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Comment by AgentOrange1234 | Hacker News Reader

This is both nostalgia and current events for me. Playing civ5 with my 12-year-old this year has been a blast. He keeps telling me about history class questions that he knows the answers to because of it. It opens up opportunities to talk about all kinds of historic leaders, events, cultures, etc. Highly recommended.

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Civ6 is the one for me and my son. It’s a ton of fun, and his social studies grades have improved quite a bit. I knew I’d successfully infected him with “one more turn syndrome” when I caught him up at 3AM on a school night solo’ing one of our multiplayer saves. I didn’t know if I should be angry or proud. On one hand, I knew he’d be a zombie at school that day. On the other hand, he was playing a game that teaches things… these days, he’s a teenager and he’s more interested in what his friends want to do, but he still plays civ when his friends aren’t online, and he and I still play on rainy days.

Do you find civ 5 way more complex than the original civs? I always try to pick up the newer ones and I’m always struck by how incredibly complex they’ve become. Civ 1/2 you could basically be on top of everything but cob 5 seems like an impossible task.

The tutorial system helps. Civ6 with expansions gets equally if not more complex. There’s def a learning curve involved. I think the complexity really comes from have more “systems” within the game to take into consideration. The good thing is, when you’re new to it you can just choose one to maximize and go for that win condition. Say you want to learn the religious side in civ6, just try to maximize that, ignore all other systems, and go for the religious win condition.

And yet at the same time the presentation is super focused on selling the "casual" angle, and because of multiplayer it's all "balanced" to the point that none of your actions seem to matter. And the ever-increasing number of parallel victory conditions makes losing an entirely unexpected pop-up that declares a seemingly random civ winner in some metric that you did not observe carefully enough on the gauges. In civ6 I either win because I set difficulty too low or I lose because some gauge value ran away. They completely lost me, after five good civs, two off-brand incarnations, 1.5 colonizations, the incredibly well written SMAC and the also-ran C:BE.

Civ6 presentation is the best overall, but the core gameplay is awful. Easily the worst gameplay wise.

A shame because of how beautiful Civ6 is.

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Civ4 combat is worse IMO but Civ4 makes it up with a fun growth system and excellent city planning. And also CIV4 is by far the best music of the series, and best narrator Lenard Nemoy.

I'm curious, how are you guys playing? 1vs1 or together playing single player?

I'm always impressed that people manage to start playing the series today, with Civ 6, considering how many mechanics and systems it's accumulated over the years.

My son and I play co-op vs computer opponents. I offer to 1v1 but he always says no.

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