TBS Comparing Civ 5 vs Civ 6

[Utfärd]

TL/DR

Ended with SMAC praised be its name

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Wrong decade to make that joke. Nowadays Call to Power looks positively respectable compared to games like Civ: Revolutions, Civ: Beyond Earth, and probably Civ 5 & 6 too.

I'm surprised we never got a new civ-like taking features from Call to Power. It had so many interesting things going for it.

Then again, the Civ-like 4X market is pretty small. I mean, there's Civilization main series, there's FreeCiv (which is meh) and, uh... yeah.

A good civ-like taking features from all the best civilizations, understanding them and having CivIV-tier mod support would blow any new Civilization out of the water.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

don't forget we now also have hunonbinarykind.

 

[civac2]

Multiplayer is typically siimultaneous turns.

 

[Eisen]

Civ 4 > Civ 5
Civ 4 > Civ 6

therefore

Civ 5 = Civ 6

There, debate settled.

Your math is a bit wrong but the Civ 4 better than 5 and 6 must be true

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Several patches ago, I would've said Civ6 is better for multiplayer, because it desyncs more. These days it keeps desyncing too.
HOW HARD IT IS TO MAKE A TURN BASED GAME NOT DESYNC IN MULTIPLAYER?
TURN
BASED
GAME
How do you fuck up the netcode this bad, for DECADES. For DECADES they can't make a Civilization game not desync, even though you can literally play BY EMAIL.

Nuremberg trials for Firaxis Games lead developers when?

play freeciv
http://www.freeciv.org/

 

[TheSoul]

Both run like shit and make you want to bang your head against your wall if you play against the AI. Did they ever fix 6's agendas?

Civ 5 at least didn't have blatant diversity quotas and battle royale modes, so I guess I'd give it to 5.

 

[Absinthe]

Several patches ago, I would've said Civ6 is better for multiplayer, because it desyncs more. These days it keeps desyncing too.
HOW HARD IT IS TO MAKE A TURN BASED GAME NOT DESYNC IN MULTIPLAYER?
TURN
BASED
GAME
How do you fuck up the netcode this bad, for DECADES. For DECADES they can't make a Civilization game not desync, even though you can literally play BY EMAIL.

Nuremberg trials for Firaxis Games lead developers when?

To quote another post of mine:

Because peer-2-peer hosting is the future now, according to whatever bullshit fad is infesting some corner of software development. The only problem is that it fucks with latency and massively increases your odds of desync and netsplit, but who cares about that? It's time to do things the modern way!

Civ 5's netcode has had some improvements (fewer netsplits, crashes, and desyncs) but Civ 5's multiplayer still has some retarded issues (fewer does not mean gone), including the lack of a proper multiplayer lobby. It's very half-assed on the whole, and stupidly so, considering it would be trivially easy to add better options to find games or select multiplayer lobbies, as well as introduce multiplayer mod support (which the game fully supports, but you have to use a hack-ish method to trick the game into thinking your mod is part of a patch and then it works fine), and that would easily have made Civ 5 much more popular. Honestly, switching to dedicated hosts, improving the lobby, enabling multiplayer scenarios, and natively supporting multiplayer mods wouldn't've been particularly hard and would have improved the game considerably. Better game options for things like natural wonders would've also been good. These guys are very asleep at the wheel and have no clue what they're doing. It's also possible that this kind of half-assed design is partially motivated by a distaste for the competitive gaming community, as iirc there were elements of that in Civ 5's design. That was an explicit reason provided by the devs for why Civ 5 originally had a massive hard-on for making AI unpredictable: to stop people from being able to min-max it. Naturally, this resulted in people gaming and exploiting the AI with trades you intend to backstab them on since real diplomacy was useless and it was all going to end in war (against an AI utterly incompetent at warfare) anyway.

 

[Norfleet]

And yet you would think latency would be the least of issues in a turn-based game which, as a genre, are notoriously insensitive to latency, since this was a genre that came into being when people could be separated by lag times of months.

 

[Absinthe]

I just wanted to update the game and downloaded a new installer and it looks infected. The old one from year ago that I have stored on ma HDD is clean. Weird.

Seems like a false positive to me. It happens sometimes, especially if you scan something with a ton of antivirus programs and only one of them declares there's a problem with it.

And yet you would think latency would be the least of issues in a turn-based game which, as a genre, are notoriously insensitive to latency, since this was a genre that came into being when people could be separated by lag times of months.

Well, because simultaneous turns are usually preferred in order to get a multiplayer game moving at a decent pace, latency actually ends up being non-trivial. The bigger problem really is that they went with P2P hosting because it was a more hip and modern way of doing things, even if the results are significantly worse.

Civ 5 had a lot of that kind of design, where design problems were regularly ignored in favor of plowing on ahead with their vision, and all the future Civ games inherited that jank. Really, the newer Civ games all have major amateur hour problems where people use vision as a substitute for insight and their vision seems to involve a lot of imitating whatever looks good at the moment. They also seem to be the kind of person who thinks balance is about stopping people from playing the game "wrong" or getting "too good" at something rather than ensuring there is meaningful decision-making, and a lot of the time instead of fixing what was wrong, they would actually ignore it or try to paper over it with some other new changes in the hopes of rendering old problems irrelevant. They definitely have no qualms about dumbing down mechanics because the AI can't handle it instead of improving the AI, which was evidently beyond them despite its many glaring issues. It's all very half-baked design, and you can tell they're the type to spin a lot of excuses instead of taking responsibility for their mistakes.

I'm sure the devs themselves would like to disagree and claim they are their own worst critics, but they're not. Wringing your hands helplessly and claiming some kind of "I did my best" shit every time you fuck shit up is a dodge against accountability. So is going "trust me" and spinning crap like "some people will always complain, esp. when you're innovating/evolving/streamlining/casualizing the genre" and "I'm confident in my design and I'm sure they'll love it in the end, just give them time" because you're so in love with your vision you'll discount the reality and complaints that contain in-depth analyses of design failures before your eyes. The "taking responsibility" and acknowledgement of failures often happens in a very slow and "oops, I can only do too little too late" sort of way.

 

[JarlFrank]

After Caveman 2 Cosmos, I can't play any vanilla Civ anymore. They feel way too fast, you pass through entire eras of history within minutes. In C2C it takes an hour before you even go sedentary!

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

but it still needs to fix two aspects:
1) remove 90% of the useless, pointless, redundant +1% buildings which bog down the ai which is never going to keep up with you who build the production tools first
2) mitigate the need to spam the -crime and -pollution units on each and every tile of the world

 

[Lady Error]

After Caveman 2 Cosmos, I can't play any vanilla Civ anymore. They feel way too fast, you pass through entire eras of history within minutes. In C2C it takes an hour before you even go sedentary!

I think there is a setting (at least in Civ V) to have a slower pace and more turns.

What I'm wondering about: Is there a strategic view in Civ 6 like in Civ 5? Or do you actually have to play with the 3D graphics?

 

[JarlFrank]

After Caveman 2 Cosmos, I can't play any vanilla Civ anymore. They feel way too fast, you pass through entire eras of history within minutes. In C2C it takes an hour before you even go sedentary!

I think there is a setting (at least in Civ V) to have a slower pace and more turns.

Doesn't change the fact that there's way too few techs, buildings and units per era.

 

[Aghoric Visions]

6 annoyed me by adding climate change mechanics that break the game. 5 plus all the DLC is still a playable and fun game.

Climate change is natural. Human impact is minimal. It will not end the world. Authoritarian pundits claim it will to harvest votes from from the normies. Then normies wonder why the cost of food skyrockets and they're suddenly knee deep rape gangs.

 

[Lady Error]

Can somebody answer this please:

What I'm wondering about: Is there a strategic view in Civ 6 like in Civ 5? Or do you actually have to play with the 3D graphics?

 

[Silva]

Both are shit and inferior to SMAC.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Can somebody answer this please:

What I'm wondering about: Is there a strategic view in Civ 6 like in Civ 5? Or do you actually have to play with the 3D graphics?

 

[Absinthe]

6 annoyed me by adding climate change mechanics that break the game. 5 plus all the DLC is still a playable and fun game.

I hope you're referring to multiplayer there. I have no idea how the fuck people consider singleplayer Civ V to be playable.

What I'm wondering about: Is there a strategic view in Civ 6 like in Civ 5? Or do you actually have to play with the 3D graphics?

Yes.

Both are shit and inferior to SMAC.

That's obvious, but it's still interesting to note how the Civ series hasn't gotten any better since Civ 4. From Civ 5 onwards they're basically Civ 5 variants and they all manage to be be worse than Civ 5, which has plenty of major issues. It's a hell of a thing that Civ 6 managed to get outperformed by Civ 5 in playercount for something like two years after Civ 6's release.

 

[Aghoric Visions]

Sometimes I like to roleplay as a maniacal, homicidally insane dictator.

That's half the fun of Civ.

Still mad they didn't finish developing Beyond Earth. I liked the concept.

6 annoyed me by adding climate change mechanics that break the game. 5 plus all the DLC is still a playable and fun game.

I hope you're referring to multiplayer there. I have no idea how the fuck people consider singleplayer Civ V to be playable.

 

[passerby]

Trying to settle the matter of doomstacks isn't the worst idea [...]

It is.

 

[Absinthe]

Sometimes I like to roleplay as a maniacal, homicidally insane dictator.

That's half the fun of Civ.

You're... LARPing in Civ 5.

Dude, playing Civ 5 against AI is like entering a martial arts tournament only to discover the other martial arts schools are full of retarded children trying to do poses and be power rangers. The lack of challenge reduces the whole endeavor into a waste of time. There are so many better games to play if you just want to be a warmongering maniac.

Still mad they didn't finish developing Beyond Earth. I liked the concept.

Have you played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri? If not, get it. It's much, much, much better (especially if you're interested in doing brutally repressive dictator things in a Civ game). Also, if you do get it, play SMAC in Classic mode (without Alien Crossfire) first. The expansion just... waters down the quality of the game.

Trying to settle the matter of doomstacks isn't the worst idea [...]

It is.

Eh, it really comes down to implementation.

 

[Aghoric Visions]

Sometimes I like to roleplay as a maniacal, homicidally insane dictator.

That's half the fun of Civ.

You're... LARPing in Civ 5.

Dude, playing Civ 5 against AI is like entering a martial arts tournament only to discover the other martial arts schools are full of retarded children trying to do poses and be power rangers. The lack of challenge reduces the whole endeavor into a waste of time. There are so many better games to play if you just want to be a warmongering maniac.

Still mad they didn't finish developing Beyond Earth. I liked the concept.

Have you played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri? If not, get it. It's much, much, much better (especially if you're interested in doing brutally repressive dictator things in a Civ game). Also, if you do get it, play SMAC in Classic mode (without Alien Crossfire) first. The expansion just... waters down the quality of the game.

Trying to settle the matter of doomstacks isn't the worst idea [...]

It is.

Eh, it really comes down to implementation.

Used to, like ten years ago. I checked into the lore of Alpha Centauri and yes it is far more rich. However, gameplay wise...it's too archaic. While I grew up with Warcraft 2, that's still playable. Centauri felt like operating an old time tape computer or some such.

Beyond Earth had good ideas like the Affinities and hybrid affinities. You could tell the production was a rushed hack job though, especially with the resourced wasted on that tie in mobile app thing they want to link to it.

I played Total War up until they got pozzed. Shogun 2 and Medieval 2 are timeless. Warhammer II was the last half decent product they put out. Been meaning to try out Crusader Kings, just don't have the time with work and all. My go to is STILL Dawn of War 1 with mods and Sins of A Solar Empire. Disciples 2 is a good old gem, when it works.

What else do you recommend? My inner Caesar needs appeasement.

 

[passerby]

Trying to settle the matter of doomstacks isn't the worst idea [...]

It is.

Eh, it really comes down to implementation.

Trying to remove stacks of doom by 1UPT is a terrible idea, what should be done is reduction of stacks size, not the possibility of stacks.

The tiresome micro of moving shitload of units could be solved by unit cost of production and upkeep growing with time resulting in an order of magnitude less units being built in the late game.
The boring stack combat can be solved by introducing some simple supply line mechanic resulting in the necessity of creating frontlines, instead of jumping with stack of doom from city to city.