Sid Meier's Civilization

[TerminalTryHard]

Now, will anyone manage drag me into playing Humankind...

you rang?

I can easily recommend humankind, I've pretty much stopped play VI entirely in favor of humankind.

Don't get me wrong it has issues, but it feels like a complete game even without the DLC.

 

[Polyboros2]

I am still annoyed that corporations never came back. Maybe they did in VI but I only played that for 100 hours or so like five years ago and don't remember much.

The season pass before the one they are currently doing(which this last one is mostly free, I think it's building up to the reveal of 7) added a bunch of alternative game modes. Not full overhauls, they all feel like ideas for an expansion that didn't work out, so they added them as optional mechanics. One of these is Monopolies and Corporations. Once you have 2 of a Luxury Resource, you can turn it to an industry, increasing that tile output, and the city that owns it gets a flat bonus like +30% research. One industry per city, and you can't have more than one industry of each Luxury type in your empire. With three tiles of a Luxury and a Great Merchant you can upgrade it further to a Corporation with the ability to export it's bonuses, and if you control a percentage of the world's total luxury tiles of that type, even further into a Monopoly.

you rang?

I can easily recommend humankind, I've pretty much stopped play VI entirely in favor of humankind.

Don't get me wrong it has issues, but it feels like a complete game even without the DLC.

I've played it a few times, but not too completion, I need to try it more. I do think it has since interesting takes, like how you choose a culture for each age and develop your civilizations as it changes cultures.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

you rang?

I can easily recommend humankind, I've pretty much stopped play VI entirely in favor of humankind.

Don't get me wrong it has issues, but it feels like a complete game even without the DLC.

Did they ever get around to fixing the pollution stuff? Last time I played I think they outright disabled the game over from the world getting too polluted, because the massive scaling issues caused your whole nation to become uninhabitable just from a little industry. It felt like there was some design lead who refused to take the mechanic out of the game entirely, and they only temporarily disabled it after people started pointing out how impossible it was, gameplay-wise.

 

[TerminalTryHard]

Did they ever get around to fixing the pollution stuff? Last time I played I think they outright disabled the game over from the world getting too polluted, because the massive scaling issues caused your whole nation to become uninhabitable just from a little industry. It felt like there was some design lead who refused to take the mechanic out of the game entirely, and they only temporarily disabled it after people started pointing out how impossible it was, gameplay-wise.

I don't know about a game over but pollution effects can be toggled on and off. I've never turned it on though.

 

[Slap47]

But VI is terrible. I want Civ V graphics and hexes with everything else being Civ IV BtS.

The game is better in every way though.

Getting religion is not just pure RNG, but something you invest in with opportunity costs.
Cities can be specialized and you aren't punished for not going tall
Policy cards are 100x better than Social Policies that lock you into a certain playstyle.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

Are we getting a trailer anytime soon? It's been nearly a year.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

Are we getting a trailer anytime soon? It's been nearly a year.

The fact that it was announced right after Solomon, DeAngelis, and Foertsch all left, alongside the executive shake-up at Firaxis with Steve Martin leaving after 25 years and getting replaced by the Fortnite producer, really makes me wonder if the announcement was some kind of sudden big shift or something hit the fan in the studio. Midnight Suns being a financial disappointment might have been a nail in some coffins.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

The fact that it was announced right after Solomon, DeAngelis, and Foertsch all left, alongside the executive shake-up at Firaxis with Steve Martin leaving after 25 years and getting replaced by the Fortnite producer, really makes me wonder if the announcement was some kind of sudden big shift or something hit the fan in the studio. Midnight Suns being a financial disappointment might have been a nail in some coffins.

That sounds like it might be a really bad sign for the game's quality.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

That sounds like it might be a really bad sign for the game's quality.

Maybe. The press release Take-Two did did mention that Ed Beach will be the Creative Director for the new game. He was one of the additional guys on Civ V and design lead on its expansions as well as Civ 6. So it might turn out alright, maybe more of the same, who knows? If we get news that he got replaced, then I'd start really worrying.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

My biggest problem with Civ (I got VI, played a bit, quickly lost interest) is that the ages run by way too fast relative to the pace of warfare.

I like Nubians, archers and production/gold bonuses are my jam. It's just too bad they have Slimer as a leader.

An eternal stick in my craw whenever I play Civ 6 is how fucking far they reached to find female leaders. 15 of the 42 leaders are female, and most of them are big stretches. Like if you write a short list of important French historical leaders and you pick two fairly obscure women over Napoleon and Louis XIV you should probably fucking kill yourself.

There's a lot of shit joke civs, especially Anglophone ones. Canada, Australia, Scotland. It really galls me that of all the Indian civs they could have added they went with the Cree (hunter-gatherers that accomplished nothing of note).

I too feel like I'd rather have the greatest/most iconic leaders of each civ be its representative, for the most part. The ones that come to my mind are:

Good picks they did:
Arabian: Saladin
Brazil: Pedro II
China: Qin Shi Huang
Egypt: Cleopatra; she may not be old school, pyramid Egypt, but there's way more personality to play with than if you go with Ramses
Gran Colombia: Simon Bolivar
Greek: Pericles
Hungarian: Matthias Corvinus
Incan: Pachacuti
Indian: Chandragupta is fine, but Ashoka works very well too
Macedonian: I don't know that this one really deserves to be a separate civ from Greece, though
Malian: Mansa Musa
Mongolian: Genghis Khan
Ottoman: Suleiman the Magnificent, but if they wanted a woman, they could have shoved it on Ottomans for Roxanna
Persian: Cyrus
Roman: Trajan and Caesar fit fine, there's lots of Romans a person could use that are all iconic
Scythian: Tomyris
Spanish: Philip II
Sumerian: Gilgamesh (really cool using a legendary figure for the oldest civ)
Zulu: Shaka

Changes I'd make:
British: Queen Elizabeth
Byzantium: Justinian (in fact, they have Theodora as an option... diversity, of course...)
Dutch: William of Orange
Ethiopia: Haile Selassie
French: Napoleon Bonaparte
Gauls: Vercingetorix (come on, why the fuck is Ambiorix the one?)
German: Otto von Bismarck
Japanese: Tokugawa Ieyasu or Emperor Meiji
Norwegian/Norse: Cnut/Canute. Harald Hardrada? Really? The loser? Or Ragnarr Lothbrok, go legendary like Gilgamesh
Polish: No clue but surely there's something better than Jadwiga
Portuguese: Henry the Navigator
Russian: I'd actually prefer Josef Stalin for Russia.
Swedish: Give me a fucking break. She's not even hot, it's an ugly tranny-looking bitch. It should be GUSTAV ADOLF YOU DEGENERATES

Ones I don't know enough about to even have an opinion:
Indonesian
Khmer
Kongolese
Korean
Mapucuhe
Mayan
Nubian
Phoenician
Vietnamese

Things that simply should not be civs:
Australia
Canada
Cree
Georgian (come on)
Maori - Why is this not just a Polynesian civ with Kamehameha as ruler? Why include the Maori specifically and not the actual KINGDOM of Hawaii?
Scottish

Things that should have been civs instead of the Cree:
Comanche
Cherokee
Iroquois

America is a hard one because Abraham Lincoln is far and away the most iconic, but I've also gotten completely sick of seeing him as a default leader in everything, especially seeing as he presided over the greatest self-destructive spaz out in the nation's history. I'm not enamored with Teddy Roosevelt either. I feel like Ronald Reagan would unironically be an absolutely fantastic civ leader, being a former Hollywood celebrity turned Cold War warrior. FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and George Washington are also all great choices. FDR is probably the smartest choice overall.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

It irritates my autism that the religions in Civ 6 are just interchangeable names. I know that's all they're meant to be, blank slates with a name for flavor, but I think there's a missed opportunity for having some branching paths, like maybe if you invent a religion other people can invent its spinoffs later down the line in a later age. (Like, Judaism --> Orthodoxy --> Catholicism --> Protestantism, Judaism --> Orthodoxy --> Islam, Hinduism --> Buddhism, etc.)

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

Changes I'd make:

The funny thing about some of these is that they were the ones used in previous titles, but Civ 6 seemed to opt for the "let's go for lesser known things" as its design ethos, which affected the leader and wonder selection.

 

[Willie B. Hardigan]

The game is better in every way though.

Getting religion is not just pure RNG, but something you invest in with opportunity costs.
Cities can be specialized and you aren't punished for not going tall
Policy cards are 100x better than Social Policies that lock you into a certain playstyle.

No amount of gimmicks they add or YouTube shilling will convince me that IV is not a terrible entry in the series. So bland and casualized, it teeters on the fine line between regular run-of-the-mill crap and pure slop as the kids would call it. I know you paid like $60 for the season pass and had to play it for more than 50 hours to get your money's worth but it's the hard truth.

 

[Acrid Alchemist]

I really wish the had kept making the Civilization Revolution spin off games. They were quick and simple and cartoony and were a good intro to the franchise and were great in that you could do a full multiplayer game in like 90 minutes instead of 6+ hours. That way the mainline Civ games could keep their deep hour melting autism but there be an easier point of entry for normies instead of making 6 the unhappy medium of the two.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

My favorite Civ is Revolution. I'm just that stupid.

try Ozymandias bruh
It’s even dumber and faster, designed to be played in an hour.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

I really wish the had kept making the Civilization Revolution spin off games. They were quick and simple and cartoony and were a good intro to the franchise and were great in that you could do a full multiplayer game in like 90 minutes instead of 6+ hours. That way the mainline Civ games could keep their deep hour melting autism but there be an easier point of entry for normies instead of making 6 the unhappy medium of the two.

To this day, CivRev is the only 4x game where I've actually gotten my friends to finish a game. Every other title seems to go like Monopoly: somebody takes the lead, somebody gets bored and distracted, somebody suggests another game, and then everybody just votes for a winner and quits after two hours. None of them are super-hardcore 4x fanatics, so I don't blame them, but CivRev did manage something special.

 

[Slap47]

It irritates my autism that the religions in Civ 6 are just interchangeable names. I know that's all they're meant to be, blank slates with a name for flavor, but I think there's a missed opportunity for having some branching paths, like maybe if you invent a religion other people can invent its spinoffs later down the line in a later age. (Like, Judaism --> Orthodoxy --> Catholicism --> Protestantism, Judaism --> Orthodoxy --> Islam, Hinduism --> Buddhism, etc.)

Honestly, one issue with both Civ 5 and 6 is the limited numbers of religions. Everybody should be able to invent a religion simply because of how good they are and how much they add to the game mechanically.

Hell, it'd be interesting if people could be rewarded for mid-late game religions that breakoff of prexisting religions.

No amount of gimmicks they add or YouTube shilling will convince me that IV is not a terrible entry in the series. So bland and casualized, it teeters on the fine line between regular run-of-the-mill crap and pure slop as the kids would call it. I know you paid like $60 for the season pass and had to play it for more than 50 hours to get your money's worth but it's the hard truth.

I paid 8 dollars for both Civ 5 and Civ 6 with all of their DLCs.

I think Civ 6 is actually less casual because you can't just mindlessly follow a meta to win.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I'm actually surprised they didn't make Israel a civ in a DLC or something considering the fact they picked civs like the zulus

They included Australia, a nation that has basically existed in any meaningful way for less than 200 years, most of that as a colony, and has never been anything close to a great power or culturally distinct.

I've had a fancy, though no dev will ever do it, of seeing Jews depicted in a strategy game as a civ that lives entirely within other civs. Can potentially own land (maybe constrained to some tight area, or one city, like Venice was) but doesn't require it, its resources come from civilian units that settle in and develop in other civ's cities and the diplomatic/political pull they get over the other civs. A successful Jewish strategy is basically the same as in real life: successfully dominating crucial services (merchandising, finance, media, science) in nations that are fully aligned with them so that they are both safe from their host civ and have an attack dog to fight where they need.

I think you could argue that if you accept the idea of Jewish diaspora as a civ, they're a candidate for IRL Civ co-winner along with (and because of) the Americans.

The one-city or other limit concept is a way to allow for gameplay when the other civs are still uncontacted/small, represents ancient Israel, and then if they ever fuck up and lose Israel then they can get back if they can align with a power (ie, Britain) that can get it back for them.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

If I was to make a Civ VII, it should have a much more photorealistic art style. The gameplay and mechanics should be like Civ IV and V with the feel and tone of the Call to power games. The game should include unit customization and terrain related tactics (beyond just placing them in defense and clicking to attack). Dynamic ecosystems (let's say you cut down all the trees in one tile and left the place alone for multiple turn, it can grow back, overworked farmland can turn into dustbowls, river watershed tiles can experience floods and droughts, abandon raised cities in jungles can get overgrown.

Civs and leaders:
Egypt: Ramses II, Menes/Narmer, Hatshepsut, Akhenaten
Akkad: Sargon (insert applebees jokes here)
Babylon: Nabonidus, Nazi-Maruttash,
Assyria: Shammuramat
Greece: Leonidas I, Alexander the Great, Agamemnon
Armenia: St. Gregory the Illuminator
Persia: Xerxes, Khosrow I
India: Ghandi, Akbar the great, Shivaji
China: Cao Cao, Kangxi, Emperor Zha of Han, Mao Zedong, Wu Zetian
Rome: Marcus Aurelius, Gracchi Brothers, Nero, Claudius Gothicus
Carthage: Hannibal
Vietnam: Trung Sisters
Germany: Arminius, Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, Henry the Fowler, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler
Gauls: Vercingetorix
Burma: Bayinnaung
Tibet: Songtsän Gampo
Arabs: Khalid ibn al-Walid, al-Mansur
France: Charles IV The Mad, Philip IV the Iron King, Cardinal Richelieu, Maximilien Robespierre, Napoleon I, Georges Clemenceau
England: Alfred the Great, king henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Duke of Wellington, Winston Churchill
Spain: Alfonso VI, Charles V, El Cid
Moors: Abd al-Rahman I
Russia, Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander I, Joseph Stalin
Netherlands: William III of Orange
Japan: Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Emperor Meiji
Portugal: Henry the Navigator
Iceland: Leif Erikson
Bulgaria: Tsar Ivaylo the Cabbage
Poland; John III Sobieski
Byzantine: Empress Zoe
Ottomans: Selmin I, Abdulmejid I
Ethiopia: Haile Selassie
Mali: Mansa Musa
Ashanti: Yaa Asantewaa I
Madagascar: Ranavalona I
Kilwa: Sultan Ali ibn al-Hassan Shirazi
Zulu: Shaka
Romania: Vlad Tepes the Impaler
Serbia: Karađorđe
Mongolia: Genghis Khan
Timurids: Tamerlane
Korea: Yeongjo of Joseon
America: James K. Polk
Comanche: Buffalo Hump
Sioux: Crazy Horse, Red Wing II
Aztec: Montezuma
Maya: Pakal
Musica: Tisquesusa
Inca: Túpac Inca Yupanqui
Hawaii: Kamehameha
Tonga: Uluakimata I
Inuit: Ekeuhnick
Brazil: Pedro II

 

[Shadfan666xxx000]

If I was in charge of civ 7 (mind you, I've only played 4 and 5 with DLCs and mods), then I'd add in a bunch of what @Rome's rightful successor is talking about with dynamic change in the environment. Canals, Dams, and changing and harnessing the environment with civil engineering and all the associated side effects is incredibly important to any civilization and is something I'd definitely like to adapt. As for the style however, I'd argue for something different. The call to power games have a rather haunting style which I really like from what ive seen and is a decent evolution in and of themselves of what ive seen of Civ 3 but it's not 'aspirational'. The future always turns out really grim in those games and the late game wonders have a neat cyberpunk feel that I like but then it starts niggling in the back of your head that the world is going to pot as you race towards the future. Also, photorealism as a style is something that feels rather limited for art direction. Civ 5 in my opinion has the best aesthetic from the art Deco look and the sleekness of the design so I'd rather take inspiration from that point.
As for gameplay, I'd take inspiration from paradox on a lot of points. Culture is never really a monolith and the way it interacts with a civilization and as part of a civilization has a lot of nuance. I'd like to make it so some cities as they develop start building up not only themselves but also "regions" that distinguish themselves as time goes on which develop their own preferences. Have it so that they are defined primarily by their geography and make I so that the primary city in it acts as its main hub where said region ends up growing and changing as time goes on. Make it so that they have an interplay where said regions draw in immigration from other regions and they draw in population as time goes on so that they naturally shift the balance of power within the civilization and can become ornery in their own ways. Even simulate them being absorbed or having them split away under certain circumstances. Also, make sure that having money really matters in these games and simulate that with PPP to really help you understand how your economy really works. Essentially, I'd make it into almost a combination of Victoria 2 and Civ 5 with how that works.
As for leaders my off the cuff picks for starting leaders would be thusly
America: Thomas Jefferson
Britain: Queen Elizabeth
France: Napoleon
Japan: Emperor Meiji
China: Tang Taizong
Russia: Peter the Great
Germany: Frederick the great
Rome: Augustus Caesar
Mongolia: you know him
Byzantium: Basil II
Egypt: Cleopatra
Brazil: Pedro II
Sweden: Gustavus Adolphus
Persia: Cyrus the great
Greece: Alexander the great
Zulu: Shaka Zulu
India: Ahsoka
Mali: Mansa Musa
Arabs: Umar II
Edit: I'd also like to include another change that is inspired by Civ 5 mods in particular is to have settlers 'upgrade' over time. It's really annoying to get to the modern era, plop down a city and find yourself having to build a new library or a lighthouse somewhere. Having settlers start to build new cities that have basic services from the start would really help in the mid-late game and encourage the continued colonization of new cities.