@TheWatchernator Wdym about changing strategy? If you mean culture victory you need to get key wonders (you can conquere them) and as much religions as you can. Military and science victories always can be pursued (depends when you choose to go monkey mode and build bazzilion treboknights/cavs/tanks) and diplomatic victory for pussies and mostly comes from skill in managing releations with AIs anyway Expansion in 4 punish you if you build useless crap cities past certain point, but unlike in later civs city spam almost never hinders you directly bc of increased cost of everything
civ4 took everything good about 3 and perfected it. But civ3 is remembered fondly imo because it represented a HUGE jump from previous civ games. Definitely the 2nd best.
Civ 3 is great, especially for large-scale single player scenarios. (Nothing beats Civ 3 in cold war scenarios) But for intricate mods or playing with other humans, I believe 4 is best. Fall from Heaven 2, Realism Invictus, they are just so great!
Point 1 had the “extended policy cards” mod created (vanilla civ6 is horrible without that) Point 5 is hilariously spot on! There’s a legitimate complaint you can’t abandon the ages system in the game menu which is what drives a lot of the endorphin rush well done pop ups
I'll be sure to google that and install before recording more footage! I'm fine with the era points system in principle, there's just too many systems like that. I would, however, very much like the option of turning off the pop-up that comes up. A lot of much more important things do not get a pop-up (like being the first to contact a city state and receiving a free envoy).
@@suedeciviii7142 yeah there’s a few in game events that are massively downplayed like the city state interaction (it’s hard to spot when they leave you for another civ as well). There’s a good rabbit hole of ui mods for civ6 that potatomcwhisky did a helpful guide through
When I was little me and my dad played Civ III together. When I was aware Civ IV existed and bought it he said it was too new for him and refused to learn it. Fast forward to Civ V it was too new for me and I refused to learn it, so I completely understand the "old man yells at cloud" thing. Your insights are very spot on and interesting to watch. That said, I remember you making a video where you said everything you liked about 4 compared to 3. Could you make a video on what you think 4 does worse, perchance?
100% Agree about the visual clutter. The screens from Civ 6 late game remind me of those WoW screenshots you see with 50+ abilities and 20+ users on the screen at the same time, where your first reaction is - wtf am I even looking at.
Yes! Jesus so many of these comments are just things I wish I said in the video. I played WoW, I do too much at the level cap, but FoldingIdeas has a great video on the game. And about how players trying to optimize things will slowly suck the life out of it. Including replacing Wow's simple, aesthetically pleasing AI with something ugly but functional.
@@suedeciviii7142 I'll comment these here, so less people see it, but: 1) Suede you do know you can change your RUclips user name so it doesn't have the numbers '7142' at the end, right? :P 2) Your description timestamps don't work, because they don't meet one or more of the 3 criteria needed for them to show up on the videos timeline: [1] The first timestamp must start at 00:00 [2] Each timestamp must be at least 30 seconds or longer (I think they actually changed this one, because I saw LemonCakes video had a 7 second long timestamp) [3] There can not be more than 50 timestamps per each video / stream. I know these because I was having trouble getting my timestamps working and I eventually stumbled upon a VidIQ video explaining how to do them properly! :P
I have always viewed civ6 as a completely separate experience from the other civ games. It is an amalgam of mini games. I still find enjoyment in it, but usually I just play Theodora because I like her minigame the most (work ethic abuser). Also, I think it is interesting to think about what type of environment encourages creativity. I think loading a game with a bunch of mechanics and options is definitely one approach, but the contrary is true, as well. I think civ3 is on the latter side of this thought; civ3 is an even environment that greatly rewards the player for learning its mechanics and utilizing effective strategies. As you demonstrated, in civ6 you really can stumble your way to victory with little complexity (even though the game appears to be chock-full of complexity), while in civ3 it seems simple, but you are going to have to learn the mechanics and develop strategies or you will "not stand the test of time."
The big thing with civ 6 is it is really 3 game ideas in one. The base game, then the eras/ages game mechanics, then the global warming/diplomacy game mechanics. All of them were added on top of each other because of the notion that Civ 6 needed more content by the people who were complaining it wasn't as complex as civ 5.
Even as someone who has adored VI and never touched III, I think your critiques are incredibly fair, and I can certainly sympathise with new players having to deal with the issues you've pointed out. As an aside, I very much enjoy your content on III, even if I don't play it. Seeing where Civ has gone over the decades is fascinating.
I have at least one video planned where I say nice things about Civ 6! Despite the flaws I mentioned, it's still by far my second favourite in the series.
By people I assume you mean the publishers, who tell the developers what to do, and spend billions on marketing to hype up a game with hundreds of features to sell you an over priced product? Because they aren't people. 😆
@@VitZ9 Publishers don't develop free mods, bro; and feature creep was a problem over 20 years ago when spending millions on video game marketing was uncommon and dlc and microtransations hadn't been invented yet.
Good call on the increasing complexity. Personally i lost a lot of interest when they brought in governors. They are silly and a pain to manage. Added complexity for the sake of it, imho.
In regards to point 1, there's a super duper duper helpful mod on the workshop called "Extended Policy Cards" that tells you the exact yields you'll be getting from each policy card based on the output of your empire. It improves the clarity of the policy system tenfold, and it should've been a base feature. I have no idea why they didn't add it to the game years ago after they saw the popularity of this mod.
100% - I feel like the core gameplay is so drastically improved by relatively simple UI mods that it's even more damning of why the dev team chose to omit (or not add later) those features
Great review and highlights! Would you ever consider doing one for Civ IV: Realism Invictus? It is a complete overhaul mod that has been in continuous development for almost 20 years, with a very high degree of polish and balance. It looks and feels much more like a standalone game than a mod. I enjoy watching your videos and the throwbacks to Civ 3, but a lot of your criticisms are handled excellently in this one, so I am curious what your take on it would be.
You seem to have played the game with both expansions and I would be curious to hear your opinion on vanilla civ 6, without a lot of the clutter features. I think civ6 core of policy, districts and improvements makes a very solid and fun engine to optimise. But the expansions features were just ok by comparison in my opinion
I played Civ 6 a couple of times when it was first released and disliked it for different reasons. This would have been before any of the DLCs so it was probably a lot less complex. I wonder if playing the game in that state may have been easier to learn for you though. For me though I am just going to stick with 3 and 5 and we'll see if the new one is any good. Thank you friend.
As I never played Civ6 much of this made no sense to me, but I still loved it :D I forget suede, I know you did a vid like this for Civ4, but did you do Civ5? If not doo eeet!
Fully agree. I've played this copiously since its release (also getting f-cked by Aspyr when they didn't allow playing it on old Mac computers, and then I still bought it on console). There's a weird progression every gama where you struggle and strategise to make use of every little resource and mechanic (and this is the best part of the game) after that suddenly you're so overpowered that the game gets insanely easy (even on deity like you mentioned). This sadly kills the prospect of making a challenge within the game and instead favours a more sandboxy type of gameplay, which can be fun, but then you have to resort to different concepts of your own, and when you do it (like finishing wonders specifically for a certain civ or other historical events) then you're finished with the game and don't play it with its intended purpose. This is what I've done for the last years. There's elements of the game I really love though. The terraforming aspect, that you can really change the environment through aqueducts, canals and more to make use of the hand you're dealt within every unique game setting. Also the historical aspects and variety (where I also understand the critique due to the quantity of it all). But after a while there is an objective way of playing the game if you want to win it, and it works every time. And the last years I haven't finished any game (I did for the first time actually the other day, and it just felt like a chore) cause there's no satisfaction in completing a game.
Odd 😮 tho. My first Civ game was 5, and then, I have easily transitioned into 6 , as expansions were released slowly😂. But you'll be surprised that I agree! Even if I "like" Civ 6, I still "somehow"😅 prefer Civ 5, FreeCiv and UnCiv! Because they aren't as hard on the mind as Civ 6. That and the ability to fake Hero units😂
I personally found Civ 6 to be a game that has more mechanics but a much easier game than Civ 5 on deity. Civ 5 on deity required a science victory rush for a guaranteed win or some other civ specific strats like Venice with diplomatic cheese. However Civ 6 offers many more diverse routes to victory on deity with it’s mechanics and the civ bonuses. I feel the more number of Civs you play the more you realize how the mechanics of Civ 6 help the civs get their unique flavour and appeal. Without mechanics or complexity I do not think a lot of Civs would feel unique. A science focussed Korea does not play the same as faith based Russia yet both may have their own way to achieve a space race victory or a culture victory on deity. The more I have spent time on this game to learn the mechanics the more do I appreciate the beauty of Civ 6. Initially I would have rated Civ 5 to be greater than Civ 6 but I right now I am leaning on calling Civ 6 a much more refined product.
Also forgot to add that the City view and the other buttons which might seem “hidden” to newer players do tell what resources or bonus amenities or other things a civilization has. It takes time to get used to but once you get hang of the UI it feels a lot more polished than Civ 5. Also one more thing that people forget is that happenies or lack of amenities/bonus resources is not as much as a deal breaker as earlier iterations of Civ like Civ 5 where low happiness would spell certain doom and there were few ways to go about it.
Would love to hear you review civ 6 more. This game always felt like more of a chore to play then the others with all the excessive prompts to interact with AI and policy selection screens. Seems like a prime example of feature bloat with a very shallow difficulty curve to compensate.
I will! I have so much say about the game, I'll of course do a "best additions to the series" video. But I need to improve the video quality first. The footage here was super choppy, some of it is unusable.
Eh I kind of half way agree with this. The complexity and screen clutter are a bit of a matter of opinion. I like it, but I could see it being an issue for other people. The big problem with the complexity is that the ai can’t handle it, so they had to give the ai big bonuses to compensate, like 3 settlers at the start for diety. In civ 4 the ai only had 2 settlers at the start but was still more challenging. Never played 3.
It's 3, wow. I thought the 2 settlers they give in Civ 3 on the highest difficulty was bad. Yeah, I've noticed that it seemed like they had a lot of cities quick, but that it tapered off and that you could catch up with them. It is absolutely mostly an issue with new players and vs the AI. In multiplayer I could see it being great (and I tend to like mods for civ 3 MP that add complexity)
Civ 6 did a lot of things very well, but it's far from perfect. I resonate with a lot of your points about the game being too cluttered with too many things going on, and I've played the game for hundreds of hours. I like going back to older titles because they do things differently, and in many cases they manage to have similar levels of depth without so many things to micromanage. One of my least favorite things in Civ 6 is the era score system, because it's an extra thing to manage that causes me to go out of my way to check boxes for the sake of checking boxes. I can be doing well and winning the game by a long shot and still enter a dark age because I didn't build a boat to get era score... even though I'm playing on Pangea. If I want to scratch the modern civ itch, I much prefer playing Civ 5. Not only does the game have a better art style, but there's less annoying stuff to micromanage and the AI is generally more competent. Which brings me to my last point. Part of the reason why you feel the game is so easy is because the AI can't keep up with all this complexity. If you're struggling to micromanage all of these different systems, imagine how an AI 10x stupider than you feels? The AI has gotten marginally smarter with each new edition, but the game has gotten magnitudes more complex. The AI in Civ 3 is dumb as a brick, but there's a lot less going on and so they can manage to steamroll a game if left unchecked. Meanwhile in Civ 6, the AI has no clue how to place districts optimally, manage all these unique troops in an organized fashion, prioritize specific buildings, or anything! And yet, Civ 3 is just as deep of a game as Civ 6, even though it's much less complex. I love the Civ franchise and I have high hopes for Civ 7. I think Civ 5 is my favorite overall for its balance of aesthetics and mechanics, but the great thing about the franchise is that each game is different from each other and there are great things to appreciate about all of them. Civ 6 may not be the best Civ game, but it's still good fun once you get past the learning curve, especially when you're able to embrace the playstyle diversity that each Civ's unique abilities enable.
Agreed about era score. One of the great delights about learning the game is learning what things you can skip building or doing, because it makes your life easier. But now I need to build 2 biplanes (a unit I would otherwise skip) just to get some eureka and that joy is gone. Personally, I'm enjoying Civ 6 a lot more than Civ 5. I'm glad different people have different options because they are such different games in a lot of ways.
@@suedeciviii7142 heh, the funny thing about planes is that fighters and bombers are op in Civ 6 just like any other game, but the AI barely ever builds them because it struggles to prioritize aerodromes. Makes it so that when the human player gets bombers, they can sail to an easy conquest!
@@suedeciviii7142 At least they upgrade to something! One of my biggest gripes with Civ 3 is that some things just don't upgrade, like I can't go from frigate to battleship or cavalry to tank. It annoyed me so much I made my own mod for it lol. At least the game makes that really easy!
I was watching this stream on a fairly large tv and I still couldn’t take in all I saw visually. Dunno how the heck on a laptop be able to see and absorb all the junk
I've been pretty disappointed with the Civ series on 5 and 6. Civ 3 is by far my favorite and peak of the experience for me, while Civ 4 I certainly have to credit as the most mechanically "complete" of the games. 5 and 6 just feel extremely dumbed down for a general audience who do not actually play strategy games, much to their determent.
I have been playing Civ games since the begging and I couldn't finish Civ6. All of the complaints I have to agree with. I stuck with Civ5 as a best modern iteration of the franchise and there are mods to fix a lot of things people complain or just don't like. And as an added bonus it is narrated by Leonard Nimoy :)
Sean Bean is great too! Honestly I like Civ 6 a lot more than 5. I'm glad we have many good options in this series. It's telling that no one can agree what the "worst" one is.
As an avid player of both Civ 3 and Civ 4, the visuals of Civ 6 are abhorrent to me, I could never buy this game. There are so many things, the art style is awful, and visual clutter is extreme.
I think everyone needs to look up what ‘intuitive’ actually means; it doesn’t mean clearly explained, quite the opposite. Intuitive UIs aren’t universally accessible or inclusive, they require the player to have a lot of experience before they can use their intuition to understand what’s going on.
to each their own, and I have my gripes with why I do not think Civ 6 is as good a game as it could have been. I do find some points in your video confusing: The game only has 20 leaders (Greece having two different flavours in Sparta/Athens). What is this Govenor mechanic you are complaining about? it is not part in my game. Nor is any World Congress or any Natural Disasters, nothing I have ever needed to interact with. Perhaps you did the mistake of getting ALL the expansions and find yourself overwhelmed instead of starting with the base game? I do however strongly agree with that for example the Culture Win condition is far from intuitive, and in my first attempt I found it very frustrating not knowing what I had to do in order to win. It is not complex per se, it is just poorly explained by the game. The same goes for all the policy cards and various mechanics of the game such as amenities, warmongering, war weariness and so on.
I wanted to enjoy this game but after four or so games, I dropped it. I tried to engage with religion because i really liked that mechanic but I ended up having a religious victory by accident every single time. My issues weren't with how dense the mechanics were but rather that the IA reaaally seems to struggle in this title.
Playing for religion feels awful and personally, i'll just be ignoring it for most games I play, for the next little while. The religious combat is just not interesting. Land combat is equally grindy but at least you get rewarded with city captures. All of the benefits of converting cities are diffuse. Combat is fun, culture and science are fun, expanding and trade is fun. Diplomacy is actually surprisingly fun too.
@suedeciviii7142 I tried to ignore it once, kinda, just using religion for the passive perks, and at some point it i realized i would have to go out my way to not try to win by religion. The religion combat is so silly lol
@@Canthary Silly is a good word for. It's mechanically perfectly functional, but in adding depth to the system, they put too much focus on something silly and time consuming that just doesn't match what I expect from a strategy game.
I'm not sure that it's better than Civ 3's "Just crank their cheats up until their eyeballs are bulging" approach, but yeah, it's telling that they can't make AIs who play their game well.
@@suedeciviii7142 Of course a more competent AI is better. In Civ 4 the AI is quite smart, at least I didn't notice any nonsensical behaviour. In Civ 6 the AI often exposes its armies in ways that make destroying them a trivial task, which hinders the enjoyment I get from the game. You could crank up the bonuses but it can also quickly reach nonsensical levels, like AI getting new armies out of thin air or the player not being able to hurt the AI's economy since it receives passive income. There's still enjoyment to be had in beating this extremely cheating AI (like you do in your CIV 3 videos), but it's not really the same for me.
I'm honestly looking towards Civ7! That's why I bought Civ 6. I need to familiarize myself with it, because typically they copy and paste a bunch of mechanics over between games.
suede i love you bro, but civ 6 is not a terribly complex game at all europa univeralis and stellaris are 100x more complex than civ 6 ever even thinks about being
It's, at the very least, way more complex than any Civ game that came before it. I've only played CK2 and EU 3 so I can't comment on the recent games, but Civ 6 has way more going on than EU 3. Or at least, the quirky features they have are forced upon you more.
@@Gravitatis I've played it once and found it disorienting. But if I'm upgrading my computer for Civ 7/civ6 it might be worth checking out. I'll say though, I don't like games that are super complex
@@suedeciviii7142 you know its funny, complexity is a strange thing, since it depends somewhat on the mind thats doing the thinking. the average person would probably consider civ 3 to be a complex game
Bros really out here trashing all the players that struggle with diety 🫢 You’ve played every Civ game, you’re hardly a noob. And the truth is most the mechanics are optional like you wanted. Just have to click something to make it go away. If you focus the basics of settling, production, and science you’ll be fine and none of that changed beyond getting a small boost from adjacency.
9:23 i don't think the game is intentionally easy on Deity, it's just that the AI is absolutely clueless on how to use all the diffirent stuff to win. In civ 3 the Ai could just slam a stack of random units and win if they had enough of them. In civ 6 they'd block eachother's movement and get killed by your ranged attacks. The Ai will built Chizen Itza in a city with 1 rainforest, place goverment plazas with no adjacent districs and declare wars based on arbitrary agendas instead of actual strategy. Many singleplayer civ players are actually installing mods, to make the game more challenging like the "Sid difficulty mod" that doubles Ai bonuses and still win every game the Ai is really that incompetent.
Also fun fact: quitting in a FFA multiplayer game is punishable (in CPL rules), since the Ai is so bad at defending, that it allows your neighbours to easyily get an unfair advantage by conqouring you.
All your points are incredibly damning. You are right that civ 6 has a lot of needless complexity and would be better with a smaller set of mechanics that you interact with more thoroughly. Paradox games often have this issue as well, but at least they have the excuse that all the extra mechanics were added in individual dlc packs over the years. I love your old man yells at cloud videos, please make more.
Yes, agreed. It's sad because I see some parts where it all comes together. Like, the diplomatic mission to reduce carbon emissions only works because of the "electrical power" system, the global warming system, the world congress system, and it rewards players for completing the tech tree. All of these are new systems where, if you take one away, the resultant gameplay would be less rich. But most mechanics aren't like that. It's not true for ski resorts or having missionary vs missionary combat inside my land.
The game that does it all better exists, it's called Civ 5. Did you know civ 5 was topping the steam charts for years after civ 6 was released? competing with counterstrike. It's for a reason. It only declined because of a generational shift in gaming.
@@doltBmB Maybe I'm drinking Sulla's Kool-Aid here, but is it not true that Civ 5 heavily punishes you for expanding? That top level players will build 4-6 cities and then sit there the rest of the game.
@@suedeciviii7142 It's a balancing issue with the expansions. Vox Populi fixes it, and the base game does not have it in the first place. Sulla even mentions this, the base game is balanced on the knife's edge of happiness vs expansion.
I feel like those Paradox mechanics are also much better designed and compartmentalized to specific areas in the wider scope of their games. They do definitely suffer from a big learning curve, but the games are far less obscure with the information on how they work and what they do.
You've honestly captured a lot of thoughts I didn't know how to express about how this game doesn't sit right with me. I have 1000 hours and no good memories of exciting games. I never want to start another game but if I start it's hard to stop. Addictive but not satisfying.
It is really addictive! And that's not bad, I like using it when I want to listen to a few albums in a row. Or, it's been motivating me to get out of bed early in the morning. But feeling satiated is an important part of enjoying something. This is like a bag of chips. I keep eating chips until I hate them.
this is the greatest civilization 6 video I have ever seen. hopefully civilization moves away from the mindset of making the game for the lowest common denominator like call of duty and falls back onto the superior mechanics from 3-5. i have low expectations for 7
I disagree that 5 belongs in the same class as 3 and 4. The hard truth is that this franchise began to die when the graphics went 3d, not because of the 3d graphics but because it became less modable. It attracted a wider but shallower player base.
I happen to be a Civ fanatic since I was 8, my dad was playing Civ 3. I even got to play Civ 2 and 1 back in early 2000. I've played a lot of Civ 4, than 5, than 6. Civ 6 was the game I played the most and I got bored a bit after the pandemic when Firaxis stopped making DLCs. The game had nothing new to teach me. I then got back to the roots in the last years, playing again on 5, 4 and 3. Each of them still have a flavor and I wish civ 7 will be able to take the best from every Civ they released. And yeah, seeing you playing Civ 6 without simple UI mods is painful, I forgot how the game itself wasn't complete until a bunch of modders worked on the game for free...
I'm quite interested by this video as someone who quite loves both Civ III and Civ VI and I want to address some of the points. First of all, Civ VI definitely has a bit of a learning curve, and picking a civ for the first game is certainly daunting. But I don't think this a huge issue for a couple reasons. First of all, it only takes a game or two to understand the gist of most mechanics. There is certainly a lot left to learn after your first game, but after you've played a few games you can understand the utility of different abilities. Learning curves are going to be unavoidable, as you aren't going to know how the game works before you play it. Secondly, I also don't think Civ III is better in this regard. While there are a lot less mechanics compared to Civ VI, a lot of the learning is not intiutive. Stuff like the despotism penalty, the fact that cultural building are very much not useful, no overflow, the whole essential strategy of the expansion phase, etc. are not things that I learned just by playing the game. Thirdly, I think the focus on more specialized bonuses is a strong suit for Civ VI. While there are few civs with easy to understand, general bonuses, they do exist. Gran Colombia for example, gives +1 Movement to all units, which is not only really good but it is easy for a first time player to understand. Plus civs like Germany, Rome, Russia, Scythia, Persia, Gorgo's Greece all have bonuses that are pretty straightfoward. But Civs with more specialized bonuses allow for you to have unique strategies, priorities and playstyles for those Civs. Your strategy completely depends on your civ of choice, and some are really far out there, like the Maori, Babylon or using Eleanor to peacefully conquer the world. It really makes the prospect of playing certain civs exciting, like creating massive mountain cities with high yields as the Inca, printing money as Mali or Portugal, or steamrolling the world with religion and heavy calvary as Byzantine. Contrast with Civ III, where the general strategy is pretty similar regardless of civ. Yes, there are strengths and weakness and variations in your strategy depending on the civ, but you never get your entire playstyle and goals revolving around your civs unique mechanics. There is a lot of information that is presented in the UI if you know where to look, but I do have to agree that it does leave some stuff to be desired. Luckily, there are some amazing UI mods that give you a lot more information, like ones that let you calculate adjacency bonuses with map pins and show exactly what yields policy cards get you. While this doesn't excuse devs for not including this in the first place, the fact there are amazing UI mods that are easily installed with the steam workshop has to mentioned, and there is basically no reason not to use these mods. For complexity, I am admitly someone that loves complexity in games, but I feel like if any game is going to have a wealth of mechanics its going to be a 4X game. Civ VI definitely has quite a few mechanics, but as I said before, it only takes a few playthroughs to get a good understanding of the mechanics, and understanding the mechanics is a lot easier and faster as you understand more. For someone who has played as much civ as I have, learning the new civs as they were added or the mechanics of the alternate gamemodes was pretty trivial. This is still a daunting task for new players, which is the point you are trying to make, but I think that is just the reality of the genre. Cutting down the number of mechanics or the number of civs might simplify the game and make it easier to learn, but it would certainly be a worse game. For mechanics that you can ignore, I don't think the examples are particularly fair, nor is that metric particularly great. There simply are going to be core mechanics you can't ignore and that doesn't make them bad. You can't, for example, think that you should be able to ignore military and get away with never being attacked. Bringing up diplomacy as an example is like that. You have to deal with other civs. Its part of the game. For the other examples, spies are something that can usually be set and forget. You can get away with having them counterspy in key cities and basically ignore them (or for barbs, never build neigbourhoods and they can't do that spy mission). World congress is also only every 30 turns and its something that takes 5 seconds to select options when you don't care. Visual clutter, yeah I get it. There are a lot of things to look at. But at the same time, there is a lot of things in a 4X game, and you have to have it be somewhere on screen. I don't really see the clicking issue. This honestly I problem I find more in other games. tbh saying clicking is hard kind of sounds like a skill issue. I really don't know what to say there. Yeah, the era score pop ups are pretty tedious, and I usually don't want to see them, and at the skill level I play at, the game gets fairly easy if I don't fall into early game disaster. I kind of wish there were more chances for things to go catastrophically wrong (although the alternate gamemodes can allow for that). That being said, dark ages, while not catastrophic, are not really good unless you can get a heroic age. The dedications are the same as a normal age, the dark age cards can be powerful but they are super specific and come with opportunity costs, and the loyalty penalty can be a huge concern. I have to completely disagree with complexity and depth. I do find the game has a lot of depth and the intricacy of Civ VI are what make my favourite in the series. The adjacency mechanics allow a lot more strategy with city placement and planing out district locations (which also allows for the short and medium goals that make Civ so addicting). I find it interesting you bring up the cultural victory. In my opinion, cultural victory is easily the best victory condition in the game. It gives you a lot of different avenues for achieving victory, and you don't have the tedium of other victory types. There is a lot of depth and strategy that goes into naturalists and rock bands, both when deciding which is the better option at the moment, and with the planning that goes into getting the most out of them. You need to consider where and what you are building so you have room for your parks. Rock bands are admittedly much simpler with their strategy. I don't get the bit about the promotions, they are very unique unit so they can't share promotions with other units and not having the promotions would make them even more RNG based than they are. I could go on about archeologists vs artists or all the other mechanics with cultural victory. The amount of options for tourism are what give it depth and what make it an interesting victory. And if we are going by the metric of "a mechanic is good if you can ignore it," then this means a lot of this tourism options are quite good. You don't have to do every single way of generating tourism. You can pick the methods that fit your civ and your game. It is this flexibility that makes it so great of a victory type. You ask "Would it be so bad if the cultural victory was won with culture and not tourism?" It would be horrible. As I stated above, there is a richness in the plethora of methods generating tourism. Different cultural civs have their own best ways of generating tourism, so there are a lot different strategies you can use for cultural victory. If you just tied it to using culture, you would lose that depth just to make it mindnumbingly simple. If it was just generating culture, it turns a varied victory type into just being "yields go brr" and making it incredibly tedious. Rock bands would not be able to exist like that. Culture is tied to the civic tree, so it would make both pursuing cultural victory mean that you accelerate down the tree. It would also mean that civs/leaders that are good at generating culture but not good for culture vctory (e.g. Trajan, Gorgo, Gaul) good at both, and that stuff like raiding for culture would make you help win a culture victory. Having them be seperate means that stuff can help you progress down the tree but not help you win the culture victory, and vice versa, which lets you have a lot different options in terms of strategy and game design. It would also increase the problem that big empire = better, since bigger empire means more culture, and more culture leads to victory. It would dumb down the game and get rid of a ton of depth in the name of "simplicity". I don't believe the point about the game being easy is fair. 4X games, by their nature, are too complex for you to have smart AI. This means that higher difficulty means AI just gets larger bonuses and not any smarter. As a result, all 4X game follow this formula for playing at harder difficulties: Survive against the AI with a huge head start, play well to catch up to the AI, and then leave the AI in the dust. This is just the reality of a 4X game. You can make the AI have bigger bonuses, but that doesn't solve it. The AI won't be smarter, and you will only make it so it takes longer to catch up or the early game becomes a total crap shoot. This isn't the fault of Civ 6 being too easy. It's a limitation of good AI. Furthermore, for better players, the challenge is not "will I win" but "how I fast can I win." I would love to discuss this futher, but this already way too long for a RUclips comment.
(Reponse below is kind of scrambled) I agree, the district planning system is very strong. The game has great fundamentals, that's why I don't think it needs so many distractions. The game has solved the expansion issue, a persistent thorn in the side of the series. None of the issues I mention in this video have a candle on what the game has achieved in terms of refining core gameplay. I was internally comparing these things to Civ 3. Yes, Civ 3's clarity is not great with regards to culture flips and the despotism penalty. I've criticized the game for this pretty consistently. There's a few other examples, but it's on systems like espionage that you can safely ignore, you're not forced to interact with them. No overflow you can ignore. None of my "tips for new players or intermediate players" videos mention it. It only really matters in multiplayer (because yield cost to grow or produce things is so low), and there it adds strategic depth. My thinking was like, Civ 3 is a 6/10 for explaining things and a 5/10 in complexity. Civ 6 is a 7.5/10 in explaining things and a 9/10 in complexity. Those might be the types of civs you could easily recommend new players, but for example, I still don't know what a trading post is, in regards to Rome. I don't think the game isn't deep. It seems very deep. But you can achieve depth without intense complexity. I find it hard to image the game being significantly deeper than Civ 3, but Civ 3 has maybe 1/3 of the complexity. The complexity makes the AI hard to program. It's telling that despite 15 years between them, the AI seems to be more skilled in Civ 3 than Civ 6. But at the same time, Civ 3 is possible to exploit and master, so the developers felt confident making hard modes that are truly hard. For reference, the AI at Chess will absolutely smash the best human players. That's because the game has less mechanical complexity and the AI has an easier time solving it. Even Alphastar (a deep learning AI) has been able to beat Starcraft 2 pros. Clearly it's possible for AI players to be good (or, not so terrible) at games. I don't think there's a good defense for Civ 6 here, either the AI isn't well made, or the game is too complex and they had trouble making it good.
I just hate how Civ 6 looks. It looks absolutely disgusting and ugly despite improved graphics, plus the clutter. I cannot imagine seeing any screenshot of Civ 6 on my screen and being engaged and interested in it. It's like looking at a warehouse logistical system network
I also 100% agree about the Deity in Civ 6 being way too easy. Yet difficulty is a discussable subject, so I'd like to discuss! :) How many % of players should be able to obtain a victory on the highest game difficulty? Depends per game, but for Civ games before looking up the numbers in my mind it was around 4-5%. According to Steam statistics: For Civ 6: 6.5% of the players have the 'God-Like' achievement - Win a regular game at Deity difficulty. For Civ 5: 3.1% of the players have the 'Flawless Strategy' achievement - Beat the game on the Deity difficulty level. Imho to obtain a victory on the most difficult setting in any strategy game you as a player should know how to effectively use every major game mechanic and thus be either fully interacting (or purposefully, strategically avoiding/delaying interaction) with about 85-95% of the games mechanics, but doing so should regularly yield you a victory. There could be some 'unwinnable' scenarios like you spawning on a small island with Zulus and a Diplomatic Civ that allies the Zulus on turn 3, before you as the player can reach either of them and stop this, thus locking you into an unwinnable 1v2 situation, but... those should be quite rare. Now, I really didn't like how they've done Deity in the older Civs, like Civ 5 for example. They made the Deity AI start with like 8 or 9 free techs. That's insane on its own. Not even talking about the free second settler, free worker, 4-6 free military units and the insane % bonus yields. You can't just give the AI free units and not change its behavior to always be aggressive against the militarily weakest Civilization, which will of course be the human player, due to not starting with the free units. The early game is the most fun part of the game and by giving the AI insane bonuses like this they just cut out the most fun part of the game for those trying to play the most difficult setting.
To me, Civ 6 has more of a mobile game feel. Sure the mechanics are complex, however, they feel like they are more as a way to get you to buy the DLC more than make the game interesting or challenging. If you take a look at some of the game modes like secret societies or heroes and legends, they are in no way balanced and take away some of the core game play of what civ is supposed to be. Why bother building an early game army to defend against an aggressive neighbor when you can rush an op hero unit and just kill them outright? In contract, civ 5 was fun as it was a good challenge throughout the run and not just in the early game with all the ai cheating bonuses. The ai in that game knew when to backstab you and punish you for not building an army. You could see it coming if you knew how to read their movements, but the game didn't feel a need to explicitly tell you what made them happy or angry, and getting to complacent got you in a war you did not plan to fight. If you want a complex games without necessarily worrying about balance, a good way to do that would be how Paradox designs their games. I don't want to get into the weeds about how they do their dlcs (I don't like that either), but when games like Stellaris do add new things, at least they try to fit the theme of the core game play of the grand strategy genre instead of endless gimmicks (opinions of how they handled the most recent dlcs may vary). Anyway, that's enough of my rambling. Good analysis, keep it up.
The other problem with complexity is that there’s a huge gap between new players and experienced players. Let’s use Babylon in civ 5 vs Babylon w/ heroes mode enabled for example. Both are extremely overpowered civs. In 5 both the new player and experienced player know that when you get the great scientist from writing, you plop down a campus to get continuous science bonus. The experienced player might use its unique bowman and walls for early conquests or defense, and focus on science for even more great scientists to finish techs faster. They matter when getting that win in deity, but new players can still reap the benefits greatly in lower difficulty settings. In civ 6 it’s much much different. The experienced player will either get a bombard rush or planes rush with help from calling up Hercules and focusing on culture/great scientist generation while new players are stuck with the 50% science debuff. By the time a veteran unlocks spec ops, the newbie might still be stuck in the middle age. The learning curve is much steeper and without someone showing you the ropes it’s impossible to reap the benefits of many of the OP civs and leaders.
I only play Civ3 Conquests. I tried Civ 4 a few times when it came out but didn't like the visual style and the tech tree; you can research "ancient chants"? What kinda granularity is this! "In order to walk you must first research how to move the left foot, then the right foot" I like lots of cities and lots of units. I can't pretend to run an empire with 3 cities and 2 units. If you can beat Civ 6 on deity after only 5 minutes of practice then the game is basically Cities Skylines. Maybe all games will become like Minecraft in the future. You push buttons and do stuff and you can't actually lose.
The level of complexity they put into this game also makes it harder for them to program the AI, hence why the game ends up being so easy. In Civ III, early decisions snowball and dictate your chances of winning; in Civ VI, you just tech to artillery or bombers and march through enemy lands filled with obsolete units. Aside from going back to Civ III, I've also found Old World to be a great alternative to Civ VI. I hope the gameplay reveal for Civ VII next week shows us a game that involves more strategy to play than Civ VI
I feel the same for Stellaris, so many resources and mechanics and yet everything ends up playing the same, in CK2 every skill is it's own gameplay, you could focus on diplomacy and get your friends to back your claims, or conquer with martial skills, get so much money with administration you could bribe anyone and buy mercenaries if things got messy, and so on, and if you wanted to mix things you could. Traits in CK2 actually say a lot about the characters, half of the time I forget the traits of my species in Stellaris.
With Paradox games I'm more ok with them being jam packed with a ton of obscure stuff, because the core gameplay is very simple. There's not really any expansion, no workers, and typically teching and building construction are quite minimal. In Civ games the core mechanics should make for a fun, engaging, strategic game. If it needs bells and whistles (which I don't think Civ 6 does! It's a genuinely good game) it's not good.
@@suedeciviii7142 idk of you're right, he was talking about stellaris, there is a lot of expansion and the construction and teching are very complicated with a ton of things influencing the imput of those mechanics and also the output being a meriad of different outcomes.
As someone who recently started playing Civ 6, I agree with everything you say. Especially on the distinction you make on complexity vs depth. It feels like there are so many mechanics that, even if you understand how to use them individually, are so abstracted that you can't tell whether your decisions are good for the whole. But because of their complexity, they can't make the AI know how to use them, so as long as you learn those mechanics at a basic level, you have a free ride. Haven't played at deity level, but considering how boring and unsatisfying combat was (especially when I got to the modern age), I don't see myself having that motivation. Overall, I still like the game fine enough, but the only reason I really play it is that it has Hungary
I refer to excessively complex games with too many mechanics and no prayer for a new player to break into them as "Paradox Games," after the publisher that produces 90% of them. The really sad thing is that if I complain to fans of those series (Crusader Kings, Stellaris, Anno, Europa Universalis, Victoria, etc) that I find it complex, they scoff at me for playing Civ as being baby's first strategy games and too simple. And I'm like, dude, what? Civ is way too complex, and you're calling it too stripped down? Safe to say that we're not looking for the same things out of a game, because I play Civ on low difficulties, start a game for ~100 turns, and then quit and do something else, and never load my saves. One of the reasons I do that is because I like the early game better...but I think one of the reasons for *that* is because I actually feel like I'm making measurable progress while I fan out my empire. Once the game gets into the "spawn a billion units and mash them into your opponents' trillion units," it bogs down and becomes SO SLOW. The other reason is because all the needless mechanics start factoring in. Cool that they're there, I guess, but I don't want to have to manage all of them. And therein lies the rub. There's too much to manage. Too much to track. So I end up not engaging with those systems. I play in a way that allows me to complete a turn in under 20 seconds. Civ just isn't meant for that.
The good news is that the AI only takes advantage of 10% of the mechanics. If you understand 1/3 of the game's mechanics, you are way ahead of the curve.
I love Civ 6, I think its the one I've put the most time into but it's also the game in the series I have the most issues with. Can't say I really experienced much of the issues with complexity myself, a lot of it felt intuitive to me but I think this is because of how I've played the game, starting with the base game (coming from Civ 5 which is similar to base Civ 6) and buying the expansions as they came out, learning each system slowly instead of it all being thrown at you all at once. With that in mind, yeah I could understand the critique and it is valid. It's an issue common among strategy games with copius amounts of DLC content, like Europa Universalis. Buying the game and all its DLC and trying to play with a million systems interacting with each other is a nightmare. What I really agree with is how braindead easy the game is. I'm not an expert in any of these games. I can barely beat a CIv 3 game on Monarch. Civ 5, my favorite and go-to in the series, I usually stick to Prince or King since anything above that is too difficult for me to win without cheese. Essentially, I stick to the 'normal' difficulties in these games because I'm not skilled enough despite the hundreds of hours to want to play the higher difficulties. Civ 6, though? Immortal and Diety aren't even that hard. Playing normal difficulty in Civ 6 is like playing easy in Civ 5, and that frustrates me. The 'normal' difficulties are supposed to be a fair, even match, no bonuses on any side, yet I always skyrocket really early. It's upsetting that the only way the devs could make the AI even remotely difficult is by giving them a ton of cheats and free units. Around the 9 minute mark, you say that the difficulty was centered around the assumption that the player will not know how to use the complex mechanics of the game. I have to disagree here. I think the issue is that the AI, even on Deity, simply doesn't know HOW to use the complex mechanics the game has. The AI doesn't get smarter at higher difficulty. It just gets more cheats to accommodate the terrible AI that can't even use the systems the devs put in. Check any AI city adjacencies and how their empires are built, they just don't play around them the same way a moderately skilled player could. All in all though I liked the video, it was an interesting to hear a perspective from someone who's stuck with an older entry for all these years.
I'll say, I probably have about 75 hours on Civ 5, and almost all of that was the vanilla game. So I'm by no means an expert on it, and some of the systems (like religion and faith, which was added in expansions) I had barely played.
Hey Suede if you see this comment, what do you think of civ 2? I think civ 2 is even better than 3. I think civ 2 is the best game of all time. I feel like in civ 3 there is too much rng. On certain maps, I can't win no matter what. Cant stop the run away AI. On Civ 2 I feel like I can win on any map on any start, and come back from almost anything.
I never got into Civ6, I started with Civ5 and wanted to learn Civ4. But I really like watching your Civ3 videos. I am curios if youll continue Civ6. 😄
A lot of those criticisms/problems can be solved by mods : one gives you previews of the effects of policy cards, for instance. ...But the intrinsic complexity of the game? It's kind of unavoidable when a game aims to "replicate all of human civilization and history", even in a simplified form. The older games would probably have implemented some of those complex mechanics too if they had the budget and the technology for it. The trajectory of the games clearly shows this is what Sid Meier and the succeeding devs at Firaxis wanted for the series right from the start : lots of complexity, to be the most "simulation" possible while still feeling like a game.
All Civ games are designed to be a superset of the previous games. I'm sure a hardcore fan of Civ 2 would have similar criticisms of Civ 4, for example. Maybe they do need to start paring things back for accessibility, but you know people will lose their crap online if a favourite game mechanic gets cut, which is why the developers have always been too afraid to do so.
Mods, as a few other folks have mentioned, greatly enhance the experience and fix issues, like clutter and 'opaque' bonuses/policies/etc. There are also mods that make the game significantly more challenging, since this is too easy for you ;). I do think the decision makers at Firaxis/2K dropped the ball in some respects, but at least the game is open enough to mods to let the community enhance the experience. I appreciate your thoughts on the game, interesting to hear.
Civ 3 is peak civ
4 imo
nah 2 is, but 3 is still very good
@TheWatchernator
Wdym about changing strategy? If you mean culture victory you need to get key wonders (you can conquere them) and as much religions as you can. Military and science victories always can be pursued (depends when you choose to go monkey mode and build bazzilion treboknights/cavs/tanks) and diplomatic victory for pussies and mostly comes from skill in managing releations with AIs anyway
Expansion in 4 punish you if you build useless crap cities past certain point, but unlike in later civs city spam almost never hinders you directly bc of increased cost of everything
civ4 took everything good about 3 and perfected it. But civ3 is remembered fondly imo because it represented a HUGE jump from previous civ games. Definitely the 2nd best.
Civ 3 is great, especially for large-scale single player scenarios. (Nothing beats Civ 3 in cold war scenarios) But for intricate mods or playing with other humans, I believe 4 is best. Fall from Heaven 2, Realism Invictus, they are just so great!
The fact that the policy cards don't actually tell you without a mod what they do is inexcusable
Point 1 had the “extended policy cards” mod created (vanilla civ6 is horrible without that)
Point 5 is hilariously spot on! There’s a legitimate complaint you can’t abandon the ages system in the game menu which is what drives a lot of the endorphin rush well done pop ups
I'll be sure to google that and install before recording more footage!
I'm fine with the era points system in principle, there's just too many systems like that. I would, however, very much like the option of turning off the pop-up that comes up. A lot of much more important things do not get a pop-up (like being the first to contact a city state and receiving a free envoy).
@@suedeciviii7142 yeah there’s a few in game events that are massively downplayed like the city state interaction (it’s hard to spot when they leave you for another civ as well). There’s a good rabbit hole of ui mods for civ6 that potatomcwhisky did a helpful guide through
The extended policy cards good and I use them, but I should not need mod to understand what is happening in game
@@anselclarke4048 This would have been a better title (and thesis) for that section!
@@anselclarke4048 the d&d analogy hits home, dungeon master just isn’t explaining all the rules clearly at the start
When I was little me and my dad played Civ III together. When I was aware Civ IV existed and bought it he said it was too new for him and refused to learn it. Fast forward to Civ V it was too new for me and I refused to learn it, so I completely understand the "old man yells at cloud" thing. Your insights are very spot on and interesting to watch. That said, I remember you making a video where you said everything you liked about 4 compared to 3. Could you make a video on what you think 4 does worse, perchance?
100% Agree about the visual clutter. The screens from Civ 6 late game remind me of those WoW screenshots you see with 50+ abilities and 20+ users on the screen at the same time, where your first reaction is - wtf am I even looking at.
Yes! Jesus so many of these comments are just things I wish I said in the video. I played WoW, I do too much at the level cap, but FoldingIdeas has a great video on the game. And about how players trying to optimize things will slowly suck the life out of it. Including replacing Wow's simple, aesthetically pleasing AI with something ugly but functional.
@@suedeciviii7142 I'll comment these here, so less people see it, but:
1) Suede you do know you can change your RUclips user name so it doesn't have the numbers '7142' at the end, right? :P
2) Your description timestamps don't work, because they don't meet one or more of the 3 criteria needed for them to show up on the videos timeline: [1] The first timestamp must start at 00:00 [2] Each timestamp must be at least 30 seconds or longer (I think they actually changed this one, because I saw LemonCakes video had a 7 second long timestamp) [3] There can not be more than 50 timestamps per each video / stream.
I know these because I was having trouble getting my timestamps working and I eventually stumbled upon a VidIQ video explaining how to do them properly! :P
@@suedeciviii7142 Are you playing The War Within?
I have always viewed civ6 as a completely separate experience from the other civ games. It is an amalgam of mini games. I still find enjoyment in it, but usually I just play Theodora because I like her minigame the most (work ethic abuser).
Also, I think it is interesting to think about what type of environment encourages creativity. I think loading a game with a bunch of mechanics and options is definitely one approach, but the contrary is true, as well. I think civ3 is on the latter side of this thought; civ3 is an even environment that greatly rewards the player for learning its mechanics and utilizing effective strategies. As you demonstrated, in civ6 you really can stumble your way to victory with little complexity (even though the game appears to be chock-full of complexity), while in civ3 it seems simple, but you are going to have to learn the mechanics and develop strategies or you will "not stand the test of time."
I honestly don't play Civilization for the game aspect. I play it for the role playing and world building.
The big thing with civ 6 is it is really 3 game ideas in one. The base game, then the eras/ages game mechanics, then the global warming/diplomacy game mechanics. All of them were added on top of each other because of the notion that Civ 6 needed more content by the people who were complaining it wasn't as complex as civ 5.
Even as someone who has adored VI and never touched III, I think your critiques are incredibly fair, and I can certainly sympathise with new players having to deal with the issues you've pointed out.
As an aside, I very much enjoy your content on III, even if I don't play it. Seeing where Civ has gone over the decades is fascinating.
It's like $2 on Steam or GOG. Buy Civ III and give it a whirl.
I have at least one video planned where I say nice things about Civ 6! Despite the flaws I mentioned, it's still by far my second favourite in the series.
@@suedeciviii7142 What do you think of the cartoonish graphics? Looks like a little kids game to me.
@@hairharbor5080 Civ 3 has my favourite graphics but Civ 6 is fine.
@@hairharbor5080 I picked it up on the last Steam sale, so it's definitely on the to-do list. Just need to escape my current Rise of Nations hole.
Feature creep is an ongoing game design problem. It plagues mods too. People seem to have reverted to children and believe more is more.
By people I assume you mean the publishers, who tell the developers what to do, and spend billions on marketing to hype up a game with hundreds of features to sell you an over priced product?
Because they aren't people. 😆
@@VitZ9 Publishers don't develop free mods, bro; and feature creep was a problem over 20 years ago when spending millions on video game marketing was uncommon and dlc and microtransations hadn't been invented yet.
Good call on the increasing complexity. Personally i lost a lot of interest when they brought in governors. They are silly and a pain to manage. Added complexity for the sake of it, imho.
In regards to point 1, there's a super duper duper helpful mod on the workshop called "Extended Policy Cards" that tells you the exact yields you'll be getting from each policy card based on the output of your empire. It improves the clarity of the policy system tenfold, and it should've been a base feature. I have no idea why they didn't add it to the game years ago after they saw the popularity of this mod.
100% - I feel like the core gameplay is so drastically improved by relatively simple UI mods that it's even more damning of why the dev team chose to omit (or not add later) those features
Exactly this. I only played a couple of games of VI until I gave up on it completely. Hundreds of games completed on III and I still love it.
Great review and highlights! Would you ever consider doing one for Civ IV: Realism Invictus? It is a complete overhaul mod that has been in continuous development for almost 20 years, with a very high degree of polish and balance. It looks and feels much more like a standalone game than a mod. I enjoy watching your videos and the throwbacks to Civ 3, but a lot of your criticisms are handled excellently in this one, so I am curious what your take on it would be.
You seem to have played the game with both expansions and I would be curious to hear your opinion on vanilla civ 6, without a lot of the clutter features. I think civ6 core of policy, districts and improvements makes a very solid and fun engine to optimise. But the expansions features were just ok by comparison in my opinion
I played Civ 6 a couple of times when it was first released and disliked it for different reasons. This would have been before any of the DLCs so it was probably a lot less complex. I wonder if playing the game in that state may have been easier to learn for you though. For me though I am just going to stick with 3 and 5 and we'll see if the new one is any good. Thank you friend.
As I never played Civ6 much of this made no sense to me, but I still loved it :D
I forget suede, I know you did a vid like this for Civ4, but did you do Civ5? If not doo eeet!
I never bought Civ VI because of how ugly it looked. The leaders, the world, the UI, everything looks worse than Civs III-V (the ones I've played).
I have never played civ6, why play any other civ when civ3 exists?
Because Civ4 exists
@@MyHydralisk because 2 exists.
@sevendaystocry2546 it's main menu theme still stuck in my memory...and the glorious throne room, oh boy!
Fully agree. I've played this copiously since its release (also getting f-cked by Aspyr when they didn't allow playing it on old Mac computers, and then I still bought it on console). There's a weird progression every gama where you struggle and strategise to make use of every little resource and mechanic (and this is the best part of the game) after that suddenly you're so overpowered that the game gets insanely easy (even on deity like you mentioned). This sadly kills the prospect of making a challenge within the game and instead favours a more sandboxy type of gameplay, which can be fun, but then you have to resort to different concepts of your own, and when you do it (like finishing wonders specifically for a certain civ or other historical events) then you're finished with the game and don't play it with its intended purpose. This is what I've done for the last years.
There's elements of the game I really love though. The terraforming aspect, that you can really change the environment through aqueducts, canals and more to make use of the hand you're dealt within every unique game setting. Also the historical aspects and variety (where I also understand the critique due to the quantity of it all). But after a while there is an objective way of playing the game if you want to win it, and it works every time. And the last years I haven't finished any game (I did for the first time actually the other day, and it just felt like a chore) cause there's no satisfaction in completing a game.
Odd 😮 tho. My first Civ game was 5, and then, I have easily transitioned into 6 , as expansions were released slowly😂.
But you'll be surprised that I agree! Even if I "like" Civ 6, I still "somehow"😅 prefer Civ 5, FreeCiv and UnCiv! Because they aren't as hard on the mind as Civ 6.
That and the ability to fake Hero units😂
you need to try 3&4
I personally found Civ 6 to be a game that has more mechanics but a much easier game than Civ 5 on deity. Civ 5 on deity required a science victory rush for a guaranteed win or some other civ specific strats like Venice with diplomatic cheese. However Civ 6 offers many more diverse routes to victory on deity with it’s mechanics and the civ bonuses. I feel the more number of Civs you play the more you realize how the mechanics of Civ 6 help the civs get their unique flavour and appeal. Without mechanics or complexity I do not think a lot of Civs would feel unique. A science focussed Korea does not play the same as faith based Russia yet both may have their own way to achieve a space race victory or a culture victory on deity. The more I have spent time on this game to learn the mechanics the more do I appreciate the beauty of Civ 6. Initially I would have rated Civ 5 to be greater than Civ 6 but I right now I am leaning on calling Civ 6 a much more refined product.
Also forgot to add that the City view and the other buttons which might seem “hidden” to newer players do tell what resources or bonus amenities or other things a civilization has. It takes time to get used to but once you get hang of the UI it feels a lot more polished than Civ 5. Also one more thing that people forget is that happenies or lack of amenities/bonus resources is not as much as a deal breaker as earlier iterations of Civ like Civ 5 where low happiness would spell certain doom and there were few ways to go about it.
I couldn’t get into it cause the end turn calculations took too long, broke the flow.
Would love to hear you review civ 6 more. This game always felt like more of a chore to play then the others with all the excessive prompts to interact with AI and policy selection screens. Seems like a prime example of feature bloat with a very shallow difficulty curve to compensate.
I will! I have so much say about the game, I'll of course do a "best additions to the series" video. But I need to improve the video quality first. The footage here was super choppy, some of it is unusable.
Eh I kind of half way agree with this. The complexity and screen clutter are a bit of a matter of opinion. I like it, but I could see it being an issue for other people.
The big problem with the complexity is that the ai can’t handle it, so they had to give the ai big bonuses to compensate, like 3 settlers at the start for diety. In civ 4 the ai only had 2 settlers at the start but was still more challenging. Never played 3.
It's 3, wow. I thought the 2 settlers they give in Civ 3 on the highest difficulty was bad. Yeah, I've noticed that it seemed like they had a lot of cities quick, but that it tapered off and that you could catch up with them.
It is absolutely mostly an issue with new players and vs the AI. In multiplayer I could see it being great (and I tend to like mods for civ 3 MP that add complexity)
Civ 6 did a lot of things very well, but it's far from perfect. I resonate with a lot of your points about the game being too cluttered with too many things going on, and I've played the game for hundreds of hours. I like going back to older titles because they do things differently, and in many cases they manage to have similar levels of depth without so many things to micromanage.
One of my least favorite things in Civ 6 is the era score system, because it's an extra thing to manage that causes me to go out of my way to check boxes for the sake of checking boxes. I can be doing well and winning the game by a long shot and still enter a dark age because I didn't build a boat to get era score... even though I'm playing on Pangea. If I want to scratch the modern civ itch, I much prefer playing Civ 5. Not only does the game have a better art style, but there's less annoying stuff to micromanage and the AI is generally more competent.
Which brings me to my last point. Part of the reason why you feel the game is so easy is because the AI can't keep up with all this complexity. If you're struggling to micromanage all of these different systems, imagine how an AI 10x stupider than you feels? The AI has gotten marginally smarter with each new edition, but the game has gotten magnitudes more complex. The AI in Civ 3 is dumb as a brick, but there's a lot less going on and so they can manage to steamroll a game if left unchecked. Meanwhile in Civ 6, the AI has no clue how to place districts optimally, manage all these unique troops in an organized fashion, prioritize specific buildings, or anything! And yet, Civ 3 is just as deep of a game as Civ 6, even though it's much less complex.
I love the Civ franchise and I have high hopes for Civ 7. I think Civ 5 is my favorite overall for its balance of aesthetics and mechanics, but the great thing about the franchise is that each game is different from each other and there are great things to appreciate about all of them. Civ 6 may not be the best Civ game, but it's still good fun once you get past the learning curve, especially when you're able to embrace the playstyle diversity that each Civ's unique abilities enable.
Agreed about era score. One of the great delights about learning the game is learning what things you can skip building or doing, because it makes your life easier. But now I need to build 2 biplanes (a unit I would otherwise skip) just to get some eureka and that joy is gone.
Personally, I'm enjoying Civ 6 a lot more than Civ 5. I'm glad different people have different options because they are such different games in a lot of ways.
@@suedeciviii7142 heh, the funny thing about planes is that fighters and bombers are op in Civ 6 just like any other game, but the AI barely ever builds them because it struggles to prioritize aerodromes. Makes it so that when the human player gets bombers, they can sail to an easy conquest!
@@AndrewChicken They are! I was dissapointed the biplanes didn't upgrade to bombers
@@suedeciviii7142 At least they upgrade to something! One of my biggest gripes with Civ 3 is that some things just don't upgrade, like I can't go from frigate to battleship or cavalry to tank. It annoyed me so much I made my own mod for it lol. At least the game makes that really easy!
I was watching this stream on a fairly large tv and I still couldn’t take in all I saw visually. Dunno how the heck on a laptop be able to see and absorb all the junk
I swear, if you play, it's better. But yeah, watching it was rough for me.
Hey did you take down your civ vi stream? Would like to watch the vod, can't find it anywhere...
ruclips.net/user/liveZ8hQ_SrFfx8?si=ZPJLysPoLhUjFtSv
ruclips.net/user/liveOHunJKufGDw
@@suedeciviii7142 Thanks you very much!
I've been pretty disappointed with the Civ series on 5 and 6. Civ 3 is by far my favorite and peak of the experience for me, while Civ 4 I certainly have to credit as the most mechanically "complete" of the games. 5 and 6 just feel extremely dumbed down for a general audience who do not actually play strategy games, much to their determent.
I have been playing Civ games since the begging and I couldn't finish Civ6. All of the complaints I have to agree with.
I stuck with Civ5 as a best modern iteration of the franchise and there are mods to fix a lot of things people complain or just don't like.
And as an added bonus it is narrated by Leonard Nimoy :)
Sean Bean is great too! Honestly I like Civ 6 a lot more than 5. I'm glad we have many good options in this series. It's telling that no one can agree what the "worst" one is.
mods solve a lot of the issues regarding point 1
Glad to hear that! I'll download the ones some people have mentioned
As an avid player of both Civ 3 and Civ 4, the visuals of Civ 6 are abhorrent to me, I could never buy this game. There are so many things, the art style is awful, and visual clutter is extreme.
and they're such a huge step back from the relatively impressive feat of 5's visuals
I think everyone needs to look up what ‘intuitive’ actually means; it doesn’t mean clearly explained, quite the opposite.
Intuitive UIs aren’t universally accessible or inclusive, they require the player to have a lot of experience before they can use their intuition to understand what’s going on.
love you suede
to each their own, and I have my gripes with why I do not think Civ 6 is as good a game as it could have been. I do find some points in your video confusing:
The game only has 20 leaders (Greece having two different flavours in Sparta/Athens).
What is this Govenor mechanic you are complaining about? it is not part in my game. Nor is any World Congress or any Natural Disasters, nothing I have ever needed to interact with.
Perhaps you did the mistake of getting ALL the expansions and find yourself overwhelmed instead of starting with the base game?
I do however strongly agree with that for example the Culture Win condition is far from intuitive, and in my first attempt I found it very frustrating not knowing what I had to do in order to win. It is not complex per se, it is just poorly explained by the game. The same goes for all the policy cards and various mechanics of the game such as amenities, warmongering, war weariness and so on.
is your pfp a garlic swordsman?
Yes! Hahah
@@suedeciviii7142
ive seen your pfp like a thousand times but it finally hit me that it was garlic
Where live chat go?
Idk, disappeared for me too halfway through the video
I wanted to enjoy this game but after four or so games, I dropped it. I tried to engage with religion because i really liked that mechanic but I ended up having a religious victory by accident every single time. My issues weren't with how dense the mechanics were but rather that the IA reaaally seems to struggle in this title.
Playing for religion feels awful and personally, i'll just be ignoring it for most games I play, for the next little while. The religious combat is just not interesting. Land combat is equally grindy but at least you get rewarded with city captures. All of the benefits of converting cities are diffuse.
Combat is fun, culture and science are fun, expanding and trade is fun. Diplomacy is actually surprisingly fun too.
@suedeciviii7142 I tried to ignore it once, kinda, just using religion for the passive perks, and at some point it i realized i would have to go out my way to not try to win by religion.
The religion combat is so silly lol
@@Canthary Silly is a good word for. It's mechanically perfectly functional, but in adding depth to the system, they put too much focus on something silly and time consuming that just doesn't match what I expect from a strategy game.
100% there is way to much going on in the game
idk why they made the ai so easy in civ 6. I guess its supposed to be more geared towards multiplayer? idk
I'm not sure that it's better than Civ 3's "Just crank their cheats up until their eyeballs are bulging" approach, but yeah, it's telling that they can't make AIs who play their game well.
It's not by choice, they just can't make it better. It's harder to program the AI for the one unit per tile system.
@@inferionemperor5219 They can't make them smarter but they can give them a bunch of bonuses. YMMV if that's better or not.
@@suedeciviii7142 Of course a more competent AI is better. In Civ 4 the AI is quite smart, at least I didn't notice any nonsensical behaviour. In Civ 6 the AI often exposes its armies in ways that make destroying them a trivial task, which hinders the enjoyment I get from the game.
You could crank up the bonuses but it can also quickly reach nonsensical levels, like AI getting new armies out of thin air or the player not being able to hurt the AI's economy since it receives passive income. There's still enjoyment to be had in beating this extremely cheating AI (like you do in your CIV 3 videos), but it's not really the same for me.
Four games and diety win?
Get yer ass back to civ3 with your buddies 😊
If you want to branch out of Civ3, instead of Civ6 content you can make EU4 content
I'm honestly looking towards Civ7! That's why I bought Civ 6. I need to familiarize myself with it, because typically they copy and paste a bunch of mechanics over between games.
suede i love you bro, but civ 6 is not a terribly complex game at all
europa univeralis and stellaris are 100x more complex than civ 6 ever even thinks about being
It's, at the very least, way more complex than any Civ game that came before it. I've only played CK2 and EU 3 so I can't comment on the recent games, but Civ 6 has way more going on than EU 3. Or at least, the quirky features they have are forced upon you more.
@@suedeciviii7142
you should give EU4 a whirl, if you think things like trade and religion are complex in civ 6, wait til you see EU4
@@Gravitatis I've played it once and found it disorienting. But if I'm upgrading my computer for Civ 7/civ6 it might be worth checking out. I'll say though, I don't like games that are super complex
@@suedeciviii7142
you know its funny, complexity is a strange thing, since it depends somewhat on the mind thats doing the thinking. the average person would probably consider civ 3 to be a complex game
Bros really out here trashing all the players that struggle with diety 🫢
You’ve played every Civ game, you’re hardly a noob. And the truth is most the mechanics are optional like you wanted. Just have to click something to make it go away. If you focus the basics of settling, production, and science you’ll be fine and none of that changed beyond getting a small boost from adjacency.
Oh hello I got mentioned
9:23 i don't think the game is intentionally easy on Deity, it's just that the AI is absolutely clueless on how to use all the diffirent stuff to win. In civ 3 the Ai could just slam a stack of random units and win if they had enough of them. In civ 6 they'd block eachother's movement and get killed by your ranged attacks. The Ai will built Chizen Itza in a city with 1 rainforest, place goverment plazas with no adjacent districs and declare wars based on arbitrary agendas instead of actual strategy. Many singleplayer civ players are actually installing mods, to make the game more challenging like the "Sid difficulty mod" that doubles Ai bonuses and still win every game the Ai is really that incompetent.
Also fun fact: quitting in a FFA multiplayer game is punishable (in CPL rules), since the Ai is so bad at defending, that it allows your neighbours to easyily get an unfair advantage by conqouring you.
My favourite part is AI declaring a war with a single (!) unit...
All your points are incredibly damning. You are right that civ 6 has a lot of needless complexity and would be better with a smaller set of mechanics that you interact with more thoroughly. Paradox games often have this issue as well, but at least they have the excuse that all the extra mechanics were added in individual dlc packs over the years.
I love your old man yells at cloud videos, please make more.
Yes, agreed. It's sad because I see some parts where it all comes together. Like, the diplomatic mission to reduce carbon emissions only works because of the "electrical power" system, the global warming system, the world congress system, and it rewards players for completing the tech tree. All of these are new systems where, if you take one away, the resultant gameplay would be less rich. But most mechanics aren't like that. It's not true for ski resorts or having missionary vs missionary combat inside my land.
The game that does it all better exists, it's called Civ 5.
Did you know civ 5 was topping the steam charts for years after civ 6 was released? competing with counterstrike. It's for a reason. It only declined because of a generational shift in gaming.
@@doltBmB Maybe I'm drinking Sulla's Kool-Aid here, but is it not true that Civ 5 heavily punishes you for expanding? That top level players will build 4-6 cities and then sit there the rest of the game.
@@suedeciviii7142 It's a balancing issue with the expansions. Vox Populi fixes it, and the base game does not have it in the first place. Sulla even mentions this, the base game is balanced on the knife's edge of happiness vs expansion.
I feel like those Paradox mechanics are also much better designed and compartmentalized to specific areas in the wider scope of their games. They do definitely suffer from a big learning curve, but the games are far less obscure with the information on how they work and what they do.
You've honestly captured a lot of thoughts I didn't know how to express about how this game doesn't sit right with me. I have 1000 hours and no good memories of exciting games. I never want to start another game but if I start it's hard to stop. Addictive but not satisfying.
It is really addictive! And that's not bad, I like using it when I want to listen to a few albums in a row. Or, it's been motivating me to get out of bed early in the morning. But feeling satiated is an important part of enjoying something. This is like a bag of chips. I keep eating chips until I hate them.
this is the greatest civilization 6 video I have ever seen. hopefully civilization moves away from the mindset of making the game for the lowest common denominator like call of duty and falls back onto the superior mechanics from 3-5. i have low expectations for 7
I disagree that 5 belongs in the same class as 3 and 4. The hard truth is that this franchise began to die when the graphics went 3d, not because of the 3d graphics but because it became less modable. It attracted a wider but shallower player base.
@@user-fx2bx1gz4cThis is an immensely arrogant comment.
I happen to be a Civ fanatic since I was 8, my dad was playing Civ 3. I even got to play Civ 2 and 1 back in early 2000. I've played a lot of Civ 4, than 5, than 6. Civ 6 was the game I played the most and I got bored a bit after the pandemic when Firaxis stopped making DLCs. The game had nothing new to teach me. I then got back to the roots in the last years, playing again on 5, 4 and 3. Each of them still have a flavor and I wish civ 7 will be able to take the best from every Civ they released.
And yeah, seeing you playing Civ 6 without simple UI mods is painful, I forgot how the game itself wasn't complete until a bunch of modders worked on the game for free...
I'm quite interested by this video as someone who quite loves both Civ III and Civ VI and I want to address some of the points.
First of all, Civ VI definitely has a bit of a learning curve, and picking a civ for the first game is certainly daunting. But I don't think this a huge issue for a couple reasons. First of all, it only takes a game or two to understand the gist of most mechanics. There is certainly a lot left to learn after your first game, but after you've played a few games you can understand the utility of different abilities. Learning curves are going to be unavoidable, as you aren't going to know how the game works before you play it.
Secondly, I also don't think Civ III is better in this regard. While there are a lot less mechanics compared to Civ VI, a lot of the learning is not intiutive. Stuff like the despotism penalty, the fact that cultural building are very much not useful, no overflow, the whole essential strategy of the expansion phase, etc. are not things that I learned just by playing the game.
Thirdly, I think the focus on more specialized bonuses is a strong suit for Civ VI. While there are few civs with easy to understand, general bonuses, they do exist. Gran Colombia for example, gives +1 Movement to all units, which is not only really good but it is easy for a first time player to understand. Plus civs like Germany, Rome, Russia, Scythia, Persia, Gorgo's Greece all have bonuses that are pretty straightfoward.
But Civs with more specialized bonuses allow for you to have unique strategies, priorities and playstyles for those Civs. Your strategy completely depends on your civ of choice, and some are really far out there, like the Maori, Babylon or using Eleanor to peacefully conquer the world. It really makes the prospect of playing certain civs exciting, like creating massive mountain cities with high yields as the Inca, printing money as Mali or Portugal, or steamrolling the world with religion and heavy calvary as Byzantine. Contrast with Civ III, where the general strategy is pretty similar regardless of civ. Yes, there are strengths and weakness and variations in your strategy depending on the civ, but you never get your entire playstyle and goals revolving around your civs unique mechanics.
There is a lot of information that is presented in the UI if you know where to look, but I do have to agree that it does leave some stuff to be desired. Luckily, there are some amazing UI mods that give you a lot more information, like ones that let you calculate adjacency bonuses with map pins and show exactly what yields policy cards get you. While this doesn't excuse devs for not including this in the first place, the fact there are amazing UI mods that are easily installed with the steam workshop has to mentioned, and there is basically no reason not to use these mods.
For complexity, I am admitly someone that loves complexity in games, but I feel like if any game is going to have a wealth of mechanics its going to be a 4X game. Civ VI definitely has quite a few mechanics, but as I said before, it only takes a few playthroughs to get a good understanding of the mechanics, and understanding the mechanics is a lot easier and faster as you understand more. For someone who has played as much civ as I have, learning the new civs as they were added or the mechanics of the alternate gamemodes was pretty trivial. This is still a daunting task for new players, which is the point you are trying to make, but I think that is just the reality of the genre. Cutting down the number of mechanics or the number of civs might simplify the game and make it easier to learn, but it would certainly be a worse game.
For mechanics that you can ignore, I don't think the examples are particularly fair, nor is that metric particularly great. There simply are going to be core mechanics you can't ignore and that doesn't make them bad. You can't, for example, think that you should be able to ignore military and get away with never being attacked. Bringing up diplomacy as an example is like that. You have to deal with other civs. Its part of the game. For the other examples, spies are something that can usually be set and forget. You can get away with having them counterspy in key cities and basically ignore them (or for barbs, never build neigbourhoods and they can't do that spy mission). World congress is also only every 30 turns and its something that takes 5 seconds to select options when you don't care.
Visual clutter, yeah I get it. There are a lot of things to look at. But at the same time, there is a lot of things in a 4X game, and you have to have it be somewhere on screen. I don't really see the clicking issue. This honestly I problem I find more in other games. tbh saying clicking is hard kind of sounds like a skill issue. I really don't know what to say there.
Yeah, the era score pop ups are pretty tedious, and I usually don't want to see them, and at the skill level I play at, the game gets fairly easy if I don't fall into early game disaster. I kind of wish there were more chances for things to go catastrophically wrong (although the alternate gamemodes can allow for that). That being said, dark ages, while not catastrophic, are not really good unless you can get a heroic age. The dedications are the same as a normal age, the dark age cards can be powerful but they are super specific and come with opportunity costs, and the loyalty penalty can be a huge concern.
I have to completely disagree with complexity and depth. I do find the game has a lot of depth and the intricacy of Civ VI are what make my favourite in the series. The adjacency mechanics allow a lot more strategy with city placement and planing out district locations (which also allows for the short and medium goals that make Civ so addicting).
I find it interesting you bring up the cultural victory. In my opinion, cultural victory is easily the best victory condition in the game. It gives you a lot of different avenues for achieving victory, and you don't have the tedium of other victory types. There is a lot of depth and strategy that goes into naturalists and rock bands, both when deciding which is the better option at the moment, and with the planning that goes into getting the most out of them. You need to consider where and what you are building so you have room for your parks. Rock bands are admittedly much simpler with their strategy. I don't get the bit about the promotions, they are very unique unit so they can't share promotions with other units and not having the promotions would make them even more RNG based than they are. I could go on about archeologists vs artists or all the other mechanics with cultural victory. The amount of options for tourism are what give it depth and what make it an interesting victory. And if we are going by the metric of "a mechanic is good if you can ignore it," then this means a lot of this tourism options are quite good. You don't have to do every single way of generating tourism. You can pick the methods that fit your civ and your game. It is this flexibility that makes it so great of a victory type.
You ask "Would it be so bad if the cultural victory was won with culture and not tourism?" It would be horrible. As I stated above, there is a richness in the plethora of methods generating tourism. Different cultural civs have their own best ways of generating tourism, so there are a lot different strategies you can use for cultural victory. If you just tied it to using culture, you would lose that depth just to make it mindnumbingly simple. If it was just generating culture, it turns a varied victory type into just being "yields go brr" and making it incredibly tedious. Rock bands would not be able to exist like that. Culture is tied to the civic tree, so it would make both pursuing cultural victory mean that you accelerate down the tree. It would also mean that civs/leaders that are good at generating culture but not good for culture vctory (e.g. Trajan, Gorgo, Gaul) good at both, and that stuff like raiding for culture would make you help win a culture victory. Having them be seperate means that stuff can help you progress down the tree but not help you win the culture victory, and vice versa, which lets you have a lot different options in terms of strategy and game design. It would also increase the problem that big empire = better, since bigger empire means more culture, and more culture leads to victory. It would dumb down the game and get rid of a ton of depth in the name of "simplicity".
I don't believe the point about the game being easy is fair. 4X games, by their nature, are too complex for you to have smart AI. This means that higher difficulty means AI just gets larger bonuses and not any smarter. As a result, all 4X game follow this formula for playing at harder difficulties: Survive against the AI with a huge head start, play well to catch up to the AI, and then leave the AI in the dust. This is just the reality of a 4X game. You can make the AI have bigger bonuses, but that doesn't solve it. The AI won't be smarter, and you will only make it so it takes longer to catch up or the early game becomes a total crap shoot. This isn't the fault of Civ 6 being too easy. It's a limitation of good AI. Furthermore, for better players, the challenge is not "will I win" but "how I fast can I win."
I would love to discuss this futher, but this already way too long for a RUclips comment.
(Reponse below is kind of scrambled)
I agree, the district planning system is very strong. The game has great fundamentals, that's why I don't think it needs so many distractions. The game has solved the expansion issue, a persistent thorn in the side of the series. None of the issues I mention in this video have a candle on what the game has achieved in terms of refining core gameplay.
I was internally comparing these things to Civ 3. Yes, Civ 3's clarity is not great with regards to culture flips and the despotism penalty. I've criticized the game for this pretty consistently. There's a few other examples, but it's on systems like espionage that you can safely ignore, you're not forced to interact with them. No overflow you can ignore. None of my "tips for new players or intermediate players" videos mention it. It only really matters in multiplayer (because yield cost to grow or produce things is so low), and there it adds strategic depth.
My thinking was like, Civ 3 is a 6/10 for explaining things and a 5/10 in complexity. Civ 6 is a 7.5/10 in explaining things and a 9/10 in complexity.
Those might be the types of civs you could easily recommend new players, but for example, I still don't know what a trading post is, in regards to Rome.
I don't think the game isn't deep. It seems very deep. But you can achieve depth without intense complexity. I find it hard to image the game being significantly deeper than Civ 3, but Civ 3 has maybe 1/3 of the complexity. The complexity makes the AI hard to program. It's telling that despite 15 years between them, the AI seems to be more skilled in Civ 3 than Civ 6. But at the same time, Civ 3 is possible to exploit and master, so the developers felt confident making hard modes that are truly hard.
For reference, the AI at Chess will absolutely smash the best human players. That's because the game has less mechanical complexity and the AI has an easier time solving it. Even Alphastar (a deep learning AI) has been able to beat Starcraft 2 pros. Clearly it's possible for AI players to be good (or, not so terrible) at games. I don't think there's a good defense for Civ 6 here, either the AI isn't well made, or the game is too complex and they had trouble making it good.
I just hate how Civ 6 looks. It looks absolutely disgusting and ugly despite improved graphics, plus the clutter. I cannot imagine seeing any screenshot of Civ 6 on my screen and being engaged and interested in it. It's like looking at a warehouse logistical system network
I also 100% agree about the Deity in Civ 6 being way too easy. Yet difficulty is a discussable subject, so I'd like to discuss! :)
How many % of players should be able to obtain a victory on the highest game difficulty? Depends per game, but for Civ games before looking up the numbers in my mind it was around 4-5%.
According to Steam statistics:
For Civ 6: 6.5% of the players have the 'God-Like' achievement - Win a regular game at Deity difficulty.
For Civ 5: 3.1% of the players have the 'Flawless Strategy' achievement - Beat the game on the Deity difficulty level.
Imho to obtain a victory on the most difficult setting in any strategy game you as a player should know how to effectively use every major game mechanic and thus be either fully interacting (or purposefully, strategically avoiding/delaying interaction) with about 85-95% of the games mechanics, but doing so should regularly yield you a victory. There could be some 'unwinnable' scenarios like you spawning on a small island with Zulus and a Diplomatic Civ that allies the Zulus on turn 3, before you as the player can reach either of them and stop this, thus locking you into an unwinnable 1v2 situation, but... those should be quite rare.
Now, I really didn't like how they've done Deity in the older Civs, like Civ 5 for example. They made the Deity AI start with like 8 or 9 free techs. That's insane on its own. Not even talking about the free second settler, free worker, 4-6 free military units and the insane % bonus yields. You can't just give the AI free units and not change its behavior to always be aggressive against the militarily weakest Civilization, which will of course be the human player, due to not starting with the free units. The early game is the most fun part of the game and by giving the AI insane bonuses like this they just cut out the most fun part of the game for those trying to play the most difficult setting.
To me, Civ 6 has more of a mobile game feel. Sure the mechanics are complex, however, they feel like they are more as a way to get you to buy the DLC more than make the game interesting or challenging. If you take a look at some of the game modes like secret societies or heroes and legends, they are in no way balanced and take away some of the core game play of what civ is supposed to be. Why bother building an early game army to defend against an aggressive neighbor when you can rush an op hero unit and just kill them outright?
In contract, civ 5 was fun as it was a good challenge throughout the run and not just in the early game with all the ai cheating bonuses. The ai in that game knew when to backstab you and punish you for not building an army. You could see it coming if you knew how to read their movements, but the game didn't feel a need to explicitly tell you what made them happy or angry, and getting to complacent got you in a war you did not plan to fight.
If you want a complex games without necessarily worrying about balance, a good way to do that would be how Paradox designs their games. I don't want to get into the weeds about how they do their dlcs (I don't like that either), but when games like Stellaris do add new things, at least they try to fit the theme of the core game play of the grand strategy genre instead of endless gimmicks (opinions of how they handled the most recent dlcs may vary).
Anyway, that's enough of my rambling. Good analysis, keep it up.
The other problem with complexity is that there’s a huge gap between new players and experienced players. Let’s use Babylon in civ 5 vs Babylon w/ heroes mode enabled for example. Both are extremely overpowered civs. In 5 both the new player and experienced player know that when you get the great scientist from writing, you plop down a campus to get continuous science bonus. The experienced player might use its unique bowman and walls for early conquests or defense, and focus on science for even more great scientists to finish techs faster. They matter when getting that win in deity, but new players can still reap the benefits greatly in lower difficulty settings.
In civ 6 it’s much much different. The experienced player will either get a bombard rush or planes rush with help from calling up Hercules and focusing on culture/great scientist generation while new players are stuck with the 50% science debuff. By the time a veteran unlocks spec ops, the newbie might still be stuck in the middle age. The learning curve is much steeper and without someone showing you the ropes it’s impossible to reap the benefits of many of the OP civs and leaders.
I only play Civ3 Conquests. I tried Civ 4 a few times when it came out but didn't like the visual style and the tech tree; you can research "ancient chants"? What kinda granularity is this!
"In order to walk you must first research how to move the left foot, then the right foot"
I like lots of cities and lots of units. I can't pretend to run an empire with 3 cities and 2 units.
If you can beat Civ 6 on deity after only 5 minutes of practice then the game is basically Cities Skylines. Maybe all games will become like Minecraft in the future. You push buttons and do stuff and you can't actually lose.
The level of complexity they put into this game also makes it harder for them to program the AI, hence why the game ends up being so easy. In Civ III, early decisions snowball and dictate your chances of winning; in Civ VI, you just tech to artillery or bombers and march through enemy lands filled with obsolete units. Aside from going back to Civ III, I've also found Old World to be a great alternative to Civ VI. I hope the gameplay reveal for Civ VII next week shows us a game that involves more strategy to play than Civ VI
I feel the same for Stellaris, so many resources and mechanics and yet everything ends up playing the same, in CK2 every skill is it's own gameplay, you could focus on diplomacy and get your friends to back your claims, or conquer with martial skills, get so much money with administration you could bribe anyone and buy mercenaries if things got messy, and so on, and if you wanted to mix things you could. Traits in CK2 actually say a lot about the characters, half of the time I forget the traits of my species in Stellaris.
With Paradox games I'm more ok with them being jam packed with a ton of obscure stuff, because the core gameplay is very simple. There's not really any expansion, no workers, and typically teching and building construction are quite minimal. In Civ games the core mechanics should make for a fun, engaging, strategic game. If it needs bells and whistles (which I don't think Civ 6 does! It's a genuinely good game) it's not good.
@@suedeciviii7142 idk of you're right, he was talking about stellaris, there is a lot of expansion and the construction and teching are very complicated with a ton of things influencing the imput of those mechanics and also the output being a meriad of different outcomes.
@@lucjanl1262 Yeah I was more basing this on my experiences with CK2 and EU 3.
As someone who recently started playing Civ 6, I agree with everything you say. Especially on the distinction you make on complexity vs depth. It feels like there are so many mechanics that, even if you understand how to use them individually, are so abstracted that you can't tell whether your decisions are good for the whole. But because of their complexity, they can't make the AI know how to use them, so as long as you learn those mechanics at a basic level, you have a free ride. Haven't played at deity level, but considering how boring and unsatisfying combat was (especially when I got to the modern age), I don't see myself having that motivation. Overall, I still like the game fine enough, but the only reason I really play it is that it has Hungary
I refer to excessively complex games with too many mechanics and no prayer for a new player to break into them as "Paradox Games," after the publisher that produces 90% of them. The really sad thing is that if I complain to fans of those series (Crusader Kings, Stellaris, Anno, Europa Universalis, Victoria, etc) that I find it complex, they scoff at me for playing Civ as being baby's first strategy games and too simple. And I'm like, dude, what? Civ is way too complex, and you're calling it too stripped down?
Safe to say that we're not looking for the same things out of a game, because I play Civ on low difficulties, start a game for ~100 turns, and then quit and do something else, and never load my saves. One of the reasons I do that is because I like the early game better...but I think one of the reasons for *that* is because I actually feel like I'm making measurable progress while I fan out my empire. Once the game gets into the "spawn a billion units and mash them into your opponents' trillion units," it bogs down and becomes SO SLOW. The other reason is because all the needless mechanics start factoring in. Cool that they're there, I guess, but I don't want to have to manage all of them.
And therein lies the rub. There's too much to manage. Too much to track. So I end up not engaging with those systems. I play in a way that allows me to complete a turn in under 20 seconds. Civ just isn't meant for that.
The good news is that the AI only takes advantage of 10% of the mechanics. If you understand 1/3 of the game's mechanics, you are way ahead of the curve.
I love Civ 6, I think its the one I've put the most time into but it's also the game in the series I have the most issues with. Can't say I really experienced much of the issues with complexity myself, a lot of it felt intuitive to me but I think this is because of how I've played the game, starting with the base game (coming from Civ 5 which is similar to base Civ 6) and buying the expansions as they came out, learning each system slowly instead of it all being thrown at you all at once. With that in mind, yeah I could understand the critique and it is valid. It's an issue common among strategy games with copius amounts of DLC content, like Europa Universalis. Buying the game and all its DLC and trying to play with a million systems interacting with each other is a nightmare.
What I really agree with is how braindead easy the game is. I'm not an expert in any of these games. I can barely beat a CIv 3 game on Monarch. Civ 5, my favorite and go-to in the series, I usually stick to Prince or King since anything above that is too difficult for me to win without cheese. Essentially, I stick to the 'normal' difficulties in these games because I'm not skilled enough despite the hundreds of hours to want to play the higher difficulties. Civ 6, though? Immortal and Diety aren't even that hard. Playing normal difficulty in Civ 6 is like playing easy in Civ 5, and that frustrates me. The 'normal' difficulties are supposed to be a fair, even match, no bonuses on any side, yet I always skyrocket really early. It's upsetting that the only way the devs could make the AI even remotely difficult is by giving them a ton of cheats and free units.
Around the 9 minute mark, you say that the difficulty was centered around the assumption that the player will not know how to use the complex mechanics of the game. I have to disagree here. I think the issue is that the AI, even on Deity, simply doesn't know HOW to use the complex mechanics the game has. The AI doesn't get smarter at higher difficulty. It just gets more cheats to accommodate the terrible AI that can't even use the systems the devs put in. Check any AI city adjacencies and how their empires are built, they just don't play around them the same way a moderately skilled player could.
All in all though I liked the video, it was an interesting to hear a perspective from someone who's stuck with an older entry for all these years.
I'll say, I probably have about 75 hours on Civ 5, and almost all of that was the vanilla game. So I'm by no means an expert on it, and some of the systems (like religion and faith, which was added in expansions) I had barely played.
Hey Suede if you see this comment, what do you think of civ 2? I think civ 2 is even better than 3. I think civ 2 is the best game of all time.
I feel like in civ 3 there is too much rng. On certain maps, I can't win no matter what. Cant stop the run away AI. On Civ 2 I feel like I can win on any map on any start, and come back from almost anything.
holy hell was that en passant?
I never got into Civ6, I started with Civ5 and wanted to learn Civ4. But I really like watching your Civ3 videos.
I am curios if youll continue Civ6. 😄
Yes! Nice to finally see someone playing Civ6 on a sh*t PC like me.
i'm down to see more civ 6 from my favorite Civ creator.
A lot of those criticisms/problems can be solved by mods : one gives you previews of the effects of policy cards, for instance.
...But the intrinsic complexity of the game? It's kind of unavoidable when a game aims to "replicate all of human civilization and history", even in a simplified form. The older games would probably have implemented some of those complex mechanics too if they had the budget and the technology for it. The trajectory of the games clearly shows this is what Sid Meier and the succeeding devs at Firaxis wanted for the series right from the start : lots of complexity, to be the most "simulation" possible while still feeling like a game.
All Civ games are designed to be a superset of the previous games. I'm sure a hardcore fan of Civ 2 would have similar criticisms of Civ 4, for example.
Maybe they do need to start paring things back for accessibility, but you know people will lose their crap online if a favourite game mechanic gets cut, which is why the developers have always been too afraid to do so.
Mods, as a few other folks have mentioned, greatly enhance the experience and fix issues, like clutter and 'opaque' bonuses/policies/etc. There are also mods that make the game significantly more challenging, since this is too easy for you ;). I do think the decision makers at Firaxis/2K dropped the ball in some respects, but at least the game is open enough to mods to let the community enhance the experience.
I appreciate your thoughts on the game, interesting to hear.