It sucks that all the Civ competitors seemed to have failed so far. The genre really needs some innovation.
Civ does seem to change a good amount each game.
Although I also will say, I’m pretty happy with Civ VII, and I think popular opinion is 50-50 right now
I'm skipping VII. Or maybe getting it when it's on sale for $10 with all addons included.
<Looks sadly at his collector's edition of VI, which is mostly unplayed.> They're going downhill...
I do want to be open minded - maybe these things are more fun than they seem to me. But I'm also not going to drop $70 just to find out. So until they release a demo, put it on game pass, or have a deep discount sale, I'm not going to risk my money on this one.
The game has a broken UI, broke gameplay and everything which should be included is dlc. Try playing on a random map. Oh no you can't as the game requires two continents.
Wait two years and then buy for 15$. At least you feel less cheated by then.
This is the most significant gameplay change for this edition, and from a concept point of view it's not a terrible idea, but the execution is extremely jarring. As you progress into the next age the game basically gets a reset. Alliances are gone, trade is reset, city states disappear unless you've pulled them into your civilization, most buildings become obsolete, units get reorganized in a rather dramatic way.
I get what they're trying to do, they're trying to balance the mid and late game to prevent snowballing. The problem with the way they've done it is that as you progress towards the end of the second age, as a player you have very few incentives to actually build most improvements. Outpace the AI in research and culture, or outproduce them and lay waste to their big cities.
The settlement limit as you go into the second age also tends to penalize early expansion, another balancing measure. You find the "new world" but you can't just go ahead and do the massive landgrab because doing so comes with a set of penalties which you'll have to offset by building things that'll compensate and in turn stunt growth. As you approach the end of the second age that limit is raised drastically which I can only guess is to promote conquest at that point, since the existing factions on the other continent will tend to expand but not be powerful enough to stop you from steamrolling them.
It leaves you with the impression that ages are just designed to stunt growth and expansion and you're fairly confined unless you want to stack penalties. I got the impression the AI doesn't deal with the reset particularly well either, since some AI players which were fairly strong early on started faltering in the second age.
Finally, the ages mechanic comes with an end-age crisis, which rather than an interesting challenge turns into a bunch of busywork. In the second age the crisis I got was religion related, where you get to pick your poison and then deal with your choice. In my case I had a choice to invest into a lot of buildings to boost happiness as the AI sent out waves of missionaries to stamp out my religion, or just churn out missionaries. The latter was cheaper and didn't take up precious space.
> you need to spread improvements across tiles instead of building tall.
I have mixed feelings about this in the long game. It's nice to see cities sprawl out into districts/quarters, but at the same time you're trading resources for growth. Overbuilding is a nice mechanic, but in the end I feel that buildings becoming obsolete at the end of an age makes me not want to invest too much in certain buildings despite having a massive amount of production. A particular game I played I ended up with Rome next to the sea, which grew and grew until there was no room for expansion anymore until the end of the age. Maybe it'd have been better to have one or two more buildings in a district?
In Civ 6 I felt it was a neat feature with some nice gameplay mechanics, but in 7 I feel the mechanic has expanded so much that you're constantly weighing options trying to plan ahead that it weighs things down. Maybe I'll feel differently about it over time.
> I’m pretty happy with Civ VII, and I think popular opinion is 50-50 right now
Honestly, this is the first time I'm really on the fence about Civ. There's a lot of ideas in there that kind of work, but at the same time kind of don't work. If I were to summarize my sentiment in a single sentence: the motto "a civilization to stand the test of time" has been supplanted with the dread of looming impermanence whispering "this too will pass".
Outdated buildings lose adjacency but have a yield of +2 (if from antiquity) or +3 (if from exploration) yield of whatever their base yields were, so they aren't worthless.
> The settlement limit as you go into the second age also tends to penalize early expansion, another balancing measure. You find the "new world" but you can't just go ahead and do the massive landgrab because doing so comes with a set of penalties which you'll have to offset by building things that'll compensate and in turn stunt growth.
I'm not sure that "things you might want to do require you to devote some of your limited resources and sacrifice something else" is really a bad thing.
> A particular game I played I ended up with Rome next to the sea, which grew and grew until there was no room for expansion anymore until the end of the age.
Having big cities grow to (very close to) footprint-filling urban conglomerations supported by fishing/farming/mining towns is quite clearly an explicit design intent.
Eg. fleet cap, star base cap, empire size, new systems requires spending influence that ticks over slowly, leader caps, etc.
Yes there’s ways you can increase things like influence 25% faster but that means you’re only 25% larger in size (and you’ll then be hit by the empire cap). In general I just don’t think paradox makes great 4x games compared to what I’ve played in the past. There must be a smarter way to have a fun 4x without resorting to a ton of different types of caps to stop you getting too far ahead. I will definitely +1 that the genre needs a shakeup.
As a sidenote, somehow the setting, leaders, and tech blurbs in Alpha Centauri managed to construct a much better facade of a story generation game, IMO. Despite being very similar mechanically. The system allowed a lot more customization… even if it was just a bunch of little +1 bonuses here and there, it made it feel like “your” faction.
Anyway, it’s all a facade. Other than dwarf fortress. I’m sure those dwarfs will achieve sentience soon.
The correct order is Civ to classic Dwarf Fortress to EU4.
Give a chunk of new base functionality as a free update.
Charge for a more expanded form of that functionality as a DLC.
We can quibble over whether this DLC or that DLC was worth the price, and there are certainly balance issues that are patch resolved, but it keeps expanding their games for years with pretty serious new stuff.
That's more than you can say for other publishers' post-release behavior.
EU4: 11 years
HOI4: 8 years
Stellaris: 8 years
But Stellaris 1.0 and all the other were massive games people enjoyed playing, they weren't stripped down skeletons to build DLC on.
Were they as good at release as they are 8 years later? Not at all. But having them change and generally evolve over those 8 years is a key part of what makes people still play Stellaris today, when many other games from that time have long been abandoned.
Not to mention, plenty of people would have actually preferred it if instead of Civ VI and Civ VII, we were getting Civ V 4.0 today.
and has more DLCs planned for release in march and april
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/dlc/281990/Stellaris/#browse
I wish Humankind was a better game because its presentation is so good.
They failed because they were not the full "civ experience", which is to say attention to detail with character design, artwork, music, voice acting, etc. etc. They were mostly just attempts at innovating on the gameplay mechanics and treating the historical aspect as an afterthought, rather than a main focus.
Indie devs can make great games with great mechanics, but this video from the OP kinda demonstrates the difference between indie and AAA dev. No matter how good of a game you can make, you simply will never have the resources for the level of polish required to truly compete against something like Civ. Short of another AAA studio taking up the mantle, I doubt anyone will ever outdo them.
What is success meant to look like? Many play and enjoy other Civ-style games, as they offer varied experiences and alternative styles of play. If success is just about becoming the biggest game, then that's a fairly narrow view of what entertainment is supposed to be.
I liked Civ(1, 2, uh.. 3 and 4 I think)because it felt like a good balance of strategy, discovery, and turn-based action. Actually I was hooked by Civ I because it was like nothing I'd ever played before, having missed out on Empire. The closest thing to it I'd played at the time was Dan(i) Bunton's Modem Wars on c64/128.