Civ VI too complex?

[Sorkvild]

I picked up the complete edition during recent sale about 10 days ago, it was was pretty good deal! Anyways after 40 hours I must say that I'm pretty much lost, not that the game is engaging but I don't know what is going on. I think I understood all mechanics during a few gameplays, but there is too much of everything to keep track of. Civ powers, productions, policies, political systems, special buildings, governors, religions - all those bonuses overlap and create confusion. And there is also a solid portion of micromanagement. AI is spamming cities like crazy, priests and religious units wander around spreading their beliefs. It is pretty hard to keep a monolith of your religion under those conditions. Not to mention waging war especially if your rival has 30 cities and he is setting some more to encircle you. There is no production but constant unit spam - you buy them en masse in every city - via money, faith. In Civ 5 every unit was precious. Here it doesn't matter. Geez, that is absolutely crazy game.
And why the city spam, why there is no building tall? There are no penalties for having many cities - instead the more the merrier. And there is this "world congress" thing - so facepalm, so badly designed, wish I could disable that thing.
As a huge Civ 5 fan I'm pretty much lost and confused. Almost makes me to install this game and return to V, but there are many features that I really really enjoy in VI - like geography, terrain features, nature, new units the whole late game. Really torn apart and stuck with mixed feelings about VI. Any Civ 6 "life advices" and words of encouragement on how to properly play this game, maybe I'm doing something wrong.

[Olterin]

Where to even begin...

I'll start with the "there is no tall" part:
Civ 5 was an outlier in the ability to play (and win) with very few cities (if memory serves, 4 was the optimal number for science spam). This was certainly not the case in civ4, nor in Beyond Earth. So it's uh, a return to the status quo from the civ5 experiment. Except not really - you have tools at your disposal to make fewer but more powerful cities, and certain civs are better at "tall" than "wide". Whether you want to (and/or can) make a city big depends entirely on the location and the purpose - if you want an economic powerhouse, you're going to need more population and space than for a military outpost (or a city entirely dedicated to getting you that arctic oil/uranium). District adjacency bonuses are your friend here if you want to go tall(er) - for example, Japan gets double adjacency from districts being next to other districts, they benefit from a very tight build (min-distance between cities, pave over tiles in favor of districts), and as such are very flexible since they don't depend on favorable terrain quite as much. Personal experience - on Immortal difficulty on a small (6-player) map it is entirely sufficient to have around 8-9 cities to win a science victory, if you have a reasonable location for it. However, should the AI get too blobby, they'll be a threat to your victory by virtue of sheer size and power, so you'll have to do something about them or lose. Personally, I hated the "optimal 4-city strat" in civ5, because it was so bland every single time - in civ6 the actual number of cities you'll have (to have) will depend on your civ and your location-based strategy.
(Note: the penalty for having more and more cities is that each subsequent settler costs more to build - there are ways to offset this a little, and conquering an opponent will handily boost your power a lot, but "the more the merrier" isn't strictly true. At some point it's more beneficial to invest in building up what you have before going for another expansion phase. Also, district build costs go up with each district if memory serves, and districts are power)

Fun examples I've had:
A)Tall Tundra Inca. I had maybe 6 cities of relevance, but thanks to Incan terrace farms those were easily size 16 by the renaissance and sporting all the districts I needed. I settled small arctic cities later (and fed them via trade) to get access to just that little bit more production and those strategic resources.
B) Wide Arctic Russia. Nothing says "Mother Russia" quite like cities being powered by sheer belief. Literally, as Russia you're near-guaranteed to secure a religion for yourself if you at all go for it, and I picked that one tenet that makes shrines and temples give food (and the faith building that does it too). Settling snow cities has never been more viable than this! (Except maybe as Canada, because Canada is the other civ strong for this kind of approach, but for different reasons). The map lent itself to me spamming decent-but-not-great cities with few factories here and there to spread production around, so I pounced on it. Win was science, I believe, and I had more than 15 cities by the end.

Then the part about unit spam - I don't know what gave you that impression. It is absolutely not optimal to spend vast amounts of resources on buying units (with certain exceptions of course) instead of production - if you can afford to do so you're already winning pretty hard. I've found every unit to be quite precious, losing those early warriors can hurt. Not to mention a veteran corps or army, that really sets you back. It is, however, at least feasible to shore up certain shortfalls in your production by spending money or faith - more so than in civ5 if I remember my impressions correctly. The thing is, if you want to stack production to "spam" out units, you have to pick up Magnus (the governor) with his Vertical Integration promotion by the time you have factories, and you want to have as many factories in range of his city as possible.

As for faith ... unfortunately, it is relatively unimportant outside of multiplayer. Unless you have a civ that specializes in faith, you're probably best off by completely ignoring it after getting a pantheon (everyone should get a pantheon ASAP). And in my experience, actually going for a religious victory is, much like going after culture and domination, utter tedium. Absolutely possible, but prepare for a slog of a game as you have to micro every unit to death.

Because yes, you are right, the game is a micromanagement hell if you have any kind of big conflict, be it cultural, religious or military. Doubly so in multiplayer, because us humans are actually not terrible with unit management (unlike the AI). (Everything else you get used to with time)

[Gavrushka]

I've owned every version of Civ over than III & VI, and there's a feeling of growing opaqueness as the series progressed. They're very pretty, packed with features, but I never felt I grasped V, so VI would be well beyond my paygrade. - The best iteration was Call To Power I, in my opinion, which had simplistic gameplay on the surface, but such tactical depth, it was a game I played constantly for over a decade. Then the servers closed, and more modern Windows PCs wouldn't play it, even in compatibility mode.

But, yeah, Civ VI. Good luck with that!

[birdtable]

I remember playing Civ III for 24 hrs non stop.. Never did it again, was not well for a few days, kept seeing strange images... Too many grey cells have died since then to ever attempt a return.

[Gavrushka]

I remember playing Civ III for 24 hrs non stop.. Never did it again, was not well for a few days, kept seeing strange images... Too many grey cells have died since then to ever attempt a return.

It was my ex wife who introduced me to Civ, but it was Call To Power I multiplayer which absolutely grabbed me. -To date, it's the only multiplayer game I've thoroughly enjoyed, and I remember playing daft hours online against people from Australia and the US at the same time. There was a league on Apolyton.Net, and I probably put more hours in on that game than any other. - I'm still in touch with a few of the people from back then. - The kids are now middle aged men, and us middle aged men are now old men. Damn...

[silenced]

If you ask me, CivVI is even missing some complexity. It's still a lot of fun, but in some parts it could be much deeper, like in the diplomatic things, or all the military units. On other parts, I miss lots of things that could be automated, like building railways, it's so tedious and the later you go, the more of a real micro-management-hell it becomes.

Though I have to say, it's always fun to rush coal, coal power plants and then Computers, to build flood barriers, and sink the world in the ocean, while your competitors are far behind and just get drowned.

This was, in all of my 1290h of CivVI, the most fun strategy of all the time.

[Masterbagger]

I didn't get seriously into the series until Civ4. That formed the basis of my strategy with later editions of the franchise. That strategy is always to rush nuclear weapons if Gandhi is present in the game because that guy is seriously a war hawk. Nuking Gandhi early and often is good strategy.

[Olterin]

I didn't get seriously into the series until Civ4. That formed the basis of my strategy with later editions of the franchise. That strategy is always to rush nuclear weapons if Gandhi is present in the game because that guy is seriously a war hawk. Nuking Gandhi early and often is good strategy.

Fun factoid - the reason that Gandhi is such a warmonger is that in one of the first civ games there was a bug where his extreme pacifism value suffered an overflow due to a modifier and made him massively aggressive. Devs decided it was more fun to make that a feature of all future Gandhi iterations than fix it. Thus, Warmonger Gandhi was born

[brucewarren]

I picked this up when it were being given away recently but in my experience it just isn't any fun. At least not for me.

Perhaps I'm just getting old and modern games too hard for my failing brain but it seems to me that in the earlier incarnations
you didn't get your arse handed to you on silver plate every single time even when playing at the settler level.

Without fail I find myself surrounded by more powerful civs with large numbers of big cities to my tiny number of small cities
unable to expand in any direction. Then they declare war on my pitifully under defended civilisation and it's all over.

For me the best games i the series were Civ 2 and alpha centauri. The graphics of 2 were more primitive but the whole thing
felt more crafted. Maybe it's just me but the latter games seem mechanical somehow. In 2 when encountering foes there was a
humour in their responses especially if they had NUCLEAR WEAPONS. The council had their moments too. Some of them were
hilarious. You felt real effort had gone into giving them character.

[pjknibbs]

The main issue with Civ 6 is that it's pretty much always good to have more cities, unlike Civ 5, where diminishing returns kicked in pretty hard after 4 or 5. This means it's critical to expand early and often if you want to compete on even turns with the AI, because believe me, that's what they'll be doing. If you're losing due to your civ being too small it's because you didn't claim enough territory early game.

[Gavrushka]

Sounds like a return to the old settler/phalanx churn that was essential to the early game of Civ CTP. - The basic tenet was to expand to your chosen government type's maximum number of cities, ramp up science and production, then churn out military units and overwhelm other civilisations.

[Mightysword]

For a game that can span hundred of turns, I kinda wish that the first 20-30 turns or so do not pretty much break or make the entire play through. Usually if you do thing right in the first 20-30 turns, it's very hard to lose unless you go out of your way to choke yourself. But set up badly and it's almost impossible to catch up. In all the strategy games I play I feel Civ VI is the weakest in term of snowballing.

If you're a fan of Civ's gameplay, there are other series similar to it:

- Galvic series from Stardock is a good one with a much better AI comparing to Civ that can give you a run without cheating, with more realistic behavior. Also it's set up so both a wide and tall gameplay are viable (at least since the last time I played).
- Endless Legend is a good alternative if you feel Civ is too complex. It has similar gameplay with a more simple system, but still fun. Fairly aesthetic pleasant as well.