Sid Meier's Civilization VII | Hacker News Reader

Sid Meier's Civilization VII

civilization.2k.com

87 pointsdoener135 comments

I've put around 20 hours into this game at this point, and I think the criticisms are way overblown. The UI is a bit clunky in spots, but the game is very solid, and very fun. I've played every Civ since IV, and mechanics-wise, this is my favorite one (actually, Alpha Centauri... but this one is a close second). I have not found it particularly buggy (as opposed to clunky).

It feels like with every game release there's this army of perpetually pissed of gamers just waiting to pounce on anything, and when you play it it's like "this is what people were so mad about?". Same thing with Dragon Age a few months ago: everyone talked about it like it was some disaster, but I played it, and it's... fine? I mean, it's not the greatest game ever, but it's not terrible. It's not as good as Inquisition, but better than Dragon Age 2. It's certainly nowhere near as bad as Mass Effect: Andromeda.

> and mechanics-wise, this is my favorite one

* Did you ever play V with Vox Populi (fka Community Balance Patch fka Communitas)?

* How did you like VI compared to the earlier ones?

I’m asking because V + VP is peak Civ for me, and because Civ VI was a complete disappointment for me (not helped by there being fewer modding possibilities).

I was big into civ5 and a bunch of mods including Vox populi. I enjoy 6 equally after the expansions.

Equally, I don’t enjoy five any less.

But that information doesn’t help much without you having played VII like OP ;)

I liked VI better than V (the districts were fun!) but never touched any mods. I think some of the ideas that were maybe a bit half-baked in VI comes together really nicely in VII.

Thanks. The districts were a nice idea from Endless Legend, but I felt they were a bit rough in Civ. Refinement of ideas from VI sounds like a good start, good enough that I’ll not completely write VII off ;)

I honestly can’t remember much of what V was modless, only my first 300 or so hours were without some VP variant (the mod is still in active development, and has been almost as long as V exists), and I’m at 2700 hours now. When you need a break from VII, I can just wholeheartedly recommend giving V + VP a try, it overhauls a lot of mechanics, fixes a lot of things, and vastly improves the AI.

_Every_ Civ game is loathed on release, and beloved a few years later (generally after a bunch of expansions). It's how it works. I think Civ 2 was the last one for which this was _not_ the case, tbh (it was so clearly better than the original).

(I had missed that there was a new one out, might have to give it a go, so that I can moan about how it's worse than VI, and then forget about that in a couple of years.)

> I think Civ 2 was the last one for which this was _not_ the case

Good addition. I just wanted to say I was pretty sure Civ 1 and 2 were immediately loved upon release.

I skipped 3 and 4, but I do remember plenty of complaints about 5 and 6, but they're great.

I almost never buy games on release day, but this is Civ. Maybe I should just get it right away. I keep starting new Civ 6 games for some reason.

AI knowing too much led me to stop with 3.

I vaguely remembering looking at 4 and same issue, maybe.

Then there was another Civ where boats were not needed any more - that looked to me to be a very different game, and it didn't appeal.

The AIs have never really been great, tbh.

> Then there was another Civ where boats were not needed any more

6 & 7 (and maybe 5, I don't recall) don't require transports for land units because they now have the ability to "embark" with appropriate technology (In 7, this is from the beginning, but only on navigable rivers and coast), but boats are very much still important (well, on most map types.)

Civ 2 was great. I mostly skipped 3 and completely skipped 4, but have played 5 a fair bit through the years and still feel that Civ 2 was better. Not graphically, obviously, but the game mechanics evolved relatively little from 2 to 5 and in some cases not for the better (unit stacking??) Worse, Civ 5 games all turn out smaller and shorter than what I used to do in 2. Fewer cities, fewer units, smaller and shorter wars. Pity it's such a pain in the ass to run Civ 2 these days.

I loved the Civ II world war 2 scenario, I played that more than anything else.

Wine runs Civ 2 very nicely these days. It's just a desktop shortcut away for me.

All in all it's pretty funny to me how a lot of games from the Win98ish era are now easier to run on Linux than on Windows.

I never got into Civ6. The rules were too different from the prior games and I fail to adapt. My favorite is still civ5 but I also really liked 4. I did try playing civ2 again recently and it now feels too unstructured.

Your entire second paragraph is a strawman based on your subjective and unfounded "it's fine" opinion.

Unless you address actual points at face value instead of dismissing people as "perpetually pissed gamers" your entire point is moot. You just want to dismiss criticism.

I have no opinion yet on civ VII because I haven't tried it but there are legitimate concerns. Often times, companies have heard the concerns of their player base and reacted accordingly (not the loudest ones, but simply listening and evaluating if they might have a point and if driving your base away is worth it for an unseen/unproven growth)

Edit: my conjecture is that Civ switching is what is likely to make or break it for me. Either I like it due to refreshing gameplay or I hate it due to roleplay/continuity reasons.

The people dismissing criticism are the worst.

A fine case example is Cyberpunk 2077 at release - the game was ridden with bugs and several of them gamebreaking. That on top of failing to reach what it’s marketing had promised.

I enjoyed the game ok then and a lot more after a lot of patches - it’s a good game atm imo.

But the criticisms were more than valid yet there was no shortage of very vocal defenders. According to them the critics were haters, complaining about nothing, they themselves didn’t encounter any bugs (or maybe two in twenty hours) etc. It’s baffling how some people want to defend shortcomings in products - wouldn’t it serve them too if the products were better? (Some goes with any brand fanboys, not just games)

I don't know if people have a natural inclination towards authority or they've been primed against it but there's a notable trend online to demonize consumer advocacy of this kind.

I mean, Inquisition itself was terribe compared to origins.

> It feels like with every game release there's this army of perpetually pissed of gamers just waiting to pounce on anything, and when you play it it's like "this is what people were so mad about?".

As I understand things, the norm in the game industry is for even expensive, well resourced games from veteran studios to launch with numerous major bugs and performance issues: https://youtu.be/DPW6fkcM-14?feature=shared&t=46

If you're like me, you never see this. I play perhaps two games per year. I play games once they're being sold at 40% off and they've got 50,000+ positive reviews, I've got no interest in early access games or pre-orders. Either the bugs and performance issues have been ironed out, or they haven't and the reviews let me avoid it.

But just because I never see the bugs and performance issues, doesn't mean they weren't there on day 1 :)

> I think the criticisms are way overblown.

The game lost me as soon as the long fought war I was on the verge of winning was suddenly over at the end of the age. Units just gone hours down the drain. What supposedly happened narratively? The clock struck midnight and everyone decided to switch to farming?

this isnt a narrative game. Its a strategy game. Having a clock makes for better strategy imo.

I get it's not a narrative game. That doesn't mean that there shouldn't be reasoning behind the mechanics. The fact that most of my troops just suddenly disappear at this arbitrary time to me at least has no reasoning behind it. It's just some arbitrary marker I have to plan around. I think asking what my troops supposedly decided to do is a fair question.

Here's a question I've been having trouble finding a clear answer to -- do you have to let it talk to the internet at any point if all you want to do is play single-player?

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/1iolpfn/steam_reviews_...

And more on that thread tell the story you tried to bury with the "gamers are toxic" narrative.

Both 5 and 6 were quite weak titles on launch, and they improved massively over many years. It seems like the starting point for 7 matches this trajectory.

There is some criticism that features have been removed to be re-added as DLC. I wonder if this is just that it is really really difficult to make a great strategy game, and putting out an imperfect title and iterating is the only way we know how.

Given that the strategy game has 7 in the title, I think they've had a good few iterations at this point.

More likely they've noticed that DLC prints money, and there's plenty of fools eager to pre-order without seeing a single review.

> Given that the strategy game has 7 in the title, I think they've had a good few iterations at this point.

Of late (at least for 5 and 6; I haven't looked at this one yet) they've been using the new versions to make _major_ changes which would clearly break the old game, and then iterating via expansions.

Possibly in a parallel universe there's a Civ game that's just Civ 2 after 29 years of iteration (Civ 2 being the first one that really received universal acclaim), but that's not they way they've chosen to go (though arguably that's kinda what Freeciv is).

Anyone else living in the parallel universe where we are on Linux 2.6.137 (or whatever)?

Going the other way, I think Battlefield 2042 has a lot of the maps from other Battlefield games. It'd be interesting to imagine a rolling release game, with both change but continuity. In some ways... That's Destiny 2! Just... A different form factor game.

> they've had a good few iterations at this point.

They probably have some learnings about the previous iterations, but it’s not a reusable code or even a reusable requirement. This game isn’t as polished as late Civ 6, but the core is good and it’s ok to have UX and few other things catching up later.

Just one example: in Civ 7 the selection of the map is just a switch with the names of the options. In Civ 6 it evolved into a more visual component and they added more types of maps eventually.

Could they work on a better release? Maybe. Should they have done it? Absolutely unnecessary.

> there's plenty of fools eager to pre-order without seeing a single review

There are people who discover and people who follow the crowd. I often come to an empty restaurant, sit there and then people start coming. I have seen people avoiding empty restaurants as if they were plagued. Isn’t it foolish to entrust your life to reviews or others? If those who go first are fools, why their review would be important?

Interesting. I love 5 + Brave New World, I think it's my favourite Civ. I bought 6 on a sale (so it had been released for a while) and I found it awkward and clunky so I never really managed to get into it and went back to 5. Are you suggesting the game improved after that? In what way?

I fell for the €30 upsell so I could play it this weekend and get the extra maps and civs. Unfortunately, Steam errored the transaction, so now I'm out my money with no game, waiting for support to resolve it. I was glad for the macos release and wanted to support (and play!), but I've learnt my lesson on handing over control before the product is delivered. I'll wait for the UX/UI updates and a price drop, still plenty of fun to be had in civ5.

The release day of Civilization n is always the best time to buy and play Civilization n-1.

Also when all DLC have been released, bundled into one package, and on sale for at least 50% off.

Like now, where Civ VI Anthology which I think includes all the DLC is currently on sale for $9 on Fanatical (activates on Steam). It's always much cheaper to game a generation behind.

https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/sid-meier-s-civilization-v...

Civ 6 was free on Epic a couple of years ago. And free for keeps, I mean. That was the best time to get it.

But you had to install the Epic installer!

That was the cost, of course. Nothing is ever entirely free.

Got a good deal on Civ6 a month ago, and it's free on Netflix too with all DLC

What is wrong with me?

I tried several modern Civilizations but I keep coming back to Freeciv. Freeciv from 1996 with its Civ II ruleset is more fun for me than Civ 5 or 6.

I never thought of myself as conservative or sticking-to-the-old just because I am used to it. Or am I?

Is it objectively more fun? If you actually ask yourself if you're used to it, you could list the positives and negatives of both games and compare, maybe it could open your eyes (or confirm your suspicion)

> Is it objectively more fun?

Fun is subjective, nothing is objectively (more, less, or unmodified) fun.

and here I am still playing Civ II MGE

https://github.com/FoxAhead/Civ2-UI-Additions

I've seen the map generation looks dreadful compared to previous versions, here's some examples: https://www.ign.com/wikis/civilization-7/Civ_7_Map_Settings

That's bizarre, they look so unnatural with all the straight coastlines. That would have been so easy to avoid I assume it must be an intentional design decision?

Probably some novice playtester felt shafted by the terrain disfavoring them so the designers took an axe to it trying to assure some kind of "balance".

I've played most Civs, enjoyed most of them, but quality has been in a downward trend since Civ IV. This one, at that price range, 70€-130€ for early access, and mixed reviews on steam, marks where I'm not a loyal franchise customer anymore.

Civ 5 was fantastic though? Certainly a whole lot more approachable than 4 ever was.

Some people get really worked up about the lack of unit stacking in Civ 5+. (Not sure if that's the case for the person you're replying to, but it's why a lot of people see Civ 4 as the pinnacle.) It's the 3.5mm headphone jack of Civilization games. I can see how, if you played and loved Civs 1-4, changing such a fundamental game mechanic would be jarring. But I don't think anyone who came later to the series would miss it.

Even if disabling unit stacking for combat was the right choice, disabling it for workers too just made the game far more tedious. Workers constantly cancelling the routes they're building because other workers were in the way means much more micromanaging. (Not to mention, workers under automatic orders are far less inclined to build roads on their own in 5 than in 2, so that's even more micro.)

approachable != better

For Civ it is. It's a pretty big title. It's the easy entry into the genre of big sprawling tech+strategy games, but it's not meant to be EU4. I play Civ as a casual game when I'm burned out from EU4. (I should really pick up and continue my Mare Nostrum attempt.)

Ah, just had a good Mamluks run in EU4 :) Left Civ to Paradox (thru HOI1) after Civ4. Nice to see a fellow Paradox player

I see Civ as the gateway drug to Paradox games. "Do you think Civ is too shallow and insufficiently historical? Well, check out these games!"

Has Civs fixed any point of the static nature of the game after begin? I like paradox games like Crusader Kings where the game throws curve balls and the whole game world feels alive.

6 has golden and dark ages which add a bit of dynamism to the game. But you’re not going to find real curve balls, like the Mongol invasion in Total War, or the civil war in Rome.

> Has Civs fixed any point of the static nature of the game after begin

What do you have in mind? How do that changes in the Gathering Storm expansion pack feel? Volcanoes, storms, climate change, floods, and droughts, changing the productivity of tiles?

(Personally, I miss that in Civ2 engineers could level mountains).

Yeah. I’m going to balk at the price too. For me civ is a “solitaire” time waster and not an epic journey.

And the real problem is Major Lords still exists. And that’s where I waste time.

Get Old World! Made by Civ IV's lead dev, Christopher Tin soundtrack, great mechanics, and a team that's still dedicated to improving the game years after release. It's my favourite 4X of all time, right besides Alpha Centauri.

This is what the average of the reviews on Metacritic also says.

Civ IV is at 94.

Civ V is at 90.

Civ VI is 88.

Civ VII is now at 80.

Civ Revolution is also at 80.

Steam reviews https://store.steampowered.com/app/1295660/Sid_Meiers_Civili...

No comments about the VR version?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lavuwKvZki8

Curious to see how well this will run seeing that it will launch on the Quest store only, so no PC VR?

That feels like a massive misstep. Who on earth thought putting a chunk of development time into VR was a good idea for a Civ title.

It might've got sponsored by Meta.

I think it's a great idea. God games (back to Populous) were always intended to be viewed through a window from the sky.

Civ shorned off some of the more direct interactions, but is still essentially in the genre.

I think it'd be really cool to look down on ones civilization in VR.

Someone receiving a large chunk of cash from Meta, no doubt.

Completely disagree. Civ seems like a great VR game. Controls easy to use on vr, top down makes sense in VR. Imo the biggest advantage to VR gaming is that its easy to play in bed or on a couch where a monitor would be tough to set up which works well with civ.

It's more that its a lot of developer focus to take away on a very, very niche market. It may be fun, it may work really well, but hardly something to focus on for the games initial release, especially a Civ game where they've got a history of launch problems.

They were always going to launch half baked. Its part of their strategy to keep people engaged for the DLC.

Couldn't imagine myself playing it like that for more than 20 minutes at a time. Multiple hours must be complete agony.

Not sure Civ is a good idea for a VR title. The games take too long for most people to put up with the headset and the controls look like it'll be just normal Civ with two mice. I'd try it because I'm a VR simp but yeah..

I'm biased about this game as the first Civilization was the first game I saw on PC beyond ZX Spectrum. So now there are a lot of discussions in the game dev community about whether it is ok to publish such a raw game or not. Yes, not all of Sid's games were perfect at the start, but for me, Sid Meier was always the " quality stamp, " so I think they should be more careful about this release.

Any real non paid reviews people recommend? Seeing the usual suspects with overly positive reviews that clearly arent representative.

Check the Steam page for reviews. Seems like the consensus is that a lot of the game mechanics were stripped out so they could be sold as DLCs.

The consensus is that the UI sucks and a few features have been stripped but overall I think the core gameplay has done quite well in reviews.

I found this one to be quite impartial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B67vadCC1gg

IGN gives Civilisation 7 a 7/10 7 days ago! The most IGN thing ever.

Verdict is that core gameplay is a big improvement and a lot of fun, but the UI gets in the way too much. High price and questionable DRM make this a "wait for sale", maybe after some expansions/DLCs land or at least after the first patch next month.

Yeah saw a few shots of it on Steam Deck, looks like they forgot the resolution there as theres more UI than map!

Eurogamer gave it a 2/5.

They basically said "it looks good and sounds good but it is just dull"

These days it's usually better to try and find players on youtube or twitch than to read text based reviews.

Negative: Civ7 is right now a bit too simplistic, i didn't find hidden gameplay, some theorycrafting will be needed but so far, playing diplomatic and getting city-states seems really overpowered imho (especially against AI, i would guess that MP make the game more interesting), and the IA is still shit at military (Civ5 VP really put the bar high, but this is worse than 6). Map generation is as broken as it was for civ6, perhaps worse. The "realism" make its hard to differentiate buildings, and the town/city mechanic are really weird (civpedia is here though)

Positive: The new way units and general work is great, i like the sim possibilities with the way building and specialists work (even though the UI is really getting in the way imho). The "souvenirs" (sorry don't have the translation) mechanic is a really good idea for solo play, the game is really, really stable (more than Civ6 and half of paradox games), i want to try a MP game with someone from South Africa or australia to see if the MP stability issues are still present in 7 (maybe MPH won't be necessary now). Civpedia is as usual, great.

Overall: if you really like civ-like 4X (humankind, endless space, or even millenia), especially solo, you should try it now. If you don't, wait a bit. If you like those, but like competitive multi, wait a bit (it's not as unbalanced as Civ6 was on launch, but close i would say). I'd say that for a new 4X player, it's better to play civ7 than civ6

(Almost) everything wrong with modern gaming in a neat little package.

  >unfinished base game
  >81% on metacritic, 52% user reviews on Steam

  >Misuse of the term "early access" to indicate advanced access 5 days early
  >5 content packs on release already
  >oh wait not all of them are included in the Founders Edition, some are just promises for later content packs

  >mobile game UI, a huge mess (maybe because Luigi wasn't there to fix 25% of the UI bugs like in 6....[0])
  >mobile game artstyle, Civ4 looked better than this in *2004*
  >they switched from Lua to JavaScript since civ6

  >horrible performance, crashes, stuttering and ridiculous system requirements
  >skin-focused, leader-focused pseudo-RPG "gameplay"
  >who needs engineers or auto-explore in a Civilization game anyway?
  >empire switching straight stolen from Humankind but worse
  >obligatory quests included

  >Denuvo, gimped modding "support" (just the usual)
  >Atomic Age stripped from the release deliberately, to be sold back to you as DLC later
  >AI? that doesn't sell DLCs....
  >storefront disguised as a game

yeah this game is a disgrace to Sid

(apologies for the formatting, I'm not good at this)

[0] https://preview.redd.it/thanks-for-your-contribution-to-civi...

I don't envy anyone trying to make games for people like this. It must be demoralizing.

Hey, it ain't too hard! There are many amazing games out there :) They are just usually not made by huge studios.

Maybe the fact you think making a game isn't too hard is part of the problem?

Making a game that people like is hard.

Making a game that has the kinds of fans who will even complain because you changed your internal scripting language will love is near impossible.

(and of course you're not required to like it: I'm strictly commiserating with the developers who have to deal with this type of "fan")

Well, why would it imply that "making a game isn't too hard"? No, I'm implying that there's loads of good games. Of course it isn't easy to make them! But it's very much possible and there's many who have done just exactly that. I'd expect better from a big, AAA studio.

I also don't think it's a best-faith assessment of my critique when you mention that I complain about the changed scripting language. It was a fairly off-hand remark and in the grand scheme of things, "let this be the biggest problem in the game". But it is surely indicative of the deeper rot.

I am not alone in this view... just look at the Steam reviews. It's not that I have irresponsibly high standards - they just consistently manage to sink lower and lower.

> 81% on metacritic, 52% user reviews on Steam

This _always_ happens with new Civ games, though. Definitely back to Civ 4 anyway (I don't remember Civ 3, though I assume it existed); I think Civ 2 _was_ seen as kind of perfect on delivery.

The issue is not so much the user scores, but the delta between users and critics. It strongly indicates the publisher is paying off critics (for instance, with access if not cash.)

Hence "everything wrong with modern gaming"

I mean I think Civ 6 had a similarish delta in the early days.

> It strongly indicates the publisher is paying off critics (for instance, with access if not cash.)

Or just that critics are less temperamental than the average user. If nothing else, the critics have been here before and know how new Civ games go.

Taking a Steam review at random:

> A couple minutes in and it's just... so blatantly unfinished, especially by Civ standards. [...]

I've got to assume from this that this person never actually played another Civ game at launch; the 'especially by Civ standards' is particularly laughable. The last one to feel 'finished' at launch was Civ 2 (or _maybe_ Civ3? I'm drawing a total blank on that one; I know I played it, but I don't remember it at all). Civ4 and on (and _especially_ Civ 6) took a while, and a bunch of patches and expansions, to get good.

(Also quite a lot of the reviews just seem to be indignation that they put Harriet Tubman in it...).

I'll probably pick this up at some point, and will go in with the expectation that it'll be extremely rough around the edges, and get better over the next few years, as is tradition.

I never got the impression that Civ 6 ever caught on. At least in my circles, people still play and talk about Civ 5, but never 6.

https://steamdb.info/app/289070/charts/ vs https://steamdb.info/app/8930/charts/ would imply that Civ 6 was _far_ more popular than 5. And may understate it a bit, because Civ 6 had that rarest of all things, a usable mobile version. The iPad version in particular is basically just the same as the desktop one, and if you have Netflix you get it free.

(Of course, this isn't necessarily the full story, as it was certainly available outside of steam, but I would guess that most users got it on steam.)

I always assume that the popular ones were Civ, Civ 2, Civ 4, and Civ 6, though I suspect I'm biased there (I was way too busy when Civ 5 came out, and though I'm pretty sure I _did_ play 3 I found it totally forgettable.)

Of course Civ 2 had to be perfect on delivery, because there was no online patching back then. Modern tech had made it easier to release unfinished games to test the waters and patch them up later. DLC also didn't exist back then.

Civ 2 actually had a bunch of official and third party expansions, but they weren't as consequential, and it was a complete game without them in a way that its successors were not.

I do recall a mod or scenario where you basically replayed the entire history of Rome in surprising detail. Tons of scripted events.

And obviously the Web was very much up and coming when Civ 2 was released, but I don't think releasing a game through downloads and updating them through the internet was really much of a thing yet when it was first released. As far as I know, everybody ran it from the CD-ROM. Also because that's how you got the awesome advisors (still the best).

It doesn't, civ4 got excellent review scores on release. This is the first one that is significantly below 90%.

>horrible performance

Cannot support it has horrible performance. Civ 5 and 6 were notorious for having minutes-long turn change times in later eras. Civ 7 seems to finally have fixed that problem for me.

There's some annoying things in it (and also the way they basically copied Humankind leaves a sour taste) but performance it's not, for me at least. It's finally a Civ again with acceptable performance and I hope it stays that way.

I can support it.

On my laptop it takes minutes to load and hung on turn four. I never got past that because reloading also took 5 minutes.

On my desktop, it simply would not run.

I requested a refund as my 5 minutes of gameplay had only measured 49 minutes in steam so I was under the magical 2 hours of frustration limit

Excellent Civ YouTuber PotatoMcWhiskey (yes, really) did this duo of reviews with the good and the bad parts:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLm8D6tN6GA (good)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFIIt8b_jsA (bad)

Very excited for this - think the age transitions is a great way to spice up the middle game, which often turned into a slog.

7 - 6 - 5 UI https://i.imgur.com/23AopFf.jpeg

Feels like they wanted the modern flat design in 7 but it just doesn't work in a game like this

What's the complaint? I prefer V for familiarity, but VII looks better than VI to me.

It's boring, grey, and flat. It takes up too much space on the screen for very little reason (and I'm a fan of whitespace used well). It's generally unpolished with various elements misaligned, squashed together, lacking padding, or in other cases randomly too much padding/margin. It's just a big mess... IMO. I think the actual game underneath the UI looks great at least. I really like VI, and V has plenty of character too.

Been playing since Civ I on windows 3.1.

I've played every version but it wasn't until I set a goal of beating diety that I really started loving it. Civ 5 was the first (hated on release) then Civ 6 (hated on release).

Civ 6 on iPad is nothing short of amazing. It supports mods and retina resolution (stylus is better on high res)

Civ 7 seems to be less hated. Usually the patches and DLC seborrheic everything out. Plus the mods for UI irritations.

I think this one is very promising.

Aside from the series become a DLC-fest, what has changed in terms of general gameplay since Civ 4?

If you really mean Civ 4 then that’s easy to answer: hexes and one unit per tile.

https://old.reddit.com/r/CivIV/comments/lfq173/how_does_civ_...

From Sid Meier's I played only Colonization and I'm still crazy about it. An the music!

  Kiss pinky ring / Hold SmellyTown fur party 
  Not a penny for those heretic swines
  Very well, we shall withdraw our forces!

And trading with Aztecs!

Probably the best turn based strategy game out there. Spent a few hours on this latest edition over the weekend has all the same core mechanics as 6 with a new ages system. Feels pretty fun so far!

They've had decades and over 7 iterations of the game to learn UI lessons. How come such insights still result in UI/UX 101 fails? Do they kill of UI staff between instalments?

The main issue I have with Civ games is the atrocious AI. (Ive played every release since Civ1) On higher levels the computer civs get basically unlimited free resources, free unit spawns, start with half a dozen settlers, etc etc and still barely put up any resistance.

I heard on Youtube reviews this is improved in VII, but no details? Does anyone know whst the situation is there?

it's even worse than 6's AI

That is incredible. If you watch the computer with fog of war off it will make it hard to ever play the game again, honestly.

My complaint for precious versions was similar. Instead of making the Ai more lifelike they just give it unfair advantages. It creates impossible situations that just feel unfair.

I think given the price, the reviews, and the alternatives, I’ll be skipping this one. I’m still enjoying manor lords as my spare time game.

Will this come for iPads? I really liked playing VI on iPad

It's my go to platform for Civ6 too - don't know how long it will take to port 7 to it

Will be playing on steam for now

Are we using Hacker News for corporate advertisement now?

Loved Civ1 & 2, suffered one playthrough in 3 & 5 and then I discovered paradox games like EU4 and CK2 and just couldn't get back to Civs.

As someone who has always enjoyed the likes of Age of Empires / Age of Mythology, is there a reason to play Civilization style games?

From an old fan of Starcraft: No.

Civ 6 was on sale on the Switch for like $2 a few months ago, and I'd heard so much about the series in general I decided to see what the hype was about and if it could fill that RTS gap despite being turn based.

Shockingly clunky controls for being 6 and I had to turn on auto-turn-advancement because otherwise I'd be sitting there most turns just hitting next... next... next... waiting for things to complete. Even then the bot players took a while so I couldn't do anything while waiting for them.

After the tutorial I did one full game, won it with a religious victory (even after fooling around for 100 turns not sure what I should be going for), and haven't touched it again.

I've been playing Civ6 for a couple of years and vowed to keep playing it

But caved last night and got the Civ7 founder's edition

Honestly, they should just remaster Civ 4. It's still the version that I return to when I want to play Civ.

One unit per tile ruined the game.

Stacks of doom are worse than 1UPT, but not every player experiences it that way. Joining units is a decent middle ground. The new mechanic (commanders) does not get this right in my opinion.

Disagree. Stacks can easily be moved as if they are a single unit. 1UPT requires micromanaging each unit individually.

Also it is fun to scorch an enemy tank with 100 kamikaze warriors.

And I've seen videos from Ukraine war where tanks get destroyed by single drone, so it's not that far-fetched.

What I prefer about 1UPT is that it forces you to think more deeply about the location of your battles and the terrain you're fighting in. Moving a large army though a narrow mountain pass, for example, is a lot more difficult, as it should be. I also find it aesthetically better to see big, sprawling battlefields. Looks very epic.

I agree the trade-off is that it can be quite tedious to move large armies a long distance.

Problem with 1UPT is that the AI doesn't do any of that, making wars trivial. That detracts from the rest of the civ experience since wars are no longer about power but unit movement.

To me, the experience of two huge murderballs endlessly chipping away at each other turn after turn has a way of emphasizing the brutality and futility of war. This is lost in Civ 5.

It's alright. I played a couple of games. It's very pretty. I don't like the age system, just seems like throwing away your progress each time it resets. 4>5>6>7

macOS system requirements are min: M1 8 Core 8GB RAM, recommended: M2 Pro 10 Core 16GB RAM.

Does this mean that the game is Mac optimized? Previous versions also have Mac support but wasn't exactly optimized much IRRC.

Does a game like this really need much per-os optimization? I would guess the graphics are not the bottleneck, and the AI/sim code is not really that platform dependant

After you have plenty of units on the map the performance drops significantly. Also, when the devs don't make accomodations specifically for the OS some UX issues can appear like showing OS UI when you move your cursor up to the edges. On top of that, macOS has some interaction conventions and gestures that might not exist or work in a different way on Windows and when those are not implemented the macOS way it gets very annoying.

I don't _think_ Civ 6 ever got an ARM build (or, well, not for MacOS; it did for iOS); it works okay on the Mx chips, but is certainly doing a lot of unnecessary work.

It runs on Metal!

Surely we know the rules by now! Only play a Civ game when its successor is launching.

Gives them time to re-release with all the DRM and you get to play a relatively complete, relatively bug-free and balanced game. Much, much, much cheaper this way too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com