Civilization VI

Shadout wrote:

ENGINEERING PROJECTS
Shape the world around your empire to overcome unfavorable land conditions by making improvements like canals, dams, tunnels and railroads.

oh baby

dammit!

Arise from your slumber, thread!

I have the urge to take the world with me. I have a fancy new iPad Pro and a Nintendo Switch. How are the versions for those platforms? Is there a consensus as to which is better? What are the pros and cons of each? I can see that the iPad version seems cheaper, but I don't mind paying a bit more for a superior version.

I'd go for the iPad version because it looks like the iPad Pro is more powerful than the Switch. The Civ VI port on the Switch performs generally quite well, but it gets chuggy in the latter eras.

Just picked this (and the expansion) up on the Humble Winter sale. I expect to be in front of my computer for a while over the next weeks.

If you're interested in the upcoming expansion and haven't been watching the (close to) weekly hour-long livestreams they've been doing with some of the new Civs, they are well worth your time (Maori, Inca, Canada, Hungary, Mali). Lots of interesting details (way more than in the shorter 2-minute videos) from each of them that should radically alter core strategies in ways I'm increasingly excited about.

The more I think about this, the less interested I get. Basically, the map itself is another enemy. They're back to the ridiculous fiction of nuclear power plants potentially causing fallout. A diplomacy victory sounds promising, but as bad as the AI has been historically, I'm anticipating that facet of the game will be a real nightmare in practice. Overall it seems to me like a lot of added complexity that's only going to create more headaches instead of making the game more fun. I don't need new and exciting ways to fail. I can do that just fine with the game as it is.

This is definitely going to be a wait and see expansion for me.

I agree, is sound a lot more complicated than before, and as you said, the map is now an enemy. Also, the need of resources for maintain your units and the new energy management sounds like a lot of burden. Still, other changes are promising. What I would love is the option to enable/disable the mayor changes in this patch, so maybe we can try some mechanics in different game sessions, and not just create a game based in the entire expansion.

I enjoyed Civ V's diplomatic victory, so I'm optimistic about its return in VI. I assume the fallout from nuclear reactors is due to a meltdown occurring due to lack of maintenance, so I have no real issue with that being in the game.

Generally feeling positive about the changes. A lot of the infrastructure looks cool to me - dams, canals, flood barriers, etc. I'm picking it up on day one, but suspect my wife will monopolize the game for a while.

I'll be there day one, my most anticipated game of ~Q1 (or to be exact, the first 80 days of the year)
In all likelihood I will be disappointed though. Just adding more and more new stuff, rather than fixing the old, is a bad thing. And it seems exactly what they are doing. (Make Eras actually interesting!)

On the other hand, the new features in terms of environmental effects sounds like one of the best new things in Civ for many years - potentially changing up one of the most basic components of the game; city placement.
Also I have long argued that one thing Civ lacks the most is more random events (paradox style) to make each playthrough feel more unique - this doesn't exactly seem like that, but it looks like another step in the direction. I wish they would go back and make the actual 'random events' from the previous expansion suck less though.
And Diplomacy victory was very much lacking in current Civ 6.

setrio wrote:

What I would love is the option to enable/disable the mayor changes in this patch, so maybe we can try some mechanics in different game sessions, and not just create a game based in the entire expansion.

From what I have understood, the weather effects and global warming can be turned off completely (or adjust how frequently it happens). Diplomacy victory can likely be turned off, but probably not the diplomacy features.

I am pretty excited for this expansion, but I do have a friend that echoes a lot of the sentiment here, he hates random events. He has really bad luck most of the time so they usually screw him over. They didn't cover it in that mini video but the changes to warmongering are huge.

I like that they are making you think about city placement, although I wish they would amp it up even more. The adjacency bonuses from districts seemed really neat, but they turn out to be pretty useless. I would really like to see the placement be the defining factor, rather than the buildings inside.

Different strokes and all, but personally, I think adding more society vs. environment aspects is great and also their way of admitting, "No, we really don't know how to make the AI better."

Short of giving it gobs and gobs of bonuses, it really is not competitive and, for me at least, what drives the game is not the other civilizations being competitive, but the work of building my civilization, much of which is made more interesting when you have to make decisions based on geography. As part of that, I think it makes perfect sense for a game that features the development and progress of civilization as its central idea to factor into the late game (which needs more interesting things for the player to react to anyway) the greatest threat to life on this planet as we've always known it. I dunno. We will certainly soon see if it's going to come together or not.

As for the nuclear plants, based on that video, the mechanic is that every so often you have to do a city works project to keep the plant maintained. If you do that, I don't think you'll ever be at risk of a nuclear accident. BadKen, I'm not sure from what context you mean by nuclear power plants not causing fallout (as in I literally don't know much about the subject), but certainly the idea that not maintaining such plants resulting in accidents that can render the vicinity unlivable is a thing.

Badken, I think that term "fallout" is just a shorthand for the after-effects of a meltdown/core exposure event, which can be pretty dire for the local area. You can see the effects at Chernobyl and Fukushima. 335,000 people relocated from the area of Chernobyl, half a million recovery workers exposed to potentially health-affecting doses of radiation with 6,000 additional cases of thyroid cancer in children between 1986 and 2005. Fukushima, while the radiation release was about 10% of that of Chernobyl, had a disruptive evacuation of 160,000 people, which is alleged to have led to the death of 1,600, mostly elderly. Both sites still have exclusion areas around them.

I think the issue for me is that the results they have in game for a meltdown are way out of proportion with what can occur, even for something like Chernobyl (which was less an accident and more a badly designed experiment gone disastrously wrong) It's subtly playing into an irrational out of proportion fear of nuclear technology.

Quill18 has his first couple of Lets Plays for Gathering Storm (Using the Canadian Civ, unsurprisingly)

should you wish to take a look before purchase.

Yeah, but... Game balance and all that. I don't think it's intended to be realistic... Something about spearmen versus tanks comes to mind...? Point is, radiation contamination from nuclear plants is an actual thing, not a fantasy.

Robear wrote:

Yeah, but... Game balance and all that. I don't think it's intended to be realistic... Something about spearmen versus tanks comes to mind...? Point is, radiation contamination from nuclear plants is an actual thing, not a fantasy.

well sure yes, i dunno, you can get similar levels of contamination and distraction from a coal ash spill, but there's no similar mechanic centered on coal power plants. I guess I just bristle at calling out nuclear power as especially dangerous when it's the least destructive (non-renewable) technology.

i know i know. it's just a game. lighten up.

I always get annoyed at games making a big deal about nuclear plants releasing fallout because the chance for one to actually go critical is less than .01%. Nuclear plants are actually incredibly safe and clean with modern technology. Sure they are not great to build in areas subject to constant natural disasters, but in a relatively calm area there is almost no chance of exposure.

No, there seems to be a penalty for coal power, which is CO2 emissions. That's bad enough without adding in ecological disaster. I view this as a balance for the nuke plants in game terms. (In real terms, coal has harmed us far, far more than nuke power plants. Unless you lived near Chernobyl or participated in the cleanup...)

Malkroth, it's not just that; it's also things like the problems at Hanford. No one is ever going to be able to reuse that site safely. Like I said, I think they picked a marquee issue to use because everyone's heard of it, that's all.

It's nuclear power fearmongering. Period. Despite highly publicized accidents and localized disasters, nuclear power is the safest way to make electricity, based on both direct deaths, injuries, and illness caused by the technology and long term effects on habitats, the food chain, and the environment in general.

The notion that a nuclear accident could have effects anything remotely like the impact of a nuclear warhead, as stated in the video, is technophobic nonsense.

I take this sort of thing much more seriously than hoplites vs. tanks, because reducing (preferably eliminating) dependence on fossil fuels is mandatory if we hope for our species to survive. Every person on earth needs to be educated with facts or we are f*cked. In fact, short of a technological miracle, it is probably already too late.

Making it a gameplay mechanic simply because it's something everyone has heard of is even worse. And yes, I realize that climate change is a gameplay feature, too, and I am not optimistic that it deals with that issue sensibly either.

Forgive me if this is too D&D for this topic, but I'm not buying a game with this kind of nonsense for the same reason I wouldn't buy a game that glorified racism or was openly transphobic.

Not to mention the fearmongering towards settling on rivers. Not once has the Torrens River expanded to swallow my house. Rivers are perfectly safe, and video games saying otherwise is irresponsible.

It doesn't matter that it highlights many otherwise important climate change issues, because there's no way I'm letting some good get in the way of my perfect.

With due respect, your homes are safe because they have been arranged to be that way. It's not too long ago that overflowing rivers killed a lot of people in their homes in the Philippine capital, and Marikina City routinely evacuates people into flood evac centers during monsoon season.

I also don't know about the game fearmongering about nuclear power. I have never had a meltdown in any of my games, and I suspect I'll never see one in Civ6 either, since it requires you to neglect maintenance for the risk to materialise at all. In addition, they specify that the fallout would be similar to the environmental effects of a nuclear weapon, but it's not the same because you won't have the blast effect, which is the worst part of a nuclear attack.

We have had 2 nuclear attacks in history. They no longer have exclusion zones. What's the projection for Chernobyl?

Apart from the environmental mechanics, there's a bunch of new units, and this expansion contains the Phoenicians, the Mali, the Ottoman, and the Maori, all of which I'm itching to play (sorry, Canada). It also has the most interesting implementation of Diplomatic Victory I've seen in a while. It's definitely more interesting than the last one which was basically stealth Economic Victory.

I did not mean to turn this into D&D. I had my say, and BadKen and others have had theirs. Let’s get back into the game stuff. I’m not going to die on this particular hill.

Unless you build a Nuclear power plant on top of it, and neglect to maintain it..

I confess, I larfed.

LarryC wrote:

Apart from the environmental mechanics, there's a bunch of new units, and this expansion contains the Phoenicians, the Mali, the Ottoman, and the Maori, all of which I'm itching to play (sorry, Canada). It also has the most interesting implementation of Diplomatic Victory I've seen in a while. It's definitely more interesting than the last one which was basically stealth Economic Victory.

Yeah, I think the new civs each come with some interesting mechanics that will affect play. The Maori starting at sea and not getting great people, but getting bonuses to production from woods along with some other perks before settling? The Inca being able to tunnel through mountains? Etc. To me, that all seems very cool to play with.

Also, BadKen gets 200 points for use of the word larfed.

double post (argh)