Civilization 6

Gbear wrote: »

The tech web was a good move in BE but ultimately it's just learning stuff in an order.

Now they're talking about how your civ's situation will influence your tech - eg. having a city next to the sea will increase the rate of learning nautical tech.

ShaneU wrote: »

New art style is awful, looks cheap.

Among many changes, Beach highlights two that he believes will make the biggest difference. The first is what he calls “Unstacking the cities,” a reference to the way Civilization 5 flattened out the “Stack of Doom” armies that ruled Civilization 1 through 4 and limited each tile to having just one military unit on it at a time. “All of the sudden the military side of the game got much more interesting,” he observes. “There’s all sort of tactical complexity that was unlocked by putting the units out on the map.” So for Civilization 6 Beach’s team has applied the same concept to cities, which in all previous games have always existed on a single tile, cramming every building into that space.
Instead, Firaxis has created the concept of 12 different types of color-coded Districts (five or six of which will be available from the beginning) that exist on their own tiles on the map, outside the city center and will house specific building types. “A science district, which we’ve called a campus, once constructed will allow you to put a library and a university and a research lab out on that tile. And now your city is sort of specialized toward being a really good science city,” says Beach.

To that end, there’s also a Military Encampment District that you can build to house military buildings, but it also can be fortified with walls and gain a ranged strike – doubling your city’s defensive power. Being outside the city walls gives it other tactical advantages as well, adds Shirk. “An enemy can’t just come in and siege your city, because you’ll be cranking out units at their back. It’s a nice side effect.”

Firaxis is also starting from a better place with the AI, which had some issues when we first played Civilization 5’s busier one-unit-per-tile combat. “We started with all the know-how and a lot of the lessons learned of what worked and what didn’t,” says Beach. “There’s a lot we learned about player expectation, for how an AI should behave and which moves the AI might have failed to make early on in Civ 5 that players were anticipating. You know like, players always like that if you could capture one of their civilians, they expect to see that happen.” In other words, this AI already knows the tricks Civ 5 had to learn over time.

the diplomatic game has also been reworked. “In Civ 5, different civilizations felt very different when you were playing as them, but when they were AI opponents they felt very similar in that they had the same way they go about playing the game. You didn’t have to react as strongly as we would’ve liked to the fact that, wow, Ghengis is next to me, or one of these leaders who might have a crazy idea about what might be a nice thing to do in the Civilization world. We had Gandhi and a few other people that definitely have some quirks to them, but not as far as we wanted,” says Beach.

Firaxis played coy about the end-game tweaks they’re working on, but Beach did confirm there will be an entirely new victory condition, and one of the traditional victory conditions has been radically reworked to change the way you go about achieving it. “We’ve definitely looked at that and shaken it up.”

TheChrisD wrote: »

The new "cartoony" look is really putting me off this iteration, it reminds me too much of the god-awful Civ Rev.

That's not to mention the fact they've jacked the base price up to €60, and are trying to sell a season pass? I hope that pricing strategy is all 2K's doing and not Firaxis', cos I doubt Firaxis really want to gouge their player base like that.

J Mysterio wrote: »

I bought it. Tried to give it a fair go but it was really terrible. I've been a massive CIV fan for years too. Very dissapointing.