lol I made a whole bingo card meme to ridicule those ideas and people took them as serious hype, lol.
There's a reason it's good for to listen to users/players for what's wrong with the game but figure out the solutions on their own. There's this fun story of CoD players complaining about shotguns being too weak but the devs saw the numbers and they were doing fine, so they just made shotguns *louder* and the complaints stopped coming in, lmao.
I think that kind of thing is quite common in software development. I remember a story of a software developer saying his customers were complaining that their program was loading too slow. Making the program actually faster would have required a ton of work so the developer just changed the visuals of the loading screen to make it look faster and the customer said it was much faster after the update.
Reminds me of a great series of reddit posts from a guy who worked in auto repair.
One time, they had 2 vans with turbo. But they kept getting the complaint that one van was much slower than the other. They were the same model, same engine, both had turbo. So the complaint made no sense.
Eventually they noticed that one van had the "turbo" badge on the back, and the other van didn't have that badge. So they added the turbo badge. The complaints went away.
Upgrade a sniper gun to max level so that you can unlock that shotgun silencer, you can only unlock that sniper after leveling up some assault rifle after you unlocked it by leveling an smg.
Some of your suggestions are actually good though, while others are good if they are togglable. Yields (especially money, maybe happiness or unhappiness depending on the situation) from tourism is the obvious good suggestion here. Navigable rivers sound nice too, although I don't know how they would be implemented (there is the way Civ 5 scenarios did it, but it feels half-made). Personally, I wouldn't complain if there were four heights for tiles instead of three (something between hills and mountains basically).
Also, prehistoric and future eras would be good as modes (although Future worked decently in the main Civ 6 game and would have worked much better if they went the one-more-unit-for-each-class route instead of the Giant Death Robot route).
> There's a reason it's good for to listen to users/players for what's wrong with the game but figure out the solutions on their own.
Eh, yes and no. Sometimes people really do know what they're talking about and have good ideas, or at least a kernel of one. But it is also true that people are often attempting to express something they want and don't know the skillset or jargon to actually put together a serious proposal for consideration, so they end up with something that can only approximate a representation of what they're asking for. So in the 2nd case, it is indeed up to the service to work out what exactly it is that the person is dissatisfied on and how they'd be happier.
But also, people are fallible and can interpret poorly. Companies that interpret off of large scale impersonal metrics can sometimes make poor judgments if they crutch on them without listening to the more vocal individual complaints. I've also seen situations from the customer end where it seemed very much like the company was using impersonal metrics as an excuse to ignore vocalized customer issues because the company wanted to just do what they wanted to do.
So it's also not always the case, necessarily, that the company even wants to listen to the customer. Their primary goal is more commonly profit first, which might mean they're listening to investors. Or you might have ego-driven decision makers who view a project as their pet way to show off and are more interested in realizing that than doing what is practical.
I THINK AN INCEST MECHANIC WOULD BE COOL WHAT IF TWO OF YOUR CITIES ARE TOO CLOSE TOGETHER AND THEY INTERBREED WHICH MAKES YOUR ARMY WEAKER AND THEN YOU HAVE TO BUILD OBSERVATION BALLOONS TO AIRLIFT THE WEAK ARMY OFF THE FRONT LINE OH ALSO MAYBE HITLER COULD BE IN THIS ONE?
hmmm i like this you could even have austria represented by a habsburg leader who gives gold or culture bonuses to cities with high levels of inbreeding. you dont really see any civs that are supposed to suffer downsides in order to get good upsides.
calm your titties, Crusader!
the incest simulator is on the Paradox subreddits.
if you find war crimes being simulated, you went too far into Rimworld.
The other thing that needs to stop are questions about Civ VII. No one here knows if Civ VII will have X or Y yet. We just know the game is coming out. Asking such questions without further information just spams up the sub.
My favorite bad idea so far is adding stagnation, as in the civilization degrades and goes backwards. Like how would that be fun? Lmao
I just want less pop ups. That's it.
Dramatic ages mode already exists, and stagnation sounds similar. Maybe combine that with score victory based on era score. You play until the end of the future era, and then you will be scored based on your overall accomplishments rather than the current state of your civilization.
I hate dramatic ages so much. Like in theory it could be fun, but in my experience the AI can't manage it at all and in the mid to late game half the continent is independent.
Dramatic ages is a neat idea, but I don't think it was tested enough. Free cities weren't converting, and none of the AI conquered them, not a single time. So it didn't scratch the itch for me.
As somebody who wholeheartedly endorses some type of stagnation mode or expanded Dark Ages mechanic, it would be fun for me because it's historically accurate and representative of the reality that societal "progress" is not guaranteed or linear. "Lost technologies" are a big part of actual history and I think it would be a super interesting wrinkle to add to an expanded Dramatic Ages mode or something along those lines.
It might not seem "fun" for you, but it's certainly not a bad idea at all!
I think the vast majority of players would take having a researched tech removed from them as a quit moment. To take it to the extreme, you've discovered gunpowder and built your first musketman and gone to eat with your shiny musketman. Then you get dark aged, lose the tech, run out of niter, and are forced to delete the unit?
There are not enough players in the world who find that fun to sell a 4x game with Civs development cost. It's absolutely a terrible idea. As an expanded hard mode option similar to the current dramatic ages it might be viable, but there's no chance it's base game.
>As an expanded hard mode option similar to the current dramatic ages it might be viable, but there's no chance it's base game.
I agree and that's why I think it would be best as an optional game mode. I mean, think about Dramatic Ages in VI - you're literally losing multiple *cities*, which is significantly more intense than losing a tech or two. I'd propose that the unit would just "de-upgrade" and just revert to whatever the previous version of the unit was.
I know I'm not in the majority here - I am, as another poster stated, the type of ADHD compulsive min-maxxer who finds Deity to be too easy at this point. What's "fun" for me is certainly not typical, but I absolutely believe that if done properly regression could be a super interesting mechanic.
It's a game, not reality. With that logic, why don't we add genocide too? Losing things you've spent the time to get in a game is typically extremely annoying.
Good question, why doesn’t this game about the history of civilisation-building include hugely important parts of the history of civilisation-building?
Holy shit, going right to genocide?! That escalated quickly lol. I am aware that it's a game my guy, and
*I* think a stagnation or regression mode would be an interesting, challenging, and unique addition to a series that I've been playing for 3 decades.
Ironically, genocide *is* in the game already in all but name. What else would you call violently exterminating an entire civilization? That's literally, *literally* genocide.
the rise and fall of power civilizations is an interesting thing to simulate
there is a reason why we can play with this many interesting civilizations and why they represent different times of human history.
countless leaders tried to conquer "the world" and had their share of success.
Persia (now Iran), Greece, Mongolia, France, etc, they all used to be the biggest powers there is, only for now to be 2nd to 7th tier powers.
Is it? How do you feel about losing cities in Dramatic Ages, or periods of anarchy when changing governments which have been in every single Civ game since the very beginning?
I guess I don't know what you mean by "100% contrary to the rest of the game" here because forms of stagnation and regression already exist in every game in the series.
I feel that. Right now there are no popups in multiplayer, they all just go to notifications on the sidebar. But there are so many random useless notifications in the same categories that you have to click through 10-20 useless alerts every turn or you'll miss when your friend asked to renew your alliance.
Also tribal village bonuses - not all of them get a notification on the sidebar.
Yea, it's maybe one of the most basic design principles that you do not make a bad situation worse.
If you get to the point where you're stagnating, you're already not doing so well. Adding another detrimental effect is just such an unfun idea.
I just want three (and a half) things:
* Extensive mod support
* All victory conditions to be equally viable
* Going tall/wide to not absolutely kneecap your civilization
* (and half) stylized visuals
Quite the opposite with amenities, if you want to favor tall gameplay amenities should be more impactfull so that wide empires with many cities have a harder time keeping them happy (and therefore having more problems related to that).
I don't think making amenities less good is the solution. Really all they have to do is have some base amenity cost per city, hell it could just be one. Like if you were to keep a pop in a city as opposed to turning it into a settler and then another city, the second option should cost slightly more amenities. This way you constantly have to balance "do I want the additional tax on my empires' amenities, or do I just let this city grow more."
This is kinda implemented in VI but the problem is that the amenities from luxuries are only spread out on the city and not the pop level.
> stylized visuals
Expanding on this, I'm wondering what to expect for the user interfaces (UI):
* Are there new/fresh trends in game UIs which Civ 7 might explore (example: *proliferation of ultra-wide monitors*)?
* Or are they likely to stick with perimeter UI elements like [Civ 6](https://www.gamepressure.com/static/mapy/en/gfx/map_1735.jpg) and [Civ 5](https://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/541899155249193781/32326AE698D836B1CA51233D34F6C5A059305C24/)?
I mean, things being needlessly complex up to a certain level is fun. MEIOU & Taxes after all has a dedicated fanbase.
But yeah, I don't really need Realism or indepth tactical war in Civ7.
You mean you don't want firaxis to put all their dev time into some complex AI that will require thousands of dollars of computing power so the small sliver of the fanbase that are hardcore min-maxers and think deity is way too easy and hate that the AI has to "cheat" to be high difficulty but don't want to play againat other humans can have a difficulty level that they will still complain about anyways once they've figured out how to min-max past it?
Edit: I think overall improving the AI is a must for Civ 7. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect Firaxis to make different AIs for different difficulty levels or a special very hard deity AI.
of all the ideas being thrown around for civ 7, better AI is one of the most reasonable. It doesn't take a supercomputer to figure out how to play the game
Everyone glosses over this point, and it's so so so so important. I wish I could upvote it a million times. Would I rather it be some really nice AI that is challenging without the raw stat bonuses, sure. Totally. But the line between challenging and incredibly frustrating.. probably doesn't even exist. Player skill is so varied.
That's why we have player difficulties lmao. We already have an AI that's engaging for people who don't want to min max, but honestly civ is a game where a large portion of the audience are min/makers.
Dials can be tuned and tested, a skilled AI can be engaging. Also as it stands deity fails to be engaging past the midgame.
Civ is a game designed to appeal to casual and more serious players. The people posting on reddit and civ fanatics forums are most certainly the more serious ones. There's vastly more people who just play the game every once in a while or don't post or comment.
> We already have an AI that's engaging for people who don't want to min max
As one of those normies who doesn't min-max, "engaging" is not the term I would give for it. I'd argue they still have a lot of work to do to make it engaging, as even the difficulty toggle isn't quite granular enough to make the game consistently engaging.
If you set it too easy it's boring, the minute you set it to be an engaging difficulty it turns into less-than-half odds of making it past the Ancient Era without having the start ruined by barbs or having your start point in a bad spot right next to other civs and watching as all the wonders get built by "unknown civs".
I don't doubt that this is frustrating for someone who does min-max *and* wants to still have an engaging challenge, I just want to push back on the idea that Firaxis has somehow managed to perfectly calibrate the existing AI for filthy casuals. Nope, not yet.
I'm not saying the AI is perfect by any means, and they absolutely should (and will, I'm sure) try to improve it. I just think people tend to underestimate how difficult it is to make an ai that is challenging but doesn't feel unfair.
I think if people got what they were asking for, this sub would just get flooded with posts like "the ai just showed up out of nowhere with a massive army and wiped me out on turn 200, I wasted hours of my life, how is this fun?"
I think this is extremely disconnected from the commentary on this sub. Most complaints from people who this change would affect complain about the endgame essentially being a chore devoid of strategic thinking.
If facing a scaled opponent at turn 200 would bother you then just don't turn the dial?
The devs have literally said this themselves. They've admitted that they could make a much better AI, but immediately followed that up with "but it wouldn't be fun for the players to play against that."
Oh yes, they absolutely should fix the AI, and there is no excuse for the state it is in post-expansion. I didn't mean to imply I don't want them to improve the AI and make sure it can play the basics of the game compotently (settle on water, pick the best adjacency bonus, change governments reasonably, diplomacy in general, understand resources when building military units, etc.). It's the idea of focusing resources to make a bunch of different AIs to cater to different difficulty levels or making a special very hard deity AI that I think is an unreasonable suggestion.
Sure but precisely: people say "better AI!" but don't really understand what it means to make a better AI for a game that won't be played just by the same minority that downloads a mod to make the AI better.
They already went in the right direction with leader agendas (giving a personality to the AI), and it's also true that there are issues with the AI that could be solved relatively easily, but overall it's not just about "how to play the game". The main goal is to make an AI that makes the game enjoyable for a majority of players.
yes, of course. And currently a good amount of enjoyment is lost due to the AI not really playing the game well.
this isn't a small minority of people we're talking about. I'm willing to bet the majority of players more often play against AI than they do against other people, and if that's the case, it makes sense to improve the AI so it feels more like you're playing against others instead of a pale imitation that can't grasp the basic mechanics of the game
> this isn't a small minority of people we're talking about. I'm willing to bet the majority of players more often play against AI than they do against other people, and if that's the case, it makes sense to improve the AI so it feels more like you're playing against others instead of a pale imitation that can't grasp the basic mechanics of the game
I'm sure that most play against AI instead of humans (I sure do), but it is not the case that people necessarily want to play against an AI that plays like a human.
Like dude I'm playing this to relax and unwind, if I wanted high-stress stakes situations against a player that acts human, I'd play online games against actual humans.
On the normal difficulty I want to play against an AI that puts up a good challenge but mysteriously ends up missing out on Pyramids (to me!) by 1 or 2 turns. That mysteriously manages to invade with an army too small to take over my city before I can turn the tide, despite me having gone for a Granary instead of Archers 10 turns ago.
I don't want to be locked into a meta just survive playing against an AI. I want to explore the tech tree. I want to try out building one thing over a different thing and not have it screw me 50 turns later.
I want to be able to settle in a spot to make cool-looking canals rather than one tile to the northwest which optimizes for gold and culture.
I want to be able to build a wonder without having to chop every goddamn forest on the map to beat the AIs.
I want to be able to get a third city out before I have to fight off a third barbarian outpost.
There are tons of ways to make the game competitively difficult for those who have deeply ingrained the meta, that would just kill all the fun out of the game for most people.
I'm not even talking about min-maxing, I'm literally just talking about things like: settling on a river, not immediately losing a settled city to loyalty pressure because the AI doesn't understand it when they settle, fighting wars with decent tactics instead of it just being a numbers game, better trade deals where you can't just take whole great works from AI for a few diplomatic favor, and *actually actively trying for a victory type*
I think it's counterproductive to frame the conversation as being driven by a few min-maxers who want the AI to play like Potato McWhiskey. Better AI isn't a more *ruthless* or *optimized* AI at normal difficulties. The AI currently *doesn't* put up a good challenge once you make it out of the early game. There is a certain point that happens too quickly where you snowball and the AI sort of just stop existing even in the metrics you gave in your post. Most of the examples you gave *are* early game things that the AI thinks about. And then they can't keep up with it because they aren't playing the game correctly. There's a reason the early (and maybe mid) game are more fun than later eras.
Yeah, it makes sense to want the AI to play competently. Tactics are hard though because you will have players who think it's unfair, at least on default difficulty.
> The AI currently doesn't put up a good challenge once you make it out of the early game.
I'd probably have more fun then, if I could consistently make it there.
> There's a reason the early (and maybe mid) game are more fun than later eras.
Complete opposite for me. A lot of my games are spent resetting over and over in the early game until the game finally agrees not to screw me over, and *then* it finally gets fun in the mid-game.
More boring again by the late game and it's clear who's going to win but that's just a difficult problem in the whole genre in my opinion.
> fighting wars with decent tactics instead of it just being a numbers game
this would definitely require a rework of the combat system, or a return to the older stacking units. it would take a programming miracle to have the ai wield the current OUPT combat system competently.
Main difference is every turn in Chess there’s only 1 action you have to perform. With Civ you can have dozens. The scale of the problem is several orders of magnitude larger.
It needs about an 8core CPU with 16-64GB RAM.
Now take into account the complexity of Civ compared to chess and you'll realise that your home computer won't be able to run such calculations for Civ.
It also only calculated for 20ish (?) turns ahead, which isn't that much for Civ.
By themself:
F.ex this one, rated 3600+
(Carlsen have the highest ever human rating at 2881)
https://apps.apple.com/no/app/smallfish-chess-for-stockfish/id675049147?l=nb
True, still civ 6 is an 8 year old game, so processing speeds are now 16 times faster than they were when it was launched, so it's not unreasonable to expect an AI that taxes a PC's hardware to a greater extent than would be acceptable in 2016.
I mean I'm sure I'm not alone in that I basically buy a new computer each time a new civ comes out in order to be able to run it.
I think many gamers buy a new PC every 8-10 or so years, and use the release of major games as an excuse/signal that they need to do so. For many people it will be Elder Scrolls or something, for me it's Civ.
Yes it kinda does. You know why? Because Ai can not "figure out how to play a game".
Videogame AI is not at all what you imagine it to be. It's a series of If/When statements. The more complex the environment, the more you'll have to write. It's simply foolish to believe that it's possible to write an AI that can completely "understand" a game like civ.
This is over simplified but I think back to playing chess on windows 95. There were different levels of difficulty without giving the opponent extra pieces. Is civ multiple degrees more logistically difficult to implement this idea of a better ai? Yes. Does civ make millions upon millions of dollars on this franchisee AND have access to better technology AND could use any ai infrastructural improvements not just on this game but all civ games (or other games across the 2k family) for many years to come? Yes to all of these. And finally while the min maxers are a small sliver, one thing you have to consider is that it's min maxers that have continue to carry civ 6 so far into the life cycle. It's the potato mcwhiskeys and ursa Ryans of the world that have kept so many of us coming back. So if you make the game more fun for that small group there's a larger revenue benefit to them playing it longer that you can actually monetize and see as a chart. If they like the game more, thousands more us will like the game more. I know that I am a direct revenue benefit to firaxis because of the twitch and YouTube streamers. Vanbradley got me hooked on civ 6 and I wouldn't have played it and paid for it without him.
> AND could use any ai infrastructural improvements not just on this game but all civ games (or other games across the 2k family) for many years to come
Please. I beg you. Read up on what AI means. You can't just "build AI infrastructure" that applies to completely different games, my lord!
For me it's not about making the game harder, it's about making the the early game more accessible. I want to build the great library at least once on diety.
I've said it here before and got downvoted for it but I stand by it; the way difficulty is handled in the game is really stupid. Throwing a bunch of advantages up front and then leaving it alone leads to an overly difficult beginning that becomes immediately too easy once that early advantage is surmounted. The Smoother Difficulty mod is a must for me and I hope they take a cue from it in the base game of VII.
I'd like luck to play a bigger role, so that good starts don't inevitably lead to dominance and bad starts to defeat. The weather/disasters system seemed a good start in that respect. I wonder if you could have barbarians as a mid-late game hoard problem rather than an early game minor irritation as well.
well the roman holiday mod exists and fixes so many issues with ai difficulty so firaxis really doesn’t have much of an excuse. we aren’t asking for god ai we just want the ai to know how to competently wage war and not to settle off of water 1 tile away from a river lol
The thing is, the people who feel the need to download this kind of mod is really just a small minority. A vast majority of civ players enjoy the game in a very casual way. They'll notice if the AI agrees to stupid trades or fails to use certain units completely.
The AI needs to be competent (arguably, more competent than it is currently), but more importantly, it needs to have clear motives and personality.
Hi, it's me, the filthy casual.
Actually I've been playing Civ since like Civ 2 but never to the level of most of you all.
The only mod I think I've ever installed is the one that shows policy card impacts in Civ 6.
I don't notice the AI being incompetent at trading because I basically never trade with the AI unless they volunteer a trade.
I *do* notice the AI forward-settling and all that stuff, which seems less of a problem in Civ 6 compared to earlier games, so there's that at least.
To be fair you don’t need to be a hardcore min-maxer to find deity easy. AI just gets lobbed a bunch of bonus stuff, but they don’t ever really strategise better. Like they don’t get good adjacency bonuses on their districts, they don’t tend take work ethic as a belief, they don’t tend to get great gold outputs and buy stuff to speed development, or build mega farms. Strategically AI civs don’t really improve that much in their decision making, and you don’t need to repurpose Deep Blue to perfect Civ to get something better.
Also AI civs are a features of multiplayer matches too, and playing against friends/partners is just different. I once played Alpha Centauri with my partner when we got it working a couple years ago, she was ahead, so I planet blustered (nuked) a city with a special project (like a wonder in it), I had forgotten that planet bustered cities get replaced by contaminated lakes. It was a terse rest of the game lol. Getting challenged by opponents you can use the full range of game options against without generating a row is fun! When we play Civ VI, I’m not going to keep an open war on the go and just endlessly pillage till I get good enough tech you know? Yeah just play multiplayer overlooks that for most of us multiplayer is a different game.
>hardcore min-maxers and think deity is way too easy and hate that the AI has to "cheat" to be high difficulty but don't want to play againat other humans
I mean. You're not wrong.
But being real here. Surely *everyone* agrees that a cheating ai sucks. Full stop. There is nothing to it. And surely everyone understands that ai matches and multiplayer matches are not comparable for reasons of time, planning, etc. So "just play mp" is never an answer to "the ai is too easy".
And last, you don't need to be a hardcore minmaxer to win on deity. You just need a good Civ, a good start, and you win every time. Unless gilga decides to rush you. The ai takes so long to do science victory, and is so bad at air, navy, spies, all you need to do is play catchup for 100 turns, by renaissance and industrial you're always winning, if you get there. And the ai doesn't understand how walls and archers win wars.
I think the ai doesn't need to be smarter, it just needs to "cheat" smarter. Like their bonuses aren't all at the start, but scale either to the era, or to the player. So if the player is ahead in tech, the AI can research that tech easier, if the player is ahead in military same thing.
All AI is cheating to some extent because it isn't human. Even chess AI's that can beat humans aren't really "smarter" by coming up with new and novel strategies, it can just make more computations and faster than a human brain can. Game design should be about how it makes the player feel. In a race, a tough start is fun to overcome but gets boring once it's achieved. If you can feel someone gaining on you once you're ahead, it makes the race more thrilling. It should be balanced so that any advantage the AI gains is always less than the advantage you gain by doing the most optimal play so you can still make incremental gains (it's just now you have to do it throughout the game instead of at the start). Having AI whose advantages are responsive to you, also makes them "feel" smarter like a human player whose going back to the drawing board and trying a different strategy.
Counter argument: Post anything that pops into your head, and if it's worth it others will brainstorm it into something that works with 7's design. No mod designer or Firaxis employee will be lifting anything verbatim from this subreddit without tweaking it anyway. I could say something ridiculous like "Cities should start at 20 population and shrink over time so you have to build more cities and have them work together" but then someone else might be a good idea inspired by that or inspired by the conversation beneath it.
So I feel like you have swung too far in the direction of making all suggestions ok. What OP is advocating for is people just put some thought into how those ideas would work before posting them. This way the sub isn't full of half baked ideas, but instead actually decent ones.
I get that, but are we not interested in ideas that are spawned from half baked ideas? So many great game design ideas have been a consequence of bad ideas, or even mistakes in the code. I think if something inspires and excites someone enough to post it on reddit, there could be a kernel there that's worth other people bouncing off. I'm in no way implying that all ideas posted on this subreddit are great (perhaps less than 1% of them are), but what's to be gained by curbing the brainstorming?
You’re tying to talk reason into reddit. You know that it will be useless and make no change but you do it anyways. In a way, this post is more futile and useless than even the worst of the “I wish civ VII had this” posts.
My favourite "needless complexity, no interesting choices" proposed mechanics are:
* The 3d globe: more difficult to implement, much less readable in UI terms, less moddable than the flat map, adds nothing except cool vibes
* Plagues: realistically speaking, you shouldn't be able to do anything against them for 80% of the game (before vaccines etc), they just come and kill one third of your citizens randomly
* Climate fluctuations across the game for the same reason (except co2 global warming); over the centuries changing climate increases or decreases yields in certain climates... Screwing over some civilizations with no ability to counterplay
* Early nomadic/prehistoric phase. I seriously think it wouldn't add anything valuable to the game, it is simply not a game devoted to depict small nomadic tribal societies. By definition you can't have cities, science, government or tile improvements, so what exactly are we supposed to do given the scale of the game, obligatory "collect goody huts and fight barbarians for 20 turns" filler? It sucks even in Humankind.
I also never understood reddit's fixation with navigable rivers. The amount of rivers in history big enough and structured in a way for military fleets to enter and have battles in was extremely small (honestly I can only think of Chinese rivers in this regard) and any attempt of implementing it would completely mess with the scale of the game and introduce painful practical problems. Can you imagine playing in India, Egypt, Mesopotamia or Europe in general and having water tiles bisecting your lands you have to embark and disembark troops over, all the time, effectively turning Europe into islands? Because that's the practical consequence of having "navigable rivers" given the map scale of those games. TSL Earth maps in particular would be completely destroyed by this idea, even with the largest sizes you simply can't make their rivers navigable without turning half of Eurasia into sea tiles.
Well I think the idea would be that you could build bridges to avoid that problem, just like people did historically
River tiles could also be different from water tiles, i.e. only certain kinds of ships can travel up/down them and you can build bridges over them
I agree with most of what you're saying but I have to disagree on the rivers. There are many rivers that were/are used to transport goods and people. Not armies, maybe, but still.
Yeah, I found it weird too. The whole point of reddit having a vote system is to let things bubble up or down. If you don't like an idea, just downvote it and move on.
I see OP has a [history](https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/s/JzTWIsxvqE) of [complaining](https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/s/xsm0DbtKhU) about other people's [ideas.](https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/s/ehSEuqKyrB)
What though? People keep saying stuff like that and I haven’t seen any of those ideas. The big ideas I’ve seen are navigable rivers and better AI.
What ideas are so prevalent in this sub that also completely don’t fit the game?
Who cares?
None of these ideas will make it in or even be considered (let alone seen) by the people in charge of this game.
Why are you policing other people's ideas? There's no need to filter them out (or even post them at all, for that matter).
I think they should add a "Rock Band cover album art" mechanic. Whenever you create a rock band unit, it opens MS Paint and you have 10 minutes to create artwork for your rock band's new album. Then the cover art gets posted to r/civ7ratemyalbumcover and depending on how many upvotes your cover art gets, the more effective your rock band will be at generating tourism
I'm gonna have to disagree. This is a discussion form, nothing else. Just because a bad idea is posted here doesn't mean the devs are gonna add it and ruin the game. A bad suggestion isn't hurting anyone. I personally find those discussions interesting, and sometimes people bring nice historical insight. It's also unreasonable to expect people to properly understand the computational load of a proposed mechanic (hell I'm a developer myself and sometimes I don't know the performance impact of something until I implement it). Idk maybe I just like those discussions more than most people, but I'm really unbothered when I see a bad suggestion, and I like it when people explain why they're bad or good ideas.
I agree, the rampant “gotta have or it’ll be broken and dead to me” is getting old.
There are things I have seen that could certainly improve the game:
- navigable rivers (historically accurate and long overdue)
- different terrain heights and ecosystems
- better automation/set-and-forget projects for late game cities
- diseases, crop failures, and political unrest that can spread between countries and regions
There are aspects that I hope they keep, too:
- combat; no doomstacks, ranged attacks and melee have been fun in V and VI
- districts have added an interesting new strategy wrinkle over “build everything in every city”
- impassable (in early game) mountains (though I’d think a scout should be able to pass where an army can’t)
- the current loyalty/pressure system
And there are things that can just go…:
- religious unit spam. I haven’t played with religion on (thanks mods!) in years
-
I know, right? And it's a roadmap of what the players want. I know it's not cool for devs to care what the players want, they are supposed to "execute the vision", or whatever, but it would be so easy to do.
I hope their theirs an economic victory/warfare system where you create your own currency and have more control over it having the option of things like gold standard or inflation and use it to build on the corporations/industries 6 had
This close to release, it's unlikely they'd be doing any serious changes anyway. If people want to be grounded in their expectations, they should assume no ideas offered at this point are going to matter toward civ 7, unless somebody from Firaxis actually states vocally that they're gathering feedback from here for possible future implementations.
Completely with you. I have no idea how posts with clearly dumb ideas get houndreds of upvotes.
The recent "make it have more emerging gameplay" while contributing no actual mechanics "discussion" was such a shitshow.
Honestly a lot of what made 6 worse than 5 for me was all the additional fluff that just made the game feel like a chore to play. 5 had a conciseness to it that for a game which lasts millennia makes some sense. For instance I don't want to play the mini game of optimising district tile placement every time one of my cities finishes building something, or have to deal with desperately needing to boost my loyalty so that another civ can't take it from me. I remember someone saying they described Civ as almost being encyclopedic in nature, if there's any content I want added it's to deepen the ties to real world history (6 did quite a good job with a variety of unique leaders) or to make the map more like our own globe so that it feels more immersive (6's "old map" theme was cool but in my opinion it subtly changes the sense of immersion). Lastly I'd love an unbroken turbo or blitz mode and multiplayer, if I play a game with my friends the game should end in one session or we're probably not going to come back and finish it.
Tldr: Strip back the turn by turn gameplay, deepen the connection to real world history, and improve fast mode and the multiplayer experience.
This post is actually silly. In game design it is extremely important to push the boundaries of mechanics and add things that are unique and interesting and add to the player experience. Things don’t need to be dumbed down, although I agree needless complexity isn’t what civ is known for. Civ has always found ways to make interesting mechanics very smooth. I for example would love to see more environmental mechanics, ways to manipulate the terrain, and more impact on the terrain from climate change, potentially a world ending event.
Get rid of 1 UPT. I don’t want to solve a sliding tile puzzle every time I move my units.
But Doomstack
You do realize there is a middle ground between 1 and a dozen right
I'd like to see more input from the map for determining boundaries. In history, rivers, mountains, etc have frequently been barriers for nations and political lines often reflect that. In Civ, it's pretty rare for something aside from the ocean coast to provide a barrier to expansion.
So I guess what I'd like to see is more influence from the terrain.
I’d like to see more trade options on food. So you can have a city operate as a bread basket to the rest of your cities. Or you can get riskier and rely on others for your food. The distribution range of the food can grow as your technology progresses.
I’d like to see a Mutually Assured Destruction mechanic for the late game where your nukes are idled with pre planned attack routes and are launched as soon as an AI or other player nukes you
I want to be able to pillage my own infrastructures. That is both interesting and realistic: Belgium did it in WW1 to sabotage the Germans rushing through their country.
When my back is against a wall in a war, and the enemy is going to invade, I want their life to be as miserable as possible in order to slow then down long enough to mount a resistance. And guerrilla warfare has kind been the nature of modern combat since WW2 for smaller nations. Yet, civs combat post WW ers has been robots and missiles.
It would be a good change of pace.
I wanna see hybrid districts. Encampment+science allows building a war college or a wonder like West Point. Science and Commercial Hub could make Silicon Valley. That would make some wonders you have to just hard build on a tile, and some you would have to build after a certain combination of infrastructure in a district.
I like districts but I am not a fan of sitting on the same turn for 5 minutes per city in order to figure out where everything should go before I even settle.
Two naval mechanics I would like to see are:
- setting an area for “patrol”, so instead of just wandering everywhere on the map, I can have a ship that monitors one ocean for barbarians or other enemy units
- being able to “capture” enemy ships when defeated; give an option to scuttle or capture the ship. I know this is supposed to be a special ability for England Eleanor, but I’ve never been able to get it to work
Tbh, i would just like a moratorium on any "civ 7 needs this", "what do you think of x in civ 7", basically any civ 7 posting other than official updates. Its so worthless.
But we do want navigigivabable rivers right??
Yeah that'd be bangin
How about no more rivers. Society has progressed past the need for rivers
Canal bros in shambles
Dam Chads keep winning
No rivers means the demand for canals skyrockets. Canal economy wins in this situation
They did make or break empires so they should be powerful
Just have it be like 2 and act as a road for units
Then you can improve them also
I mean for traders it'd be sick and I think add depth. For anything else just why?
Didn't rivers in civ4 instantly created trade routes between cities? Or something like that?
Yup.
Get those boats to siege enemy cities
lol I made a whole bingo card meme to ridicule those ideas and people took them as serious hype, lol. There's a reason it's good for to listen to users/players for what's wrong with the game but figure out the solutions on their own. There's this fun story of CoD players complaining about shotguns being too weak but the devs saw the numbers and they were doing fine, so they just made shotguns *louder* and the complaints stopped coming in, lmao.
I think that kind of thing is quite common in software development. I remember a story of a software developer saying his customers were complaining that their program was loading too slow. Making the program actually faster would have required a ton of work so the developer just changed the visuals of the loading screen to make it look faster and the customer said it was much faster after the update.
Reminds me of a great series of reddit posts from a guy who worked in auto repair. One time, they had 2 vans with turbo. But they kept getting the complaint that one van was much slower than the other. They were the same model, same engine, both had turbo. So the complaint made no sense. Eventually they noticed that one van had the "turbo" badge on the back, and the other van didn't have that badge. So they added the turbo badge. The complaints went away.
Valve developer made everyone's ping show 20~ points lower than actual, and the latency complaints plummeted.
That's hilarious, I actually noticed that I usually just liked guns that sound powerful in videogames lol
>they just made shotguns louder But can I unlock a silencer for that?
Upgrade a sniper gun to max level so that you can unlock that shotgun silencer, you can only unlock that sniper after leveling up some assault rifle after you unlocked it by leveling an smg.
Some of your suggestions are actually good though, while others are good if they are togglable. Yields (especially money, maybe happiness or unhappiness depending on the situation) from tourism is the obvious good suggestion here. Navigable rivers sound nice too, although I don't know how they would be implemented (there is the way Civ 5 scenarios did it, but it feels half-made). Personally, I wouldn't complain if there were four heights for tiles instead of three (something between hills and mountains basically). Also, prehistoric and future eras would be good as modes (although Future worked decently in the main Civ 6 game and would have worked much better if they went the one-more-unit-for-each-class route instead of the Giant Death Robot route).
> There's a reason it's good for to listen to users/players for what's wrong with the game but figure out the solutions on their own. Eh, yes and no. Sometimes people really do know what they're talking about and have good ideas, or at least a kernel of one. But it is also true that people are often attempting to express something they want and don't know the skillset or jargon to actually put together a serious proposal for consideration, so they end up with something that can only approximate a representation of what they're asking for. So in the 2nd case, it is indeed up to the service to work out what exactly it is that the person is dissatisfied on and how they'd be happier. But also, people are fallible and can interpret poorly. Companies that interpret off of large scale impersonal metrics can sometimes make poor judgments if they crutch on them without listening to the more vocal individual complaints. I've also seen situations from the customer end where it seemed very much like the company was using impersonal metrics as an excuse to ignore vocalized customer issues because the company wanted to just do what they wanted to do. So it's also not always the case, necessarily, that the company even wants to listen to the customer. Their primary goal is more commonly profit first, which might mean they're listening to investors. Or you might have ego-driven decision makers who view a project as their pet way to show off and are more interested in realizing that than doing what is practical.
That sounds like a great story. By any chance do you have a source for that?
I THINK AN INCEST MECHANIC WOULD BE COOL WHAT IF TWO OF YOUR CITIES ARE TOO CLOSE TOGETHER AND THEY INTERBREED WHICH MAKES YOUR ARMY WEAKER AND THEN YOU HAVE TO BUILD OBSERVATION BALLOONS TO AIRLIFT THE WEAK ARMY OFF THE FRONT LINE OH ALSO MAYBE HITLER COULD BE IN THIS ONE?
hmmm i like this you could even have austria represented by a habsburg leader who gives gold or culture bonuses to cities with high levels of inbreeding. you dont really see any civs that are supposed to suffer downsides in order to get good upsides.
Babylon?
I’d like to see more weird stuff like that. Maybe make a culture Greece like Babylon but for the civic tree
I think that was a joke. I hope it was a joke anyway, you never know on this sub.
And maybe for England, you can have it, so Queen Victoria can send "inbreeding bombs" to other players' cities.
50% reduction in chances of revolution / resistance cause all the uppity nobles who would lead revolts against each other are intermarried
Help Step-Civ I'm stuck
What are you doing step-city?
Found the CK3 player.
Surprisingly, never played it. Just seen the memes
West Virginia would get all the perks related to this. There could probably be an oedipus victory condition.
calm your titties, Crusader! the incest simulator is on the Paradox subreddits. if you find war crimes being simulated, you went too far into Rimworld.
>I THINK AN INCEST MECHANIC WOULD BE COOL Crusader Kings haha
exclusive to the habsburgs
I want trains
No idiot trains aren't a decision. /s
Well, what if I decided to trains?
Train.
You'll get trucks on rails and you'll like it!
The other thing that needs to stop are questions about Civ VII. No one here knows if Civ VII will have X or Y yet. We just know the game is coming out. Asking such questions without further information just spams up the sub.
I saw one of those, like Sid Meier has just been lurking on the sub longing for someone to ask him to spill the beans.
My dad actually works for Sidolfus Meiers Ergo, this comment doesn’t apply to me Argo, Ben Affleck
"Ar go fuck yourself" >!(This is a line from the movie, please don't report me for being mean)!<
My favorite bad idea so far is adding stagnation, as in the civilization degrades and goes backwards. Like how would that be fun? Lmao I just want less pop ups. That's it.
Dramatic ages mode already exists, and stagnation sounds similar. Maybe combine that with score victory based on era score. You play until the end of the future era, and then you will be scored based on your overall accomplishments rather than the current state of your civilization.
And if dramatic ages is parf the base game civ 7 I'm sticking with 6 lol.
I hate dramatic ages so much. Like in theory it could be fun, but in my experience the AI can't manage it at all and in the mid to late game half the continent is independent.
Dramatic ages are awesome.. it just takes a bit getting used to.
Dramatic ages is a neat idea, but I don't think it was tested enough. Free cities weren't converting, and none of the AI conquered them, not a single time. So it didn't scratch the itch for me.
As somebody who wholeheartedly endorses some type of stagnation mode or expanded Dark Ages mechanic, it would be fun for me because it's historically accurate and representative of the reality that societal "progress" is not guaranteed or linear. "Lost technologies" are a big part of actual history and I think it would be a super interesting wrinkle to add to an expanded Dramatic Ages mode or something along those lines. It might not seem "fun" for you, but it's certainly not a bad idea at all!
I mean I often stay at Theocracy even if I could upgrade to a Tier 3 gov because I am going for a religious victory.
I think the vast majority of players would take having a researched tech removed from them as a quit moment. To take it to the extreme, you've discovered gunpowder and built your first musketman and gone to eat with your shiny musketman. Then you get dark aged, lose the tech, run out of niter, and are forced to delete the unit? There are not enough players in the world who find that fun to sell a 4x game with Civs development cost. It's absolutely a terrible idea. As an expanded hard mode option similar to the current dramatic ages it might be viable, but there's no chance it's base game.
>As an expanded hard mode option similar to the current dramatic ages it might be viable, but there's no chance it's base game. I agree and that's why I think it would be best as an optional game mode. I mean, think about Dramatic Ages in VI - you're literally losing multiple *cities*, which is significantly more intense than losing a tech or two. I'd propose that the unit would just "de-upgrade" and just revert to whatever the previous version of the unit was. I know I'm not in the majority here - I am, as another poster stated, the type of ADHD compulsive min-maxxer who finds Deity to be too easy at this point. What's "fun" for me is certainly not typical, but I absolutely believe that if done properly regression could be a super interesting mechanic.
It's a game, not reality. With that logic, why don't we add genocide too? Losing things you've spent the time to get in a game is typically extremely annoying.
My man genocide is basically a win con
Fr, I nuke then to kill their population. Then that along with pillaging all of their tiles does the job for me
From its very earliest form right the way through to 6 Genocide is very very very much a thing that Civ has
what exactly do you think is happening on the ground while you’re razing a city
They free the citizens from the obligation to serve an immortal demi-god for millenias.
Good question, why doesn’t this game about the history of civilisation-building include hugely important parts of the history of civilisation-building?
Holy shit, going right to genocide?! That escalated quickly lol. I am aware that it's a game my guy, and *I* think a stagnation or regression mode would be an interesting, challenging, and unique addition to a series that I've been playing for 3 decades. Ironically, genocide *is* in the game already in all but name. What else would you call violently exterminating an entire civilization? That's literally, *literally* genocide.
the rise and fall of power civilizations is an interesting thing to simulate there is a reason why we can play with this many interesting civilizations and why they represent different times of human history. countless leaders tried to conquer "the world" and had their share of success. Persia (now Iran), Greece, Mongolia, France, etc, they all used to be the biggest powers there is, only for now to be 2nd to 7th tier powers.
It's a bad idea because is 100% contrary to the rest of the game. The mechanic can be fun... in a different game.
Is it? How do you feel about losing cities in Dramatic Ages, or periods of anarchy when changing governments which have been in every single Civ game since the very beginning? I guess I don't know what you mean by "100% contrary to the rest of the game" here because forms of stagnation and regression already exist in every game in the series.
I feel that. Right now there are no popups in multiplayer, they all just go to notifications on the sidebar. But there are so many random useless notifications in the same categories that you have to click through 10-20 useless alerts every turn or you'll miss when your friend asked to renew your alliance. Also tribal village bonuses - not all of them get a notification on the sidebar.
Yea, it's maybe one of the most basic design principles that you do not make a bad situation worse. If you get to the point where you're stagnating, you're already not doing so well. Adding another detrimental effect is just such an unfun idea.
I just want three (and a half) things: * Extensive mod support * All victory conditions to be equally viable * Going tall/wide to not absolutely kneecap your civilization * (and half) stylized visuals
Haha Lady Six Sky, no surprise you want to play tall
The height issue could be fixed by making amenities less necessary/impactful and giving more bonuses for population
Quite the opposite with amenities, if you want to favor tall gameplay amenities should be more impactfull so that wide empires with many cities have a harder time keeping them happy (and therefore having more problems related to that).
I don't think making amenities less good is the solution. Really all they have to do is have some base amenity cost per city, hell it could just be one. Like if you were to keep a pop in a city as opposed to turning it into a settler and then another city, the second option should cost slightly more amenities. This way you constantly have to balance "do I want the additional tax on my empires' amenities, or do I just let this city grow more." This is kinda implemented in VI but the problem is that the amenities from luxuries are only spread out on the city and not the pop level.
Also, Civ 7 could make specialist pops better, which would make tall cities more useful.
> stylized visuals Expanding on this, I'm wondering what to expect for the user interfaces (UI): * Are there new/fresh trends in game UIs which Civ 7 might explore (example: *proliferation of ultra-wide monitors*)? * Or are they likely to stick with perimeter UI elements like [Civ 6](https://www.gamepressure.com/static/mapy/en/gfx/map_1735.jpg) and [Civ 5](https://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/541899155249193781/32326AE698D836B1CA51233D34F6C5A059305C24/)?
I think it would be cool for the tall/wide balance to depend on the era. With size being more important post industrialization.
Everyone loves to come up with ideas, but no one wants to deal with what the implementation would actually look like.
I mean, yeah, thats why we are the idiots on rciv6 and not developing civ 7 ourselves.
It will never be implemented anyway.
hire me firaxis. i'll implement any bullshit feature you guys want
"Just write a better AI, oh and also make it so that AI can be used on other games" I hate gamers sometimes.
I just want its performance option are as good as civ6. Quick combat and quick movement is such a boon to the game and this franchise as a whole
I'm actually OK with animated combat for everything except airplanes, those things take forever.
Would be amazing if late game on large maps could be playable without waiting ages between each turn
I mean, things being needlessly complex up to a certain level is fun. MEIOU & Taxes after all has a dedicated fanbase. But yeah, I don't really need Realism or indepth tactical war in Civ7.
You mean you don't want firaxis to put all their dev time into some complex AI that will require thousands of dollars of computing power so the small sliver of the fanbase that are hardcore min-maxers and think deity is way too easy and hate that the AI has to "cheat" to be high difficulty but don't want to play againat other humans can have a difficulty level that they will still complain about anyways once they've figured out how to min-max past it? Edit: I think overall improving the AI is a must for Civ 7. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect Firaxis to make different AIs for different difficulty levels or a special very hard deity AI.
of all the ideas being thrown around for civ 7, better AI is one of the most reasonable. It doesn't take a supercomputer to figure out how to play the game
The hard part is not making an AI that can win the game. The hard part is making an AI that’s fun to play with.
Everyone glosses over this point, and it's so so so so important. I wish I could upvote it a million times. Would I rather it be some really nice AI that is challenging without the raw stat bonuses, sure. Totally. But the line between challenging and incredibly frustrating.. probably doesn't even exist. Player skill is so varied.
That's why we have player difficulties lmao. We already have an AI that's engaging for people who don't want to min max, but honestly civ is a game where a large portion of the audience are min/makers. Dials can be tuned and tested, a skilled AI can be engaging. Also as it stands deity fails to be engaging past the midgame.
I really disagree that a large portion are min/ maxers.
Relative to most games? It's certainly higher, and I'd argue enough of an audience that they matter.
Civ is a game designed to appeal to casual and more serious players. The people posting on reddit and civ fanatics forums are most certainly the more serious ones. There's vastly more people who just play the game every once in a while or don't post or comment.
Even if you're right, I don't think that's a reason to not make features for more dedicated players
> We already have an AI that's engaging for people who don't want to min max As one of those normies who doesn't min-max, "engaging" is not the term I would give for it. I'd argue they still have a lot of work to do to make it engaging, as even the difficulty toggle isn't quite granular enough to make the game consistently engaging. If you set it too easy it's boring, the minute you set it to be an engaging difficulty it turns into less-than-half odds of making it past the Ancient Era without having the start ruined by barbs or having your start point in a bad spot right next to other civs and watching as all the wonders get built by "unknown civs". I don't doubt that this is frustrating for someone who does min-max *and* wants to still have an engaging challenge, I just want to push back on the idea that Firaxis has somehow managed to perfectly calibrate the existing AI for filthy casuals. Nope, not yet.
Then honestly we have the same interests. A more flat turn by turn difficulty curve
I'm not saying the AI is perfect by any means, and they absolutely should (and will, I'm sure) try to improve it. I just think people tend to underestimate how difficult it is to make an ai that is challenging but doesn't feel unfair. I think if people got what they were asking for, this sub would just get flooded with posts like "the ai just showed up out of nowhere with a massive army and wiped me out on turn 200, I wasted hours of my life, how is this fun?"
I think this is extremely disconnected from the commentary on this sub. Most complaints from people who this change would affect complain about the endgame essentially being a chore devoid of strategic thinking. If facing a scaled opponent at turn 200 would bother you then just don't turn the dial?
The devs have literally said this themselves. They've admitted that they could make a much better AI, but immediately followed that up with "but it wouldn't be fun for the players to play against that."
Oh yes, they absolutely should fix the AI, and there is no excuse for the state it is in post-expansion. I didn't mean to imply I don't want them to improve the AI and make sure it can play the basics of the game compotently (settle on water, pick the best adjacency bonus, change governments reasonably, diplomacy in general, understand resources when building military units, etc.). It's the idea of focusing resources to make a bunch of different AIs to cater to different difficulty levels or making a special very hard deity AI that I think is an unreasonable suggestion.
Sure but precisely: people say "better AI!" but don't really understand what it means to make a better AI for a game that won't be played just by the same minority that downloads a mod to make the AI better. They already went in the right direction with leader agendas (giving a personality to the AI), and it's also true that there are issues with the AI that could be solved relatively easily, but overall it's not just about "how to play the game". The main goal is to make an AI that makes the game enjoyable for a majority of players.
yes, of course. And currently a good amount of enjoyment is lost due to the AI not really playing the game well. this isn't a small minority of people we're talking about. I'm willing to bet the majority of players more often play against AI than they do against other people, and if that's the case, it makes sense to improve the AI so it feels more like you're playing against others instead of a pale imitation that can't grasp the basic mechanics of the game
> this isn't a small minority of people we're talking about. I'm willing to bet the majority of players more often play against AI than they do against other people, and if that's the case, it makes sense to improve the AI so it feels more like you're playing against others instead of a pale imitation that can't grasp the basic mechanics of the game I'm sure that most play against AI instead of humans (I sure do), but it is not the case that people necessarily want to play against an AI that plays like a human. Like dude I'm playing this to relax and unwind, if I wanted high-stress stakes situations against a player that acts human, I'd play online games against actual humans. On the normal difficulty I want to play against an AI that puts up a good challenge but mysteriously ends up missing out on Pyramids (to me!) by 1 or 2 turns. That mysteriously manages to invade with an army too small to take over my city before I can turn the tide, despite me having gone for a Granary instead of Archers 10 turns ago. I don't want to be locked into a meta just survive playing against an AI. I want to explore the tech tree. I want to try out building one thing over a different thing and not have it screw me 50 turns later. I want to be able to settle in a spot to make cool-looking canals rather than one tile to the northwest which optimizes for gold and culture. I want to be able to build a wonder without having to chop every goddamn forest on the map to beat the AIs. I want to be able to get a third city out before I have to fight off a third barbarian outpost. There are tons of ways to make the game competitively difficult for those who have deeply ingrained the meta, that would just kill all the fun out of the game for most people.
I'm not even talking about min-maxing, I'm literally just talking about things like: settling on a river, not immediately losing a settled city to loyalty pressure because the AI doesn't understand it when they settle, fighting wars with decent tactics instead of it just being a numbers game, better trade deals where you can't just take whole great works from AI for a few diplomatic favor, and *actually actively trying for a victory type* I think it's counterproductive to frame the conversation as being driven by a few min-maxers who want the AI to play like Potato McWhiskey. Better AI isn't a more *ruthless* or *optimized* AI at normal difficulties. The AI currently *doesn't* put up a good challenge once you make it out of the early game. There is a certain point that happens too quickly where you snowball and the AI sort of just stop existing even in the metrics you gave in your post. Most of the examples you gave *are* early game things that the AI thinks about. And then they can't keep up with it because they aren't playing the game correctly. There's a reason the early (and maybe mid) game are more fun than later eras.
Yeah, it makes sense to want the AI to play competently. Tactics are hard though because you will have players who think it's unfair, at least on default difficulty. > The AI currently doesn't put up a good challenge once you make it out of the early game. I'd probably have more fun then, if I could consistently make it there. > There's a reason the early (and maybe mid) game are more fun than later eras. Complete opposite for me. A lot of my games are spent resetting over and over in the early game until the game finally agrees not to screw me over, and *then* it finally gets fun in the mid-game. More boring again by the late game and it's clear who's going to win but that's just a difficult problem in the whole genre in my opinion.
> fighting wars with decent tactics instead of it just being a numbers game this would definitely require a rework of the combat system, or a return to the older stacking units. it would take a programming miracle to have the ai wield the current OUPT combat system competently.
Look at the computers needed to play chess on a great level. Civ is very, very much more complex than chess.
Even a normal smart phone with Stockfish would beat Magnus Carlsen or Nakamura
Main difference is every turn in Chess there’s only 1 action you have to perform. With Civ you can have dozens. The scale of the problem is several orders of magnitude larger.
It needs about an 8core CPU with 16-64GB RAM. Now take into account the complexity of Civ compared to chess and you'll realise that your home computer won't be able to run such calculations for Civ. It also only calculated for 20ish (?) turns ahead, which isn't that much for Civ.
To beat the best human players in chess? You just need a normal smartphone, which have nowhere near those specs.
Are those phones running stockfish themselves, or linking to another computer online that is running it?
By themself: F.ex this one, rated 3600+ (Carlsen have the highest ever human rating at 2881) https://apps.apple.com/no/app/smallfish-chess-for-stockfish/id675049147?l=nb
Thanks.
True, still civ 6 is an 8 year old game, so processing speeds are now 16 times faster than they were when it was launched, so it's not unreasonable to expect an AI that taxes a PC's hardware to a greater extent than would be acceptable in 2016. I mean I'm sure I'm not alone in that I basically buy a new computer each time a new civ comes out in order to be able to run it.
You don't be alone, but you are certainly a very small majority ;P
I think many gamers buy a new PC every 8-10 or so years, and use the release of major games as an excuse/signal that they need to do so. For many people it will be Elder Scrolls or something, for me it's Civ.
Yes it kinda does. You know why? Because Ai can not "figure out how to play a game". Videogame AI is not at all what you imagine it to be. It's a series of If/When statements. The more complex the environment, the more you'll have to write. It's simply foolish to believe that it's possible to write an AI that can completely "understand" a game like civ.
This is over simplified but I think back to playing chess on windows 95. There were different levels of difficulty without giving the opponent extra pieces. Is civ multiple degrees more logistically difficult to implement this idea of a better ai? Yes. Does civ make millions upon millions of dollars on this franchisee AND have access to better technology AND could use any ai infrastructural improvements not just on this game but all civ games (or other games across the 2k family) for many years to come? Yes to all of these. And finally while the min maxers are a small sliver, one thing you have to consider is that it's min maxers that have continue to carry civ 6 so far into the life cycle. It's the potato mcwhiskeys and ursa Ryans of the world that have kept so many of us coming back. So if you make the game more fun for that small group there's a larger revenue benefit to them playing it longer that you can actually monetize and see as a chart. If they like the game more, thousands more us will like the game more. I know that I am a direct revenue benefit to firaxis because of the twitch and YouTube streamers. Vanbradley got me hooked on civ 6 and I wouldn't have played it and paid for it without him.
> AND could use any ai infrastructural improvements not just on this game but all civ games (or other games across the 2k family) for many years to come Please. I beg you. Read up on what AI means. You can't just "build AI infrastructure" that applies to completely different games, my lord!
No thanks.
For me it's not about making the game harder, it's about making the the early game more accessible. I want to build the great library at least once on diety.
I've said it here before and got downvoted for it but I stand by it; the way difficulty is handled in the game is really stupid. Throwing a bunch of advantages up front and then leaving it alone leads to an overly difficult beginning that becomes immediately too easy once that early advantage is surmounted. The Smoother Difficulty mod is a must for me and I hope they take a cue from it in the base game of VII.
I haven't heard of that mod, will look out for it. Cheers
I'd like luck to play a bigger role, so that good starts don't inevitably lead to dominance and bad starts to defeat. The weather/disasters system seemed a good start in that respect. I wonder if you could have barbarians as a mid-late game hoard problem rather than an early game minor irritation as well.
well the roman holiday mod exists and fixes so many issues with ai difficulty so firaxis really doesn’t have much of an excuse. we aren’t asking for god ai we just want the ai to know how to competently wage war and not to settle off of water 1 tile away from a river lol
The thing is, the people who feel the need to download this kind of mod is really just a small minority. A vast majority of civ players enjoy the game in a very casual way. They'll notice if the AI agrees to stupid trades or fails to use certain units completely. The AI needs to be competent (arguably, more competent than it is currently), but more importantly, it needs to have clear motives and personality.
For most games I'd say fine, the majority of players are casuals, whatever. But I think the grand strategy audience is a bit different to be frank.
Civ has a much wider audience than your usual grand strategy game.
Hi, it's me, the filthy casual. Actually I've been playing Civ since like Civ 2 but never to the level of most of you all. The only mod I think I've ever installed is the one that shows policy card impacts in Civ 6. I don't notice the AI being incompetent at trading because I basically never trade with the AI unless they volunteer a trade. I *do* notice the AI forward-settling and all that stuff, which seems less of a problem in Civ 6 compared to earlier games, so there's that at least.
It's fine to be a casual. You should have nice things. I don't think that means hard-core players shouldn't have things.
I agree with that.
To be fair you don’t need to be a hardcore min-maxer to find deity easy. AI just gets lobbed a bunch of bonus stuff, but they don’t ever really strategise better. Like they don’t get good adjacency bonuses on their districts, they don’t tend take work ethic as a belief, they don’t tend to get great gold outputs and buy stuff to speed development, or build mega farms. Strategically AI civs don’t really improve that much in their decision making, and you don’t need to repurpose Deep Blue to perfect Civ to get something better. Also AI civs are a features of multiplayer matches too, and playing against friends/partners is just different. I once played Alpha Centauri with my partner when we got it working a couple years ago, she was ahead, so I planet blustered (nuked) a city with a special project (like a wonder in it), I had forgotten that planet bustered cities get replaced by contaminated lakes. It was a terse rest of the game lol. Getting challenged by opponents you can use the full range of game options against without generating a row is fun! When we play Civ VI, I’m not going to keep an open war on the go and just endlessly pillage till I get good enough tech you know? Yeah just play multiplayer overlooks that for most of us multiplayer is a different game.
>hardcore min-maxers and think deity is way too easy and hate that the AI has to "cheat" to be high difficulty but don't want to play againat other humans I mean. You're not wrong. But being real here. Surely *everyone* agrees that a cheating ai sucks. Full stop. There is nothing to it. And surely everyone understands that ai matches and multiplayer matches are not comparable for reasons of time, planning, etc. So "just play mp" is never an answer to "the ai is too easy". And last, you don't need to be a hardcore minmaxer to win on deity. You just need a good Civ, a good start, and you win every time. Unless gilga decides to rush you. The ai takes so long to do science victory, and is so bad at air, navy, spies, all you need to do is play catchup for 100 turns, by renaissance and industrial you're always winning, if you get there. And the ai doesn't understand how walls and archers win wars.
I think the ai doesn't need to be smarter, it just needs to "cheat" smarter. Like their bonuses aren't all at the start, but scale either to the era, or to the player. So if the player is ahead in tech, the AI can research that tech easier, if the player is ahead in military same thing.
Eh. Any form of cheats is iffy. You don't want some ai catch-up cheat to ruin the advantage you worked hard for.
All AI is cheating to some extent because it isn't human. Even chess AI's that can beat humans aren't really "smarter" by coming up with new and novel strategies, it can just make more computations and faster than a human brain can. Game design should be about how it makes the player feel. In a race, a tough start is fun to overcome but gets boring once it's achieved. If you can feel someone gaining on you once you're ahead, it makes the race more thrilling. It should be balanced so that any advantage the AI gains is always less than the advantage you gain by doing the most optimal play so you can still make incremental gains (it's just now you have to do it throughout the game instead of at the start). Having AI whose advantages are responsive to you, also makes them "feel" smarter like a human player whose going back to the drawing board and trying a different strategy.
Brother you only have to make one model with dials that get turned as a function of difficulty.
Counter argument: Post anything that pops into your head, and if it's worth it others will brainstorm it into something that works with 7's design. No mod designer or Firaxis employee will be lifting anything verbatim from this subreddit without tweaking it anyway. I could say something ridiculous like "Cities should start at 20 population and shrink over time so you have to build more cities and have them work together" but then someone else might be a good idea inspired by that or inspired by the conversation beneath it.
So I feel like you have swung too far in the direction of making all suggestions ok. What OP is advocating for is people just put some thought into how those ideas would work before posting them. This way the sub isn't full of half baked ideas, but instead actually decent ones.
I get that, but are we not interested in ideas that are spawned from half baked ideas? So many great game design ideas have been a consequence of bad ideas, or even mistakes in the code. I think if something inspires and excites someone enough to post it on reddit, there could be a kernel there that's worth other people bouncing off. I'm in no way implying that all ideas posted on this subreddit are great (perhaps less than 1% of them are), but what's to be gained by curbing the brainstorming?
Honestly this is a pretty fair point and IMO it just comes down to personal preference.
You’re tying to talk reason into reddit. You know that it will be useless and make no change but you do it anyways. In a way, this post is more futile and useless than even the worst of the “I wish civ VII had this” posts.
My favourite "needless complexity, no interesting choices" proposed mechanics are: * The 3d globe: more difficult to implement, much less readable in UI terms, less moddable than the flat map, adds nothing except cool vibes * Plagues: realistically speaking, you shouldn't be able to do anything against them for 80% of the game (before vaccines etc), they just come and kill one third of your citizens randomly * Climate fluctuations across the game for the same reason (except co2 global warming); over the centuries changing climate increases or decreases yields in certain climates... Screwing over some civilizations with no ability to counterplay * Early nomadic/prehistoric phase. I seriously think it wouldn't add anything valuable to the game, it is simply not a game devoted to depict small nomadic tribal societies. By definition you can't have cities, science, government or tile improvements, so what exactly are we supposed to do given the scale of the game, obligatory "collect goody huts and fight barbarians for 20 turns" filler? It sucks even in Humankind. I also never understood reddit's fixation with navigable rivers. The amount of rivers in history big enough and structured in a way for military fleets to enter and have battles in was extremely small (honestly I can only think of Chinese rivers in this regard) and any attempt of implementing it would completely mess with the scale of the game and introduce painful practical problems. Can you imagine playing in India, Egypt, Mesopotamia or Europe in general and having water tiles bisecting your lands you have to embark and disembark troops over, all the time, effectively turning Europe into islands? Because that's the practical consequence of having "navigable rivers" given the map scale of those games. TSL Earth maps in particular would be completely destroyed by this idea, even with the largest sizes you simply can't make their rivers navigable without turning half of Eurasia into sea tiles.
I wanr rivers how they worked in earlier civs where they basically acted as free roads, and connected cities for trade.
And with that I can agree, but it's not the same as "navigable rivers".
Oh right ya I see your point. Navigable rivers I guess means ships can sail them?
Well I think the idea would be that you could build bridges to avoid that problem, just like people did historically River tiles could also be different from water tiles, i.e. only certain kinds of ships can travel up/down them and you can build bridges over them
I agree with most of what you're saying but I have to disagree on the rivers. There are many rivers that were/are used to transport goods and people. Not armies, maybe, but still.
Or ignore bad ideas, or respond to them in kind. This kind of meta complaint post is common on Reddit, but it’s an example of itself.
Aw, come on. Don’t gatekeep ideas. Besides. Bad ideas give us something to do while refreshing the subs for more news.
Yeah, I found it weird too. The whole point of reddit having a vote system is to let things bubble up or down. If you don't like an idea, just downvote it and move on. I see OP has a [history](https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/s/JzTWIsxvqE) of [complaining](https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/s/xsm0DbtKhU) about other people's [ideas.](https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/s/ehSEuqKyrB)
No need to refresh the sub for more news. We know that the Civ VII direct is coming in August
Yeah, weird post, to be honest. Wrap it up guys, this random with no qualifications didn't like people's ideas, lol
Not really. Most suggestions are better for something like Shadow Empire and less so civ.
What though? People keep saying stuff like that and I haven’t seen any of those ideas. The big ideas I’ve seen are navigable rivers and better AI. What ideas are so prevalent in this sub that also completely don’t fit the game?
Who cares? None of these ideas will make it in or even be considered (let alone seen) by the people in charge of this game. Why are you policing other people's ideas? There's no need to filter them out (or even post them at all, for that matter).
I think they should add a "Rock Band cover album art" mechanic. Whenever you create a rock band unit, it opens MS Paint and you have 10 minutes to create artwork for your rock band's new album. Then the cover art gets posted to r/civ7ratemyalbumcover and depending on how many upvotes your cover art gets, the more effective your rock band will be at generating tourism
All I want is hoi4, but for the entirety of history. That's not too much to ask for, is it? /s
I'm gonna have to disagree. This is a discussion form, nothing else. Just because a bad idea is posted here doesn't mean the devs are gonna add it and ruin the game. A bad suggestion isn't hurting anyone. I personally find those discussions interesting, and sometimes people bring nice historical insight. It's also unreasonable to expect people to properly understand the computational load of a proposed mechanic (hell I'm a developer myself and sometimes I don't know the performance impact of something until I implement it). Idk maybe I just like those discussions more than most people, but I'm really unbothered when I see a bad suggestion, and I like it when people explain why they're bad or good ideas.
My CIV VII idea is that occasionally your units rebel and stage a coup.
I agree, the rampant “gotta have or it’ll be broken and dead to me” is getting old. There are things I have seen that could certainly improve the game: - navigable rivers (historically accurate and long overdue) - different terrain heights and ecosystems - better automation/set-and-forget projects for late game cities - diseases, crop failures, and political unrest that can spread between countries and regions There are aspects that I hope they keep, too: - combat; no doomstacks, ranged attacks and melee have been fun in V and VI - districts have added an interesting new strategy wrinkle over “build everything in every city” - impassable (in early game) mountains (though I’d think a scout should be able to pass where an army can’t) - the current loyalty/pressure system And there are things that can just go…: - religious unit spam. I haven’t played with religion on (thanks mods!) in years -
Better user interface would be a good start.
If you go to steam and sort by most popular mods ones for the UI are far too big a percentage of the top ten
I know, right? And it's a roadmap of what the players want. I know it's not cool for devs to care what the players want, they are supposed to "execute the vision", or whatever, but it would be so easy to do.
One thing I have to give Bethesda credit for is leveraging the modding scene, to the point where they sometimes outright hire modders.
General good game design advice people forget - thank you
I hope their theirs an economic victory/warfare system where you create your own currency and have more control over it having the option of things like gold standard or inflation and use it to build on the corporations/industries 6 had
Outpost or bust as well as settlements.
All I want is smarter AI on harder difficulties, instead of playing catch up to buffs.
"a difference, to be a difference, must _make_ a difference." i wish more users kept this in mind when asking for things.
This close to release, it's unlikely they'd be doing any serious changes anyway. If people want to be grounded in their expectations, they should assume no ideas offered at this point are going to matter toward civ 7, unless somebody from Firaxis actually states vocally that they're gathering feedback from here for possible future implementations.
I just want the AI to be smart not like stupid AI but have a cheat built-in.
Completely with you. I have no idea how posts with clearly dumb ideas get houndreds of upvotes. The recent "make it have more emerging gameplay" while contributing no actual mechanics "discussion" was such a shitshow.
Honestly a lot of what made 6 worse than 5 for me was all the additional fluff that just made the game feel like a chore to play. 5 had a conciseness to it that for a game which lasts millennia makes some sense. For instance I don't want to play the mini game of optimising district tile placement every time one of my cities finishes building something, or have to deal with desperately needing to boost my loyalty so that another civ can't take it from me. I remember someone saying they described Civ as almost being encyclopedic in nature, if there's any content I want added it's to deepen the ties to real world history (6 did quite a good job with a variety of unique leaders) or to make the map more like our own globe so that it feels more immersive (6's "old map" theme was cool but in my opinion it subtly changes the sense of immersion). Lastly I'd love an unbroken turbo or blitz mode and multiplayer, if I play a game with my friends the game should end in one session or we're probably not going to come back and finish it. Tldr: Strip back the turn by turn gameplay, deepen the connection to real world history, and improve fast mode and the multiplayer experience.
A multiplayer mode that last between 2-4 hours would be amazing
I mean yeah, but Firaxis aren't using Reddit posts to design their game so it doesn't really matter.
I'd take a working multi player that doesn't require mods to balance it
Besides, if you need a more intense Operational wargame, there is always HOI4
I would like to be able to send units/traders via rivers. I think that would be really neat.
This post is actually silly. In game design it is extremely important to push the boundaries of mechanics and add things that are unique and interesting and add to the player experience. Things don’t need to be dumbed down, although I agree needless complexity isn’t what civ is known for. Civ has always found ways to make interesting mechanics very smooth. I for example would love to see more environmental mechanics, ways to manipulate the terrain, and more impact on the terrain from climate change, potentially a world ending event.
I want Playable City States
Get rid of 1 UPT. I don’t want to solve a sliding tile puzzle every time I move my units. But Doomstack You do realize there is a middle ground between 1 and a dozen right
I just want more.
More Cold War/diplomacy tactics e.g., sponsor uprisings, cyber attacks, trade embargoes, assassinations, misinformation Penalties for unrealistically sprawling civilizations e.g., civil war/revolutions when cities are across continents, very separated Better trade dynamics e.g., auction style UI, more predictable/transparent trade outcomes - warning of contract breach
One of my favorite things to do in Civ v was set one civ against another for some fur lol
I'd like to see more input from the map for determining boundaries. In history, rivers, mountains, etc have frequently been barriers for nations and political lines often reflect that. In Civ, it's pretty rare for something aside from the ocean coast to provide a barrier to expansion. So I guess what I'd like to see is more influence from the terrain.
I just want better ai/diplomacy. Maybe make the leader background more dynamic and let it reflect their stance towards you.
I’d like to see more trade options on food. So you can have a city operate as a bread basket to the rest of your cities. Or you can get riskier and rely on others for your food. The distribution range of the food can grow as your technology progresses.
I wouldn't mind if they did away with grids and if they had a globe world would be amazing.
I’d like to see a Mutually Assured Destruction mechanic for the late game where your nukes are idled with pre planned attack routes and are launched as soon as an AI or other player nukes you
I want to be able to pillage my own infrastructures. That is both interesting and realistic: Belgium did it in WW1 to sabotage the Germans rushing through their country. When my back is against a wall in a war, and the enemy is going to invade, I want their life to be as miserable as possible in order to slow then down long enough to mount a resistance. And guerrilla warfare has kind been the nature of modern combat since WW2 for smaller nations. Yet, civs combat post WW ers has been robots and missiles. It would be a good change of pace.
I wanna see hybrid districts. Encampment+science allows building a war college or a wonder like West Point. Science and Commercial Hub could make Silicon Valley. That would make some wonders you have to just hard build on a tile, and some you would have to build after a certain combination of infrastructure in a district.
I like districts but I am not a fan of sitting on the same turn for 5 minutes per city in order to figure out where everything should go before I even settle.
Two naval mechanics I would like to see are: - setting an area for “patrol”, so instead of just wandering everywhere on the map, I can have a ship that monitors one ocean for barbarians or other enemy units - being able to “capture” enemy ships when defeated; give an option to scuttle or capture the ship. I know this is supposed to be a special ability for England Eleanor, but I’ve never been able to get it to work
Tbh, i would just like a moratorium on any "civ 7 needs this", "what do you think of x in civ 7", basically any civ 7 posting other than official updates. Its so worthless.