Civilization VI Review

Julio Franco

Posts: 9,092   +2,043
Staff member

From the 1991 original through to today, Civilization games have all shared the same core design ideas. 2K’s marketing will try and sell you on new stuff all they want, but the nuts and bolts of this game are the same as they’ve always been, and the same as they’ll probably always be, and they’re what really makes Civ great. You take turns, you build cities, you research tech, you fight.

It’s been six years since the last full Civilization game was released. Six years! That’s a record between appearances for the series. It’s so long we had enough time to review Civilization V twice.

That means the team at Firaxis have had six years to study the game that came before this one. Learn what made it ticked, see what worked, what was successful and what wasn’t. Then take all that and build something new and improved on top of it.

Read the complete review.

 
Seems more like SimCity to me .... I just wish he would have continued to improve some of his other earlier games like GOLF. It was very unique and fun, and certainly also had a lot of potential.
 
I know this is Kotaku's review but any chance you guys will be doing a performance benchmark on this game?
 
I know this is Kotaku's review but any chance you guys will be doing a performance benchmark on this game?
We likely won't, system requirements are very forgiving on the GPU end. The CPU may be the bottleneck here in comparison but still nothing outrageous we believe:

3133715-reqs.jpg
 
Having played very other civ game to death. I'm frankly not too interested in this one so far. This game feels more like a step back and more like an xpac then a new game to me. That and remembering all the issues that I had when civ5 came out and it will take a year before this game is really enjoyable. I'll be waiting on this one.
 
In Civ V the world never really changed to reflect your progress, we were basically looking at a screen full of farms for the entirety of the game. Having the buildings outside the city walls in Civ VI gives us a lot more eye candy.

I LIKE CANDY!
 
Based on this review, other reviews, and player response, it seems firaxis dropped the ball AGAIN on the AI. How hard is it to fix the AI? CIV IV was pretty good in this respect.
 
Played about 5 hours so far. I'm impressed, it seems to have taken a bit of the gloss off civ v and replaced it with meat. I love that you no longer build roads, it's been a long time coming! It's also been a much smoother launch, there seems to be less issues than the civ v launch. I would like to think I'm a civ veteran, I was too young for the original but the 11 year old me enjoyed the second and onwards For hundreds of hours. I'm looking forward to seeing how many hours of my life il sink into this one!
 
I've already put in several dozen hours.... and hundreds more to come... The AI is no more "broken" than it's always been - at least now, each leader has a different RANDOM "hidden" agenda so that it's not always completely predictable. Still a bit shocking, however, to have Ghandi declare a surprise war on me after 25 turns...

People used to complain about how long waiting for the AI to take each turn took on a huge map with tons of units... well, the builders only being able to build 3 things (then disappearing) makes for far less units... turns still take awhile, but it's getting better - wish it utilized multiple cores properly :(

The mini-map is my only real complaint. It used to represent the world (or at least, the explored world) quite handily... Now it simply shows colored squares for each city, but makes it very hard to see the actual shape of the underlying continents... Also, an annoying feature of building a world wonder is that the game automatically zooms in - leaving me to have to manually zoom out after...

Still, this game is AWESOME and I can hardly wait until all of the expansions are out :)
 
I'll have to agree with other die-hard Civ fans (I.e - you've been playing since Civ I) - Firaxis dropped the ball...AGAIN!! This seems to be a recurring theme for them since Civ V and continuing onward.

With this being the 25th Anniversary release of this venerable title, Firaxis needed to pull out all the stops for such a milestone, but, instead, they cheaped-out.

They needed to give us ultra-realistic graphics with 3-D rotational aspect view, they needed to give a superbly-polished AI, they needed to give a montage of all the best features from the past 5 games and then sprinkle in districts to boot, they needed to give unprecedented user game options, for example, 1UPT or 3 UPT support-model or unlimited UPT - the player chooses how he wants to play, and I could go on and on about what they "should've" done...

BUT, noooo, they went shoe-string budget and gave us cartoonish graphics (they more than likely hired fresh-out-of-college graphic design majors and threw $30k/year at them - you get what you pay for) and an AI that forgot all of the advances it made in Civ IV and V (I'm guessing all of the brainiacs that worked on the AI for IV and V have all left for greener pastures...and more money)

This 'let's strip away everything we worked hard to fix and propel the game forward" from previous versions and ",,,,let's give ourselves breathing room to be able to show we are fixing and improving something in newer versions" mentality needs to STOP! Because it is making them look desperate and incompetent. I mean, could you imagine if this strategy was employed by, say, car manufacturers or smartphone manufacturers? Where they strip away advanced features from previous models and then gradually add them back into the newest models and attempt to market it as "improvements and stability enhancements"? Those company would be ostracized and put out of business. And this is what is happening with Firaxis as more and more users are catching on to their BS shenanigans and con games.

Again, my recommendation...DON'T buy this game, at least...not now. Give it a year or two for them to put back all the features they sucked out of it from Civ V and its DLC and expansion paks. If you have to, find a friend or buddy and borrow his to play for a bit if you have new Civ cravings.

Better yet, as someone mentioned earlier, dust off Civ IV and add the Cavemen 2 Cosmos mod - very large mod and it changes the game completely with the options YOU set at the beginning - including AI variations. Options that make you say, "THIS is what Firaxis needs to be doing!!"
 
I've been playing the Civ series since Civ2 and one thing is I would never ever call Civ5 a perfect game or even close. It was infact a disaster until the expansions which made it alright but most Civ fans still prefered Civ4's gameplay to Civ5.

Civ VI however looks cool but has some serious flaws. The AI for one is absolutely terrible at a whole new level. If the AI goes to war on you which they most certainly will unless you have them scared and you take a city when peace happens the AI that attacked you will think your a warmonger as will the rest of the world. The AI will break promises no problem at all and there isn't anything you can do about it other then war which will make everyone else hate you as well. Ghandi for instance will flood your civ with his religion and no matter how many times he promises to stop he will keep sending missionaries and apostles which you can't even attack except through your own apostles. As far as the UI building units and research I'm currently in one game at year 1800+ and am in the industrial age myself playing on normal (prince) and the AI is running around with warriors, battering rams, and crossbowmen as their most advanced unit for most of the AI's. This is due to much of the AI being focused on either mass military or mass religion vs city growth. It feels like they don't want to get higher units because they can't churn em out as fast.

Then of course how the AI hates you so. They hate you for not having their religion, not spreading your religion, having a different government, having more wonders, not making enough money, not expanding as much as you should, making friends with city-states they want. Pretty much in any game 3/4 of the AI will hate you, 1/8th will just dislike you, and the other 1/8th will be neutral or occasionally like you.

One major mistake they made with Civ 5 that they repeated in Civ 6 as well is religion. Many people want a way to turn it off and when it first entered Civ5 in expac people wanted it was often hated.
 
Based on this review, other reviews, and player response, it seems firaxis dropped the ball AGAIN on the AI. How hard is it to fix the AI? CIV IV was pretty good in this respect.

The AI for CIV 5 was only bad at launch. It became very good after a few patches. The same thing applied for CIV 4 as well and the same will likely apply for CIV 6.
 
I've been playing the Civ series since Civ2 and one thing is I would never ever call Civ5 a perfect game or even close. It was infact a disaster until the expansions which made it alright but most Civ fans still prefered Civ4's gameplay to Civ5.

Civ VI however looks cool but has some serious flaws. The AI for one is absolutely terrible at a whole new level. If the AI goes to war on you which they most certainly will unless you have them scared and you take a city when peace happens the AI that attacked you will think your a warmonger as will the rest of the world. The AI will break promises no problem at all and there isn't anything you can do about it other then war which will make everyone else hate you as well. Ghandi for instance will flood your civ with his religion and no matter how many times he promises to stop he will keep sending missionaries and apostles which you can't even attack except through your own apostles. As far as the UI building units and research I'm currently in one game at year 1800+ and am in the industrial age myself playing on normal (prince) and the AI is running around with warriors, battering rams, and crossbowmen as their most advanced unit for most of the AI's. This is due to much of the AI being focused on either mass military or mass religion vs city growth. It feels like they don't want to get higher units because they can't churn em out as fast.

Then of course how the AI hates you so. They hate you for not having their religion, not spreading your religion, having a different government, having more wonders, not making enough money, not expanding as much as you should, making friends with city-states they want. Pretty much in any game 3/4 of the AI will hate you, 1/8th will just dislike you, and the other 1/8th will be neutral or occasionally like you.

One major mistake they made with Civ 5 that they repeated in Civ 6 as well is religion. Many people want a way to turn it off and when it first entered Civ5 in expac people wanted it was often hated.

I think you are coloring the world in your own view. I've been playing CIV since the original and Civ 5 was a better game than 4, even at launch. The Unit stacking in CIV 4 was horrid and thank god they got rid of it. Before CIV 5 the sole military tactic in the game was to bundle up all your units into one stack. It was incredibly stupid.

"The AI for one is absolutely terrible at a whole new level"

The AI of nearly every CIV game has been poor at launch. I remember playing CIV 3 the day it came out and the AI was the worst at moving it's military.

" If the AI goes to war on you which they most certainly will unless you have them scared and you take a city when peace happens the AI that attacked you will think your a warmonger as will the rest of the world. "

I played my first entire CIV 6 game without one war. It depends entirely what civs are on the map. In my 2nd game Pedro II tried to wipe me out during the ancient era. FYI you do not get a warmongering penalty if you are declared war on. You can be labeled a warmonger if you commit atrocious acts or declare war on others.

"Ghandi for instance will flood your civ with his religion and no matter how many times he promises to stop he will keep sending missionaries and apostles which you can't even attack except through your own apostles."

Actually if they do break a promise you can go to them in the diplomacy menu and declare a formal war under the reason of a broken promise. Doing this will eliminate any warmongering penalties.

"As far as the UI building units and research I'm currently in one game at year 1800+ and am in the industrial age myself playing on normal (prince) and the AI is running around with warriors, battering rams, and crossbowmen as their most advanced unit for most of the AI's. This is due to much of the AI being focused on either mass military or mass religion vs city growth. It feels like they don't want to get higher units because they can't churn em out as fast."

That's only the city states that do that. I've been through multiple games and the actual CIVs always produce modern units.

"Then of course how the AI hates you so. They hate you for not having their religion, not spreading your religion, having a different government, having more wonders, not making enough money, not expanding as much as you should, making friends with city-states they want. Pretty much in any game 3/4 of the AI will hate you, 1/8th will just dislike you, and the other 1/8th will be neutral or occasionally like you."

It sounds like you are just trying to play your tried and true strategy and not actually adapting at all to your surroundings. You can see each civ's agenda in the diplomacy menu. You should read it, it tells you what they like, don't like, and what they are trying to do. Of course Ghandi is going to be mad at you if you go around killing everyone and of course Spain is going to chastise you for not being their religion or if you are spreading a competing religion.

"One major mistake they made with Civ 5 that they repeated in Civ 6 as well is religion. Many people want a way to turn it off and when it first entered Civ5 in expac people wanted it was often hated."

What this sounds like is that you don't factor religion into your strategy and would rather just turn it off so you can keep doing what you usually do. Instead of complaining about a feature of the game how about you try to use it. Religion was a great addition in CIV 5 and they made it even better in 6.
 
Civ 2 was the last great civ game... after that it became more about bulding the city (a la` simcity) than about overall military strategy (see Risk). I don't care about 'culture' or 'ideas' or 'religion'... and I certainly don't see the problem with unit stacking. One guy said the strategy is to just stack up a ton of units into one stack. Well in Civ2 that was a sure route to disaster becuase the defense is only rated by one unit, albeit the best defender (as it should be), but ALL units die if that defender dies. It worked perfectly.
 
I'm disappointed that the developers still haven't brought back building your throne room. Holding out for the DLC!
 
Think I'll stick to Empire Earth: Art of Conquest. I never really did like this game way back when, and EE always seemed superior. Compared to this new Civ, the old EE still actually is superior!
 
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