Sid Meier’s Civilization VI free until May 28th | Hacker News Reader

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI free until May 28th

epicgames.com

159 pointstosh125 comments

Has the AI gotten any better?

Civilization has never been a bastion of great computer opponent strategy, but it typically was good enough to suspend disbelief and enjoy. However, VI was just horrific. I played a lot of VI and stuck with it for a few years but the AI still would declare war... not attack, put little to no effort into defense.

It was a fun game and I got my value out of it but eventually it just became frustrating with the AI sort of rage quits and almost behaves like a human greifer just taking random actions that make no sense at all / kill the fun of the game.

I've played civ games constantly since civ but unlike the previous games I just had to quit VI because the AI made it seem so pointless when it ruins a perfectly good game by just going bonkers after you've put hours into it...

Unless it has gotten better, if you have a low tolerance for wonky AI, you might want to pass on this one.

No, it hasn't. The only way to really make the game challenging is to heap bonuses on the AI player, which is what the game does at higher difficulty levels.

You'd think at this point it would be worthwhile to use ML to train your AI for basically every big name game. It's fairly clear that such methods can make computer players that are better than any human player, and once you have the net it would be pretty easy to have different level computers based purely on how many epochs the net is trained for.

I wonder how much retraining you'd have to do for each patch and rule change. In Civ patch to patch how you value things / do things can change fairly dramatically.

Not that you couldn't do it, I just wonder what that would look like.

I imagine that's one of the benefits of ML as opposed to a program that embodies crystallized human knowledge and skill: when things change, you don't have to get a bunch of humans to rethink the implications and rework the program, you just do more training.

This, sadly, is so accurate. That, or the fact that as difficulty levels increase, the game just gives the AI opponents crude modifiers - they don't get smarter, they just get cheat codes.

I would shell out money for DLC that just added good AI. Computer players are so important for a game with friendship-ending potential.

> I played a lot of VI and stuck with it for a few years

> It was a fun game and I got my value out of it

> you might want to pass on this [game that I played for years which is temporarily free]

I think other people may find it less worth their time than I did if they greatly value the AI behavior.

Folks putting time into a game that takes a while to complete might take quite awhile before they realize AI rage quitting is pretty common.

I had the same reaction to that comment. I bought Civ VI for the iPad for maybe $40. I played it for probably 80 hours total, and felt like I got my money’s worth.

It’s hard to imagine the mindset where you play a game for “years” and then say it wasn’t worth the $50 or so it cost.

It would be great to see some of the advances in deep reinforcement learning flow into game AIs.

Late game Civ 6 is nearly unplayable. Civ 6, in particular, really encourages a "wide" play style, where you need to own many cities to win. Improving tiles and planning districts in all of those cities requires so much micro-management. Throw in a war on top of that where you have to move individual units around and it is just all too much, especially as the time it takes to calculate each turn increases. Does anyone know a good empire building game that doesn't have this problem?

don't play total war.

try Settlers, maybe Age of Wonders? though both are fairly different from Civ and Total War

If you are willing to stretch beyond "Empire Building", I find Prison Architect amazing.

The PC version is the best, but there are Console Versions (even Switch), and IOS versions that have about 80% of the game.

I admit my thinking might be effected by quarantine but Prison Architect scratched my strategy simulator itch in a way CIV used to and hasn't for the last couple years.

It's way more contained, and more supportive of fun play sessions that are sub 30 minutes which is all I can squeeze in now.

Oh, I've seen a few videos of that. Does look interesting.

Try Stellaris, it is also a grand strategy game about empire building and diplomacy and wars... etc but I love the part that it is all real time, no turn base. And even better: I can pause the game and make a lot of commands, then unpause to see it runs. And able to increase or decrease the game speed.

And this game is on sale on steam very often. It was free last week though.

There isn't really a win condition in Stellaris though, just survive the end-game crisis.

The most recent update to Stellaris (with admin offices) makes going wide the strongest strategy to do this by far. Still fun though.

You can win with few cities. I’ve won with one city on emperor difficulty, and regularly win on immortal with less than 6 cities. It’s harder, but doable. You can also do smaller maps, or island maps where space is too limited to have tons of cities.

I mean, the Civ franchise is the golden example of the 4X genre: Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate

That said, if you're going for cultural or science victories, tall is still the way to go.

It's a bit of an unsolvable tension. Too little to do per city and the early game where you have few cities is boring, too much per city and the lategame is overwhelming. Add a way to delegate tasks to AI, and the question arises of why those tasks are in the game at all if you lose nothing by automating them. And if you discourage wide play (which is my main complaint of the prior game, Civ 5) then you're barely interacting with the broader world at all, and the rest of the map seems pointless.

Civ 1 & 2 also had this problem. Civ's 3, 4 & 5 added some mechanisms to discourage a wide play style. Civ 6 has some of these mechanisms but they aren't as effective as they previously were.

> Does anyone know a good empire building game that doesn't have this problem?

Stellaris, lets you put colonies on autopilot. It's ripe with other problems, but handling late game scale isn't an issue unless you like to hyper optimize.

I've been trying Stellaris for a bit but it's very slow paced. It feels like theres no tension of any kind at least in the first 1-2h of a game.

You can tweak the settings on the galaxy size or whatever to make things smaller, or at least closer together

Civ IV!

I loved the earlier Civ games, and almost everything else with Sid Meier's name attached, but these new ones feel so focused on being pretty that they forget to have good mechanics. I honestly can't remember anything special about Civ 4/5/6, or anything that would make me want to play one of them more than the others.

Plus they've been putting so much of the interesting content behind a DLC wall that giving away the base game is basically pure profit for them. Paradox proved this business model with CK2 and EU4, which is why CK2 is like a $400 game now.

I think I'll just go play Alpha Centauri again instead.

>I honestly can’t remember anything special about Civ4/5/6

Aww c’mon, not even one thing? What about the greatest video game song ever produced (Baba Yetu): https://youtu.be/IJiHDmyhE1A

Agree on Alpha Centauri—definitely recommend picking up a copy on GOG for anyone in the mood for a classic strategy game timesink.

Add my vote to SMAC (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri)

I played up to 5 and while I enjoyed it, was more like a 3/5 meh not bad experience. I haven't even bothered with 6 and based on the comments here not going to either.

The song gives me the idea to be able to start anew and see remnants of your previous empire(s). A generational thing.

I agree that Civ 4 didn't really take the game to new heights the way 2 and 3 did, but it is probably the most sound and deep iteration of the series. It fixed all of the problems with degenerate gameplay that plagued the previous games and balances the viability of all the victory conditions. The tech tree and wonders are well tuned to make a lot of interesting strategies workable. The BTS expansion has the best vanilla AI in the series too.

On top of all that, it's the most moddable game in the series! I might just go see what people have done with it in the past couple of years... oh no...

This seems like a very interesting move from Epic's side. Their giveaways had some pretty nice giveaway games in the past (Assassins Creed Syndicate, Darksiders 1 and 2, Amnesia, Into the Breach and Towerfall)[1], but recently they've started giving away far bigger games like GTA V, and now Civ 6.

I wonder if this'll actually kickstart their market share.

[1] Source - https://old.reddit.com/r/EpicGamesPC/comments/e9vj2c/updated...

In a way Steam also did that with insanely good sales for several years, so much so that it achieved meme status.

I would prefer the option to buy via Steam, but Epic's PC exclusive game has been on point.

Big games but also relatively old games.

That doesn't matter to me because I'm such a casual gamer I waited for the first steam sale before I bought RDR2 on PC. Out of principle as a cheapskate PC user.

But to most gamers GTA V and Civ VI are old games by now.

Either way, clearly Epic are trying to buy into the market share of Steam. Well needed competition.

No! No, no! Nicotine is less addictive than Civilisation. One person I accidentally introduced to Civ burned her PSU on the first game - which lasted 16 hours - all she could muster was "one. More. Turn"....

Then again it's been so long since I played it. One quick game won't hurt. It's just a few turns, is it not?..

First turn's free.

I reinstalled it about a week ago. Then re-un-installed it a few days ago. Yep, still too addictive.

I still, to this day, have never beaten the game.

I've come close, many times. Usually outdone by some super AI (I call them all Alexanders, after my first crushing defeat at the hands of none of than, Alexander the Great of Greece).

Never seen the late game Death Robot, never seen the Stealth Bombers... and I have an embarrassing amount of time in this game.

I used to only play on Epic with Random Personalities. Even when I tried Quick pacing, I still didn't get to the very end of the game without losing. Those cultural defeats sneak up on you.

I certainly have nuked more than my fair share of cities though... very satisfying.

What a great game.

Back in the Civ 3 days, I would lose weight playing it.

I'd play for 10-15 hours, and get hungrier and hungrier. But I just had to play one more turn.

When Civ 3 came out I had to install windows on a new partition, lasted about 2 years -- that was last time I had windows at home

My freshman year roommate failed out of college because of Civilization.

Been playing Civ since Civ 1. Unfortunately, 6 was a bit of a miss in my opinion. Civ 5 is still as addictive as nicotine.

I’ve never played any Civ game. Can you elaborate?

It is turn based. Each turn taking anything from seconds (early in the game, knowing only the immediate surroundings of the single city, with zero known opponents) to multiple minutes (late in the game, having a complete planet as play area and >100 opponent cities). But in aggregate it's terribly easy to play for hours on end, often into the next morning.

I was asking more specifically why Civ 6 was worse than its predecessors, but I appreciate your answering. I see that there are now many comments detailing the shortcomings of 6.

something about the graphics has continually rubbed me wrong about Civ 6. It sounds weird but I can't get into it. Civ 5? I will play that all day long.

Same for me, the graphic of Civ 6 always felt sluggish, at least now I can get more people to try it with me.

On another side, the multiplayer in Civ 5 was always broken, the saves didn't load, someone getting dropped almost always meant 2+ turns lost for them. Hopefull this one doesn't suffer from this any more.

It's the cartoon proportions applied to everything.

Civ 6 is deeper and better balanced than anything before it. What is your specific complaint?

Personal opinion, Civ 6 gameplay feels like it sacrificed some personality in the name of balance. Civ bonuses are more muted, so it feels like less personality.

It introduced interesting new systems, but the agenda system usually feels more annoying than actually offering interesting long term strategic options. Same goes for religion, the religious combat mechanic is too fiddly, leading to me mostly just ignoring it.

Civ 6 is a deeper game, but for whatever reason I can't put my finger on, it was just a bit less fun.

I played a little bit, but what really made the beginning hard for me was that Barbarians suddenly "get away" from you. In V and earlier, a Barbarian came, your warrior killed him, fine.

In VI the Barbarian is faster than you, so it gets out of sight quick, and from then on you get one wave of Barbarians after another.

Also, I didn't understand the mechanics of the new religion system, but I think I got it on a basic level at least by now.

In some ways, I like VI (the district system can be infuriating, but is basically a good idea), I like the graphics, as well, but I never got "into" it as I did with V.

Indeed, early game is hard because barbarians spawn repeatedly and out tech you. They only spawn from camps, so once you expand your area of influence it's less a problem but you need some way of dealing with spearmen early to really clear them out.

The way it the barbarians work though is somewhat clever: they send out scouts, and it seems like until their scout spots your city they won't spawn attackers. So you're incentivized to harass their scouts early on at least, but it's not really explained in any fashion beyond perhaps a visual ding.

After that the AI is so bad that you've basically won once the barbs are no longer threatening. I got back into civ 6 last month after a two year break and had forgotten this dynamic and kept starting over when the barbs felt overwhelming and killed a slinger or captured a cheeky unprotected settler.

The barb mechanic would be cool if it weren't for the fact that it's nigh impossible to catch the scouts due to movement and terrain mechanics.

Barbs don't have a speed bonus AFAIK, but the terrain impacts movement significantly. So, if they are 'getting away from you' it's not because their barbs, it's because their unit has more movement and isn't moving through trees, or over hills/rivers.

That's what I mean with "faster". I cannot keep up when chasing them. They often move one hex further than I can on the same path (and I think it's usually across rivers, but I don't remember it particularly clearly).

Scouts have fewer movement penalties through terrain and can therefore outrun your soldiers. The way to deal with that was to get horsemen or archers ASAP since your melee footsoldiers can't catch the scout.

Well, my point was that it was unit specific, not Barb specific. If you are chasing a Barb Scout with a Warrior, you'll never catch them. Scouts bypass movement penalties over hills and through trees, warriors don't.

You also may be moving in a straight line over bad terrain, while the AI is making sure it is always using the flattest terrain to get the most movement per turn.

TL;DR - The issue is unit specific. Build units that have more movement per turn, and have few penalties moving over bad terrain, and Barbs won't get away from you.

Also, just a tip; Don't chase them. Focus on finding their camp, because thats where they spawn. If you start attacking that, Barbs will naturally come to defend it. Spend your movement and units to find and destroy the camp. Far more valuable than trying to eliminate specific Barb units. If left unchecked, the camp will spawn horseman or spearman which are much harder to deal with. It's way better to have a wandering scout on the map with no more barb spawn than hunting down a few scouts and leaving the camp in tact.

Honest question: in what ways do you feel it to be deeper than Civ 4? (I'm a 4 fan who did not like 5, and now I'm wondering whether I should give 6 a try.)

Opposite for me, I like Civ 6 far better than 5. Give 6 another run with some of the popular mods.

Usually with Civ, don't play it until the second expansion is released. That's when it's stable and improved enough to be a great game.

It's weird I loved 3 and 4, hated 5 and enjoy 6 a lot I think it has a lot to do with expectations/current trends

You can't make a price low enough if the product isn't good enough.

Civ is the only game I've played consistently since college, 1994. Civ VI breaks the balance a good strategy game has between aesthetics and efficient movement. It's become too inefficient to enable committed game play.

One possible progression of Civ would be to enable players to script movement or trade or war, to make it even more efficient, so that game play scales with the size of your empire, which indeed reflects the way leaders increasingly rule larger organizations through policy rather than direct action...

Try the Historic Speed mod on Gathering Storm. It brings Civ VI into better balance, its a blast, especially if you like the longer game speeds. (I also turn down the storms and turn off city states altogether). But I agree there's too much tedium in the late game and movement takes too long -- like a decade to move armies from one side of a continent to the other. Another good mod is the trade mod that lets you automatically renew trade routes.

Bingo. I'm pretty sure this is just an attempt to move more DLC and pump the Civ franchise for a few extra bucks.

They’ve just announced a Season Pass that will give players content through next year, so it’s likely an attempt to increase the player base to maximize sales of that pass.

It’s an unfortunate sign that they may be moving away from paid, yet substantial expansions.

That, plus this free version doesn't include previous DLC and expansions. The platinum edition with all the DLC up till now is still $40, plus another $40 for the next season pass.

Maybe, but it's only free on windows, on Epic Games' store, which has a monthly free game apparently. They seem to be trying to buy their way into the user count steam has, and it might even be working.

I'm sympathetic to the AAA publisher / developer plight, where they're basically doomed to give Steam a cut.

But for god's sake, take the Hulu approach.

Both Origin and Uplay were a hot mess last time I tried them, when if they'd cooperated they would have had the resources to surpass Steam. Short term thinking at its finest.

And both of them have now brought their games back to Steam.

Civ VI is also freemium on phones/tablets, with the move limits removed via an in-app purchase.

The CEO has specifically said that he wants to convert all Take-Two games (of which 2K is owned by) into subscription models.

This was driven by the seemingly "easy" profits from the GTAV Online marketplace, and also why Grand Theft Auto V has also gone free, with bi-yearly "big crimes" that players can buy into.

Same is true of XCOM, which they also own and has been releasing yearly DLC for.

I find this sort of thing a bit short-sighted because although I loved all three of these games, I still get bored of the same mechanics and would rather dive into something new.

If they're putting DLC deployment ahead of fresh IP development (which they seem to be), then I guess that's why I sold my TTWO shares yesterday.

Aah.. I fear for KSP2 then

So? Is that so bad? You don't need to buy the DLC. Do people make this same complaint about stuff that goes up on humble bundles for free?

I love the civ games and Civ 6 as well, but I fully agree that the gameplay can become a little tedious at scale. Moving large groups of units deters me from wanting to play really large empires despite it being my favorite playstyle

The funny thing is that the tedious army of movement of Civs 5 & 6 are the result of countering the (controversially) tedious unit stacking mechanic of prior Civs. There ought to be some happy medium here, which I wonder if they're saving for Civ 7 (though they did clearly try to work there way towards that happy medium in 6 with the corps/army mechanic). Even just allowing Great Generals to stack units into "columns" for quick transport, and then deploy them at their destination (pseudo Endless Legend style) would be a massive improvement.

Go into the options and turn on fast movement. Also remember that you can order units to move further than one turn at a time.

> Also remember that you can order units to move further than one turn at a time

Until anything in the calculated path changes.

Kind of agree, but I don't think the problem is specific to Civ 6.

As someone who's been playing since Civ 3, agreed. Every wide, lategame empire turns into a management quagmire eventually.

Previous games did have a feature where you could assign AI governors to handle the city for you, but they were all so bad at their jobs that I could never being myself to use them.

If anything I think Civ 6 is the least affected, because now cities can be set to perpetually produce "projects" (which produce empire-wide resources like science or faith) rather than working through the tree of buildings or units. It still doesn't make the lategame nearly as good as the early game, though.

> you could assign AI governors to handle the city for you, but they were all so bad at their jobs that I could never being myself to use them

Perhaps this is most accurate to real life! It’s often tough to delegate tasks and watch them done less effectively. But it’s the only way to scale...

Indeed, I appreciate the (intentional?) parallel to reality, but that doesn't necessarily make for a fun game. :)

Haha, you aren't wrong.

I think the big difference in 6 is that you aren't penalized for building wide vs tall, in fact you're encouraged to do so. You need as many useful district bonuses as you can get, which are often improved via the Pantheon. Since any City can only have one of a specific district, you want to build many cities.

Civ 5 encouraged building Tall. So it was far less likely to end the game with 15 cities unless you played one of the few leaders that needed Wide expansion.

In 6, there is really never a logical stopping point for building a new city. You either stop because you don't have space, you're busy with war, or it is so late in the game and you're just trying to end it. Otherwise, it's worth settling in a bad spot just to control more of the map or get a district bonus.

But, yes, I don't think this is new to the series overall.

Or perhaps it just needs to update its main formula. After playing Endless Legend (which brought great and inventive stories to 4X genre), Civilization VI just feels stale and out of date. It's pretty, but nowhere near as interesting.

They did. Unfortunately, they isolated all the innovation in the Alpha Centauri / Beyond Earth / Starship line.

CIV6 was the first civ game I've played that I wasn't hooked on. I don't know if its the gameplay, the AI or what but I just didn't care and regret my purchase.

It's my heartfelt opinion that Beyond The Sword is the peak of the series by a large margin. Cool though.

On the Epic store? Too expensive.

Why? Is more than one store client a bridge too far?

Would Steam have been preferred?

Personally, supporting Epic's anti-customer activities by purchasing from their store is the bridge too far for me.

Buying exclusivity over finished games, the lack of common customer-friendly features in their store (like reviews), and their past interactions with indy developers (not allowing some non-exclusive new releases on EGS) have all joined into one intolerably heavy load of straw.

I have a different view. I'm not on an epic supported platform, so I don't and can't use their launcher. I wouldn't buy anything directly from them, but I will log in and claim my free copies, in hopes that it cost them money in licensing fees.

I don't know if they make bulk licensing deals, or pay a reduced price per copy claimed, but I hope it's the latter and I'm just a drain on their budgets.

Software companies often struggle to acquire customers, and they are often presented with a decision: Make the product better, or coerce / force / bribe users to accept your product as it exists.

Everyone probably does a bit of both, but Epic is the perfect example of button-mashing option 2.

Are developers of the freebie games complaining?

Who is harmed by another competitor with lower royalties and lower prices?

Is EPIC store a Windows platform only? CIV VI had macOS version but doesn't seems to be available on EPIC store.

Still a little sad with the current state of Mac Gaming. macOS install base went from 10-20M to now 100M and yet things hasn't changed a bit.

I spent most of the money I'd saved from my summer job during my first year at university on a 42MB hard drive for my Amiga just so I could play Civ I without continually swapping floppies.

... and now I feel old.

I am a massive Civ VI fan even though I understand the criticism. Running it on Linux is a far better experience for me than V, but both are phenomenal strategy games in their own right.

Not supported on MacOS.

You'll have to load Windows on Boot Camp to play.

Annoyingly, you aren't informed of the limitation until after you sign up for an account and install their store and client software.

Supported on MacOS through Steam.

not supported on Linux either while the Steam version is

Or Linux/Proton. Can't stand Epic for this.

What's the install format / DRM for this?

Any chance that it runs on Wine?

Unfortunately no, at least for the Epic distribution. I just tried to download it from the Epic store on a Mac and I got an error message saying my device is unsupported.

Meh. I want to downvote you for these news... (of course I won’t)

EGS, so windows only DRM. Steam has a Linux port available but it runs pretty terribly (I got maybe 20fps with a Titan XP SE on Ubuntu). ProtonDB lists this game as "bronze" so it probably doesn't run very well.

So in general this game does not work well outside of Windows.

Have you tried running it in Proton? I've noticed Proton seems to run at higher FPS than a lot of the Linux specific ports

Hm, Linux port from Aspyr works fine for me.

I get a pretty clean FPS for civ6 on a thinkpad, what are you doing wrong?

Cool. Can't quite tell, but it looks like this is only for the Windows platform?

Also, "free until" seems to mean "and then you can run it free forever"?

It runs fine on linux.

Through Steam sure.

This seems to be free through epic's own system. I signed up and it gave me an MSI to download. Fail.

Yes, it means you just have a time window to claim it.

Epic has been giving away games every week for a long time, you "buy" it for free now and you own it forever on their store.

Too bad it got hobbled on the last Mac update. With Metal I find it completely unplayable and it doesn't do fullscreen.

I think the Epic store offering doesn't support Mac, but...

Switch back to OpenGL. It's an option available in the Aspyr splash screen that pops up when you try to launch the game from Steam.

Argh, tried this and after messing with it for 20 minutes, it simply won't install on my year-old, completely up-to-date Windows 10 Dell laptop. Fie on Epic.

This is why I don't buy games any more.

Friendly reminder FreeCiv is free forever--albeit with less glam

It's not free, it's a trade for your identity.

now they know my email address! I am but a faceless drone now

I just got Civ 6 a few weeks ago. I've never played it before. Does anyone know good resources (websites, videos) to learn basics of the game?

Check out playthroughs on youtube like Marbozir or just any youtube guide

Gamer Grampz has some really good videos, and full playthroughs, if you want to learn it more. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaGxTImj_nhq-EZ7VAhaukA

Yay, GTA 5 a few days ago and now another AAA game.

I've claimed them both but don't actually have a Windows PC to play them on.

It looks like the strategy here is to use free Civ Vi to try to get you to install the Epic Games store. If you have Windows, this may be compelling, but it also comes without a lot of the extra content that you'll need to play with friends if they use the extra content.

Civ V is where it's at

platform Windows.. meh

wake me up when it's available on Linux

The Steam version is available on Linux

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