The cracks are starting to show.

Anybody noticing that the tech progression is crazy fast? I'm playing a normal speed game, and by 1600 I have Infantry, Flight and Battleships, while my (King level) opponents have Crossbows at best. I'm sacrificing production to get there (most of my cites take 15+ turns to pump out that one infantry, except for my capital which can do it in 8.), but it doesn't matter much when the few modern era units I have can take ten times their number in medieval troops.

@mandude said:

The cracks are starting to show.

Yeah, the Eureka and Inspiration bonuses are not balanced with the production levels. You can progress blazingly fast science-wise without even specializing too much, but the production levels can't keep up at all. Everything takes forever to build.

Some other issues are fairly obvious. The AI is utterly lost at combat, even worse than Civ V, and they love sending unescorted settlers out.

However, I do think they've got a really really good foundation here. The new district mechanics are really fun and lead to very interesting city planning instead of the regular "build everything everywhere" kind of thing Civ V was. It's unfortunately rough around the edges, but every Civ has always been this way at launch.

This seems to be a problem some people are having:

If anyone's finding load times suddenly extremely long, either turn off Windows Defender real time protection (at your own risk, obvs) or create an exemption for the Civ 6 folder - That fixed things for me.

@crommi: Religion is pretty easy as you said. Downside is the ai can do it too and even faster. I haven't seen it much myself but I've been reading stories of the ai running away with religion victory while the player is trying to reach something else. Definitely important to get and maintain a defensive religion for that reason alone.

Has anyone played Civ 6, or any of the other Civ games with a steam controller? Does it work well. I have my pc hooked up to my television and mouse and keyboard is fine, but playing games with a controller is always a better experience on the sofa.

I really like what they have done with the district system, between resources, tile and adjacency bonuses, terrain limitation and overall space constraints, city development is a mini game of it's own it's nice and varied. I daresay it's an even better implementation then what Endless Legend did.

That said there are some major issues with the game atm:

1. No build que. No, districts are not an excuse for this feature to be missing, you can adjust build ques on the fly in every modern 4X, they are a useful staple for many reasons.
2. Spy system is a mess in it's current form. One spy to guard only 1 of dozens of buildings you might have. Even worse they need to be reassigned orders every few turns.
3. Diplomacy is currently a joke, with every Civ you meet near guaranteed to be starting on negative relationship with you. Denouncements are given out like free candy. And even trying to trade/bribe or be diplomatic is likely to leave you on bad terms.
4. imo: aside from a few outliers a lot of the wonders feel weak and anemic this combines with the fact that there are so many

@dr_unorthadox: I'm playing it with a Steam controller on my TV. It's slightly hard to read the text on the TV, but as for the controller itself, it works fine. The buttons take a bit of getting used to, and I'm not as fast as I'd be with a mouse and keyboard in front of a monitor, but I haven't had any serious issues with the game yet from that perspective.

Also, is it just me (and everyone I play with) or is the turn processing in multiplayer hella slow?

EDIT: @dave_tacitus: Just saw this. Will look into this when i get home for sure. 3 hour multiplayer game and the turn speed was so slow that we only got 80 turns in

@tennmuerti: I haven't had the problem that everyone else is running into with diplomacy. Im entering the late game with France going for a culture victory.

At this point I'm allied with 4 civs and happy or neutral with some others. I've been denounced from differing govt, which seems a little odd, but those civs hate everyone. I found it pretty easy to get civs to keep improving just by occasionally throwing some gold at them and taking deals.

@gaftra: What difficulty are you on? I haven't had a single game yet where there wasn't at least one guaranteed DoW against me between turns 10-50, and constant negative (frown face) from all of the civs in the game until over halfway into the game when some will maybe start to turn around in my favor as long as I really try to play nice with one or two of them.

It's not impossible to get good relations and it does get easier in the later two eras, but the problem is the AI instantly hates you for the first half of the game. They might as well be barbs that you occasionally trade with.

The negative relation modifiers are way too extreme. Especially civs who have certain agendas that will trigger way too early. Rome will complain about you not expanding on turn 5, Kongo will complain about you not spreading religion to them the turn that you create it, ghandi will denounce you for going into a war that he asked you to join, etc. In addition to this, having differing governments will give you a giant penalty and given the number of governments in the game its pretty hard to match more than one or two of the 6 or 8 ai in the game. The rest might as well just be considered unapproachable in most cases.

Really enjoying the game so far. Like always, on marathon speed and just staking my time learning everything. About 14 hours into my first game and I just hit the Industrial Age.

I really like the districts system, definitely makes me think about each city differently and how to build them and in past games I build everything in one city that had every wonder and stuff where you can't do that with this game, hated it at first but actually really like it and makes me balance all my cities.

I hate the housing system right now though, feel like I've been butting my head against that since my second city

just cracked into it last night, and here i am nursing a civ 6 hangover (up till 3am with work at 8am).

while i'm not head-over-heels for the art style (or more precisely, i think the UI looks great but not-so-much the cartoonish humans)- this game feels like coming home. i'm having a really fantastic time, and sean bean is an absolutely inspired choice for the narration.

i could quibble about some annoyances here or there, but to do so would ignore the fact that my inner monologue is constantly pondering, "i wonder just how much sleep a man needs to survive?" so i guess i'm a fan.

I just won my first game, standard speed & standard size (8 civs) on prince difficulty as China. I started with a pretty miserable seed, very few luxury resources, no natural wonders nearby, and most of the peninsula I was on was desert, but I managed to sprint to get a religion and cleverly stacked some faith bonuses (including one that gave me a +1 bonus for every adjacent desert tile to a holy site) to go for a religious victory. By the time I won I was getting 500+ faith per turn and buying apostles and missionaries and throwing them at other cities. It seems like a kind of mindless and easy way to win, especially on bigger maps, and since I got theocracy pretty early I could spend faith on military units so even when I was a target of war I never really felt threatened.

Overall, I will echo a lot of what is being said on here. It is a cool game and most of the added stuff is very interesting, especially the district system, but certain things definitely feel less fleshed out, like religion. Production felt super slow on everything but it did push me towards city specialization, which makes me feel like there could be a lot of diverse play styles. Diplomacy was totally fucked, I declared war on one city state mid-game and had people denouncing me for warmongering the rest of the match. I didn't even touch the espionage system. I'm looking forward to digging into the rest of it later.

One thing that I've begun noticing in the later stages of the game that is a bit annoying is that now due to all the wonders and districts plus how large a lot of tile improvements are. You have entire continents looking like one giant urban sprawl with just a hodge podge mess of structures vomited onto the map. They kind of did a 360 turn and now it all looks silly and unbelievable because of it, if in previous Civs you visually identified cities as concentrations of power now it's like looking at a 4 seasons pizza with extra toppings :/

There is just something about how that art style interacts with the large number of structures of built up cities that all bleed into each other.

A bigger issue I find is the overall pacing of the game, especially when it comes to production. Now science seems about on the same level as in other Civ games (if not faster). But production costs are a bit out of whack. Firstly it's how each district increases overall district production costs for you globally. Towards the end game I decided to fund a new city and to build it's fist (industrial) district would have taken 130+ turns!!! If not for the nearby forest that I quickly processed in it's entirety getting new cities off the ground in mid-late game is a bizzare endeavor that makes 0 sense.

Secondly it's just the sheer amount of time it takes to get an army off the ground and an invasion started. Even fairly sizable cities with fully built up and supporting industry churning out 70-100+ production a turn, it still takes anywhere from 6-20 turns to get a battalion going (depending on unit type and city in question) and that's with some great general boosts and several city state army production boosts. Then to get it all together and send it to another continent. I was sitting around idling for about 40 turns on fully researched science and social trees while trying to get an invasion underway. And at the end it didn't even look like a lot of troops. This is all on normal speed btw (on a large map).

At the moment I am not feeling like starting another game of civ6 underway at all.

There's several reasons why production seems out of whack:

1) Industrial district buildings (Factories and Power Plants) give MASSIVE bonuses that get spread out to cities within 6 tiles of the district. That is a massive, massive bonus that you need to plan for in order to take advantage of it.

2) Trade routes give production bonuses if you're trading to a city with an industrial district, especially internal ones.

3) A lot of government policies give production % bonuses for specific stuff (wonders, settlers, builders, units) and there's a lot of +production for a lot of other things.

4) Hills now give plenty of food. Mines and lumber mills are super super super important improvements and you should be spamming them all over the map.

5) Plenty of non-industrial districts have buildings that give production bonuses: encampents, harbors, airports.

It takes a while to adapt. Personally I think the trade route bonuses and industrial bonuses are so large that they kind of railroad you into building a commerce and industrial districts on every city (since every commercial district gives you an extra trade route). I still think research is way too fast. But the costs are there for a reason, even if it's not fine tuned yet.

Yea here's the thing tho, I had most of the above bonuses going :/

Several cities close by with fully built up industrial districts, encampments, trade routes, policies with 50% or 100% bonuses to military production and plenty of mines. My cities have 95, 95, 130, 115, 115 production values or thereabouts. Plus 2 military suzerain states for further production boosts. And I have the vast majority of the worlds wonders and some great people boosts. That still puts stuff like various army battalion types at like 7-15 turns.

At some point all this synergy should be able to crank out an army at a decent pace, but it just doesn't feel like it. I am not going to sit here and say my layout/cities are perfect for totally 100% maxing production, my starting location and geography kinda screwed me over in several ways, but still they shouldn't have to be. When you start gearing up for war in 1940s and only get a good invasion underway in the 80s. It feels way out of whack.

Plus that still leaves the problem of setting up cities in the late game and the massively inflated district costs.

And yeah research is way to fast especially when compared to production. I mean all my cities have industrial districts with synergies, but I only ever build science districts in a few of them.

Can someone explain culture victories to me and what I'm doing wrong?

Gallery

@starvinggamer said:

Can someone explain culture victories to me and what I'm doing wrong?

Gallery

i was about to type an explanation, but i saw this and this is probably most to the point:

(credit to http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=787617041 )

@mellotronrules: In my screenshot I'm 763/140. That was a few hours ago. Now I'm like 1200/230 or something.

Civ6's diplomacy has gotten extremely frustrating. The AI Civs are as dumb as a sack of potatoes, get pissed at you for the slightest infraction, and make it obscenely hard to ally with them. I've been in a 100-turn war that Arabia declared on me, despite Arabia only having 1 city compared to my 5, yet it refused to end the war even after I obliterated its entire invasion. Only once I was sieging their sole city halfway across the continent was it ready to talk peace. While I was heading there, Russia was constantly complaining about my troops being on their borders... but I couldn't explain that was because Russia was between me & Arabia... and Russia's borders had expanded enough that my roads were going right past it. There were even Arabian units attacking me that I couldn't melee against because they were positioned right next to Russia's borders. I finally made an Open Borders deal with Russia to just move my troops directly through it to get to Arabia... and Russia still complained about my troops being too close to its borders!

The worst part was when Egypt settled a new city right next to my army and immediately complained I had troops on her border. Sadly there's no options to scream at the AIs about how idiotic they are.

i guess this is in running for disappointment of the year now! [/s]

I'm really digging it. I couldn't figure out how culture worked and then won a cultural victory by accident. That post above made my win make more sense.

Time to crank up the difficulty.

Part of the reason I won though I think is because Spain went to war with me, then sent like 5 weak units I killed, then paid me a bunch of money to stop the war. I started getting so much gold eventually that I just built buildings and bought units if I was attacked.

@ben_h: The AI does seem a bit dopey at times. Have yet to try it at a higher difficulty, but I love the new systems, at the very least.

As someone who've loved playing the Civ games almost entirely on keyboard, I'll say the keyboard support is kinda lacking. Lots of things like automatic exploration and city bombardment don't seem to have any keyboard shortcuts anymore, and the city bombardment button in particular is a nightmare to hit if there are fortified units within the city. The UI in general seems harder to navigate than in 5, and some buttons seem kinda glitchy, especially the unit promotion one.

All in all, I suppose it's a better base package than Civ 5 was, and so far I haven't had any issues that can't be patched. I still prefer Civ 3 and the Call to Power games though.

in that case it looks like you've got a bug. maybe post on the official forums?

I have a few things that are frustrating me:

• Dislike movement of military/scout units not being able to move onto hills, over rivers, etc. unless they have 2 movement to spare.
• Warmongerer penalties are really unbalanced. I got surprise DOW'd by my ally in a joint war and was denounced for defending myself against it? Doesn't seem right.
• Diplomacy doesn't make a lot of sense to me right now. I find that Civs by default seem to hate you which makes making allies an uphill battle.
• I find the game pushes you to go for a wide civ a bit too much. As a Tall Civ 5 player (almost exclusively) this is a new skillset I need to learn on top of trying to learn all the intricacies of Civ 6 in general.
• I wish the game did a better job of helping you understand districting bonuses. That said, the community is doing a really great job pulling this information together

All of that said, I think the game is really great and a lot of my hangups are just things I need to get over/learn how to work with in the new game. Would like to see diplomacy and war get a bit of an overhaul though, just to make things feel more "fair".

I just can't wait to have enough time to play more of it.

There have been plenty of stories about how the AI would declare war on you despite having no chance of defeating you. I had the opposite happen at the start of a match. I had barely researched any military tech yet, and Rome came at me with knights and catapults. I managed to scramble together all my warriors and the few spearmen I had to my two cities closest to the Roman border, and managed to kill their first wave of attacks (with some help of a city-state between us that took potshots at the Roman units as they passed through the city-states' territory), I saw a whole bunch of legions and chariots coming next, but just as they were about to attack my cities again the diplomacy window popped up where he begged for a peace treaty, offering a lot of gold, including a 6 gold per turn for 30 turns asking nothing in return from me.