
Sid Meier’s Civilization VI - ZoeZoeBee
http://store.steampowered.com/app/289070
======
throwaway7767
Just started this yesterday. I like some of the new mechanics, multi-tile
cities especially.

That AI though... declares war on you for no reason. In my first game, five AI
players decided to declare war on me out of the blue within the space of three
turns. This was in the early game and there was no obvious reason for it. Some
of them didn't even border me, and I was no military threat at that time.

In the second game, I had a city with districts that reached out to the end of
my city's border. One of the AIs decided to place a city right next to my
border and the very next turn expresses nervousness at my troop buildup near
its border. The troops being the units fortifying my city, which were there
before it settled its city.

It's like playing against a schizophrenic.

~~~
partycoder
Certain Civs are more aggressive than others. I remember that the Aztecs in
Civ 4 were especially aggressive. Try to not piss them off.

After Civ beyond the sword, some Civs would express their aggression in terms
of espionage.

~~~
LoSboccacc
also Indian with Gandhi, as a shoot out to a bug that goes back to the first
game and was the most classic case of unsigned overflow.

~~~
patio11
Never before has an HN comment caused me to think back over 20 years and say
"So much that I never understood now _makes sense_."

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edem
I wonder when will they make a real sequel to Alpha Centauri. I think it is
still the best Civilization game out there. For me Beyond Earth seemed like a
bland reskin. In AC you could terraform, do social engineering and design your
own units. I havent seen something like that ever since.

~~~
throwaway7767
Oh yes, a real successor to SMAC would be terrific. I liked Beyond Earth but
it wasn't Alpha Centauri.

I tried playing SMAC the other day but I had trouble adjusting myself to the
dated interface, even though I spent so many hours playing it years back. I'd
be happy with a remake of SMAC with the same gameplay but updated graphics and
interface (especially the ability to give move orders that take several
turns).

No Civ game comes close to Alpha Centauri for atmosphere.

~~~
anbende
The atmosphere? Oh man, so good. I loved the little quotes in the descriptions
of new technology. They got darker as the tech got higher up the tree. I still
remember the gist of the one for human cloning:

"She's gone. She said she wants nothing more to do with me. But I saved a lock
of her hair. She will be mine again..."

Still gives me shivers.

~~~
grotsnot
That's... not entirely accurate:
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri#P...](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri#Peacekeeping_Forces)
(2nd one for Peacekeepers)

    
    
        I loved my chosen. How then to face the day when she left me? So I took from her body a single cell, perhaps to love her again.
            Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Time of Bereavement"
    
    

I didn't consider until now that it might be a little ambiguous, but I'm
pretty sure the implication is not that Lal's chosen broke up with him, but
that she died.

~~~
anbende
Thanks. I guess it's gotten a little more twisted in my memory over the years.

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lordnacho
I learned an incredible amount from this series. Pretty much every Civ, tech,
religion, civic, or unit with a special name ("Hoplite") is a story in itself
worth reading about. Not just the civilopedia, which is a good start.

I may have spent more time playing this game than reading actual history
books.

~~~
oblio
If you want to go into overdrive, try Europa Universalis 4. It's basically
Civilization, turned up a notch.

~~~
dagw
I'd say it more like compare an arcade flight sim to a hardcore military
flight sim. From a distance one might just look like a more advanced version
of the other, but they're fundamentally very different games that appeal to
different audiences (despite there being some obvious overlap).

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galfarragem
I would like to see a remastered Colonization. Colonization IMO is way more
original than Civilization and one of the best games ever made.

~~~
masklinn
There is a Civilization IV: Colonization
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_IV:_Colonization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_IV:_Colonization)).
I found it to be a terrible remake compared to my memories of the old
Colonization, though those may be rose-tinted at this point.

~~~
jbmorgado
Yes, that just plays basically as a Civ IV scenario, not a real Colonization
game.

Perhaps it's because my introduction to the Civ series was made by the
original Colonization, but for me that will always be the most addicting of
all the Civ series.

~~~
masklinn
I don't think it's fair to call the original Colonization a Civ, it was a
completely different 4X with its own principle and gameplay.

I liked it because it played much more tactically than Civ, with much more
micro-management of individual colonies, and way more interesting interactions
with non-civ players (native tribes)

Sadly that style doesn't seem to have been pursued much, or if it was I missed
those, the 4X I've played since mostly seem to follow Civ's relatively
remote/high level investment in cities.

~~~
eropple
It's a difficult style of 4X to build (I've tried, it's probably my favorite
Meier 4X title). In particular, I think it's almost untenable for a
multiplayer-focused title, which most 4X games tend to be these days; I don't
think the flow of it, that level of micro, really works in a hotseat or
concurrent environment. The economics of the game are really cool, but
balancing that against other players or modern-quality AIs (the AIs in the
original are basically nonfunctional) is a tricky task. I think the focus on
making 4X games into multiplayer experiences is kind of suboptimal, but I
think that's also what the playerbase seems to want.

Also, the topic itself is kind of messed up for a video game, in that doing it
justice is really difficult. Like, in retrospect, while I dearly love the
game, Colonization is deeply problematic in the worldview it pushes (while the
manual for the game is notable in being pretty up-front about the shitty
behaviors of the colonial powers, the game itself plays as straight as "in
fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue") and I think,
in order to ethically create a similar game, you have to challenge the default
assumptions a lot more. And that's a really tough line to walk: on one hand,
you _do_ want to make it possible to dispace and wage war on the natives,
because that _happened_ , but that comes with its own ethical problems that I
don't think a game is very good at exploring (and yet I feel _needs_ to
explore in order to treat the historical topic appropriately). The only nod in
Col to the general shittiness of European colonial powers in the New World was
a score penalty when you burned native villages, and that's not nothing, but
it also isn't a _lot_ given the game they were working with.

The best idea I came up with was the synthesis of a fake Wikipedia article
after the end of the game, but that's going to be more of a lecture after-the-
fact than a conscious exploration of player decisions as they progressed.

It's a really, really hard one to tackle. I'd love to take another crack at it
someday.

~~~
masklinn
> It's a difficult style of 4X to build (I've tried, it's probably my favorite
> Meier 4X title). In particular, I think it's almost untenable for a
> multiplayer-focused title, which most 4X games tend to be these days; I
> don't think the flow of it, that level of micro, really works in a hotseat
> or concurrent environment.

Makes sense. I only play solo 4X so I don't really see that, or care.

> Also, the topic itself is kind of messed up for a video game

The topic is a side-issue, you could make a similar micro/tactical 4X with a
completely different settings, it's not like all 4X have the same premises.
Hell, not even all Civs have the same premise (if you consider Alpha Centauri
and Beyond Earth Civs anyway)

~~~
eropple
You totally could attach it to a different setting, but figuring out that
setting is in itself tricky! Like, I think a bunch of the military dynamic in
the game is tied to the pseudohistoricity of it. While it isn't strictly
historically accurate that, for example, dragoons devolve into soldiers when
defeated, there's a certain amount of concreteness to the concepts involved
(okay, you lose your horses before your guns) that makes a lot of sense. So I
think you could make a more micromanagement-focused 4X, but I don't think you
could really learn too many lessons beyond the very general ones from Col in
the process just because so many of the game concepts are so tightly tied to
the historical context around it. (That's huge, huge praise for Col, btw. It
uses its setting to inform game features, not to merely dress them up in the
way that, say, Civ does.)

For another example of a game that sort of falls down when it becomes so
unmoored from something we recognize as reality, I'd like to suggest Pandora:
First Contact. In addition to just not being a super-great game, I feel like
the fact that it relies on transposing "familiar" concepts to an unfamiliar
environment and just totally falls over in the process. Ditto Beyond Earth.
Alpha Centauri actively _doesn 't_ do that, but it was also designed by Brian
Reynolds and he's a rather sharp individual. =)

~~~
masklinn
> Like, I think a bunch of the military dynamic in the game is tied to the
> pseudohistoricity of it. While it isn't strictly historically accurate that,
> for example, dragoons devolve into soldiers when defeated, there's a certain
> amount of concreteness to the concepts involved (okay, you lose your horses
> before your guns) that makes a lot of sense.

Sure but I don't think that's a very important/interesting part of Col, and
you could always have that with mounted or mechanised units in other settings.
The most interesting parts of Colonisation to me were the management of
cities, their very specific resources, the colonists/workers and their
specialisations, and the necessary setup of trade/exchange links (both with AI
and between your own colonies as you might have raw resource cities which are
not amenable to extension and processing, so you'd have a small colony
producing a ton of e.g. tobacco or sugar — either directly or through native
allies — and a bigger one processing them into cigars).

The big sticking point I think would be Col's early reliance on the "mother
nation" for economic needs (selling goods, raw materials and new colonists).

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mattnumbe
I didn't get into the series until 5, but I'm really glad I did. The AI wasn't
so good, but the mods that were built for it are fantastic and solve so many
issues with the game. Even only exploring the map and fighting off raging
barbarians can be fun. Anyone have any favorite MODs? I've been playing the
community mod for a while. It's incredible the amount of work fans put into
that game. I want to thank them all for making rainy days a lot more
enjoyable. A bottle of wine and a friend makes for a great Civ V experience.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
I don't recall their names right now, but I have a pair of barbarian upgrading
mods I'm running right now that are tons of fun. All the Civs is constantly at
the grips of a disorganized barbarian horde with their own technology tree.

InfoAddict is a awesome for getting a higher level view of what's happening in
the game.

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kubami
I am surprised no one mentioned freeciv yet. I used to play Civ II on Amiga.
After moving to linux on a PC I found myself missing Civ and found freeciv. It
was even better than Civ because of the multiplayer aspect of it. I played
with my friends over 'LAN' over serial port connection. Ah! Good times!

~~~
partycoder
I played FreeCiv, especially when I first moved to Linux. They were first at
having hexagonal tiles. There is also a web version.

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stiangrindvoll
Waiting patiently for the Linux release... ;)

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SwellJoe
I simply won't buy it until there's a Linux version. It's pretty much my rule
for games these days...if I have to reboot to play, I know I'll almost never
play, so I just don't buy Windows-only games.

I only switched to Civ V from IV because it has a Linux version (and Civ IV
does not, though it does run reasonably well under Wine, though I hate the
fiddling required to keep Wine and GPu drivers happy through OS upgrades and
such). Civ V runs as well under Linux as it does under Windows; not perfect,
mind you, but it's not perfect under Windows either.

~~~
partycoder
Civ 4 works well under wine until you research the calendar. Then you need to
save, exit to the main menu and load the game again.

~~~
partycoder
Well, don't get me wrong. I play Civ 4 under wine every other day. I think it
works great, except for that bug that would appear every game.

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bkmn
The mechanics of Civ VI seems great, but I’m not to keen on the new, cartoony,
style of graphics...

And why couldn’t they keep the fantastic Art Deco-style UI?

~~~
usrusr
The world rendering is different than before, but in a less unpleasant way
than I expected. I wholeheartedly agree about the UI though. A chaotic mess of
styles, typefaces, colors and scales. Also the font rendering seems a bit
wonky in places, like when you mix system rendering with text rendered to
bitmap on a different engine.

But civs are like shoes, the new ones never fit as well as those that are
already well worn in.

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Hermel
The newer victory options, such as "cultural victory" always felt a little
artificial to me. Did they improve that in civilization VI? Also, I watched
part of the AI battle royale this week, and one of the developers commented
that domination victories in such battles among AI players would be very rare.
That's a pity, because IMHO this is the most fun way to win.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I played a lot of Civ I and III, but kind of stopped after that. Culture was
present in III while being almost useless except as a way to prevent you from
founding cities near other players.

But I personally love the idea of cultural victory. Military victories are an
easy way to win, but they feel unsatisfying to me because you never develop
high technology. Advancing your civilization needs to have some payoff.

A lot of games lean heavily on having you judge a "guns or butter" tradeoff,
where if you don't produce enough otherwise worthless guns, someone else will
come in and take all your nice stuff. I prefer to play in an all butter style,
where you're competing over how well you develop yourself rather than how well
you can balance an unfun military tax against fun development.

~~~
zelias
If you're looking for a "butter only" game centered around economic
competition, I highly recommend Offworld Trading Company
([http://www.offworldgame.com/](http://www.offworldgame.com/)).

~~~
nylonstrung
Coincidentally designed by the lead designer of Civ 4

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cZuLi
"Just... one... more... turn..." A typical sentence player.

~~~
argio
[https://arcaderagedotco.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/mart-
vir...](https://arcaderagedotco.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/mart-virkus-how-
every-civilization-game-ends-up-arcade-rage.jpg?w=660)

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anexprogrammer
I always thought III was the sweet spot for Civ. They've changed hands a
couple of times, so perhaps it's because of new teams, but it's never quite
seemed on target since III. IV had a rubbish interface, V used insane amounts
of CPU mid game on, and I wasn't that convinced by single troop per space.

It's not just that I'm older and less interested in games - there's still the
odd one makes me think I need rehab. Factorio managed to achieve it early this
year! I'll undoubtedly buy VI and play it though.

~~~
bryanlarsen
If you look in older HN threads about Civilization, for every version of
Civilization you'll find somebody claiming it's the best. And they'll have
valid reasons for their claim.

~~~
toomanybeersies
That's one thing I love about Civ. Every game is still so playable because
they all have their own individual strong points.

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mholt
Did that trailer show a Dragon capsule on the rocket booster at the very end?

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joss82
Indeed it does!

Even though the Dragon's engines are for emergency take off or surface
landing, they would not be used in space in real life, unless I'm mistaken.

Pretty sweat that they included it in the trailer, though!

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vilmosi
Last night I started a game just to get a feel of it. Before I knew it, it was
3 am :/

~~~
partycoder
Unless you are playing online, it's better to save and resume later. Enable
the in-game clock or set an alarm.

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ungzd
There's something unpleasant in graphical style. Similar to standard "chinese
warcraft clone" style which is default game style these days, but not quite
it. Reminds me about Clash of kings.

~~~
partycoder
This style is more similar to Civ III and IV. Civ V had a more "serious" art
style, with normal proportions and a more natural color palette.

Personally I am among the people that enjoyed Civ III and IV more than any
other Civ. Civ Beyond Earth had good potential and I was legitimally hyped by
the trailer, but the game was less fun than Alpha Centauri.

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aRationalMoose
I prefer Galactic Civ for the sole reason that the AI is wayyyy more
interesting. Civ's AI i have always found somewhat lackluster.

~~~
warfangle
Is it though? I found GC AI to be laughably easy, even on the hardest
settings.

A third of the way through a game and my military units are orders of
magnitude better than my opponents, because the AI doesn't know to stack
traits.

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yread
And 1500 lucky bastards already reviewed it!

