Civ 6 compared to 5, as someone who typically only plays SP:
Good
There’s definitely some really fresh changes and innovations in 6.
Districts are a great innovation and make the game map more strategic
AI diplomacy is much improved – you can actually cultivate relationships and work with/against other Civs in a meaningful way
Culture “tech tree” is another interesting change, but it could use some tightening up
Battles feel decent and there’s a few solid options for strategy to play a larger role than just strength.
Espionage system feels worthwhile and is a good blend of what it as in 4 and 5.
Great People system is flexible and can work well with most types of builds, even if you don’t focus on GP.
Bad
A ton of tiny things still feel unfinished:
Religion system (esp “religious battle”) is a bit confusing and I’ve still not seen it work quite “right” in a SP game yet
Trade routes are somehow still an annoyance to manage. I thought they fixed that in BE.
“Eureka” system is an interesting addition, but with the same bonuses each time, tends to guide your build into a similar pattern every time. Not exactly “bad” but could use some refining.
Some of the map visuals look beautiful, but hills don’t stand out as well as they should.
Maybe it’s just me, but the alliances system appears broken. I’ve offered and been offered alliances (still not sure the difference there…) and had wars declared on me / my ally in both scenarios, and nothing happened.
Balance issues are everywhere: certain things take forever to build and are impossible to boost, other things seem seemingly short to build. Higher-tech units don’t seem to have enough of a bonus in combat (think crossbows vs battleship).
Nobody seemed to actually care at all that I nuked an enemy city, except Gandhi, who was pleased with it.
Ugly
The UI is shockingly unrefined:
Tooltips don’t work right a lot of the time
Pop-up news items don’t work right
You can’t find out the effects of buildings you’ve built even through the city > buildings tab
Right-click to enter civopedia only works in certain menus
Round-by-round news updates are hard to follow and disappear too quickly
Keeping track of luxury resources and to which cities they’ve been distributed is next to impossible
Why in the world is tile yield not automatically shown when selecting workers/settlers?
Why can’t we sort trade route options by yields, like in 5?
With districts, a lot of different combinations of adjacency bonuses + buildings can really change whatever outputs it has… it would be great to have those outputs available at a glance.
The local / regional / national resource system is confusing and should be more clearly shown in some way.
Most of these things seem to be addressable in a patch or expansion… I’m really hoping for some news at some point soon.
Edit: don’t take the length of these lists as a cue that the game is “bad” or anything – it’s still quite fun. It just needs tightening and hopefully a light overhaul of the UI.
Original Link – Continuation of discussion
Add comment