Civ 6 is Very Nearly a Great Game
I’ve been a huge fan of Sid Meier’s Civilization Series since Alpha Centauri came out in 1999. (Amusingly, the game installer offered a “laptop install” option, since the full ~150mb installation was too big for portable devices.) According to Steam, I’ve logged 178 hours in Civ 5, 33 hours of Civ Beyond Earth, and 19 hours in Civ 6. (These are not huge counts, obviously, but I feel that it’s enough to justify the opinions written here.)
I just finished another Civ 6 game, and although I greatly enjoyed most of it, I’m also fairly frustrated with the game’s flaws.
The Late Game is an Interminable Click Fest
I see three distinct phases of a Civ game against AIs. (This article is focused on Civ 6, but I’ve observed this across all Civ games.)
In the early game, you’re generally at a disadvantage relative to the AI. The game increases AI difficulty not by making them smarter at harder difficulty levels, but just by granting the AI bonuses to everything it does. (More on that later.) So in the early game, you’ll be at a substantial disadvantage relative to the AI. The early game is the simplest time to create AI strategies for, because there are fewer moving pieces in play.
In the mid-game, the fact that you’re making smarter decisions than the AI will start to outweigh the AI’s bonuses. You’ll get those key Wonders that you need, knock out the other civ on your continent, or have some other inflection point in your trajectory. You’ll start to pull ahead. It’s exciting to see your intelligent decisions paying off.
In this analysis, I’m characterizing the “late game” as the time when it’s overwhelmingly likely that you’ll win, shy of self-destructive behavior on your part. The problem is that this inflection point occurs long before the game actually ends. It’s fun for maybe ~20 turns to kick around the AIs that were bullying you for the whole game, and to revel in your victory. But then it starts to feel grossly self-congratulatory. And this transition happens slowly enough for me that it’s like the boiling frog parable — I suddenly realize that I haven’t really been having fun for the past hour.
You get to a point where you’ve essentially won, but the game hasn’t formally recognized it yet. It’s not satisfying to stop playing the game before getting the “You Win” message, but it’s also not satisfying to plow through an interminable click fest to get there.
(I always play Civ games with max world size and max number of players. I suspect that on a smaller game, the long tail of the clickfest would be much shorter.)
In Civ 6, this frustrating effect is magnified by how lame the win sequence is.
Here’s what one of the the win sequences was with Alpha Centauri, in 1999:
The cinematic is full of meaning in the context of the game’s storyline. And here’s a Civ 6 win sequence:
Somehow, despite being 17 years later, Civ 6’s production values actually manage to be lame compared to Alpha Centauri.
During the late game, there’s a period of time in which the game would go back to being a challenge if all the other civs realized you were about to win and teamed up on you:
This would be an exciting challenge: just when you think you’re about to win, everyone else throws everything they have at you. (Incidentally, this is also how my housemates in college played Settlers of Catan.)
The latest patch release notes promise that the AIs will start becoming less friendly as the player approaches winning. But I haven’t noticed that to be a particularly strong effect.
So without the AIs figuring out they need a new strategy, and without a satisfying ending to the game, you’re left with an awkward choice of just walking away, or a repetitive slog.
Documentation is Shockingly Sparse
Civilization games are very complicated. There are many different mechanics to understand, and ways to win: Domination, Religious, Cultural, Science, and Score. Each victory condition has its own set of mechanics.
These mechanics are generally explained very poorly or not at all in the in-game Civilopedia. In my most recent game, I wanted to win with a Religious victory. This involves training a bunch of missionaries and apostles, sending them to cities all over the world, and invoking their “Spread Religion” ability to convert followers.
When you invoke the “Spread Religion” ability, an animation happens. Sometimes, followers are successfully converted. Sometimes, they’re not. To play most effectively, I went to the Civilopedia. Here’s the only detail it had:
This gives me no information on how to optimize my strategy. It barely gives me any information that’s not obvious from the game UI itself. Is my low conversation rate because I’m doing something wrong? Or is it part of the game that you’re taking a low-probability shot? Who knows!
The sparse documentation on game mechanics is made more frustrating by the great bounty of useless flavor text that’s sometimes intermingled with the actual docs.
Another frustrating example: as my last game approached the turn limit, I considered the possibility that the game would be decided on score. The game tells you what score every civ currently has, but the Civilopedia doesn’t tell you how the score is actually computed.
As a result, I am not interested in putting in the effort to progress past a certain difficulty level of Civ. It would be a fun challenge to think about the mechanics and how to defeat an opponent using those mechanics. Trying to reverse-engineer the rules of the game I’m playing is not interesting for me personally.
The alternative to proper documentation from the developers is shitty Wikia sites that are bloated with heavy and aggressive ads, and that feel like they’re trying to put malware on my machine. The Wikia sites are often written at a 9th-grade level, and can have factual inaccuracies of their own.
By contrast, Alpha Centauri came with an entire book:
As a final frustration, it’s hard to find things in the Civilopedia, because the search is weak. If you don’t know the exact phrase you’re looking for, you can’t find it. For a 2016 game, I’d expect better than that.
The AI is Bad
To increase the difficulty of the AI, the game does not make the AI more intelligent. It just gives it bonuses, like being able to build things faster than you. Maybe Civ is just too complicated to make a decent AI for, but what this boils down to at higher difficulty levels is fighting against a muscly but generally stupid opponent. I would rather have a more fair fight against someone intelligent.
And speaking of stupidity, the AI will sometimes make mistakes on a micro scale, where it gets units killed or wastes them in a way that it’s hard to imagine a human doing.
Many Random Bugs and UI Flaws
There are a bunch of little issues that make playing the game unnecessarily high-friction:
- When selecting a trade route, there’s no way to sort routes by which provide the most of a particular resource. You have to scroll through the entire list, which on max-sized games can be quite long.
- When asking you to make moves for each of your units, the game can jump around the entire map, instead of having you make all your moves for units in a given region at the same time. This forces you to context switch between what’s going on in each region, and makes it more likely that you’ll make a mistake.
- In the spy escape modal, critical game mechanics information is hidden in a tooltip.
- When you receive reports from other civs’ activity, there are sometimes string concatenation errors. The game will display a message with incorrect capitalization, like: “Your trader, Robyn, overheard that There is a new granary in Barcelona.” (emphasis mine)
- Your own actions will show up in the newsfeed of activity of other players. For instance, if you are playing as Spain and declare war on India, you may see the following in your newsfeed next turn: “A recent news article revealed that Spain declared war on India!”. This would be less annoying if the newsfeed weren’t spammed with other information of minimal value.
- The game copy has some grammatical errors, like run-ons.
- Some animations will play incorrectly.
- For religious units, the “Rest and Repair” button is sometimes enabled, even when the unit cannot actually rest and repair in that location.
- When you gain a new Tech or Civic Policy, the in-game messages sometimes does not appear. This is particularly frustrating for Civic Policies, because the turn on which you unlock them is a limited chance to freely rework which policies you have active. If you don’t realize that you completed the Civic Policy because the message didn’t appear, then you’ll miss that chance.
- When considering an action that will influence your civ’s resource flow, like adopting a new religious belief, Civic Policy, etc, there’s no easy way to know what impact it will have. For instance, I may be maximizing for gold income. One Civic Policy grants +10% gold on all cities not on my home continent. Another grants +100% gold in my capital city. For my specific civ, which will produce more gold per turn? I’d like the game to present that info to me in the UI, so I can make an intelligent decision. In lieu of that, I have to guess, which is less fun because now I’m no longer making the best possible decisions. Or, I could fire up Excel and extract data from the game and do my own calculations, which is also not my idea of a recreational activity.
Civ is Still a Fun Game
Despite all these complaints, I do enjoy playing Civ. I find Civ 6 to be a good improvement on the series, adding interesting new mechanics and feeling reasonably balanced. The “just one more turn” addictive nature is present, as always. And during the mid-game section identified above, it is fun to watch your empire grow and flourish. In some ways, these strengths make the flaws even more frustrating, because Civ 6 is so close to being great.
