What better way than to post some initial impression of Civilization VI?
Be warned: This is a long one.
Background
I've been a fan of the civilization series for a fairly long time, though not from the beginning.
I started out playing Civ IV. I enjoyed Civ IV, and I want to say I have fond memories of it, but I'll be honest... I don't remember it very much. I remember the music, I remember Leonard Nimoy's dignified voice quoting Sputnik as it ventured around Earth, and I know I played it a good deal in the latter half of high school and over breaks in college. But honestly, truly, beyond that I don't have a good recollection of this game. My strongest memories of the series start with Civ V.
I had a pretty big love affair with Civ V in college. I spent way, way too much time with it. Like... I won't quote how much time Steam claims I've spent in that game. It's embarrassing. Maybe as many hours as sports fans watch the NFL. Suffice it to say that, post several expansions and DLC's, it's one of my favorite strategy games of all time. It had it's shortcomings... ultimately the structure of the game lead to a handful of specific strategies being ideal in 90% of situations. This gave a game that *should* have been very open ended a certain almost linear quality that wasn't really to my liking, nor anyone else's for that matter. Still, switching from a square to a hex based grid, switching to 1 unit per tile, and many other changes, were significant upgrades to the series and I've never really been able to go back to Civ IV and it's doomstacks.
Civ: The Next Iteration
When Civ VI was announced I was nonplussed but excited. I knew it would come eventually, as this franchise is too gargantuan to stop without warning. It took awhile before information was released, but eventually started leaking out. And I was initially skeptical.
Skeptical because graphically the franchise took a, in my opinion, huge step backwards. As opposed to keeping a 'realistic' graphical style the design team has instead opted to go with what many have described as a cartoony look. Initial screenshots on Steam (which have since been removed...) showed relatively textureless landscapes (a fact since mitigated), units with absurd proportions, and color saturation taken to an absurd degree.
Frankly, it looked more like a free to play mobile game than something AAA that I'd want to actually play.
Still, certain aspects were an upgrade: Despite disliking the style, it's undeniably crisp and clear. The water effects look fantastic and the day night cycle adds a certain moodiness you don't get from previous iterations. Plus, the wonder animations are back and better than ever! So, ok. I'll overlook the graphics that don't quite fit my taste and give it a chance once released and hope game play wins over visuals.
What, exactly, is fun game play?
The game has been released. I've spent some time it in it at the point, with a couple significant patches having come out thus far. And, thus far, my feelings on the game are on the whole positive but also mixed.
There are many, many things they nailed when making this game. All the subsystems and how they intertwine create interesting game play. Civ VI absolutely has that 'one more turn' appeal. They've continued with the hex based map, and this was a good decision. Unless they someday decide to abandon tiled entirely and go free form somewhat like the Total War series, I really think hexes are the way to go. Districts are great and add a new level of depth to the game play that didn't exist before. Brilliant decision!
Really, there are many positives (districts, casus belli, trade roads, more) and negatives (extremely poor balance, nonfunctional AI, micro nightmare late game, unfun tech progression, low productivity, many more) I could talk about at length, but I think I'll save those for potential future posts and focus on one nitpick in particular: Where's the production?
I titled the above, "What, exactly, is fun game play?" for a reason. With my time in the game thus far the single biggest negative has been the, at times, completely lack of anything to do. That is, production is scarce in this iteration of Civ thus far and it makes for incredibly long slog games, particularly if you're going for a Domination Victory. By the time you reach late game, even with the policy cards that reduce production time for late game units, you're likely to spend over a dozen turns making even simple mechanized infantry armies. This results in wars that consist of maybe a dozen units on each size poking at each other. Doesn't feel particularly epic.
This is further problematic because once one side has effectively lost the bulk of the battles, it's rather difficult to rebuild any sort of defense. Once I have the upper hand against an opponent, it's just a matter of reducing enemy defenses and taking city after city. No point in bothering on win conditions: I 'll just take every city and wipe them out. Taking even one city makes me an egregious warmonger to the AI anyway, no point in holding back.
Conversely, once an army has been lost, you might as well quit the game. There is no recovery, you're at the complete mercy of the enemy because in the time it takes you to rebuild an army you may very well lose everything you've build. Armies take significant amounts of time to construct.
So, what is fun gameplay?
In my recent game as Poland (a new DLC Civ... more on that in a later post) I disabled all victories but Domination just for the heck of it. I wanted a game with a little more conflict. As I slowly (and I mean slowly...) march my troops around the globe taking city after city, my progress slowed to a halt, not because the AI was putting up a stiff resistance. No, rather, the AI had very few units indeed. In fact it slowed to a halt because, simply, churning out reinforcements for me to cover an ever increasing war front was increasingly difficult. I eventually sought peace deals not because I was losing the war, but because the war was leaving me in total stagnation, as occupied cities cannot grow and therefore are relatively unproductive.
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| Well, hey, this city might be useful by... well, never. Repair times of 36, 48, and 35 turns are highlighted, in order, not to mention the repair time on individual buildings within districts. |
This lack of production period, much less so in occupied cities, meant that districts in the like take an absurd amount of time to repair. There were occasions when district would need over one hundred (yes, 100+!) turns to be returned to working order. Over one hundred turns before my newly conquered (or recently pillaged...) harbor could be used to make ships! I can't remember the last time it took it over 100 years to repair a shipyard.
Further, what is fun gameplay? I don't know how to define fun gameplay, but I promise you waiting 100 turns before you can put a basic gameplay system to use it not fun gameplay.
Quality of Life Reversals
Production Conversion: One of the most prominent examples is the conversion of production into other staple resource in the game, science, gold, or culture. In previous iterations, this was straight forward. Once unlocking the appropriate technology - for example, Guilds in Civ V allowed the conversion of production into gold - you could simply set the city to produce the given resource. It would do this non stop until the city was instructed to produce something else. It wasn't an overly efficient way of doing things, however it was absolutely necessary as in large, long game, you always ended up with redundant cities that you needed to 'set in forget,' less you end up in a never ending micromanagement game turn after turn that didn't really equate to fun gameplay.
Well, the developers of Civ VI decided that sort of micromanagement is, in fact, fun (hint: it's not) and have changed the production conversion into various projects based on the districts in a city. They are, in no particular order:
- Encampment Training
- Industrial Zone Logistics
- Commercial Hub Investments
- Holy Site Prayers
- Harbor Shipping
- Theater Square Festival
- Campus Research Grants
Each of these projects gives some gold and great person points. (How much gold? Who knows, not in the tool tip.) The gold is nice, the great person points become useless late game after all the great persons have been claimed. The frustration is that these projects don't work in perpetuity. They have a certain amount of time they take to complete, at which point you have to queue up another project. The result is that my late game turns in my Poland domination game consists of about 30% queuing up these projects. Every. Single Turn.
Really, who thought this was a good idea?
Alert Stance: They also didn't have Alert Stance implemented at launch, a stance that would fortify your military units and 'wake them up' as an enemy approached. They have since added this stance in the 'Winter Update,' but unfortunately it works in the exact opposite manner as intended. Units stay asleep, even if attacked by an enemy unit, until death. I've watched it happen. Swing and a miss... maybe next patch. :/
Spy Missions: Spies are back in physical form. You can assign them various missions, which is all well and good, except that counterespionage missions, like the various production projects, all take a certain amount of time and then you have to reassign, once again leading to a late game microtedium as I reassign spies to the same tasks again and again. This really needs an 'auto renew' checkbox to allow you to leave a spy in place until needed. If all I'm doing is reassigning him to the same task over and over, there's no reason for me to need to click it. Let me use a checkbox to save some clicks. Please Firaxis.
Trade Routes: Basically the same problem as the above. Many, many trade routes late game and way too much micro. I need an autorenew option. Why is it not in the base game?
None of those above listed items are game breaking, but they cut into the gameplay. Renewing a trade route 100+ times isn't gameplay - it's tedium. Firaxis has a solid game on their hands. Lets focus on the game and not the tedium by working out these QoL improvements. In the mean time, maybe mods can alleviate the situation?
Beta/Balance Testing
I don't think they did any.
Truly, I hate to be so critical, but the balance is unbelievably awful. And I'm not talking about the production balance, I'm talking, well... everything.
Naval Balance is the worst. Navy ships pretty much can't affect transports. You have to attack a transport ship with four or five naval units of the same or higher tech level to sink it. Since escorts for transports aren't really needed as navies pose no significant threat to naval invasion, navies are almost useless in the game at the moment. (This has an adverse effect on the Viking Scenario DLC to be discussed in a later post.) Truly they could cut transport endurance by 50% and it still might not be enough. This problem makes all naval maps terribly frustrating and naval civs drastically under powered.
Land Balance also suffers from problems across eras. The earliest eras (the ones played through the most in testing...) are probably the closest to resembling a certain degree of even balance. The problems start around the medieval era. Knights are absurdly powerful. Yes, they were the tanks of their day, but even cavalry counters can't stop them. Further, the AI seems to love cavalry, so you end up in some situations where unless you've build a mountain of cavalry on your own you're in some pretty big trouble.
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| This many horse units might as well be a doom stack. Goodbye Arpinum. |
These problems unfortunately don't fix themselves later. In the late game I find all land units bow down to Mechanized Infantry, and there's no point in building anything else. They can beat Modern Armor. They can beat AT Soldiers. Mechanized Infantry rules the late game, especially with a few upgrades and Medics backing them. This really shouldn't be the case, but unfortunately no RPS style counters are in effect, or if they are they need serious tweaking.
In terms of technical polish this game is in pretty decent shape - some bugs exist, but they typically aren't game breaking. Still, despite two post launch patches, the balance remains horrendous. Here's hoping the early spring patch will give balance a substantial pass to alleviate some of these issues.
Mod Support
One final thought in this post before taking a bit of a break. Firaxis has made bold claims that this will be the most moddable Civ to date, claims I hope are true. Right now that mod support is nonexistent, which is doubly confounded because they haven't yet enabled Steam Workshop support. I wouldn't normally be too upset at this except for the fact that right now mods are really the best way to optimize your game play experience as patches, while progressive and impressive in addressing the issues the player community is voicing concerns about, are slow coming.
While I appreciate their caution, there really are many issues that don't need such hesitation before taking at least an initial pass at fixing them, naval balance being one. Anyone who's spent a single game on a water based map could probably rebalance the naval game play to a better state given the right modding tools. Maybe not perfect, but improved. I would love a) Firaxis to be more forthcoming and aggressive with their patch, but more importantly b) Firaxis to enable the Steam Workshop so mods can be more easily accessed and continuously updated so that third party websites can be avoided in the process.
Closing Thoughts
I know that my thoughts have perhaps been on the negative side, but I really do like this game and the foundation it has laid for future expansions and DLC. I really think this is the strongest base Civ game to date and I'm hopeful that the future content will only improve on the base game play. I'd encourage any fan of Civ or 4x games to pick it up and give it a shot, at the patching from Firaxis, while slow, has been effectively addressing issues and I have no doubt that, given time, this game will age well and ripen to most likely the strongest entry into the franchise.
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In my next post I'll continue rambling about other game features such as Trade, Religion, the state of the AI, and the implementation of districts into the game, both the positive and negative aspects. As always, questions and comments are encouraged!
