you have to play around that desire.
Like, a harbor on an highly desirable piece of land of major interest to the Empire shouldn't take 54 years to build.
It's not great but chopping scales as well, so a couple of trade routes plus a builder or two can still make that harbour take under 10 turns, or you invest in Reyna and buy the districts. The Hic Sunt Dracones golden age plus moving Reyna makes new cities very strong, very quickly. Punishing settling entire new cities to the point they take some investment is fair I think. What would be great is if there was a stronger emphasis on land features, like if there was a natural harbour you get 100% bonus production on harbours and its buildings for example.
It's a bit annoying, but with tile yield improvements and trade routes, once you grow the city it's not so bad.
That's what chopping is for!
It's both realistic (colonization became too expensive in modern age IRL) tho and a good stop gap when new resources appear, I had to go out of my way to settle and develop a colony on some remote isle that had oil. It made trading for it a more sensible choice... Which is, again, realistic.
I think the workers (or builders or whatever they're called now) with finite charges is a great improvement even though it rubbed me the wrong way at first, it forces you to actually prioritize important improvements rather than just having a gazillion workers on automate instantly zooming all over your civ 3 empire
Agreed! It also reduces worker micro in general. And it's so satisfying when they just instantly complete the improvement.
Ah yes they solved the “problem” of players having to make a choice of tall or wide by forcing players to go wide and removing all penalties.
Fixed
Tall and wide are both good in Civ 6.
@@suedeciviii7142 there’s literally no advantage to having a 8 pop city vs 2 4 pop cities. You get more districts (4v3), get to repeat CH and your Victory districts (which are the only ones that matter), use way less food, can stack range bonuses like factories, don’t need housing, and can stack per city amenities policies. Literally the only advantages I know are for Yongle (who should spam as many 10 pop cities as he can) and the one city you have pingala in.
@@suedeciviii7142 no... more cities are better by an exponential degree in civ6, that not placing as many as you can, as close together, as you can, is limiting your own potential to a potentially game crippling degree...
99% of the time when someone good at the game looks at a game goin badly for another player, the reason is; that they did not build enough cities...
Nah, I think civ 4's expansion limitation mechanic is the one that makes the most intuitive sense. Cities have a rising marginal cost but their marginal benefit does not fall like it does in civ 3. Every city has the potential to become lucrative but it takes time to get there. When a city is founded, it has an immediate cost and if you are expanding quickly, that initial cost will be higher than the revenue it can generate, thus the city will operate at a net loss. It doesn't take long for it to break even, though, if you develop it.
You stated that you can bankrupt yourself by expanding in civ 4. That's just because you're a civ 4 noob. That only happens a couple of times before you learn why it happened. Essentially, you need to be very careful about expanding in the very beginning of the game. Once you have currency you can basically expand as much as you want. Also, certain traits like financial and organized will allow you to expand more quickly. Once you're even somewhat familiar with the game there is absolutely no reason you should ever bankrupt your economy from expansion.
Depends on difficulty, noble you can expand line a weed with code of law.
Organised effected civic costs not maintenance costs.
Merchant specialists rock.
I've won on high difficulties at Civ 4, I wouldn't call myself a noob. I still was having to lower the tech rate to 30 or 40% at times, or playing a financial civ and letting my core carry me. Someone else made a good point about cottages though, which I likely underutilized. It's fair to say that problems go away when the game is played at a high level, but if 90% of people are not playing at a high enough level to understand the system, and it's causing problems, then it's a flawed system. Just likely the despotism penalty in Civ 3, which is quite flawed.
I'll give Civ 4 another go sometime soon though, if there's interest.
@@suedeciviii7142 there sure is interest! :)
@@Christina-g4s civic maintenance costs are affected by both population and number of cities, so it rises as you expand. It's in the game code.
@@suedeciviii7142 ah don't worry, I was kidding about the noob part (somewhat :P). There's nothing wrong with needing to lower the tech rate if you expand rapidly, you're investing in the future. Civ 4 is very different from civ 3 in that regard because in civ 3 there is very little opportunity cost in expansion because there's not much else to do at the beginning of the game. A lot of wonders in civ 3 are rather weak and there's no decision to make between hammers/commerce. You can mine and road every tile. Civ 4 is very different in this regard because if you want expand quickly and play wide, you pretty much need to spam cottages to pay for it. A cottage economy will eventually become very powerful but early game it doesn't do much for you as it doesn't give you production. It's one of the things I love about civ 4 - ther e are different playstyles and you need to decide which one you will go for. I wasn't trying to say that expansion difficulty goes away at high difficulty levels, I was trying to say that you can rapidly expand in civ 4 without going bankrupt, it's just that you need to learn how to do it and you wil figure it out after a few playthroughs. You hardly need to be an expert to pull it off. All you need to do is get pottery asap, and spam cottages in almost all of your cities, prioritizing the cottage tiles, while you beeline to currency. If you do that, you just can't go bankrupt. It's a very powerful strategy if you learn how to pull it off.
2:35 is fucking wild lmao
The problem why I don't think that Civ6 actually solved expansion problem is very simple: they forgot to teach AI how to expand under these new rules. As the result Civ6 AI have no idea how to build their cities and survives purely on difficulty bonuses. Taking AI cities in Civ6 is almost always worthless to the player outside of denying AI the resources. And it is a big problem.
That's an issue with AI and the difficulty levels. The system could be copy and pasted into a game with better AI without much of an issue, and the system (I imagine) works great in multiplayer. But yes, lacking good AI is a missed opportunity here.
I’m a long time Civ 4 player and I think the expansion aspect is more or less perfect.
It’s never a simple yes or no if you should settle a new city but there is also constant pressure that remaining too small will lose you the game in the long run.
Early on, you need to select specific city spots with high yield tiles but by the late mid-game you can make marginal tiles very productive, very quickly.
It’s a fine balance between staying small and teching quickly early on for an advantage or expanding fast and falling behind in order to secure more land for the later game.
I reinstalled Civ 4 recently so I'll find out if you're right
City states also give you a buffer zone and a great way to legally war dec an opponent when they go after one of your tributaries.
A comment for the algorithm god! 🙏 (great video btw :)
I have only play civ 3, but this made me want to check on 6.
Maybe i like it and spend another ridiculous amount of hours on a civ game.
It's a good game, you should! It's cheap right now on steam.
You can't complain that a 4x video game doesn't let you expand your empire like civs have done throughout history then say that Civ6 found a solution but its hyper-unrealistic. I mean, isn't the point of having different civs and different policies and even different win conditions to give players a variety of ways to play and enjoy the game? In Civ5, you've got world-conquering Huns that burn everything they conquer and Mongols that run over EVERYONE and then you've got Ghandi who wins the game with just three cities to his name.
I think the game should start with high corruption when you have many cities and then just be reduced as your technology progresses.
Endless space 2 has this as well where you can colonize a maximum of 10 planets for example, but a late game research allows you to build a structure in a system that increases this by 1. You can build this item in every system which in turn just abolishes the planet limit at the end of the game. This encourages warfare and stuff as well as expansion.
Gating things with technology is a good idea! it gives agency (prioritize techs that matter to you) while also incentivizing players to care about science. Especially since Civ 6 basically has 2 tech trees, it needs more content to fill it out.
Do you feel like civ VI is easy compere to civ 3(granted you just started playing civ6)
Easiest to win on the highest difficulty? Absolutely.
Easier to play at the highest level... I would assume no? Civ 6 is probably harder since it's more mechanically complex. But I don't know how much of the complexities are used. Civ 3 MP has an insane amount of depth but it'd be naive to say that Civ 6 can't match or exceed it.
Of course you start playing Civ 6 when the next game comes out, lmao. No, but this is awesome!
It is hilariously contrarian of me, but it was for two reasons:
1) I want to understand whatever systems they end up porting into Civ 7.
2) It was on sale hahah
Nice video! I do agree with you that there is a palpable smugness in the elite Civ IV community which is off-putting and I don't want to be associated with, but I do think your conclusion about its solution to the expansion dynamic is a bit hyperbolic. You definitely have a strong incentive to expand and not doing so is terminally consequential; you just can't do it break-neck and constantly or you will go bankrupt. In essence, it's a more elegant system and requires more situationally dependent thought and planning without removing the incentive, so I find it to be a great approach personally. Anyway, thanks for highlighting how Civ 6 manages this, and I enjoy watching your videos. Cheers!
Some Civ 3 players are a bit smug too! But we have the benefit of being irrelevant in the discussion.
I think it helps that a lot of high profile Civ figureheads like Sulla and Soren Johnson really love Civ 4, and frequently make unfavourable comparisons to Civ 3.
Civ 3, on the other hand, had massive improvements over Civ 2 (resources! borders!) that are trumpeted as much.
seems like your pc needs a little upgrade hope you get it soon 😉
Yes! No more Civ 6 vids until that is sorted sadly. But plans are in motion... announcement next weekend.
@@suedeciviii7142 about PC upgrades: don't worry about bottlenecks, upgrading a graphics card fixed all my speed issues and upgrading to SSD would solve loading times. You don't need everything top of the line.
@@KasumiRINA For Civ 6 yes, but hopefully I can stream Civ 7 too hahah
it's called civ 4 because thats how many cities you build
😂
That's why I hate loyalty mechanic
I realize this is a video about Civ VI, but one of the things they announced about Civ VII that intrigues me is the map physically growing between ages and introducing new independent peoples when it does. That seems to align with your points about mimicking the real expansion of civilizations in history well. Would also be cool if you met new proper civilizations when it did, not just independent peoples
Agreed! Reminds me of Spore, in a way.
Continents map kinda simulated that in earlier games by having no way to contact other civs and sometimes you even had some form of Australia with isolated civ on island with no resources that stays in stone age until you stumble upon it late game.
My ideal 4x game would be closer to a grand-strategy game like eu4, with no to little "uninhabited" land. Expansion should basically never be peaceful, except for expanding with cultural influence and diplomacy. The idea of just sending a settler somewhere feels weird and unrealistic. I also think a pop-system like Stellaris could help with balancing tall and wide strategies, as the main yields will be from population not territory. Yes: expanding helps you grow your population (more territory means more places to farm), but if you have a small very fertile territory (think Nile-delta), then that should be reflected in the population density and how valuable that land is.
Civ 5 doesn't let human players take all the land. You get 4 cities (if you happen to get 4 luxuries) and 6 cities if you hold them at 3 pop. The only exception is Notre Dame which lets you have one more city in the Renaissance era and is the best wonder by far. The updates and mods make it much worse, not better. Brave new world nerfs the happiness building so ever city will have 3 less happiness in modern era. Lekmod, the most popular mod, nerfs all ways to get 2 happiness from Religion so have fun building all those buildings for 1 luxuries' worth of happiness.
Civ 5 really makes you feel excited to play tall like Venice or India especially early where the wide players are 20 turns behind on national college
It’s still by far the worst game in the series visually wise in my eyes. It made the game cartoonish when it didn’t need to be, that said i do like alot of aspects in cov 6 such as the wonders being absolutely amazing, the ai…sucks but it’s not possible to create an ai that can keep up with a good player who knows the game without cheating, the civs were great…still made about venice and austria not returning lmao and the civ bonuses…well mods fix those
I don't like the leaderheads at all in Civ 6. From what I've seen, Civ 7 is less cartoony.
I felt the same way at first about the visuals but they grew on me eventually, I do desperately still want the civ 3 palace editor to come back though. It had no bearing on the actual game itself but little things like that are just so satisfying. Also better postgame statistics/histograms/etc like Age of Empires 2 has are so useful for raising player satisfaction levels, and for players learning what they did right/wrong.
They need more games like Civ Rev!
@@jonathanwilson5831 I criticized Civ 6 for being easy but Civ Rev was much easier IIRC.
@@ethanpayne4116 This is petty but it bugs me that when you retire the game it won't show you what the map looks like. C'mon! I'm curious! I totally would never use it to cheat.
I think if they wanted the expansion phase to closer follow real life, they would need maps where there is an abundance of bad land and a scarcity of good land. In real life the Sahara is huge, Siberia is huge, Europe is only modest and crowded with civs. No civ game defaults to having most players crammed into a fertile corner, with 3/4 of the land tiles being of marginal quality. Expansion always being good is because unlike real life land in civ games is almost always productive.
Civ 6 maps do feel pretty big. I played a few Seven Seas games and the arctic was routinely not settled until the modern era. So I think Civ 6 has it right on that issue.
I don't think land quality is what held back settlement in real life. Singapore was IIRC pretty much a swamp, but it was settled due to its strategic location with regards to trade. Meanwhile, a lot of great land in the Americas lacked the big cities you might find in similar land types in Europe.
I like the idea that certain land types don't become good until later in the game, although I worry that just further punishes players who are already behind. Maybe just straight up don't let players settle certain land types. "The people who live in the desert are nomads without structured settlements until we discover X technology"
@@suedeciviii7142 Yeah map scripts have a huge effect on how expansion in civ 6 plays out. Continents and pangaea tend not to have much space and (at least on deity) pretty much all the city spots will be taken within the first 100 turns. Map scripts lakes and highlands will have city spots (even good city spots) that never get settled at any point during the game.
Desert and tundra tiles kind of suck unless you're a civ with bonuses (like orcs), but reality is Africa is resource rich and was colonized for that exact reason, deserts are pain to settle tho, saying as someone who defaults playing as Egypt.
I don't think Civ 6 ultimately "fixed" it because there's still the issue of "more cities is always better". There isn't really a debate of whether you should go tall or wide in 6, because the answer is always wide! It can be fun for sure, and military conquest is very easy in Civ 6 compared to Civ 5 as a result, but it's not the ultimate solution imo.
Something I really like about Civ 5 is how the game allows you to play competitively with fewer cities if you want. Shoot, there's a whole civ that isn't even allowed to build settlers in exchange for massive bonuses to trade. Sometimes, you don't want to manage dozens of cities, but it feels like you need at least a dozen cities if not more to win in Civ 6 (even more in Civ 3). Civ 5 allows you to do that very well.
Of course, the downside is that Civ 5 clamped down a little too hard on expansion. Conquering the world is very difficult due to the drain keeping cities will have on happiness. I once saw an AI continent that was at war the whole game, and the whole place was destitute with razed cities littered everywhere because the AI couldn't afford to keep them due to the happiness penalty.
I really hope that Civ 7 allows players to have small, cute empires like Venice in Civ 5, but also allows you to expand and conquer a huge empire if you want like in Civ 6.
(Also as others have pointed out, PLEASE install the "Extended Policy Cards" mod on the Steam workshop. It makes Civ 6 SOOO much better!)
His point is that "more cities is always better" is how it should be.
Tall and wide are both good in Civ 6! You can definitely hamstring yourself by not growing your cities (especially since it limits districts!) just like you can hamstring yourself by not expanding. One is easier to solve than the latter, but usually there's land left over on far away islands that you can claim.
@@aname4437 It's more cities is always better*. For example look at Israel, an abysmally small nation yet with massive global influence. Diplomacy and trade should be other avenues. My only deity win on Civ 5 was with Siam, I only had 2 cities yet I won a diplomatic victory. My science, culture, faith, and gold output were insane due to my influence over the city states and partnerships with other nations. That's my favorite game in Civ I've ever played despite Civ 5 not even being my favorite Civ game. If production is your goal, then yes more cities should always be better 100% of the time. However if culture, diplomacy, research or gold is your goal, I'm not convinced even as few as 1 city should be unviable. More cities shouldn't always be better, like why is having another city automatically more culture?
Tall is what kills 4x games. Stop.
@@kabletar1332 A little tall is ok as a treat
Also how civ 6 limits expansion is through districts. As you churn out the settlers you will inevitably research more techs and civics. This makes the base cost of districts to rise, so your new cities take longer to become productive
The devs in Civ4 were like : "Ok, you want more little towns? Build cottages with workers" So the settler spawn in Civ3 translates to cottage spawn in Civ4. If you want to expand limitless in civ4, you can do it without selling your house, but you may fall in tech / the other AIs my attack you.
I feel like expansion in civ 5 is too slow, but expansion in civ 6 is too frantic. Maybe it's me that needs to slow down a little, but I still feel like the early game becomes a frantic land grab at higher difficulties.
Expansion should always be limited in some way. One thing is allowing you to build cities without penalties and another to build with penalties. Especially as the map has only so much room to fit cities. Civ 7 is looking promising by adding a growing soft cap as you research tech so that the question of "can i build another settler" isn't always yes. This is to reward strategic planning over spamming.
I would prefer a system of unlocking settlers the same way you unlock envoys in Civ 6, in place of the systems from Civ4/5. What you described is harsh but as long as you can make game choices that allow for more settlers, it would be ok.
I love city states, one saved my ass last game. I moved almost my entire army away from my western boarder with the Aztecs to my south west to deal with a massive barbarian horde. I thought I was safe because Aztec was weakens by an ongoing war they were having. But they made peace and rebuilt then came after me. They took one city and had a straight shot at my capital within 2 turns. Thankfully there was a city state I could be friend who also happened to have a large army. They fought off the Aztecs around my capital and weakened the city I lost. By the time my army was repositioned the city state already broke the back of the invasion and allowed me to counter attack right away.
Oh god, wasn't expecting that Soren Johnson burn! xD That goes way too hard!
The guy made my favourite game of all time, and occasionally trashes it on twitter hahah
Also he made Civ 4, which is a good game.
@@suedeciviii7142 Which is? Isn't it Civ3?
@@thomasvandevelde8157 Civ 3. He made both Civ 3 and Civ 4
Yeah, I love Civ V, but always thought global happiness in particular was awful and unfun. No building a cool large empire with big cities allowed! At least, not until the late game. Makes early game warfare kinda meh,: you spend on troops to raze cities you can't keep, the only purpose is to kill the enemy.
It solved the problem of expansion but created a new one, whoever builds more cities tends to win, and playing tall is less viable
"Courthouses in their capital".😂 When you know you know
You can just press enter instead of clicking the next turn button
i really, really, really hate the global happiness system.
at least the way it implemented.
i mean i tend towards localized happiness system.
but a mix of both would make sense.
perhaps total happiness are both local and global factor with some modifier like distance (like how loyalty works)
like in real life where cities or province with bad situation tend to rebel more than city with good situation, but
on case of revolution, it might affect everyone
Yeah, in Civ 3 some things cause global effects and some things cause local effects. If you drafted a city into the ground, it will need special help for a while.
Civ4 maint is better than corruption, its only a problem until the city gets big enough to pay itself. you can have as many cities as you want it just stops you mindlessly spamming them in the early game before you unlock build wealth and courthouses
I still play Civ 3 to this day.
I've been amazed by the c3x mod by flintlock -- they decompiled the game to fix some of the long standing bugs and it's great. 🙂
6 is probably my favorite after 3, though, then 4. I was really not a fan of 5.
@@RickyBrent it seems a lot of people who hate on 6 (and already at 7) never played 3. Some choices in 5 are just mind-boggling.
More cities is actually better even in Civ V, including with Tradition, but it requires fairly advanced knowledge of the game to pull off, which is a problem. For a so-so player the rule of thumb that you should stick to 4-5 cities is generally true. It's better if the game allows anyone to play "wide" if that's their style, and not just Deity tryhards.
The inverse is true in Civ 3, where building tall is possible if you know what you're doing. Interesting dynamic!
I think it depends on Policies in Civ 5. Tradition is better at 3 to 4 cities at the start, Liberty is best at 4 to 5 cities. Only explaining when you have the tech for colosseums or you can capture a city with good lux or happiness wonder, often around Medieval to industrial era.
Huge fan of the scaling costs mechanic, there's a bonus bit of gameplay where by getting your district down as soon as possible (even without actually building them) means they retain their original cost, rewarding your early decision making.
Am a just keep playing Civ 3 then. :D
Team Wide!
I really enjoyed this kind of video! I think it's a very interesting discussion to talk about which recurring problems of the series are solved by each game and which game does best so. It especially feels refreshing to her a Civ III enjoyer talk about the positive aspects of the newer entries.
You might enjoy the video below, or the similar ones I did for other Civ games. In fact, I'll make a playlist
ruclips.net/video/pUbHzlT-Tm4/видео.html
Civ 4 (CIV) remains the best version of the game. Before courthouses expamsion could kill your economy, but c'mon, you shouldnt be a continent wide civilization in 1000bc anyways. Didnt stop me from doing it. Tokugawa games were always my favorite. CS slingshot your way to samurai before christ, then just go ham. Then spend the rest of the game fixing the economy. I would still come out ahead in the long run, as my next expansion phase came with modern infantry tanks and bombers killing off muskets.
Civ 6 (CiVI) is all about population numbers. More pop = more tech. You want to dominate that tech tree, then you MUST expand, and kill off some neighbors. If you didnt own your entire continent before masonry was invented, you were too slow. Now those walls are going to slow you down. I actually hate this about CiVI, all your expansion MUST be done in the ancient era to avoid the bad reputation, and to overcome the ai bonuses early game. Late game ai bonuses just dont exist, all their bonuses happen early game, and you have to overcome that or you wont buld a single wonder until radio. So a mad rush of war against every neighbor using the worst units in the game (warriors and archers ONLY), then the rest of the game just building perfect cities. Nothing even close to how good CIV was, and the constant game crashes dont help the matter.
I agree that I found walls to be too powerful. It's impossible to take cities without 3+ ranged units and land units in front if they have walls. But with walls, 3 melee units can do it even if the enemy has a defender.
You can literally win in Civ Vi without ever invading someone, even small maps got enough land and eventually AI will attack and you can absolutely crush them and take their cities with no penalties. OF COURSE people hate you if you act like russia IRL. But defending all the way to moscow? Sure. You can also win religious victory, science or cultural without fighting.
Civ 4 was the peak of the series, in every way.
@@TheWatchernator 3 was also good. I would place it 2nd on my list.
I guess this is the overwhelming smugness talked about in the video. That being said I 100% agree that Civ4 is peak civ.
Even UI is still best in civ IV with rally points for units
@@aname4437 It might come across as smug at first but it’s derived from immense frustration with every game produced since the 4th.
@@lateralus6512 Meh I like VI a lot. Outside of the awful AI I think its a really good game. Civ V sucked though.
The part I really can’t stand about Civilization VI is that it’s not Civilization V.
civ 6 is complete garbage
civ 4 is a masterpiece
One thing I dislike in later Civ versions (past 3, but especially past 4), is how the definition of an empire just gets smaller and smaller. The map being full after just a handful of cities in 5/6 really makes the world feel tiny, and more like a collection of small city states in a fantasy world duking it out, rather than vast and sprawling empires with dozens of cities.
Civ 5 really had this problem, They tried with Civ 6 to address this to incentivize cities to be put closer together (adjacency) and the district system to add width to cities instead of everything being in one small tile.
@@linknlogs2273 Having cities be wider than a single tile is a great idea in my opinion, but imagine that same thing being applied at the scale of Civ 3/4 (can't talk about 1/2 myself, hardly played 2 and 1 never)
@@MrAbgeBrandt IMO too many big cities to micromanage is pushing it. I like playing wide instead of tall but then turns take 20+ minutes as you need to decide to build same things dozens of times, build railroads, manage power and religion (late game if I'm not at war is hopscotch with engineers and priests), and micromanage citizens sometimes too.
I wish 5 had a good modpack without Vod Populi because I want to get achievements but the base game is boring with so few unique units, but as of now it's just making sure the 25th city I founded to get two barrels of oil per turn gets enough loyalty and spends less than 80 turns on a harbor.
Civ 5 and 6 have atrocious UIs. It's basically an excel spreadsheet with some graphics here and there. That's not a game, it's work. Civ 7 might be slightly better at the UI, we'll see.
"Menu simulator" is a term that was used in the Civ 3 Discord. But for Civ 6, the only one that bugs me is the zoom in city screen.