Given how this game is coming to Nintendo Switch, and I have been a fan of past console incarnations of Civ, I tried this game again.
Pros:
* The District system - Placing districts is visually and functionally satisfying (I can't describe the vibe I get when I drive by 6 people and 5 I hit... something like that). The modifier and adjacency bonuses add a nice little puzzle game to the monotony of city and tile building. It makes purchasing additional tiles feel absolutely worth it, and planning out how a city is going to look well in advance. It's not a brain wrecking exercise: there's an ideal approach to a city that is fairly easy to figure out - then it is a matter of fitting that ideal approach around resources and terrain - both of which can add advantages. Lastly, this system makes ALL tiles feel potentially valuable, and not like "Ah, but there's a bunch of arctic and desert crap here."
* The Amenities system - is the best solution the Civ devs have had to solve the problem of rampant expansion; there's a name for the strategy of building as many cities as possible as close together as possible, it slips my mind. It doesn't feel as artificial as the distance or happiness penalties, despite accomplishing the same thing. This system allows cities to build improvements to fix individual happiness and feels closest to what they were trying to achieve with Civ 2 as a result.
* Trade - actually feels useful and a way to tailor-make your civilization. Basically - foreign trade = money and influence with the world; internal trade = heavy city growth - but that is just the basics - the fun begins when you see the advantages. Build new cities on a new continent and send 4 trade routes from each going to your core cities, you have a viable city immediately instead of having to wait for 150 turns or spend 1200 gold to get that first production building. But say you only care about your core, you can have all trade routes coming out of those cities to your other cities giving them all gigantic food boosts (production boosts become less impactful at this time). The only downside is that the trade menu becomes unstable when there are a lot of cities; and Firaxis hasn't fixed this.
* Eureka quests are very fun - you essentially get something like "Build 4 Sewers" and the result is always the same, you get 50% progress toward a culture or science tech. I may change my mind on these on later playthroughs because they may get repetitive given that doing them is the optimal path to success.
Cons:
* The fruits of each age don't come along until later ages - it is very difficult to raise a medieval army until the rennaissance, or build a Nuke until LONG after the Atomic Age (I finished my Manhattan Project just as I finished researching my first future tech).
* Nukes - This is the same thing as above, but I wanted to go into more detail: like the other Civ games since Civ 2, it's likely you won't get your first Nuke until you have already completed the tech tree and the game is over in 20 turns. It's more like something to use as fireworks at the end. In Civ 2, Nukes felt like a significant part of the late game, and it hasn't been since then that a cold war-like feeling has occurred in the series.
* Space Race - bland, again, Civ 2 did it right, and it hasn't been done right since. This time you're building a series of wonders and its done.
* All other non-Domination victory conditions - See space race. They feel very passive, and not any more exciting than simply having more points than anyone else at the end.
* Great People are poorly balanced - I got one that gave me 50% tech progress on ALL Information age techs, that's crazy! This is the same as the Eureka thing I described in the pros, it's essentially giving you the rewards for all of those quests without doing anything.
* Bugs - as mentioned before, the trade menu is unstable in the late game - at least on huge maps.
* All government types are the same experience - they are even more similar to one another than the governments of Civ 2. This is really bad considering how other strategy games, like Crusader Kings 2, have vastly different experiences for different government types.
* Turtling strategies are over-powered - Bare with me a moment as I describe the experience:
Historically, Pericles built walls across Attica from Athens to Piraeus and Phalerum and developed a gigantic navy by extorting their allies with a "provide us with ships" tax The Delphian Legue, or Athenian Empire as it is more correctly called, was the inspiration for Plato's Atlantis - as he saw this strategy as corrupt and doomed to disaster... I wanted to try doing something similar, and built 4 cities and surrounded them with Encampments in strategic locations virtually walling off my lands from the rest of the continent, and built a strong naval force (While you actually CAN get your city-state allies in Civ 6 to give you their armies, I didn't do this).
At one point, Persia declared on a city-state I was Suzerain over (my vassals) and I had the option to declare and defend them, which I took - my intention was to use my navy to defend the city state while giving Persia more targets, the goal was to defend the city state. Sure enough, Persia's units were utterly crushed by my city and encampment ranged attacks, along with a few blasts from crossbowmen that I had defending. They were of a higher military tech-level, but were still easily crushed.
When the time comes for peace, I notice that Persia is offering a lot in return. My armies had barely set foot in their lands. Curiously, I tried to get a city by cancelling their offers and adding a city instead; sure enough, they were willing to give one over. I added some gold and found out they were willing to give more. I effectively bought 7 cities, nearly tripling the size of my Empire. In addition, this gave me NO Warmonger penalty.
Seeing the opportunity, I looked for options to declare wars with low Warmonger penalty and eventually conquered 20+ cities across my continent with the ease of playing Chieftan... but I was on King and had a very small army compared to everyone else. There are a few cities the AI won't give up under any circumstance and their capitals - but these amounted to relative few. This seems incredibly broken to me I shouldn't have been able to conquer this much as quickly as I did, as I turned from the world's smallest Civ to its largest within a single era. Also in this era, I was sending settlers to an empty continent, other Civs came around the same time, but I essentially just bought their cities after wars barely fought and now completely own it (aside from the City States which are now my vassals).
In real life, this strategy proved disastrous for Pericles because the moment his successor lost one battle, his whole system of Imperialism fell apart, and like Atlantis, the Athenian Empire fell apart. They couldn't trade for food with allies, and the Peloponnesian league had them tear down the walls. I know something this disastrous wouldn't happen in Civ 6 as a consequence of my strategy, but to actually see Pericles's somewhat insane strategy work out to the greatest delusions of its supporters makes Civ 6 feel very very broken. This strategy is MORE effective at conquering than actual conquest - and it is way easier.
Conclusion:
There's interesting stuff, but the formula fails to keep Civ from anywhere near the crown of strategy that it once held through the 90s and early 2000s. It is probably a good game for the Switch, as lighter strategy games tend to work a lot better on console than more complex games - and Civ 6's UI is as slick as the series has ever had. Civ 6 is basically a very polished off Civ 5. But, like Civ 3-5 - it has a lot of features I wouldn't want to give up, but at the same time, the experience of Civ 2 and Test of Time are still more fun - despite some unforgivable leftovers of a bygone era - like moving 40+ units every 10-minute long turn. It is the first Civ game since Civ 2 where I felt I had the freedom to play how I wanted rather than being forced into a certain playstyle with contrived mechanics. Unfortunately, the game is broken by being able to acquire cities without conquest, and getting access to nukes about two ages after I should have been able to build them (and all other similar things) was disheartening. It has some feature wins over Civ 2, but the balancing is not nearly as good.
Pros:
* The District system - Placing districts is visually and functionally satisfying (I can't describe the vibe I get when I drive by 6 people and 5 I hit... something like that). The modifier and adjacency bonuses add a nice little puzzle game to the monotony of city and tile building. It makes purchasing additional tiles feel absolutely worth it, and planning out how a city is going to look well in advance. It's not a brain wrecking exercise: there's an ideal approach to a city that is fairly easy to figure out - then it is a matter of fitting that ideal approach around resources and terrain - both of which can add advantages. Lastly, this system makes ALL tiles feel potentially valuable, and not like "Ah, but there's a bunch of arctic and desert crap here."
* The Amenities system - is the best solution the Civ devs have had to solve the problem of rampant expansion; there's a name for the strategy of building as many cities as possible as close together as possible, it slips my mind. It doesn't feel as artificial as the distance or happiness penalties, despite accomplishing the same thing. This system allows cities to build improvements to fix individual happiness and feels closest to what they were trying to achieve with Civ 2 as a result.
* Trade - actually feels useful and a way to tailor-make your civilization. Basically - foreign trade = money and influence with the world; internal trade = heavy city growth - but that is just the basics - the fun begins when you see the advantages. Build new cities on a new continent and send 4 trade routes from each going to your core cities, you have a viable city immediately instead of having to wait for 150 turns or spend 1200 gold to get that first production building. But say you only care about your core, you can have all trade routes coming out of those cities to your other cities giving them all gigantic food boosts (production boosts become less impactful at this time). The only downside is that the trade menu becomes unstable when there are a lot of cities; and Firaxis hasn't fixed this.
* Eureka quests are very fun - you essentially get something like "Build 4 Sewers" and the result is always the same, you get 50% progress toward a culture or science tech. I may change my mind on these on later playthroughs because they may get repetitive given that doing them is the optimal path to success.
Cons:
* The fruits of each age don't come along until later ages - it is very difficult to raise a medieval army until the rennaissance, or build a Nuke until LONG after the Atomic Age (I finished my Manhattan Project just as I finished researching my first future tech).
* Nukes - This is the same thing as above, but I wanted to go into more detail: like the other Civ games since Civ 2, it's likely you won't get your first Nuke until you have already completed the tech tree and the game is over in 20 turns. It's more like something to use as fireworks at the end. In Civ 2, Nukes felt like a significant part of the late game, and it hasn't been since then that a cold war-like feeling has occurred in the series.
* Space Race - bland, again, Civ 2 did it right, and it hasn't been done right since. This time you're building a series of wonders and its done.
* All other non-Domination victory conditions - See space race. They feel very passive, and not any more exciting than simply having more points than anyone else at the end.
* Great People are poorly balanced - I got one that gave me 50% tech progress on ALL Information age techs, that's crazy! This is the same as the Eureka thing I described in the pros, it's essentially giving you the rewards for all of those quests without doing anything.
* Bugs - as mentioned before, the trade menu is unstable in the late game - at least on huge maps.
* All government types are the same experience - they are even more similar to one another than the governments of Civ 2. This is really bad considering how other strategy games, like Crusader Kings 2, have vastly different experiences for different government types.
* Turtling strategies are over-powered - Bare with me a moment as I describe the experience:
Historically, Pericles built walls across Attica from Athens to Piraeus and Phalerum and developed a gigantic navy by extorting their allies with a "provide us with ships" tax The Delphian Legue, or Athenian Empire as it is more correctly called, was the inspiration for Plato's Atlantis - as he saw this strategy as corrupt and doomed to disaster... I wanted to try doing something similar, and built 4 cities and surrounded them with Encampments in strategic locations virtually walling off my lands from the rest of the continent, and built a strong naval force (While you actually CAN get your city-state allies in Civ 6 to give you their armies, I didn't do this).
At one point, Persia declared on a city-state I was Suzerain over (my vassals) and I had the option to declare and defend them, which I took - my intention was to use my navy to defend the city state while giving Persia more targets, the goal was to defend the city state. Sure enough, Persia's units were utterly crushed by my city and encampment ranged attacks, along with a few blasts from crossbowmen that I had defending. They were of a higher military tech-level, but were still easily crushed.
When the time comes for peace, I notice that Persia is offering a lot in return. My armies had barely set foot in their lands. Curiously, I tried to get a city by cancelling their offers and adding a city instead; sure enough, they were willing to give one over. I added some gold and found out they were willing to give more. I effectively bought 7 cities, nearly tripling the size of my Empire. In addition, this gave me NO Warmonger penalty.
Seeing the opportunity, I looked for options to declare wars with low Warmonger penalty and eventually conquered 20+ cities across my continent with the ease of playing Chieftan... but I was on King and had a very small army compared to everyone else. There are a few cities the AI won't give up under any circumstance and their capitals - but these amounted to relative few. This seems incredibly broken to me I shouldn't have been able to conquer this much as quickly as I did, as I turned from the world's smallest Civ to its largest within a single era. Also in this era, I was sending settlers to an empty continent, other Civs came around the same time, but I essentially just bought their cities after wars barely fought and now completely own it (aside from the City States which are now my vassals).
In real life, this strategy proved disastrous for Pericles because the moment his successor lost one battle, his whole system of Imperialism fell apart, and like Atlantis, the Athenian Empire fell apart. They couldn't trade for food with allies, and the Peloponnesian league had them tear down the walls. I know something this disastrous wouldn't happen in Civ 6 as a consequence of my strategy, but to actually see Pericles's somewhat insane strategy work out to the greatest delusions of its supporters makes Civ 6 feel very very broken. This strategy is MORE effective at conquering than actual conquest - and it is way easier.
Conclusion:
There's interesting stuff, but the formula fails to keep Civ from anywhere near the crown of strategy that it once held through the 90s and early 2000s. It is probably a good game for the Switch, as lighter strategy games tend to work a lot better on console than more complex games - and Civ 6's UI is as slick as the series has ever had. Civ 6 is basically a very polished off Civ 5. But, like Civ 3-5 - it has a lot of features I wouldn't want to give up, but at the same time, the experience of Civ 2 and Test of Time are still more fun - despite some unforgivable leftovers of a bygone era - like moving 40+ units every 10-minute long turn. It is the first Civ game since Civ 2 where I felt I had the freedom to play how I wanted rather than being forced into a certain playstyle with contrived mechanics. Unfortunately, the game is broken by being able to acquire cities without conquest, and getting access to nukes about two ages after I should have been able to build them (and all other similar things) was disheartening. It has some feature wins over Civ 2, but the balancing is not nearly as good.
