My prediction is that people will overhype it with lots of hopes for super complex systems, call it shit when it has fewer mechanics and civs than 3/4/5/6 with all their DLC, and then eventually decide it's good after a couple years of DLC and patches.
You know, the usual Civ cycle. I'll probably buy it day 1 assuming it isn't actually broken, per usual, and dump a couple hundred hours in it, per usual.
The AI has never been great in the series for various reasons, but for whatever reason it just did not know how to play in Civ6. I'd either get crushed by the bonuses early on if I played on high difficulty or have the game firmly in hand by the Renaissance otherwise. Easily the worst game in the series for me as a result.
Yes pretty graphics are nice, but I have never understood why it seems like all effort to make better game 'AI' just completely stopped.
Like I get getting game ai to act 'real' is/was virtually impossible, but it's possible to fake it enough to make it enjoyable and has been for a long while and yet is always an afterthought.
One mechanic I'd love to see added to Civ is disease. It's had huge significance throughout history and would be another fun layer to the game.
For example, if you settled near a swamp there would randomly be disease outbreaks. When you encounter a new civ your diseases would have a chance to infect each other's units, and you would spread it to your Civ if you brought them back.
Military units who are fortified in certain terrain would slowly lose health as they suffer from things, and you could have civilian units that can undo disease damage. Hell, you could purposely send infected units to an uncontacted civs and decimate their populations.
To fight this they could add a hospital district, new great people, and new technologies.
Is this a bot, or are you an actual human being that only engages with other people by pedantically correcting very minor or esoteric grammar mistakes?
I just hope (foolishly) that with the current hype that it's AI will be a focus. I hate that because it cheats things that would work on me don't work on the AI etc.
It would be really cool if they made an API for the game so people could build their own AI
The Ottoman Empire is suffering a plague of health concerns! With your modern science, you have determined this is because they apply glue to their pizzas. Do you wish to provide assistance by helping them click the squares that contain a motorcycle?
That really is one of the biggest flaws of Civ. It's so hard to find a breakpoint where the gameplay "feels good" but still is challenging. If you're at a difficulty level where the gameplay is mostly intact, the AI is just too dumb, and if you bump it up it becomes a meta game of playing around the AI bonuses.
His main thesis is that players constantly demand stronger AI (that doesn’t cheat) but when they try it they hate it. The issue is that strong AI doesn’t role-play like an actual historical leader, it plays like a “gamer” who will stop at nothing to win.
That is, strong AI opponents treat Civ like a game of poker and they’ll use every possible means of defeating you. They’re not reliable allies or trading partners, they’re bluffing, duplicitous liars.
Human players who play against such AIs report a very negative experience. Many of the diplomacy functions in the game become rather useless against such an untrustworthy AI, and the whole situation devolves into something more akin to “turn-based Warcraft” rather than Civilization.
I played Civilization for years. When Civ 5 came out, I was incredibly psyched. I specifically went to PAX one year just so I could get new information on the game. When I finally played it, it was the biggest disappointment of my gaming life. It just doesn't feel like any of the previous ones. Civ 6 is way better in almost every way.
I'm wary of Civ 7 though. How can they improve upon the game without adding minigames or breaking it into insane amounts of DLC eg. Stellaris? I probably won't pick it up until it's on a steam sale with all its DLC at 50% off or something stupid.
I have probably a cumulative 2000 hours between civilization 4, 5, and 6. I disliked each as they came out, I had played 3 briefly right before 4 was released. But after a few games in each they really grew on me, and moving back to the older versions just didn't slap the same way.
I'm sure 7 will be different in enough ways that people will initially hate it, and still spend dozens of hours playing it.
I've been playing Civ since the first release, and this is the pattern with all of them. The transition to hexagonal tiles was pretty weird at the time.
Let's hope it isn't. Even though civ 6 had multiple interesting aspects and in certain ways it was objectively better than 5, I just could not look past the ugly presentation.
Same. Civ 5 was nice to look at, for example the swirly white clouds for the fog of war. In Civ 6 that gets replaced with… an ugly brown parchment thing
Same. And I tried, even during a free weekend. But I couldn't even fix it because all the mods that changed the colors or unit sizes seemed to have been outdated and abandoned.
Hopefully Ara will be good, which at least looks to be very promising.