
Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes - yread
http://www.polygon.com/features/2016/5/11/11653620/civilization-6-release-date-preview
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civilian
I've bought every Civilization game except the very first one. They're good
games, but the one I really love is Alpha Centauri. Maybe it's a nostalgia
thing--- I got SMAC when I was in middle school. But the faction design was
phenomenal, and it was great how you actually had to play the factions
differently, and knowing the other factions meant you handled them
differently. I started playing University of Planet and just out-teching
everyone, but learning how to play the other factions was very interesting and
provided a ton of replay.

To me, Paradox's Stellaris is more of a spiritual successor to SMAC than
Beyond Earth is. You have empires that have radically different traits,
values, and governments. You actually have to play to your strengths and think
about your policies. (Disclaimer: I am extremely sleep deprived from playing
Stellaris the last two nights.)

The Civs and Beyond Earth all play the same. The faction differences are
superficial. It's bleh.

//edit forgive me HN, I commented before I read. The article does address my
concern:

> _" We found that there was a bit of a sameness to leaders as opponents," he
> says. "They didn’t really act as different personalities in terms of
> diplomacy. In Civ 6, every single leader in the game has a historical
> agenda. We look at something they did very well in history and we dial that
> up in the game world to make them a bit fanatical about it in Civilization
> 6._

But I have very little faith that they've solved it. Having a leader that is
more fanatical about something isn't the same thing as having to make hard
deicisions about Values & Government trade-offs!

For reference: The Alpha Centauri Social Engineering panel:
[http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/201...](http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/03/29/nerdiness-
from-noah-alpha-
centauri/jcr:content/body/inlineimage_1.img.800.png/45485743.cached.png) And
wiki for details:
[http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri/Soci...](http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri/Social_Engineering)

~~~
tpeo
SMAC also had 10/10 flavor text and setting overall. It's a game that has a
lot of character.

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mdemare
Any of you fellow SMAC fans play Beyond Earth? Is it a spiritual successor?

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Paul_S
Sadly, no. BE is a dressed up Civ5.

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douche
Beyond Earth _is_ kind of sad...

Civ 5 wasn't bad, but I'd rather take on Auriga in Endless Legend if I'm
playing a hexagonal 4X - plus it reminds me pleasantly of Master of Magic.

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vinceguidry
I would love to see a game that accurately reflects modern geopolitics. It
would generate a world and run a history up to a certain point, at which you'd
take control as head of state of a particular nation and conduct national
affairs.

Ideally, the game would be able to make conducting the affairs of a large
global hegemon like the United States as interesting as playing a small
kingdom beset on all sides. Sort of like Crusader Kings but set in the modern
world.

The real interesting part of the game in my view is that conquest is no longer
an option, and tactics would get abstracted out of armed conflict in an
"amateurs think tactics, generals think logistics" kind of way.

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tcoppi
> The real interesting part of the game in my view is that conquest is no
> longer an option

Isn't it though? Russia seemed to do OK with the conquest of Crimea. Anyway
the suggestion of Europa Universalis is probably the closest you will get
right now. If Paradox made a post-cold war sim I'd play the hell out of it,
but I think it would be hard to do right and be interesting precisely because
without real conquest and wars, there isn't much that is interesting for a
game on the global level.

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peteretep

        > Russia seemed to do OK with the conquest of Crimea
    

While I'm no Putin apologist, Russian "conquest" of Crimea is a bit like
hypothetical Éire conquest of Northern Ireland. You're certainly going to
upset a lot of people, but it's also hardly black and white.

~~~
hackuser
> it's also hardly black and white

No, I think it's clear. The Russians invaded another country, conquered
Ukranian land and kidnapped Ukrainian people.

EDIT: Fixed the ambiguous pronouns

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peteretep

        > Their military invaded
    

"Their" being Russian here...

    
    
        > conquered their land and kidnapped their people
    

By 'their', you mean the people of Crimea, of which over 50% identify as
Russians?

~~~
flashman
Under that logic, the 87% Hispanic population of Texas's 15th and 34th
congressional districts ought to welcome the Mexican army.

~~~
hackuser
Don't forget cities like New York, with China Town, Crown Heights, etc. etc.
etc. It's going to be a challenge to manage all those national borders in such
a small area.

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cletus
When Civ 1 came out I played it religiously. To the point I could wake up at
noon, start playing then look outside and find it was dark.

I didn't really play Civ 2 or 3. I just found them to be classic examples of
sequels: adding tedium more than anything else.

Civ 4 I also played a lot, possibly as much as Civ 1. Civ 4 was, for me, a
rare sequel that didn't just add feature bloat. It added a lot of depth while
streamlining some other aspects.

But I didn't play the base game as much as I played a particular mod: Fall
From Heaven 2. Fall From Heaven was, I believe, a mod that came with the game
that was fantasy themed. Ffh2 was that taken to another level with years of
development effort.

There was much more difference between civilizations. Unit promotions were
about twice as strong (eg each strength was 20% not 10%). Heroes and magic
were pretty interesting. I spent countless hours playing this mod.

I tried to like Civ5. Really I did. But it just never grabbed me. Some people
got excited about hexes. Not me. Once you add in all the expansions (that fix
a lot of issues with the original Civ 5) it's not bad but just not inspiring.

I'm not sure I have terribly high hopes for Civ 6. I mean, it might be a
perfectly fine game but the smart money is on it not hooking me like Civ 1 or
Civ 4 did.

Really I just want a Ffh2 successor.

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tormeh
The right way to buy Firaxis games is to buy the "Complete Edition" or
whatever. Civilization N with all expansions are almost always better than the
base Civilization N+1 game.

~~~
some-guy
I agree, I bought Civ 5 about a year ago on sale with all expansions and DLC
for a small penny. Vanilla Civ 5 feels like an incomplete game with zero
replay value. I'll most likely pick up Civ 6 in five years.

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scrumper
> Stonehenge can only be built near stone.

Found this a bit amusing given that the most likely quarry site for
Stonehenge's material is a couple hundred miles away from Salisbury Plain, in
Wales. (Not a nitpick at all, the restriction is a good idea, just thought it
was quite funny given reality.)

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robertcorey
Each tile in this game represents a large area of land.

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btreesOfSpring
some might say, "huge tracks of land."

~~~
pohl
tracts

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mvd366
I'm a bit surprised at the graphics they have shown so far. I originally saw a
screenshot and assumed it was a mobile game rather than a full-fledged AAA
title for the PC.

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bd
Let's hope some mods will make the look more palatable.

Here is a fan made mockup of how Civilization VI could look with a different
art direction:

[http://i.imgur.com/ZawuP8E.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/ZawuP8E.jpg)

Here is the original look for comparison:

[http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/289070/ss_a79c8...](http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/289070/ss_a79c8fabd12e0f1711ac61486c859656d4cd894e.jpg)

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mywittyname
I think the original looks so much better. I guess I'm tired of the trend in
games where they remove most of the color and add some filters to them.

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bd
Well, the fan-made mockup has such look because that's the only thing you can
do with the screenshot.

Real mod could do much more, e.g. changing textures or models geometries.

It's the whole new cartoony art direction that's weird and off-putting,
unfortunately evoking the feel of cheap mobile games.

Here is a real world photo example of what look modern AAA "Civ-like" game
could strive for:

[http://i.imgur.com/p4XZDeR.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/p4XZDeR.jpg)

It's possible to be lush and colorful, yet realistic and more mature looking.

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tormeh
I think this may be inspired by Endless Legend and how it does improvements in
"districts".

Endless legend is pretty cool, but doesn't run on Linux, sadly.

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lewisl9029
I'm hoping they've made some changes towards making vertical expansion
(focusing resources on developing a small number of large, advanced cities) a
bit more of a viable alternative to horizontal expansion (focusing resources
on founding as many cities as quickly as possible).

In Civ5, with the former approach, city population growth eventually becomes
unsustainable (as with fewer cities, you have access to fewer resources and
buildings to provide happiness to offset the growth of unhappiness from
population), and city productivity will also eventually plateau (as all tiles
are worked on and specialist slots filled). In practice, you tend to fall so
far behind your rivals in terms of technology, economy, and military that even
a cultural victory becomes out of reach on higher difficulties.

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dragonwriter
IIRC, Vertical expansion has been improved and made more competitive in every
Civ release starting with at least Civ III.

~~~
jharger
Yeah, I remember spamming cities seemed to be the only way to get ahead in Civ
1 (and democracy to elimite waste/corruption... ha!). Now I play most Civ 5
games with somewhere around 3-4 cities if I'm not going for a conquest
victory.

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ranman
Does anyone remember Empire Earth? I'd love for that game to be remade. I
truly enjoy playing Civ but the RTS side of empire earth created a dynamic mix
of technology advancement and geopolitics combined with a starcraft like
micro-management opportunity.

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anexprogrammer
To me, III was the sweet spot.

IV added some interesting ideas, and could have worked really well, but the
interface and design was an ugly mess.

V sorted the interface and design, but seemed a very shallow shadow of the
former game. It also seemed to want a ludicrous amount of resources - a simple
isometric view that always seemed to need as much PC power as Far Cry. Games
bogged down to plain slow from mid game on - too much turn waiting, not enough
playing. I gave up on V quicker than any previous Civ and spent most of my Civ
time since in Europa Universalis.

If I buy VI at all it'll be after it's been out long enough to have plenty of
_real_ reviews and opinions on how well they did. Some of the ideas sound
interesting, but the real test is how the balance ends up.

Don't like the cutesy graphics style though, so would hope for a mod or post-
processing fix.

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Mendenhall
If you liked any CIV game do yourself a favor and get the mod Fall From
Heaven, civ 4.

I really enjoyed the civ games and played all of them and this mod blows them
all away by far and im not much of a mod fan. Seriously go look it up now :)

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JauntTrooper
I strongly agree. I rarely play mods, but Fall from Heaven 2 is awesome and
totally reinvented the game in a very new and creative way. I might've played
more FfH than Civ.

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mthoms
I wonder if there are any plans to improve game engine performance on OSX. It
never seems like a high priority. I understand Windows is 80%[1] of the market
but still.

[1] Number pulled out of my butt - I've no idea the exact figure.

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distances
It's not only OSX/Linux, the Windows version is a bit embarrassing with its
performance and graphics glitches too. I really hope they're using a different
game engine for this one. Civ5 late games with massive maps are very tedious
to play even with a beefy gaming desktop.

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joshschreuder
I think the AI turns are quite CPU bound with the current engine, so I agree.
Late game end turns take forever to complete.

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acdha
Last time I profiled it, most of the execution was in vsprintf. I'm pretty
sure the answer is just “nobody put time for that in the budget”, as with
multiplayer support.

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tomashertus
And I'm still sitting here and waiting for Age of Empires 4 :/

~~~
asimuvPR
You and me, friend. Whatever happened to the MS division that published those
games?

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bdavisx
I wonder if those games didn't make money, or just didn't make enough money.
I'm thinking AoEs and Flight Sim.

~~~
tomashertus
RTS genre in general is on decline. Last good RTS was Starcraft 2. It is all
caused by the shift to MOBA games...

Also there is huge challenge to create playable RTS game with current popular
monetization strategies - in game purchases

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asimuvPR
AoE would be awful with in-game purchases. I'd rather play an old version on a
VM than go through that experience.

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nfoz
I've been playing a lot of CIV 1 lately. Because I happen to have it installed
on my travel-laptop in DOSBox. I'm sure I've clocked over 100 hours of CIV1 in
the past year.

It would be fun to upgrade to a new CIV and see how it compares. Maybe I'll do
that in October. But I might need some laptop-upgrades :)

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partycoder
I have more fun playing Civ 4 than Civ 5. I have not played Beyond Earth much
but it doesn't feel like a true spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, a much
immersive game.

I think there has been a strong pressure to make Civ more appealing to casual
audiences and this has somehow degraded the game to a more bland experience.

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toyg
I loved Civ I, trekked through the sequels, and fell in love again with Civ V
(the orgy of stats in IV was starting to kill the franchise, IMHO). I think
they are on the right track - the point of Civ is to find a balance between
statecraft drudgery and military action, and V moved the needle back towards
that ideal centre IMHO.

This new direction sounds slightly too RTS-y, but as long as they don't try to
pull a Simcity 5 ("social" games, just say no, kids!), I'm happy to give them
the benefit of the doubt.

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Aelinsaar
I really like the visual style changes, especially how resources show up on
tiles. Very nice!

Now, just to let my friends and family know that I'll be a little harder to
get hold of this autumn...

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rdl
Ugh. I wish they'd delay this for a year or two -- I'm afraid I'm going to
lose a couple weeks of my life to this game when it comes out, unless I ration
it very strictly. Civ II through V were amazing, especially with the
expansions, so a version of this made by the people who make the expansions is
going to be novel and addictive.

"Just one more turn..." is the ultimate design pattern for a game.

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endgame
Interesting. The new city system feels almost like a return to Accolade's 1996
game, "Deadlock":
[https://images-4.gog.com/b621a9344cd3732776dfe5bd8039acde7eb...](https://images-4.gog.com/b621a9344cd3732776dfe5bd8039acde7eba4f5d6a80525a663d1ac69ab39d9b.jpg)

Most improvements were sensitive to the type of tiles they built upon.

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J_Darnley
Nice but if it is only available with Steam's DRM then it will pass me by like
Beyond Earth and Starships. Civ5 fooled me, I won't get fooled again.

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BatFastard
Hopefully they can add some AI that is not totally lame.

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VT_Drew
Agreed. I was kind of disappointed in the "AI" in Civ V. The first time I
played and an country denounced me I obliterated them off the map and thought
to myself, no one else will be foolish enough to denounce me now. Wrong, if
you take over nation completely then everyone starts to denounce you, that is
the way the "AI" is programed to think.

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mwfunk
I dunno, makes sense to me. Annexing one nation will make all the others fear
and hate you even more, of course they'll denounce you. A big part of the game
is figuring out how to walk the line between expansion and alienating the
other civs.

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VT_Drew
They can fear and hate me, as long as they are too scared to do anything about
it.

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kirubakaran
It would be interesting if they logged the total hours everyone spends on it.

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nedwin
Am I the only one who wants to play this in VR with a Vive?

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hosh
I remember this kind of city building in Alpha Centauri.

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zem
i really like the idea of having tech advances depend on in-game actions.
likewise the idea that city improvements would be more linked to geography.

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enraged_camel
I love the Civilization series, but I'll be honest: it really bothers me that
certain companies have one or two franchises and they keep churning out new
iterations of them every year or every other year. It just feels like a money
grab after a while (especially with franchises like Call of Duty or Madden,
which, from my perspective, don't improve appreciably in between iterations).

I'd like to see them taking some risks and innovating new franchises, and
perhaps even new genres.

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dragonwriter
> I love the Civilization series, but I'll be honest: it really bothers me
> that certain companies have one or two franchises and they keep churning out
> new iterations of them every year or every other year.

The main Civ series has had a new base-game release every 4-6 years, not every
year or every other year.

Civ I: 1990 Civ II: 1996 (6 years) Civ III: 2001 (5 years) Civ IV: 2005 (4
years) Civ V: 2010 (5 years) Civ VI: 2016 (6 years)

~~~
wolfgke
Not to forget:

Civilization: Call to Power (1999)

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (continuing where Civilization II ended) (1999)

Call to Power II (2000)

Civilization: Beyond Earth (2014): Spiritual sequel to Sid Meier's Alpha
Centauri.

There are of course other PC games that are related to the Civilization series
but those are IMHO further away from the "main Civilization series".

~~~
dragonwriter
SMAC and the Call to Power series were made by different companies than the
main Civ series, even though, through the process of the various sales and
mergers since, all the rights related to them are, I think, in the same place
_now_.

~~~
Quinner
SMAC was the same people, though you're correct about CtP.

~~~
dragonwriter
> SMAC was the same people,

SMAC was made by the same _people_ (at least, some of the key people) that
made Civ I-II, at a different company (Firaxis) from the one then producing
and controlling the IP for the main Civ series (MicroProse) who had, IIRC,
laid them off.

Several acquisitions and spinoffs of everyone involved, and all the rights are
now with Take-Two, of which Firaxis is now a studio under the 2K games
umbrella.

