Sid Meier's Civilization

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Welcome to the Lemmy community for the Civilization series of turn-based strategy games! All official games and even spinoffs (here's to you, Call to Power) are welcome here!

founded 4 years ago
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I love the game civ6, that's why the problems with it make me troubled and I want to suggest improvements. I've played through multiple playthroughs and here are some issues that stand out to me.

TLDR: Civ6's gameplay forces you to play in a very imperialist, chauvinistic, racist, and religious way to win.

Problsms

'Barbarians' (indigenous or native people, obviously stereotyped as always warlike), the tech tree that forces you to discover things in the way the Europeans discovered them, not just making you unlock actually necessary technologies before you unlock new ones, even more so with the civic tree as any policy or government can be developed in isolation, it doesn't need the preceding civ6 ones, also you can't have a democracy from the beginning if you want what's best for your people. You have to conquer other continents displacing or killing the natives, and the way it frames certain governments such as communism is disingenuous when they're really describing authoritarianism, and making that misunderstanding more widespread.

My suggested solutions/improvements

Abolish the civic tree. Let you establish any government or any policy ( you can still have policy slots but it's the same across all governments) at any time without culture cost. Governments could affect things like the happiness and productivity of your people, but not more than that. Rename 'barbarians' to natives or indigenous people and create more peaceful options for interacting with them, don't make them aggressive by default. Encourage cooperation with civilisations on other continents (such as lasting trade agreements that you don't have to renew every 30 turns) rather than encouraging settling everywhere on the map. Allow individual cities to get upgrades that allows producing multiple things at once rather than the only way to do so being creating multiple cities. Allow agnosticism or atheism as a 'religion' option and rename religion to 'philosophy' or 'ideology' or something like that. Having real historical cultures and leaders on a generated world doesn't really make sense so there should be fictional or generated civilisations and leaders as options too.

I don't mind if they keep the victory conditions they've got, scientific, religious (although ideological is a better term), military, although not cultural. If people want to play as murderous colonial maniacs they should be allowed to, they just shouldn't be forced into it and should have more peaceful options to play. The scientific victory should be collaborative, with multiple civilisations working together to advance scientific knowledge and improve human conditions (although the current goal of space travel is overly simplistic). Convincing the world of your ideology isn't a bad measure for success either, and conquering the world military is a kind of success, if not a very moral one. Culture victory is just a thinly veiled way of saying that only European culture is good and the way of proving your culture is best is attracting tourists, which is again overly simplistic.

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  • does trading among your own cities get you more resources, or are they simple transferred between cities?
  • how much should I follow the recommendations for producing stuff? Sometimes it's useful but it almost never tells me to produce a builder even though they seem kinda crucial
  • how fast should I be expanding? Should I be starting cities as much and as quickly as possible?
  • is it me, or is it very hard to trade favorably or even equally with non-human players? They never seem to be OK with trading one resource for another. They always want some gold too.

I'm only on my second game so far, so still figuring things out. Enjoying it a lot though!

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I own a Switch, PS5, and a beefy PC and have been playing Civilization since the first one on MS-DOS.

I love playing games on my TV and using a controller nowadays. I've been playing the Switch version and it works great (controls-wise) but there are obvious performance issues. My PC has no difficulty playing Civ6 regardless of map sizes or number of AIs. But I dislike playing with the KBM when I'm in front of the TV. Since I've already double-dipped (well, triple, since I also own Civ6 on my iPad), I'm reluctant to buy the PS5 version as well.

Does anyone know if there are any good controller mods out there for the PC version? I've even tried emulating the Switch version on my PC, which works well, but doesn't quite give the performance level I would expect to get, since it's emulating a Switch now.

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Game of Civ6 using mods which multiply everything by 10. (I'm the original author of the Traits x10 mod, working on update now)

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There's just something about the art style that works really well for screenshots.

Playing with a bunch of mods, so if you don't recognise it, it's probably a mod.

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Thanks for the invitation, @tskaalgard@dev.lemmy.ml, I hope this will become a community teeming with activity.