Hacker News Reader

Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com