The Civ 4 launch AI was a lot worse at warfare and whipping, but the AI difficulty bonuses were still enough to juice it up to be a latent threat in each game. In Civ 6 it's kind of lame that even on Deity, it's fairly trivial to outpace the AI in science, without touching how bad it is at warfare. Difficulty bonuses are a crutch, but they are a crutch that works well Civ 5 and Civ 6 didn't get good use out of them.
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Civilization 7 is in development
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Another problem is the high price tags for entry.
Right now on steam I have one game working heavy on, another light on, and 3 in the queue to play. All of these are already paid for and will keep my busy for multiple months. Past that I have 2 games to buy. $20 for a complete bundle with all DLC. $40 for the other bundle with multiple DLC. These are older games, but I still will have fun with them. Plus I can't tell you have many games I have for free from Humble Bundle to check out. If anyone of those turns out to be another winner that can be months. I very much enjoyed the first 3 galactic civ games. Right now I can buy 4 including all bundles cheaper the civ 7 + the first DLC. I feel very confident that I will enjoy this over Civ7. This doesn't touch the fact that Civ 3 / 4 were my favorites in the series. Once they went to 1 UPT my interest went way down.
Another problem is the high price tags for entry.
Right now on steam I have one game working heavy on, another light on, and 3 in the queue to play. All of these are already paid for and will keep my busy for multiple months. Past that I have 2 games to buy. $20 for a complete bundle with all DLC. $40 for the other bundle with multiple DLC. These are older games, but I still will have fun with them. Plus I can't tell you have many games I have for free from Humble Bundle to check out. If anyone of those turns out to be another winner that can be months. I very much enjoyed the first 3 galactic civ games. Right now I can buy GC4 including all bundles cheaper the civ 7 + the first DLC. I feel very confident that I will enjoy this over Civ7. This doesn't touch the fact that Civ 3 / 4 were my favorites in the series. Once they went to 1 UPT my interest went way down. (March 30th, 2025, 13:15)Sullla Wrote: I finished typing up an intro game report for Civ7 which is over at my website. It's a long report in four parts designed to walk a newcomer through what a typical game might look like now that I have a better understanding of the gameplay. Consider this a continuation of Chevalier's excellent game writeup from last month when Civ7 first came out: Good stuff. I haven't bought Civ 7 but I've read a little bit about it and it was great to see your perspective. One thing I want to quibble with: You complained about is how the game incentivizes you to wait to end the era and instead prepare a bunch of era points to cash in at once. I don't think that's the game's fault. That was the GotM's fault. It made you want to maximize era points and apparently only minimize final-era turns. And of course it's the AI's fault for being incompetent. (But also the GotM's fault for giving you such easy AI, maybe?) The way it SHOULD work is that there is more than one player getting era points. And so the era is going to end whether you like it or not - if you don't finish it, you're letting your opponents get more points, and they will. Incidentally, another thing you complained about is not being able to get more than one golden age. Quote:However, the player can only pick one of these golden age options which doesn't make sense to me; if the player unlocked them, and has the legacy points to spend on them, why not let them choose it? I don't particularly understand this design decision since it seems to be penalizing success.This seems like it would work in harmony with the above - again contingent on there being more than one competent player in the game. It means there are diminishing returns to getting more era points. It's only the first category in which you get to do a golden age, so once you achieve that you can feel good about ending the era earlier, thereby shutting out your opponents and potentially denying them ANY golden age if they have falled too far behind. In other words it's trying to prevent the exact situation you saw where the player in the lead tries to not end the era because they're profiting more than their opponents are by the era continuing. But of course with low-level AI making terrible decisions, this dynamic can't even get off the ground. I am somewhat curious how well these systems will work with a fixed AI. If they fix the million problems with the UI I will look forward to trying it at that time!
All very good points SevenSpirits, and if the gameplay functioned better, a lot of the current problems wouldn't exist. For example, the player ideally shouldn't be delaying scoring points because they should be worried that the AI is going to claim them instead and cause them to lose out, just as you said. That's how things work in lots of tabletop board games where everyone is competing to score points across multiple rounds, and most of the balancing in the gameplay is driven by the other players themselves.
Unfortunately, this kind of model is a terrible fit for the Civilization series and it remains baffling why the developers chose to go in this direction. The Civ games have always been about the long haul, creating a player fantasy of "building an empire to stand the test of time" and going off into sandbox mode to do whatever silly and ahistorical things they have in mind. The decision to replace this with a series of three era-specific minigames makes no logical sense and understandably has alienated a huge portion of the playerbase. As far as those scoring goals are concerned, the AI simply does not pursue most of them at all, only stumbling into them by accident. In the Exploration age they can get the relics by dumb luck because they spam missionaries everywhere, but they never generate treasure fleets or get the 40 yield specialists, not even a little bit. So the player is left with these rigid, unchanging scoring goals that the AI doesn't compete over and which have to be repeated in every game. It gets very, very boring after a few games and this is so core to the design that I doubt it can be salvaged. Speaking of unpopularity, Civ7 keeps cratering in the Steam data and doesn't appear to have bottomed out yet. It was down to 8k concurrent players when I checked this morning, sitting in 140th place on the rankings (!) barely two months after release. Civ6 had 29k players (40th place) and Civ5 had 12k players (107th place) for comparison. There's also this graph that someone put together showing that Civ7 is tracking way below Civ6's release and has now fallen below the pace of Civ: Beyond Earth's release: I mean, Civ Beyond Earth?! I don't see how you come back from that.
I typed up a written version of the Civ7 Livestream game played out over the last month or so, in case anyone wants some more examples of Civ7 gameplay:
https://www.sullla.com/Civ7/AOCC-1.html
I'll be booting up a game in the new patch this evening. But I'm honestly expecting to be disappointed. Apart from the treasure resource overhaul and maybe the food rebalance everything added was stuff I expected to be in the game AT RELEASE, if not that at least a day one patch. Putting a One More Turn button or freakin research queuing in a 1.2.0 release is just ridiculous. Even the hideous civ 5 Vanilla had those right out of the box.
I'm done with Firaxis in the 4X space, they won't get my money next time. I feel scammed. Thank the gods that at least Endless Legend 2 looks great, and will still get an entire Beta/Early Access track before release. Strategy gaming seemed to be bouncing back recently, but when was the last actual good release without endless DLC scumminess and barebones mechanics? Endless Space 2? (March 16th, 2025, 11:54)Sullla Wrote: What's more concerning is that Civ7 has fallen below Civ6 in terms of active players on Steam. And it's not just a little bit lower either, Civ7 is down around HALF of the active players on Civ6 (27k against 55k as I type this). That should not be happening for a game that's been out just over a month as compared with its predecessor that came out nine years ago! Take-Two was obviously operating under the belief that it wouldn't matter how unfinished the release version of the game might be, everyone would just buy it anyway and keep buying downloadable content for the next decade. I think they may have screwed this one up very, very badly with their shortsightedness. That's been the direction of AAA games for at least a decade now. And I would say both Civs 5 & 6 were similarly unfinished on released, albeit less obviously buggy.
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
(March 17th, 2025, 06:25)yuris125 Wrote: I'd say both. Plenty of comments about things which can be attributed to rushed release (bad UI, lack of QoL, lack of larger map sizes, etc. - things they have on the roadmap to be addressed, but which really should've been in the game on release). But also a fair amount of comments that because of the ages system, the game doesn't feel like one where you can devise and execute your own strategy, more like a set of scenarios where you're given objectives to complete in each age, and it gets repetitive quickly As Stephanie Sterling keeps pointing out is that roadmaps are a live service gaming model which never get implemented. If Civ 7 has a roadmap, I'm guessing it has about a year of half hearted DLCs in it and no real game improvement support.
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
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