izigame.me

Edit (4 May 2024; at 14 hours of play): I've opened up to the game more. I get how the game plays now, however, in short, the game still has multiple mechanics and terms that is heavily overcomplicated, making the game feel overwhelming. However, I can see how you can enjoy it, because this feels more like a "city builder game" more than a "Civilization game" with the introduction of districts, wonders per tile, buildings in said district, etc. You can enjoy this game by thinking it as such, probably.
I've given this game a chance multiple times but I can't seem to recommend Civ 6.
For the record, I am a huge fan of Civ 5 and I've been trying to adapt my game sense from Civ 5 to Civ 6, it just doesn't connect most of the time because the game has a lot of questionable changes from Civ 5.
TL;DR if you wanna try a Civ game, please try Civ 5 instead.
Bad things:
- Movement is heavily nerfed, where you can't inch out moves to a high cost hex if you have only 1 movement left. Previously in Civ 5, you can still cross a river if your remaining movement is 1. Mobility feels really bad now especially when surrounded or on some terrains that randomly has hills next to it, making exploration feels really bad.
- Global Happiness is changed to Amenities. Amenities are basically Local Happiness per city. The Amenity system is a huge problem mainly for expansion because the new city can't grow big without building amenity buildings and in extension, the housing system. In Civ 5, since there is a Global Happiness, you can carry the newer cities in happiness by having higher overall happiness to begin with, so they grow without any halt, making the newer cities not so much of a burden than it is worth. With the Amenity system AND the Housing system in Civ 6, obviously, the newer cities are basically a burden to your civilization until you decided to build amenity buildings with workers, which have its own problem.
- Workers are expendables now with charges. It doesn't make sense in any explanation. Do the workers just die after building some buildings now? Anyway, this means that you have to spare some production in your cities to build more workers now instead of other useful productions which feels very bad for the progression.
- The general UI is opaque, ugly, and hard to read sometimes. They settled with a hard opaque blue for the background of their UI, which makes it harder to read the fine details and numbers. Also, the fog of war is a novel idea being a map and all, but the brown color hinders a lot of the readability of the terrain especially if the terain itself is yellowish in color.
- Districts instead of buildings. Novel idea at best, which tries to utilize empty hexes into use. But this is where you also need to upgrade a city's amenities, housing, and also libraries, workshops, etc. "You'd have to think what you wanted to build in your city, which is good for the amount of strategy approaches you have" is what I would say if amenities and housing isn't so much of a problem to begin with.
- The Culture track is a research tree now. Only difference is that you have to apply the cultures within a card system to actually apply the culture for your civilization. It is a bad change in general. Culture track is executed better in Civ 5 with the Social Policy system where it is a selection of different cultures depending on your choices and speciality. It is understandable that Cultures need to be researched before you actually apply it in the society, but putting this in Civ 6 feels like every civilization don't have their distinct playstyle in culture. Every civilization feels like it has the same culture because you have to start with the same one because you have to research them, whereas in Civ 5, you can already start with a different tree.
- Envoys from what I heard is how you be allies with a city state, however I haven't touched that system ever, it looks unnecessarily convoluted for their own good. Civ 5's city state allying system is kinda bad because it dumbs down to spending gold on them at the end game, but it is easy to understand and straightforward. I can't seem to understand Envoys and the beginning fact that you need envoys instead of gold to befriend them is another "unnecessary currency" in my book.
- Golden Ages doesn't feel rewarding at all, I don't even know when is my Golden Age. I've reached Golden age one time but it doesn't even have any effect on my civilization. This point is just me being confused, which is also elevated due to the UI being terrible.
- Character design is a straight downgrade. They directed the designs to more cartoonish than somewhat "realistic" and "grounded". As a result, they all look ugly. Not a single character or leader in this game looks good in my opinion. The designs between characters are vastly different and incoherent they seem to not be the same species. For all I know some of the leaders could be an alien.
- The natural disaster DLC pretty much ruins the game's pacing and knowledge. Previously, settling on a flood plain / besides a river is generally a good choice because you will have access to fresh water, and that leads to more population. Now, there are disasters and flood plains can actually flood now and it destroys a city's economy just like that. That inherently teaches everyone to not build on areas that actually makes the civilization prosperous, the logic is ass-backwards.
- The hero DLC (I think it's a DLC) is also convoluted, and unrewarding to make those heroes, because they will die of natural causes after a few turns.
There are some good changes like the Wonders built occupying a hex to prevent "Wonder Racing" is good, and the multiple leaders approach of the same Civilization is great so you can pick and match which leader of that civilization is the best for your playstyle. However, as mentioned above, I can't recommend this due to the huge amount of negatives outweighing the positives.