Civ 5 vs Civ 6

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