your friends
Single player supremacy
I’m still enjoying civ5 without any DLC
I had a friend that played civ, he invited me to multiplayer. Little did I know, he plays against the hardest bots on a regular basis. I had only done like, two single player games.
I don’t play with him anymore.
I like playing with my sister because we both regularly play on Deity difficulty and playing against each other is the only way either of us can be challenged anymore. Of course many times we just team up against the rest of the world.
That’s what sucks about Civ (and EU4, HOI4 and the like for that matter) — once you figure out how it works and you start winning it becomes boring in single player.
And then for multiplayer it’s hard to find someone committed to playing for long stretches of time consistently.
IMO games where losing is fun is where it’s at, like Crusader Kings, Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress.
Something fun to mess with in Civ V is on small custom maps with designated start points, when start bias can’t take effect it will always place players on points starting from bottom right going left and then from bottom to top.
Example: Player 1 will always be placed on the lowest tile furthest to the right.
You can use this to get the deity achievment if you just don’t give the AI any workable tiles.
I’ve got like 120 hours in Civ5. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish the second match.
Everyone shits on 6 but never actually gives a reason other than “5 iS bEtTeR!”. The mechanics in 6 are a massive improvement on 5; civics tree > social policies, city loyalty > happiness etc. It has a bigger and better roster of civs/leaders. Combat and religion are more fleshed out. I love both games but I can’t think of anything that 5 does better
Comparing the Civs steals the joy they bring for their various reasons.
- Civ 1 was unlike anything else and so legendary it created the 4X genre.
- Civ 2 had the best espionage until an expansion for 4. Civ2 also defined the scope for all future Civs.
- Civ 3 was fine. Resources were a good addition and tile quirks, like Floodplains on top of another base tile like desert, helped bring tons strategy and gave the ability to grow Tall.
- Civ 4 was probably peak Civ for many people, especially including DLCs.
- Civ 5 removed unit stacking and made happiness a resource.
- Civ 6 emphasized the city development aspect and brought back the climate stuff from 2, 3, and 4.
They are all good but they are not collectively suitable for every person. Civ6 is amazing but it took me literally 30 hours to finally have it click. I also have 550 hours in Civ 6 and over 1200 in Civ 5. CiV is also a high water mark but it overshadows the real value and fun in 6.
It’s a shame most folks will ignore us and say 6 was bad for being too game like.
Civ 6 was made much more to be a digital board game. The combination of little to no multiplicative bonuses and generally small adjacency bonuses means you have to micro manage city planning all the time. It bombards the player with so many individual decisions that each make little impact.
Civ 5 felt much more like an empire simulator. The biggest bonuses come from making “big” decisions, like which policy tree, who/when to war, which ideology. As the game progressed, there was typically no need to micromanage.
The combat in civ 6 is atrocious after they removed the ability to build roads offensively for war until you unlock military engies (way too late in the game). Civ 5’s road system took ages to get up and running, but the payoff was immense.
The civics tree system is better, but the policy card system is broken. It gives players too much flexibility, so everyone ends up running the same/similar set of cards every time. Tradition + Rationalism is a meme in Civ 5, but it did offer more esoteric strategies with different trees.
It’s the micromanagement. When earlier games became tedious, I could just pick a quicker game speed, and I would suddenly feel like I was playing with more momentum. But in VI, it actually kills momentum, as if driving the slightly faster route to work at the cost of particularly frustrating traffic, since the most tedious micro isn’t turn-based, but city-based. You only have to plan districts/improvements once per city, so I find I can still have fun with VI if I play suboptimally (i.e., tall) on tiny maps and with mods that let me cram more civilizations into the game. I’ve probably put in a few hundred hours this way.
But I’d rather just play IV or V.
Yeah I prefer 6 over 5 any day, but there are a few small things that 5 does do better imo. I do prefer the more serious art style of 5, and I noticed that there is a lot less actual dialogue in a civs respective language compared to 5. While I do like automatic road creation, I do also miss being able to build it manually to have more control over where units can go. Finally, I think the happiness system in Civ 6 is a bit too easy, as it can be mostly ignored and very easily fixed compared to 5. Keeping your citizens happy was much more of a challenge there.
Why anyone ever plays multiplayer is s confounding mystery to me. They must like being forced to rush and being abused.
Ha, those friggin normies and their friendships. Whats up with that? Almost like spending time with people you trust and care about causes neuroendocrinal response of dopamine and endorphins resulting in feelings of happiness and fulfillment.
causes neuroendocrinal response of dopamine and endorphins resulting in feelings of happiness and fulfillment.
Do people really feel that way? I’m just drained and glad to be home alone again.
It’s not a constant 100% result, but yeah it’s kind of a well established natural phenomenon. Couldn’t stop it if you wanted to. Some people can get the same benefit solely from having their comments upvoted, we process it the same as regular human interaction. Bonus points exist for huggers.
Do people really feel that way?
Being around people I know and like is incredibly pleasant and relaxing, particularly when we’re all engaged in an activity together - volleyball or board game night or watching a movie together.
The trick I’ve found is to do something everyone vibes with and that has incredibly low stakes. So, like, carving pumpkins during Halloween or splitting a bottle of wine and complaining about work together or visiting a museum.
Its nice to have people saying and doing things that you wouldn’t normally say or do. And its nice to have other people responding to your own thoughts and feelings.
Almost all my friends have kids now, so group anything is basically impossible, assuming we we even want to do the same thing at the same time.
Seems like it’s a valid choice in a competitive game. Unless there’s an option to disable military victories or explicitly play coop.
I don’t consider abusing my friends because they’re slower than me in a turn based strategy a good thing to do.
I’ve been playing couch co-op with my husband on both of our Switches. It’s not too bad if you don’t force a turn timer. The game will give you a ding when you’re the last one to play, but we both have ‘side games’ or play with our cats in the meantime if the other needs more time. I wouldn’t do it online or with a turn timer, though.
4 is peak for me. The only thing I dislike about 4 is the unit stacking making it hard to know if a unit is just 1 unit or 20 dudes in the same spot.
Back in the day I used to check out civfanatics.com for mods. There were tons for Civ4:BTS that made it so much cooler. After playing that and then playing Civ5, I was incredibly disappointed. Civ6 is better, but not by much. I still go back to Civ4 when I need my “one more turn” fix.
I hated the stacks. Idk why, but it was always confusing how big they should be. When they can’t stack it makes more sense to me. How many troops do I need? As many as I can fit.
