Civilization VI

Climate change increases the risk of all the weather effects. Which it a nice way to handle it - considering how accurate it is. But the main weather effect; floods, can be mitigated entirely. Maybe the other effects; storms and droughts could become so frequent that they became an issue, but I haven't seen that happen at least - playing on weather effect setting 2 (normal). Trying a weather effect setting 3 game now.

I agree that something like desert spreading wildly could be an interesting effect - and fun to abuse with a Civ getting desert bonuses

And for something completely different, my newest game is with the new leader Eleanor. Quite interesting (if not very effective) bonus she has. I wish the game would do more with the whole loyality gameplay in general.
She is supposed to make it easier for other cities to flip to your side. So far I've had one capital 'randomly' flip over to me, and one city where I had to work for it. As well as another small city randomly flipping despite being in the middle of enemy territory. Makes it pretty hard to prevent them from flipping back again.
Anyway, an interesting way to play, trying to set up loyality bonuses (and not the least, lower your neighbours loyality) to take their cities.

Shadout wrote:

Climate change increases the risk of all the weather effects. Which it a nice way to handle it - considering how accurate it is. But the main weather effect; floods, can be mitigated entirely. Maybe the other effects; storms and droughts could become so frequent that they became an issue, but I haven't seen that happen at least - playing on weather effect setting 2 (normal). Trying a weather effect setting 3 game now.

I agree that something like desert spreading wildly could be an interesting effect - and fun to abuse with a Civ getting desert bonuses

And for something completely different, my newest game is with the new leader Eleanor. Quite interesting (if not very effective) bonus she has. I wish the game would do more with the whole loyalty gameplay in general.
She is supposed to make it easier for other cities to flip to your side. So far I've had one capital 'randomly' flip over to me, and one city where I had to work for it. As well as another small city randomly flipping despite being in the middle of enemy territory. Makes it pretty hard to prevent them from flipping back again.
Anyway, an interesting way to play, trying to set up loyalty bonuses (and not the least, lower your neighbors loyalty) to take their cities.

I just about to enter renaissance as the Inca with Eleanor France as my neighbor, and i am desperately trying to keep her from taking my closest city to her, governor installed, buying up amenities. trying to rush an entertainment district but I don't think I'm gonna make it.

200 turns into my first game.

loving most of the changes so far.

weirdly the Scotland civ in my game never got around to creating a settler.. still stuck on only one city that isn't accomplishing much. There is a volcano inside the city so im wondering if that's what neutered them.

my only real annoyance would be the trading.. with the new resource system(especially favour) I'm fielding 3-4 trade requests on every single turn and it's a bit tedious. Would appreciate a tweak so that AIs who get turned down don't just come back with a slightly modified offer on the next turn.

thrawn82 wrote:

I just about to enter renaissance as the Inca with Eleanor France as my neighbor, and i am desperately trying to keep her from taking my closest city to her, governor installed, buying up amenities. trying to rush an entertainment district but I don't think I'm gonna make it.

Do you have the policy cards equipped that give loyalty if you have a unit in the city, and +2 loyalty from governor?

Shadout wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:

I just about to enter renaissance as the Inca with Eleanor France as my neighbor, and i am desperately trying to keep her from taking my closest city to her, governor installed, buying up amenities. trying to rush an entertainment district but I don't think I'm gonna make it.

Do you have the policy cards equipped that give loyalty if you have a unit in the city, and +2 loyalty from governor?

I have one or the other, i can't recall which. I think they are both the same color (yellow?) and my current government only has room for one.

@Shadout: It'll be interesting to see how you find climate at level 3. My experience was that storms (hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes--things you can't mitigate in advance) were suitably frequent to impact the game without being a constant headache. I had a couple cities lose 6-12 turns each to repairing damaged districts (plus the population losses), and the sea rise seemed to come more frequently over time (something like ten turns or less between rises toward the end--way too fast for small cities to put up barriers).

In terms of the CO2 component, by the time climate change was really hitting, I had contributed about half the global amount via two coal power plants, a handful of carbon-consuming military units, and a somewhat extensive rail system. I started on clean energy as it became available, but builders implement those as tile improvements. There seems to be no way to decommission/demolish a district's power plant other than upgrading it to nuclear. (Maybe in the panel that lists all a city's buildings? I didn't think to check there.) Also, by the time I started substantively doing carbon extraction projects it felt like I was only slightly slowing down the inevitable. I suspect for that to have an impact once the problem is already getting out of hand, you have to make it a civ-wide priority... which would actually be pretty authentic.

Trying to decide if I want to bump up the setting to 4 for my next game or not. I think that might be too much, but it'd be interesting to see.

Eleanors city flipping might be slow to get going, but when you get that foothold with a few cities at the border, it snowballs fast. 10 cities converted in 11 turns. With no interference from me after the initial setup.

Climate change is going 'well' too. One of the other civs took a 3 population, 12 damaged tiles hit just now.

ubrakto wrote:

There seems to be no way to decommission/demolish a district's power plant other than upgrading it to nuclear. (Maybe in the panel that lists all a city's buildings? I didn't think to check there.)

Yeah that doesn't seem smart. Unless the power plants just stop doing anything if you have replaced their power with other sources.
Speaking of lack of power, my current map is weird. I can see exactly 1 uranium tile on the whole map. Which is inaccessible. And no other civ or city-state got any either. I assume there must be more under the other civs buildings, and they just haven't reached the tech yet. Still a bit problematic.

Got a cultural win with Kristina. Sweden's ability to theme full museums makes for fast tourism. Had an insanely small army though, started to get nervous my neighbors would come stomp on me towards the end, but thankfully I was able to keep them happy.

I looked into the power stuff a bit at CivFanatics (egad, some of those threads) and, yeah, it seems there's no way to just take a power plant offline. It sounds like cities will consume clean energy first as long as it's available, so you can get from carbon-emitting resources to renewable, but you have to build that capacity out.

There's no way to tell your civ to just stop using them even if it means leaving buildings unpowered, which seems a rather glaring oversight (hopefully they patch that in), and it also leaves you stuck maintaining any nuclear plants you've built through to the end of the game. (I think a city project to decommission a nuclear plant would be an awesome, and realistic way to deal with those.)

I've yet to get the last two expansions, although the boy is having fun playing Australia. I'm not sure the expansions will do much for me as I ignore diplomacy and don't take advantage of trading luxuries or play the religion victory.

Bfgp wrote:

I've yet to get the last two expansions, although the boy is having fun playing Australia. I'm not sure the expansions will do much for me as I ignore diplomacy and don't take advantage of trading luxuries or play the religion victory.

The expansions actually add a lot of other subtle feature beyond the banner features. For instance, Gathering Storm adds a bunch of units so that Horsemen don't languish in Ancient Era strength until Cavalry.

Yeah, there really is a lot of small changes that easily matters as much, if not more, than the volcano in your backyard.

I just finished my first game since the expansion. It makes the game better but still feels like Civ VI. I didn’t have any crazy diplomatic behavior by the AI. I was able to stay on good terms with 3 civs for the bulk of the game, eventually maintaining alliances. I ended up with a space victory, but would have gotten a diplomatic victory in a turn or two assuming I had enough influence to buy my last 2 diplomatic victory points. I played on King difficulty.

I’m not sure what happened to Korea. They were ahead of my in science and were the first to complete the first space objective, but then I took over. Maybe they didn’t have cities with good production to build. I did start a joint war with them with another civ that was a neighbor of theirs just hoping it would distract them. I didn’t actually attack.

I didn’t find voting on the proposals that interesting. I think everyone pretty much either voted for themselves or against their enemy. I didn’t see any way to try and get other civs to join votes for a cause. That could have made it more interesting.

I also don’t fully understand the CO2 emissions. I switched from coal and oil to solar, wind and nuclear - but it didn’t look like my emissions went down. Maybe the number reported is just total emissions and not the current rate. What makes the carbon extraction projects available? I don't think I saw those.

The end game was just still a lot of end turn while I waited for my spaceship to arrive. In Civs 1-4 I would have pressed on to take over more land, but in 5 and 6 I just find any extra war an inconvenience. I considered going after Korea, because they were ahead of me in the science victory, but the thought of having to try and corral my troops to the other side of the world wasn’t appealing. She may have been a tough nut to crack too. I guess I like that taking cities isn’t as easy as it was in prior civs due to defenses and needing to position troops. With the right defenses a city can be troublesome to take.

The expansion is a good addition and it’s nice to have some new toys to play with.

Outside of nukes, which solves most problems, I guess spies are the best way to stop someone going for tech victory. Heck, spies feels completely overpowered for nearly everything, even more so than before the expansion. Now you can even destroy dams for some additional mayhem.

robc wrote:

I didn’t find voting on the proposals that interesting. I think everyone pretty much either voted for themselves or against their enemy. I didn’t see any way to try and get other civs to join votes for a cause. That could have made it more interesting.

Had the same initial reaction. But then the way to get others to vote how you want them to, is to buy their diplomatic favor. Thematically I guess the votes in the World Congress is not your own votes, but how other Civs and city states voted for your proposal, through your diplomacy.

I wish there were better ways (than I have found at least) to judge how a vote is going to end up, so you knew how much diplomatic favor you needed to spend. In the real world, it is often quite obvious how the votes are going to end up, both in UN and national parliaments, so you can "fine-tune" the amount of pressure you place on others, to get the result you want.
Diplomatic visibility seems to make you able to see what others want to vote for (A or B), but as far as I have seen, not more than that. Could be interesting if you could see the actual votes, either through close relationships (alliances) or through trading, paying other civs to see how many votes they would spend.
That might make it too easy to abuse the World Congress of course, but as long as that increased insight comes with some opportunity cost (having to maintain alliances, spend lots of gold, or spying) it could be balanced out. And have some randomness factor around it as well.

I think Carbon extraction is from of of the last techs. So around the same time you can launch a spaceship.

I agree regarding the WC. Between the power stuff, the warming stuff, and the way the WC votes are set up, it's going to be very interesting to see how Firaxis tunes the game from here and if they introduce more tools or features to make some of this new content work just a little bit better.

Started a new game as Sweden on Emperor difficulty, and am about 75 turns in, I'm hopelessly behind the 8-ball. I had progressed to three cities (not especially great locations) and Scythia comes trolling in at my third city with a legion of warriors. (I think 6-8 warriors and a slinger coming at me in 2-3 waves.) I wasn't prepared to fight off nearly that many. The city ended up virtually surrounded and changed hands about three times before I could finally polish off all her units under constant archer fire and take it back for keeps. The commitment to producing/diverting all my own units set me back on progress with my first two cities in a big way. I don't even have a district yet!

I don't know if this is an improvement for the AI or not, but it felt like it managed its units and line of attack a lot better than I'm used to. Got some real catching up to do now if I hope to turn this game around!

Completed my first game of Gathering Storm, played on King. Won a Culture Victory in 1825 AD. Probably could have won sooner but forgot Rock Bands were purchased with faith so I only used them in the last 5 turns of the game. Kristina's auto-themeing bonus is really strong for a culture victory. Was left on my own island on a Continents map so I did not have to compete with anyone but Barbarians for land. Ended up with 9 cities on my island and Kongo/Nubia had taken over the majority of their continents. I was allied with everyone (except Saladin, screw that guy) and had trade routes running. Everyone kept asking me for my great works but I shooed them all away. I contributed almost 75% of the CO2 to the world, but only had 2 coal plants running. Eventually converted one to oil then in the World Congress, used my massive Diplomatic influence to ban Coal plants as I was the only one advanced enough for Oil. Was a very Sim City type game.

Only had 3 disasters affect me during the whole game, and they were all really early (prior to turn 100). Disaster intensity was at 2, may have to bump it up to 3 in the next game. Took me a long time to scout the world so I didn't see all the other disasters affecting the larger continents.

Spoiler:

IMAGE(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/948475442977528098/E4B1D310F5E5F14FE2334D7CC6FD5068925EC6FE/)

Thanks for all the reports and information, everyone! I'm enjoying reading this thread and hearing people's impressions and results.

The other day when the Green Man Gaming sale said just over an hour remaining, I said to myself "what the heck," and bought Gathering Storm. So I guess I'll have some reports soon, too. I'm starting with disasters on 0 though. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to turn them off completely.

I bumped the difficulty up to Emperor and now I'm having the opposite problem with the barbarians. They're freakin' everywhere! In fact, there's a huge horde of them off to the west that have banded together and formed a rudimentary nation called 'America' or some such.

Didn't have any issues with lack of barbs until my current game. There has been exactly zero barbs on land anywhere I have been. They have shown up on the ocean, but very rarely. It is quite weird. Their spawnrate has always been really random, but only in the range from 'normal amount' to 'barbs everywhere'.
Maybe a lack of available spots where the game want to spawn them. Another thing nearly completely missing on that map is strategic resources. Nearly no coal, oil og uranium except from a small remote island where all three are to be found. Maybe that island even had barbs once...

Also turned weather effects up to 11. Or 4. They are still quite rare, but who knows if the map is the issue this time.
Kinda bad that the map generator can fail to this degree. If this had been my first game of the expansion, it likely would have soured me on it.

I haven't had any barbarian problems in my first game (yet). You may be right about the lack of room for them. I usually play on a Standard map, but I use one less than the default number of AI civs. That makes more room for me to expand, but it also might make more room for barbs.

Of course... sample size of 1, so...

Generally, Barb camps and generation depends on how the AI and the City States deal with them. If the CSs are passive and allow the barbs to spawn invasion forces a couple times, then you're going to get a LOT of units. Can happen with the AI, too. I've had games where my nearest neighbour was essentially defeated by barbs.

Yeah that can bring the spawns from normal to many. Though they also seem to vary independent of that - like even if you are alone on an island.
But lack of barbs seems harder to explain. Even if the AI is dealing with them fast, you will see the fights occasionally, or empty camps. Then later when exploring you will find the random 1 tile islands with a barb on it etc. So it probably is some kind of bug.

I doubt it is a lack of space in the first few turns. If i'm having a barb-full game, then I'll find some within 4 or 5 turns. I still get occasional games that have none, even with masses of continent to walk about. Usually once I've decided that this is a Barb-less game, I bail out because I don't know what else is broken, such as resources as mentioned above.

I saw there was an update the other day, not sure of the patch notes, but will do some testing and see if I can recreate the no-barb situation.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/lMqAashh.jpg)

This thread has a big Barb problem.

Playing as Poland, built an encampment adjacent to enemy territory, no culture bomb.

Err...

No mods, verified files, am I missing something?

I did see this note in a strategy guide:

Only expands to areas that are within workable tiles of the nearest cities

This explains why it didn't expand into enemy territory, but there were workable tiles that it didn't expand into.

Oh, and:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/uchBZoR.png)

Disappointed that "Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster" doesn't fit in the name. I guess I'll have to go with Pastafarianism in the future.

You could use 'Pastafarianism'. I usually take the turtle symbol and found A'tuinism.

On my issue with Poland's Golden Liberty culture bomb not working as advertised:

Nevermind.

I reviewed the save files in preparation for sending a bug report off to Firaxis, and it turns out I am an idiot. The tile I thought should have been workable was not. The culture bomb did in fact give me two new mountain tiles, which I failed to notice, because, well, mountains.

Carry on, King Jadwiga!

For some reason I find it very cool that Poland had a lady king in the 14th century. Fluke of Polish law or not, she was way ahead of her time! And leave it to Civ to teach me this fact. She's a saint, too!

Poland's encampment culture bomb is nice, but the Forts are really where it's at. That specific power ensures that you will always claim maximum workable land tiles in all Polish cities.