The major problem of civ 6 is that it has too many redundant features. Really, I'm literally ignoring half of the game:

(1) I ignore most of the civs and never play as them

(2) I ignore trade routes because it's too much work to always reassign them

(3) I ignore theming bonuses/puzzles in museums

(4) I partly ignore adjacency bonuses/puzzles in district placement, as far as I am able to ignore them

(5) I ignore religion entirely

(6) I ignore most districts, buildings

(7) I would like to ignore the governors, but they are too important

Additionally, some game mechanics are simply weird:

(1) Settlers, builders become more expensive with each one you build. That's just counterintuitive and blatant game mechanic.

(2) Districts become more expensive the more techs/civis you get. That's weird as hell.

(3) Split tech/culture tree: Of course you can have different fields of science. But why the hell do theatres "develop" new governments? Culture is culture, it's about entertaining people, impressing and convincing them - hence borders spread with accumulated culture. Science is science, it's about coming up with ideas.

At the same time, they removed features I liked:

(1) Giving builders limited charges was maybe done to reduce the time you had to invest to constantly manage your workers. However, improving the terrain is one of the main parts of a 4x, namely the "building" part. I like to manage my builders.

(2) Removing transports and granting every unit the embarkation ability might at a first glance reduce the work for loading/unloading troops. But it also removed the fun of landing operations at an enemy shore. You have to keep your units protected when at see, land at a spot with limited troops (because you have limited transports) etc. Now you can just embark your whole army and just land somewhere.

Frogsquadron wrote:

Out of curiosity, if they removed many features you liked and added a bunch of features you just ignore, and some features you feel are counterintuitive or oddly implemented... what are the features that make you still play it?

Let me put it this way: if civilization 6 did not have cultural victory type as good as it is, i would quit long time ago. All other victory types are boring and one-dimensional. Religion=spam holy sites & prophets. Science = spam campuses. Domination = spam units. Diplomacy = spam emergencies ....

Cultural/tourism victory synergizes with so many game mechanics, that it really feels like a nice and well deserved achievement.

You have:

- great artists, writers, and archeologists. Theming is actually important and I disagree with the previous poster who finds no use in that. Carefully placing your great works increases the yeald x2. What more do you want? Increase your difficulty if you find this unnecessary part of a gameplay.

- Theatre districts and adjacency bonuses with wonders

- Important wonders either for storage of great works (apadana, great library....) or just generally buffing your cultural victory (eiffel tower, cristo redentor)

- NATURAL PARKS. You need to actually own lands that have appeal to generate tourism

- Rock bands. i dislike this one, but there is no denying that they are very important which means you have to also consider generating faith, not just culture in your game to reliably win against culture-focused civs

- Buildings like city walls, water parks, stadiums are all necessary

- Improvements like seaside resorts and ski resorts should also always be considered because the stacking of bonuses you receive with cards and wonders really makes them very powerful

- Policy cards. You have to sacrifice slots for policy cards that increase your touriss

- Trading and open borders with opponents. You have to have good relations with them. Going to war might sometimes actually hurt your chances rather than benefit you.

There are so many factors that make this gameplay so ENGAGING that i really don't think Amplitude will able to top it upon launch of their game. I'm just being realistic here.

Fame is a good concept for HUMANKIND and i can only hope quests will be as engaging as cultural victory is in civilization 6. I'm definitely giving this new game a try, but i'm not sure if it will be as good as culture in civilization games. 

We will see.

(1) Exploration. I like exploring worlds in Skyrim, I like to find new shores in colonization. Honestly, I'm right now playing colonization, because the exploration aspect is done there very well.

Just to ping and build off of this, I totally agree. For me it is great to explore around my starting spot and pick out the next city placement, the district advantages, and strategtic placement. Then finally through playing the game seeing the development of the land itself. It may have started as a small river valley, but it may have become a huge trading hub with farms and a dam to provide power/security. Or, maybe due to the city's placement it would become a military hub with mines for production just tearing the land apart to protect the nation.

Thats why when I see the trailer and screenshots of Humankind, I am immensely excited as I see the sprawling cities and the mishmash of cultures coming together. I love to see the changes and development over time. That is what gets me by the simplistic military play, repetitive religion play, and late game monotony.

Well Exploration is always the most fun part of any 4x game whether land based or space based. 

I agree that the change to 1UPT negatively impacted the domination victory by making it a tedious slog and the AI is not up to the challenge in most cases.

But it also makes combat more tactical. So I do more of my conquest in the early game when I don't need to position a ton of units or move them long distances. 

I like what Amplitude is bringing to the table with armies traveling as a  stack then deploying to 1UPT for battle.

I am a fan of both the current culture and diplomatic diplomatic victories. 

Trade Routes are my most disliked feature because it is too menu-based. Although the sorting tools make it more tolerable. 

Frogsquadron wrote:

Out of curiosity, if they removed many features you liked and added a bunch of features you just ignore, and some features you feel are counterintuitive or oddly implemented... what are the features that make you still play it?

I do not by the dlcs yet, bit a system wich  is underrated and could be way more inproved  - in my opinion( in civ v as ),well is the spy system.

Gamling wrote:

I played the Civ series since the beginning. The two last games has been a mixed bag for me. The 1 unit per tile changes and strong city defens wihout troops made conquest too bothersome to me. Its to easy to block the AI and shoot it down with ranged troops. Defence is to easy and conquest is to cumbersome. I find myself almost never starting a war and almost always setteling with taking one or two cities from the AI who dared attacking. Usualy they are wasting their big invading army on my cities  letting me counter attack for an easy kill.

So usualy I end up in a peacefull Civ VI game of "Endless building que" (If you wanted to make a Civ clone that could have been your name.) and happen to win culture without trying. A few games I won sience but never ever bothered with conquest. I tried religion a couple of times but that just comes down to who produces the most faith and if I can be bothred by moving around all those apostles. Not fun to do over and over again. I did like the last expansion of Civ VI. Natural disasters and plauges has plaid a big role in history too and the right amount of disasters and set backs makes things more intresting.  

The reason why I still happen to play Civ VI is the early game of Exploration. The feeling of discovering a new world and see how history plays out is an amazing concept. But after reaching midle ages and the exploration slows down and the repetetive things of all the other systems kicks in I usualy quit.

What I would like is better combat with tactical battles where army unit composistion, the map  and perhaps  generals with some sort of strategy cards desides the outcome. I realy do enyoy games like the Age of Wonders series. But for a civ game I geuss you need slithly faster system. The Test of times games was ok but I think I prefer something less automated. 

I would also like a more advanced map. Where things like climate, geografy,  ground water, animals and vegetation plays a bigger role for the fertility of the map tiles. That was one of the better mechanics of Alpha Centauri. I find it very intresting how most of the big cultures of history of the world destroyed the nature and used up most resources around it. The fertile moon of the midle east is now to most part a desert. The medeterian countries are now also largely made deserts where in ancient times you could grow crops for millions.

Funny how different people are. I played the entire series at release as well and Civ 5 was a godsend by moving to one unit per tile. Every civ game before that just had these endless stacks of units and wars were so one dimensional and boring with almost zero tactics involved. I agree that it was a move that needed better AI, but CIv has always had brain dead AI. I agree with you on the religious system. It's so awful I wish I could just turn the whole thing off and I always play with the victory condition off. It's crazy you mention Age of Wonders though. I loved the way battles worked in the first Age of Wonders game and always thought that would make a great fit in Civ 5 or 6. You avoid the endless stacks of earlier games, but aren't quite limited to 1 unit per tile. Maybe 4 units per tile and you get different strengths and weaknesses depending on the makeup of those units.

Speaking of exploration, I liked how the Endless series handled this. Whether through the ancient ruins in Legend or the anomolies in Space, you always had a reason to have your units travel around the map to find new things. I kinda wonder if HK will have anything similar and if so, how will it work?

Dinode wrote:

Speaking of exploration, I liked how the Endless series handled this. Whether through the ancient ruins in Legend or the anomolies in Space, you always had a reason to have your units travel around the map to find new things. I kinda wonder if HK will have anything similar and if so, how will it work?

There should be some quests by tribal villages, that you would do for them for rewards, which would involve exploring and fighting the barbarians.

Catodion wrote:

Dinode wrote:

Speaking of exploration, I liked how the Endless series handled this. Whether through the ancient ruins in Legend or the anomolies in Space, you always had a reason to have your units travel around the map to find new things. I kinda wonder if HK will have anything similar and if so, how will it work?

There should be some quests by tribal villages, that you would do for them for rewards, which would involve exploring and fighting the barbarians.

Would the villages stick around for you to get more quests from later? That was the point I was trying to make, some form of exploration that can stay relevant late game.

yes that could be a nice thing actually. The villages don't have to disappear unless you specifically make it so.

I must admit i'm a complete ignorant and definitely please correct me if i'm wrong but doesn't endless legend have a system like that in the game?

Catodion wrote:

yes that could be a nice thing actually. The villages don't have to disappear unless you specifically make it so.

I must admit i'm a complete ignorant and definitely please correct me if i'm wrong but doesn't endless legend have a system like that in the game?

Yup, that was what I was referring to.

An interesting thing could be to use the cultural score as a modifier for morale. There were many battles in history that was won not because of numbers or technology, but because one country has a cultural reason to defend and the other has no actual reason to attack - pure conquest of more lands.

THANK YOU!!! Finally a civilization strategy game that, hopefully, makes sense to me.

I've played the Civilization series from Civilization 2 onwards. Lately felt it incomplete and just not right.

A civilization strategy game should allow the player, to define the kind of civilization it wants it to become and not start the game with a pre-selected Civilization with perks/attributes along with a notable leader.

I believe, it would enrich the gameplay if events of various nature (e.g. society, belief, government, architecture, traditions, etc) would pop-up as the game timeline progress with options/decisions, allowing the player to create it's own civilization.

Once again, THANK YOU!!

PS: I apologize if this post isn't on the proper thread, just wanted to share my view as strategy passionate gamer.

In regards to researching new technologies, I'm a fan of the tech web design (e.g. Civilizaion Beyond Earth).

Buildings construction availability should follow a prerequisite system (e.g. population level/city size)

IcSo wrote:
A civilization strategy game should allow the player, to define the kind of civilization it wants it to become and not start the game with a pre-selected Civilization with perks/attributes along with a notable leader.

Ironically this change is probably inspired from games like the Endless series and the renaissance of the Master of Orion 2 genus of 4X games.

There are almost as many people still playing Civ5 as Civ6 on steam because of this kind of thing I think. They're almost like diverging branches of the same core game.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
We've got an Events system that usually presents you with several choices, as well as the civics system, both of which impact the Ideologies of your civilization.

Bear in mind that this mechanic was one of the core reasons Beyond Earth wasn't replayable and Elemental failed where Fallen Enchantress was comparatively successful. I was actually just about to add a little spiel about this topic here so here goes:

Sid Meier has said, "interesting choices". I would say, don't give the player a false choice or tell them when to choose. Worry about making things interesting after you've eliminated every hint of those 2 problems.

Beyond Earth's tech quests became inspirations in Civ6. Because Inspirations can be popped at any time without consequence, tech research can be partially completed while waiting for the inspiration. This "juggling" is a critical skill progression for pushing past emperor.

Endless Legend's quests were bloody awful from a gameplay perspective but so great narratively that I just accepted them and played an RPG with a 4X minigame. Instead, we could've discovered the elements of the quest organically on the map, ultimately opening up an extra victory condition. There is ultimately no difference except that the player doesn't feel like their game is gated by something unrelated to the core gameloop and it's optional - i.e. not a false choice or forced timing.

I would personally extend this reasoning into the UI and graphic design. Many 4X games end up with lots of popups like this:

+5 science per population

+5 dust per population

+5 industry per population

If it were me (and I'm not a designer), I would do:

+5 ⚛/?/⚙ production

"production" would be an unambiguous per population term, "yield" referring to the end result (for things like % bonuses/maluses). Civ6 has clear language like this and it really simplifies the interpretation of the game without decreasing the depth.

Endless Legend frequently felt like it had an overwhelming level of detail in its presentation. Both gameplay-wise and in the art on the map (which was wonderful but a little too high detail for the height of the camera - only a little though).

It's been years since I played Endless Space but its cards are a great example of a fantastic system hampered by poor communication. What the cards did was actually spatial and probabilistic but it was explained using large amounts of esoteric text and little sense of the overall concept or picture. Sorry if that sounds harsh - I really liked it, it was fantastically innovative and I can also tell when something would confuse a client  :)

Stardrive, interestingly, is a fantastic example of a system that is easy to understand and clearly communicated with lots of organic choices. It's just that it has an intractable time complexity problem. If you turned the scale way down and quit the game halfway through, it was actually great  ;)

It would blow my socks off if the screens in the game were treated as context for choices rather than an epic in JIRA too. My personal opinion is that Conway's law extends to JIRA and that 4X screens suffer greatly as a result.

My first encounter with the modern notification based 4X was Civ5 and it is a great innovation. However, it dumps you in a context that's missing a critical part of why you went there - the map.

I would love for the notifications to be on the map and when off-screen to give some indication of which direction they are in and how far away they are. I don't know that having them ring the edge of the viewport like in a first person game would work but I'd definitely try that out.

This would also allow you to sit at a specific place on the map, sort it out, move on. I feel that this is a fundamental improvement to the gameplay loop. At the moment, things feel quite disconnected in most 4Xs and the natural way to play the game on the map usually involves changing obscure UI settings (e.g. cycle next unit automatically) and fighting the UI. Keep us on the map please, we like looking at your art. You could even make it so that there were immersive sounds for pending notifications (idle units etc) and they went quiet as you gave orders. It would actually be nice to be able to achieve quiet. The endless hammering in the background can, unsurprisingly, cause us to turn ambient sounds off.

Bottom line is that you'll forever have a B-tier 4X if you make it an RPG and that numerous games have demonstrated this, including Firaxis' own work. Overwhelming presentation and bitsy mechanics will also do this - you only have to look at Age of Wonders to see that. I personally like, buy and play these games but I don't know anyone else who does and I regularly play multiplayer games of Civ6 with my RL friends.

Hi there going to piggyback to this thread here I’m also a veteran 4x player with over 1000 hours logged into civ 5 and civ 6 and while in not sure if these have been mentioned before here are my ideas

MODDING SUPPORT

This is essential for the longevity of almost any game now.

Allows you to create a more balanced game while still addressing people who want crazy options.

The more ability you give to the modders the better, 

It would be cool to actively try to engage that community by hosting design challenges or having special prestige in-game items or steam achievements that you can get by modding/contributing to the community. 

CUSTOMIZATION

Ability to customize map, scenario, civilization as much as possible

The more ability we have to change the “game” we play the more replayability has. 

Some suggestions 

Era gate

Extreme world generation

• Hot/cold
• # of continents
• # of civilizations
• Victory conditions

SCENARIO CHANGES

Scenario changes like

Modifiers (X% more research or production or culture)

Aggression level of AI 

The ability to spawn an advanced civilization that snowballs giving the player a mid to late game opponent who isn’t snowballed 

Some more scenario suggestions come from rimworld. They have one of the most robust scenario editor out there with game long events that completely change your playstyle. I don’t know if this would be possible to add to Humankind, but it would be interesting to be able to turn on an option like.

Overgrown Fauna (Fauna takes twice as long to cut and regrows if not used in 20 turns… or something similar)  

Global Ice Age (colder map biome, less food, more food costs and more blizzards) 

Aggressive World (Civ AI are 4x more likely to go to war with each other and 3x more likely to team up with each other to go to war with others.) 

Challenge mode (you can only have a max of X cities)

Zugg_zug wrote:

First of all let me say how excited I am for Humankind. I loved a lot of the mechanics and design choices in Endless Legend and Endless Space 2, and I'm very much looking forward to the fresh ideas that you guys at Amplitude will surely bring to the historical 4X genre. And from first impressions, it seems most of the hardcore Civ community is excited, or at least quietly optimistic about this game as well. 

Inevitably HK will be compared to Civ 6 and its predecessors, so I feel HK has a great opportunity to excel in some areas where those games are lacking. 

As a long time Civ and 4x player I totally agree with OP. CIV 6 was definitely a mixed bag. 

I think diplomacy is currently the biggest untapped mechanic in 4x games, here are some mechanics I think would make it a truly engaging and interesting mechanic. 

1. True embargoes (that require me to intercept their trade vessels or vice versa)
2. Threaten - (i.e. do this or I will do this) - if they refuse I get a mission to follow through on my threat and deal with any consequences that result.  
3. Different levels of diplomatic co-operation (Stellaris has great mechanics on this)
4. Sanctions and multilateral agreements that target an enemy
5. I should also be able to enter territory despite being told not to (this may lead to war, but should not be a declaration of war itself). 

I also totally agree with OP's comment on a deeper economy and I think the mechanics could fit really nicely in here too. 

 Here are the things I think CIV 6 does well:

1. War: Civ has always created interesting war mechanics that require strategic thinking (landscape, ranged vs mele, technology etc)
2. Espionage: Variety of options although can start to feel quite repetitive, it does, however, add a flavour to most of the other mechanics in the game which is a massive win. 
3. Global warming: a totally unique an interesting mechanism it is a big shame that it does not meaningfully tie into any other mechanism in the game.

As someone with 700-ish hours sunk into last two Civs (and some playtime in EL) I'd like to add my three pennies too.

Unstacked cities in EL were annoyance, I always built one long snake of boroughs to maximize their lvl asap, and the fact that I didn't understand a lick off the tech tree didn't help at all.
In Civ 6 unstacked cities offer real nifty puzzle to solve for optimal gameplay, but compared to the map these cities seem like towns of giants built in world of lilliputs.

I'd totally love to see 4X game when there's a lot more of a lot smaller tiles that allow for much greater fiddling with districts and buildings, and I am happy to see that in HK you can add territories to cities to expand the size they can build on