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Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes
- Aelinsaar 11y agoI really like the visual style changes, especially how resources show up on tiles. Very nice! Now, just to let my friends and family know that I'll be a little harder to get hold of this autumn...
- cletus 11y agoWhen Civ 1 came out I played it religiously. To the point I could wake up at noon, start playing then look outside and find it was dark. I didn't really play Civ 2 or 3. I just found them to be classic examples of sequels: adding tedium more than anything else. Civ 4 I also played a lot, possibly as much as Civ 1. Civ 4 was, for me, a rare sequel that didn't just add feature bloat. It added a lot of depth while streamlining some other aspects. But I didn't play the base game as much as I played a particular mod: Fall From Heaven 2. Fall From Heaven was, I believe, a mod that came with the game that was fantasy themed. Ffh2 was that taken to another level with years of development effort. There was much more difference between civilizations. Unit promotions were about twice as strong (eg each strength was 20% not 10%). Heroes and magic were pretty interesting. I spent countless hours playing this mod. I tried to like Civ5. Really I did. But it just never grabbed me. Some people got excited about hexes. Not me. Once you add in all the expansions (that fix a lot of issues with the original Civ 5) it's not bad but just not inspiring. I'm not sure I have terribly high hopes for Civ 6. I mean, it might be a perfectly fine game but the smart money is on it not hooking me like Civ 1 or Civ 4 did. Really I just want a Ffh2 successor.
- tormeh 11y agoThe right way to buy Firaxis games is to buy the "Complete Edition" or whatever. Civilization N with all expansions are almost always better than the base Civilization N+1 game.
- some-guy 11y agoI agree, I bought Civ 5 about a year ago on sale with all expansions and DLC for a small penny. Vanilla Civ 5 feels like an incomplete game with zero replay value. I'll most likely pick up Civ 6 in five years.
- BuckRogers 11y agoSimilar boat here. I burned out on Civ back in 1991. I believe most of the new Civ4 or later addicts simply started later and missed the original's release. I also played Civ2 for DOS and the Windows version that had multiplayer over modem. After that I was definitely done with the general mechanics and had my fill. I'm going to take a look at FFH2 out of interest, but more than likely won't start playing it. I can't play the same game for 25 years straight and I imagine most gamers my age have also just moved on. Maybe the others don't even play games anymore. But MOBAs are still new enough for me that I haven't burned out on those yet. I played WC3 Frozen Throne DOTA back in 2003 when it was new but I didn't play enough to really get it. Fast forward to when League of Legends came out in '09 I was hooked and been playing that ever since. I have friends that played Duke Nukem 3D over Kali with me and are still playing FPS games daily. That's another genre that I enjoyed but really can't do anymore out of overexposure. After League of Legends wears off on me I'll probably move to games built for VR as the formulas that work there are solved.
- jandrese 11y agoCiv 5 was arguably incomplete at launch. The optimal strategies ended up being pretty shallow and the AI was pretty brain dead. The expansions helped a lot (although Religion tends to feel like a sideshow), but BNW made it a little to easy to secure a culture victory IMHO.
- toyg 11y ago> although Religion tends to feel like a sideshow Does it? One of my favourite tactics in Civ5 is rushing to pile up religious wonders, convert the crap out of other countries, and proceed to actually get decent trade deals with their leaders. Combined with Patronage and a few network-oriented beliefs, religious domination will let me lock-in complete support from all City-States (as long as goddamn Alexander isn't in the picture) and dramatically ease my path to victory.
- touristtam 11y agoCiv4 had more depth (with expansions) regarding alternative way to dominate (religious or commercial).
- civilian 11y agoPssst, go treat yourself to Stellaris!
- kirubakaran 11y agoIt would be interesting if they logged the total hours everyone spends on it.
- tormeh 11y agoI think this may be inspired by Endless Legend and how it does improvements in "districts". Endless legend is pretty cool, but doesn't run on Linux, sadly.
- mvd366 11y agoI'm a bit surprised at the graphics they have shown so far. I originally saw a screenshot and assumed it was a mobile game rather than a full-fledged AAA title for the PC.
- jcdavis 11y agoDitto. The cartoony feel doesn't really fit what I would expect from a CIV title, hopefully that will change. The gameplay changes themselves seem very promising, though
- placeybordeaux 11y agoI feel like V is fairly cartoony. These screen shots just don't feel polished though.
- jandrese 11y agoArt usually doesn't change much from the screenshots. What you see is probably what you're going to get.
- undersuit 11y ago99% of my time in Civ 5 is spent in strategic view. Keep that mode and fix that I can't tell if a tile has a coast line and you can base the graphics on the My Little Pony for all I care.
- mfoy_ 11y agoAlternatively, Civ 6 for the tablet could be amazing.
- lewisl9029 11y agoDefinitely. I'd love to be able to pick up a Civ game I started on desktop and continue it on my tablet/smartphone on the go.
- xlm1717 11y agoCiv 5 and Beyond Earth both have tablet modes. They work very well.
- tomashertus 11y agoAnd I'm still sitting here and waiting for Age of Empires 4 :/
- asimuvPR 11y agoYou and me, friend. Whatever happened to the MS division that published those games?
- bdavisx 11y agoI wonder if those games didn't make money, or just didn't make enough money. I'm thinking AoEs and Flight Sim.
- tomashertus 11y agoRTS genre in general is on decline. Last good RTS was Starcraft 2. It is all caused by the shift to MOBA games... Also there is huge challenge to create playable RTS game with current popular monetization strategies - in game purchases
- asimuvPR 11y agoAoE would be awful with in-game purchases. I'd rather play an old version on a VM than go through that experience.
- balls187 11y agoRise of Nations 2
- mdemare 11y agoOh yeah, totally! Surprised there hasn't been, thought it was a hit (for an RTS, that is)
- lmickh 11y agoMS shuttered the studio in 2009. You are going to be waiting a long time.
- vinceguidry 11y agoI would love to see a game that accurately reflects modern geopolitics. It would generate a world and run a history up to a certain point, at which you'd take control as head of state of a particular nation and conduct national affairs. Ideally, the game would be able to make conducting the affairs of a large global hegemon like the United States as interesting as playing a small kingdom beset on all sides. Sort of like Crusader Kings but set in the modern world. The real interesting part of the game in my view is that conquest is no longer an option, and tactics would get abstracted out of armed conflict in an "amateurs think tactics, generals think logistics" kind of way.
- selimthegrim 11y agoYou never played Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis?
- douche 11y agoVictoria 2 is, I think, the most interesting of them. Although I've never gotten deep enough into Crusader Kings II to really know how to play it.
- tcoppi 11y ago> The real interesting part of the game in my view is that conquest is no longer an option Isn't it though? Russia seemed to do OK with the conquest of Crimea. Anyway the suggestion of Europa Universalis is probably the closest you will get right now. If Paradox made a post-cold war sim I'd play the hell out of it, but I think it would be hard to do right and be interesting precisely because without real conquest and wars, there isn't much that is interesting for a game on the global level.
- defenestration 11y agoI enjoyed Europa Universalis as well. It taught me quite some history while being engaged with addictive gameplay. A modern version simulating the last 100 years of politics and war on a worldwide scale would interest me. Especially if you could try different strategies and perspectives in current day hotspots like Syria, Southeast Asian sea, etc.
- mthoms 11y agoI wonder if there are any plans to improve game engine performance on OSX. It never seems like a high priority. I understand Windows is 80%[1] of the market but still. [1] Number pulled out of my butt - I've no idea the exact figure.
- knodi123 11y agoYeah, I have a modern macbook pro, but nothing I do on here sucks battery faster or makes the fan noisier than playing Civ 5.
- distances 11y agoIt's not only OSX/Linux, the Windows version is a bit embarrassing with its performance and graphics glitches too. I really hope they're using a different game engine for this one. Civ5 late games with massive maps are very tedious to play even with a beefy gaming desktop.
- joshschreuder 11y agoI think the AI turns are quite CPU bound with the current engine, so I agree. Late game end turns take forever to complete.
- acdha 11y agoLast time I profiled it, most of the execution was in vsprintf. I'm pretty sure the answer is just “nobody put time for that in the budget”, as with multiplayer support.
- geitiegg 11y agoFWIW, Steam reports 3.57% of users running OS X in April [1]. [1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
- zyxley 11y agoLow user numbers are something of a self-fulfilling prophecy if it's a bad port in the first place, though.
- enraged_camel 11y agoI love the Civilization series, but I'll be honest: it really bothers me that certain companies have one or two franchises and they keep churning out new iterations of them every year or every other year. It just feels like a money grab after a while (especially with franchises like Call of Duty or Madden, which, from my perspective, don't improve appreciably in between iterations). I'd like to see them taking some risks and innovating new franchises, and perhaps even new genres.
- jandrese 11y agoThey did make Beyond Earth, which is more different than Civ than you might expect. That said, I didn't find Beyond Earth to be much fun...
- dragonwriter 11y agoBeyond Earth is essentially a sequel to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (both of which are in the same genre as the main Civilization series, though quite distinct from it.) (They also recently made Sid Meier's Starships, which is a completely different genre, though IIRC it can integrate with Beyond Earth.)
- Fomite 11y agoIn contrast, I found it far more compelling than Civ. And yeah, they play surprisingly differently.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> I love the Civilization series, but I'll be honest: it really bothers me that certain companies have one or two franchises and they keep churning out new iterations of them every year or every other year. The main Civ series has had a new base-game release every 4-6 years, not every year or every other year. Civ I: 1990 Civ II: 1996 (6 years) Civ III: 2001 (5 years) Civ IV: 2005 (4 years) Civ V: 2010 (5 years) Civ VI: 2016 (6 years)
- FireBeyond 11y ago
- nfoz 11y agoI've been playing a lot of CIV 1 lately. Because I happen to have it installed on my travel-laptop in DOSBox. I'm sure I've clocked over 100 hours of CIV1 in the past year. It would be fun to upgrade to a new CIV and see how it compares. Maybe I'll do that in October. But I might need some laptop-upgrades :)
- lewisl9029 11y agoI'm hoping they've made some changes towards making vertical expansion (focusing resources on developing a small number of large, advanced cities) a bit more of a viable alternative to horizontal expansion (focusing resources on founding as many cities as quickly as possible). In Civ5, with the former approach, city population growth eventually becomes unsustainable (as with fewer cities, you have access to fewer resources and buildings to provide happiness to offset the growth of unhappiness from population), and city productivity will also eventually plateau (as all tiles are worked on and specialist slots filled). In practice, you tend to fall so far behind your rivals in terms of technology, economy, and military that even a cultural victory becomes out of reach on higher difficulties.
- dragonwriter 11y agoIIRC, Vertical expansion has been improved and made more competitive in every Civ release starting with at least Civ III.
- lewisl9029 11y agoYou're probably right. I've only played Civ5 though, so that's the only perspective I have. Hopefully they continue the trend with Civ6!
- jharger 11y agoYeah, I remember spamming cities seemed to be the only way to get ahead in Civ 1 (and democracy to elimite waste/corruption... ha!). Now I play most Civ 5 games with somewhere around 3-4 cities if I'm not going for a conquest victory.
- Colin_M 11y agoI agree. Venice was a very viable Civ to play as in V, and there you're only allowed one city.
- Terr_ 11y agoOr at least provide some AI governors so that when you do build wide, you don't have to micromanage all the different build-priorities quite as much. "Look, it's very simple, the city is called Moneyopolis, it's next to gold mines, and I want it to focus on money. That means unless something really dire is happening like a food-shortage, you build a marketplace, a bank, and a stock-market. If you can't, then make me some gold." "OK, now Scienceland and Warriorville, any status updates?"
- hosh 11y agoI remember this kind of city building in Alpha Centauri.
- partycoder 11y agoI have more fun playing Civ 4 than Civ 5. I have not played Beyond Earth much but it doesn't feel like a true spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, a much immersive game. I think there has been a strong pressure to make Civ more appealing to casual audiences and this has somehow degraded the game to a more bland experience.
- scrumper 11y ago> Stonehenge can only be built near stone. Found this a bit amusing given that the most likely quarry site for Stonehenge's material is a couple hundred miles away from Salisbury Plain, in Wales. (Not a nitpick at all, the restriction is a good idea, just thought it was quite funny given reality.)
- robertcorey 11y agoEach tile in this game represents a large area of land.
- btreesOfSpring 11y agosome might say, "huge tracks of land."
- pohl 11y agotracts
- civilian 11y agoI've bought every Civilization game except the very first one. They're good games, but the one I really love is Alpha Centauri. Maybe it's a nostalgia thing--- I got SMAC when I was in middle school. But the faction design was phenomenal, and it was great how you actually had to play the factions differently, and knowing the other factions meant you handled them differently. I started playing University of Planet and just out-teching everyone, but learning how to play the other factions was very interesting and provided a ton of replay. To me, Paradox's Stellaris is more of a spiritual successor to SMAC than Beyond Earth is. You have empires that have radically different traits, values, and governments. You actually have to play to your strengths and think about your policies. (Disclaimer: I am extremely sleep deprived from playing Stellaris the last two nights.) The Civs and Beyond Earth all play the same. The faction differences are superficial. It's bleh. //edit forgive me HN, I commented before I read. The article does address my concern: > "We found that there was a bit of a sameness to leaders as opponents," he says. "They didn’t really act as different personalities in terms of diplomacy. In Civ 6, every single leader in the game has a historical agenda. We look at something they did very well in history and we dial that up in the game world to make them a bit fanatical about it in Civilization 6. But I have very little faith that they've solved it. Having a leader that is more fanatical about something isn't the same thing as having to make hard deicisions about Values & Government trade-offs! For reference: The Alpha Centauri Social Engineering panel: http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/03/29/nerdiness-from-noah-alpha-centauri/jcr:content/body/inlineimage_1.img.800.png/45485743.cached.png http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/201... And wiki for details: http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri/Social_Engineering http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri/Soci...
- tpeo 11y agoSMAC also had 10/10 flavor text and setting overall. It's a game that has a lot of character.
- Tossrock 11y agoOne of my favorite stories about Alpha Centauri was from a person on the PA forums called Wallhitter: I learned the word Atrocity from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri My dad and I had a horrible discussion in the car about the word, eventually. "Dad, what's an atrocity?" "It's when someone does a horrible thing to a lot of people" "...but sometimes they're necessary, right?" "..."
- BatFastard 11y agoHopefully they can add some AI that is not totally lame.
- VT_Drew 11y agoAgreed. I was kind of disappointed in the "AI" in Civ V. The first time I played and an country denounced me I obliterated them off the map and thought to myself, no one else will be foolish enough to denounce me now. Wrong, if you take over nation completely then everyone starts to denounce you, that is the way the "AI" is programed to think.
- mwfunk 11y agoI dunno, makes sense to me. Annexing one nation will make all the others fear and hate you even more, of course they'll denounce you. A big part of the game is figuring out how to walk the line between expansion and alienating the other civs.
- VT_Drew 11y agoThey can fear and hate me, as long as they are too scared to do anything about it.
- secabeen 11y agoRight, you are now an expansionist violator of the social order, and they're all going to gang up on you to stop you from doing it again.
- Mendenhall 11y agoIf you liked any CIV game do yourself a favor and get the mod Fall From Heaven, civ 4. I really enjoyed the civ games and played all of them and this mod blows them all away by far and im not much of a mod fan. Seriously go look it up now :)
- JauntTrooper 11y agoI strongly agree. I rarely play mods, but Fall from Heaven 2 is awesome and totally reinvented the game in a very new and creative way. I might've played more FfH than Civ.
- toyg 11y agoI loved Civ I, trekked through the sequels, and fell in love again with Civ V (the orgy of stats in IV was starting to kill the franchise, IMHO). I think they are on the right track - the point of Civ is to find a balance between statecraft drudgery and military action, and V moved the needle back towards that ideal centre IMHO. This new direction sounds slightly too RTS-y, but as long as they don't try to pull a Simcity 5 ("social" games, just say no, kids!), I'm happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.
- ranman 11y agoDoes anyone remember Empire Earth? I'd love for that game to be remade. I truly enjoy playing Civ but the RTS side of empire earth created a dynamic mix of technology advancement and geopolitics combined with a starcraft like micro-management opportunity.
- anexprogrammer 11y agoTo me, III was the sweet spot. IV added some interesting ideas, and could have worked really well, but the interface and design was an ugly mess. V sorted the interface and design, but seemed a very shallow shadow of the former game. It also seemed to want a ludicrous amount of resources - a simple isometric view that always seemed to need as much PC power as Far Cry. Games bogged down to plain slow from mid game on - too much turn waiting, not enough playing. I gave up on V quicker than any previous Civ and spent most of my Civ time since in Europa Universalis. If I buy VI at all it'll be after it's been out long enough to have plenty of real reviews and opinions on how well they did. Some of the ideas sound interesting, but the real test is how the balance ends up. Don't like the cutesy graphics style though, so would hope for a mod or post-processing fix.
- rdl 11y agoUgh. I wish they'd delay this for a year or two -- I'm afraid I'm going to lose a couple weeks of my life to this game when it comes out, unless I ration it very strictly. Civ II through V were amazing, especially with the expansions, so a version of this made by the people who make the expansions is going to be novel and addictive. "Just one more turn..." is the ultimate design pattern for a game.
- nedwin 11y agoAm I the only one who wants to play this in VR with a Vive?
- zem 11y agoi really like the idea of having tech advances depend on in-game actions. likewise the idea that city improvements would be more linked to geography.
- endgame 11y agoInteresting. The new city system feels almost like a return to Accolade's 1996 game, "Deadlock": https://images-4.gog.com/b621a9344cd3732776dfe5bd8039acde7eba4f5d6a80525a663d1ac69ab39d9b.jpg https://images-4.gog.com/b621a9344cd3732776dfe5bd8039acde7eb... Most improvements were sensitive to the type of tiles they built upon.
- J_Darnley 11y agoNice but if it is only available with Steam's DRM then it will pass me by like Beyond Earth and Starships. Civ5 fooled me, I won't get fooled again.