I’m sorry, I’m that friend that gets really into Civ and spends way too long coming up with optimal strategies. I know it’s a problem and I won’t stop.
Have you tried Googling everything and spending tens of hours making optimal progress flowcharts that require hours to read over instead of playing the game?
Or, you know, just pour everything into science and forget don’t dare about getting distracted by other game mechanics.
s/ in case.
your friends
Single player supremacy
I’m still enjoying civ5 without any DLC
civ5 without any DLC
Utterly insane. 😳
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I’m still playing civ IV. With the direction the series has been going, it looks like I probably always will.
I had a friend that played civ, he invited me to multiplayer. Little did I know, he plays against the hardest bots on a regular basis. I had only done like, two single player games.
I don’t play with him anymore.
I like playing with my sister because we both regularly play on Deity difficulty and playing against each other is the only way either of us can be challenged anymore. Of course many times we just team up against the rest of the world.
That’s what sucks about Civ (and EU4, HOI4 and the like for that matter) — once you figure out how it works and you start winning it becomes boring in single player.
And then for multiplayer it’s hard to find someone committed to playing for long stretches of time consistently.
IMO games where losing is fun is where it’s at, like Crusader Kings, Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress.
Speaking of DF and EU4: I just heard about Songs of Syx not too long ago that’s basically Dwarf Fortress/Rimworld combined with EU/HOI. A granular empire builder, where you also have other competing empires to conquer or ally with. It looks dope, and I might get it.
That sounds awesome. I’ll try it out some time.
Do you know about Timberborn? That’s another one that looks cool.
I refused to buy Helldivers 2 for this reason and my friend bought it for me, I’m level 10 months later, what a waste of money…
Helldivers is at least cheaper than most other games. I’ve been playing the crap out of it both with friends and randoms and having a lot of fun. Hoping I don’t lose interest once I get all the strategems unlocked, but just got one of the warbonds after grinding for the medals so I should have something to do for a while
Thousands of hours in every Civ since Civ III Complete came with an old PC I bought.
I’ve never touched multiplayer and never intend to. Don’t need friends to want to play the same single player game.
I like the idea of playing with friends, but fuck me if people don’t take for-fucking-ever to do NOTHING! Click, skip, move!!! It’s the first four turns, FUCKING go!!!
Everyone shits on 6 but never actually gives a reason other than “5 iS bEtTeR!”. The mechanics in 6 are a massive improvement on 5; civics tree > social policies, city loyalty > happiness etc. It has a bigger and better roster of civs/leaders. Combat and religion are more fleshed out. I love both games but I can’t think of anything that 5 does better
5 had better pacing for mechanics, 6 bombards players with lots of things from the start and then goes a but flat.
Civ 6 was made much more to be a digital board game. The combination of little to no multiplicative bonuses and generally small adjacency bonuses means you have to micro manage city planning all the time. It bombards the player with so many individual decisions that each make little impact.
Civ 5 felt much more like an empire simulator. The biggest bonuses come from making “big” decisions, like which policy tree, who/when to war, which ideology. As the game progressed, there was typically no need to micromanage.
The combat in civ 6 is atrocious after they removed the ability to build roads offensively for war until you unlock military engies (way too late in the game). Civ 5’s road system took ages to get up and running, but the payoff was immense.
The civics tree system is better, but the policy card system is broken. It gives players too much flexibility, so everyone ends up running the same/similar set of cards every time. Tradition + Rationalism is a meme in Civ 5, but it did offer more esoteric strategies with different trees.
Yeah I prefer 6 over 5 any day, but there are a few small things that 5 does do better imo. I do prefer the more serious art style of 5, and I noticed that there is a lot less actual dialogue in a civs respective language compared to 5. While I do like automatic road creation, I do also miss being able to build it manually to have more control over where units can go. Finally, I think the happiness system in Civ 6 is a bit too easy, as it can be mostly ignored and very easily fixed compared to 5. Keeping your citizens happy was much more of a challenge there.
It’s the micromanagement. When earlier games became tedious, I could just pick a quicker game speed, and I would suddenly feel like I was playing with more momentum. But in VI, it actually kills momentum, as if driving the slightly faster route to work at the cost of particularly frustrating traffic, since the most tedious micro isn’t turn-based, but city-based. You only have to plan districts/improvements once per city, so I find I can still have fun with VI if I play suboptimally (i.e., tall) on tiny maps and with mods that let me cram more civilizations into the game. I’ve probably put in a few hundred hours this way.
But I’d rather just play IV or V.
Comparing the Civs steals the joy they bring for their various reasons.
- Civ 1 was unlike anything else and so legendary it created the 4X genre.
- Civ 2 had the best espionage until an expansion for 4. Civ2 also defined the scope for all future Civs.
- Civ 3 was fine. Resources were a good addition and tile quirks, like Floodplains on top of another base tile like desert, helped bring tons strategy and gave the ability to grow Tall.
- Civ 4 was probably peak Civ for many people, especially including DLCs.
- Civ 5 removed unit stacking and made happiness a resource.
- Civ 6 emphasized the city development aspect and brought back the climate stuff from 2, 3, and 4.
They are all good but they are not collectively suitable for every person. Civ6 is amazing but it took me literally 30 hours to finally have it click. I also have 550 hours in Civ 6 and over 1200 in Civ 5. CiV is also a high water mark but it overshadows the real value and fun in 6.
It’s a shame most folks will ignore us and say 6 was bad for being too game like.
I like playing tall and I’m not a huge fan of the micromanagement that comes with the sprawling empires. Civ 5 limits this through happiness. Civ 6 doesnt. Throw in an artstyle that i dont like and i just dont want to play it as much
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I gave up on Civ after you couldn’t automate settlers anymore. I really don’t need to spend time manually connecting my cities with roads. That’s just unnecessary grinding.
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But didn’t you always have that freedom? You could always play without automating any settlers or automating some and not others. Or am I not understanding what you’re saying?
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With Civ VI the traders build the roads, so you just send a trader between cities you want a road built on.
Works just about the same except the source city gets some resources
That’s definitely a little better, although honestly even doing the farmland stuff with every settler per term is a huge PITA. It’s just not what I play Civ games for. It’s always been possible to not have them automated if you don’t want them automated and not automated was the default. I don’t understand why they took that option away.
It just felt like V was a huge amount more about grinding. Sounds like that’s been somewhat rectified at least.
Friends? You guys have friends?
Who actually plays Civ multiplayer?
The play-by-email mode was broken to the point of uselessness in Civ5 and I don’t think they fixed in it in 6 (you had to have an always-on Windows desktop system running the server, and because the game logic was integrated into the graphics engine you couldn’t run it headless, and then on top of that there was basically no working system to coordinate active DLCs between players so most of the time people couldn’t join even if you did get the damn thing running) so my friends and I tried once and gave up. I would love for 7 to have a robust PBEM system so that we can play together without needing to spend hours a week watching paint dry while everybody else plots their turns, but I’m not holding my breath.
(you had to have an always-on Windows desktop system running the server, and because the game logic was integrated into the graphics engine you couldn’t run it headless, and then on top of that there was basically no working system to coordinate active DLCs between players so most of the time people couldn’t join even if you did get the damn thing running)
Jesus fuck. You should be able to run a game of Civ as a series of XML files, with the GUI being practically perfunctory. I am disappointed that the game isn’t backwards compatible, much less that you can’t integrate between DLCs.
What is functionally a feature-rich version of Diplomacy shouldn’t be this hard to integrate in Play-by-Post.
They should have it so if one player has DLC, everyone gets to use it in multiplayer. It Takes Two works for players that haven’t even bought the game, and that’s published by EA ffs.
2K really are the greediest mfs out there.
I know this won’t help you a whole lot, but I do.
Oh hey, a new civ! It’s been a while since Gandhi nuked me.
I played all of civ 6 there is an I loved it. The add-ons were great and districts were definitely a cool idea. Civ 5 however had the better art style.
Well considering this ideas were taken from Endless Legend, you should give that a try. Or if you want something more Civ like, they also have Humankind, which is like Civ but better and the AI is really good (they made it even better now than before, and it was already way ahead of Civ’s NPC AIs). They also have a unique win condition with Fame.
4 is peak for me. The only thing I dislike about 4 is the unit stacking making it hard to know if a unit is just 1 unit or 20 dudes in the same spot.
Back in the day I used to check out civfanatics.com for mods. There were tons for Civ4:BTS that made it so much cooler. After playing that and then playing Civ5, I was incredibly disappointed. Civ6 is better, but not by much. I still go back to Civ4 when I need my “one more turn” fix.
Fall from Heaven 2? Rise of Mankind? Caveman to Cosmos? Rhyes and Falls of Civilization? Dawn of Mankind? Planetfall? Mars Now? How about all of them at once?
Civ 4 was a goddamn library of 4X games. I still reinstall it after every few years.
I hated the stacks. Idk why, but it was always confusing how big they should be. When they can’t stack it makes more sense to me. How many troops do I need? As many as I can fit.
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It gets less fun for me every iteration. Cant say im excited for Civ 7
Why anyone ever plays multiplayer is s confounding mystery to me. They must like being forced to rush and being abused.
I’ve been playing couch co-op with my husband on both of our Switches. It’s not too bad if you don’t force a turn timer. The game will give you a ding when you’re the last one to play, but we both have ‘side games’ or play with our cats in the meantime if the other needs more time. I wouldn’t do it online or with a turn timer, though.
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causes neuroendocrinal response of dopamine and endorphins resulting in feelings of happiness and fulfillment.
Do people really feel that way? I’m just drained and glad to be home alone again.
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Some people can get the same benefit solely from having their comments upvoted
That’s about all the human interaction I can stand most days
Sounds like you have shitty friends lol, my group would never do that.
Seems like it’s a valid choice in a competitive game. Unless there’s an option to disable military victories or explicitly play coop.
I don’t consider abusing my friends because they’re slower than me in a turn based strategy a good thing to do.
…It occurs to me that I am interpreting “rush” in the RTS sense of attacking early before your opponent is ready, not in the sense of pressuring people to take their turns faster.
Haha yeah that makes sense why you would think that. Could definitely be taken either way.
Almost all my friends have kids now, so group anything is basically impossible, assuming we we even want to do the same thing at the same time.
Team Humans Vs Team AI is a very fun option. Lots of civs have really fun team synergy.
Still hasn’t been a better experience than Alpha Centauri
That game was a fuckin masterpiece. I actually don’t want it remade because I worry it would never live up to the original.
Occasionally they just give games updated graphics and audio. I’d be fine if that was how they remade it. They did that with Grim Fandango and it was just as fun as the original.
I can agree with that. In fact, I just played the System Shock remake and found it quite enjoyable. It kept the same vibe and feel while just updating the cosmetic aspects and having a few QoL changes for some of the mechanics. The maps and story felt the same, and I enjoyed the nostalgic feel of playing it again.
Maybe I wouldn’t mind an alpha centauri remake. They’d only have to update the cosmetics and the UI, after all.
And 5 was a significant downgrade from 4.
