I like the idea of playing with friends, but fuck me if people don’t take for-fucking-ever to do NOTHING! Click, skip, move!!! It’s the first four turns, FUCKING go!!!

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.

6 has many mechanics dumbed down, trade is just completely bugged, and it came wrapped in a very cartoonish style including several world leaders who were straight up mythological figures.

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.

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.

5 had better pacing for mechanics, 6 bombards players with lots of things from the start and then goes a but flat.

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.

I like playing tall and I’m not a huge fan of the micromanagement that comes with the sprawling empires. Civ 5 limits this through happiness. Civ 6 doesnt. Throw in an artstyle that i dont like and i just dont want to play it as much

civ5 without any DLC

Utterly insane. 😳

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.

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’m still playing civ IV. With the direction the series has been going, it looks like I probably always will.

Wait, how did you even finish a single match in just 120 hours?!

Well considering this ideas were taken from Endless Legend, you should give that a try. Or if you want something more Civ like, they also have Humankind, which is like Civ but better and the AI is really good (they made it even better now than before, and it was already way ahead of Civ’s NPC AIs). They also have a unique win condition with Fame.

Stacking wasn’t perfect but even with stacks of doom it allowed for a balanced variety of viable playstyles. You pretty much have to cheese a min/max urban sprawl (iirc - it’s been years) on Civ5 to beat the higher difficulty levels because of the differences in action economy, which undermines replayability. Replayability is the heart of Civ.

Some changes in G&K seemed like they were designed to patch the economics to a degree.

I was poor and didn’t want to have to pay for a patch, so I ended up getting tired out on vanilla and didn’t get into G&K much by the time I could justify buying it. But from the discussions I’ve seen the issue was too fundamental to simply be patched over. It’s still a good game but Civ4 reigns as king imo.

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.

That game was a fuckin masterpiece. I actually don’t want it remade because I worry it would never live up to the original.

Helldivers is at least cheaper than most other games. I’ve been playing the crap out of it both with friends and randoms and having a lot of fun. Hoping I don’t lose interest once I get all the strategems unlocked, but just got one of the warbonds after grinding for the medals so I should have something to do for a while

For future reference, the two hour window is more of a suggestion not a requirement. Just last week I refunded a game with 4 hours.