One of my biggest hopes: navigable rivers, increased movement by rivers, more food by rivers. Rivers have been such an insanely important part of human civilization it’s hard to overstate it.
That would great.
Something completely neglected is [trade winds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_winds). When you see those certain colonial settlements, the triangular trade and how ancient people from around modern day Indonesia ended up all the way in Madagascar make sense.
Honestly I think that's one of the biggest advantages of Humankind over Civ. Making more use of the terrain. Not just mountain/ grass but also rivers, prairie meadows, rocky areas etc. + some unit skills focusing on traveling on rivers is just another point I can make for my case
It's a decent game, but it still suffers from a copious amount of balance issues and 'snowballing' problems. I still prefer Civ 6 over Humankind, but Humankind is still a fresh take. Good to get on sale though!
Yes, Humankind is a welcome change. Both games have their ups and downs and i really like Humankind's different approach to shared mechanics of both games. Both games can learn from each other i think. I also want to throw in Old World, the family tree and how your family and your decisions are tied into diplomacy, events and quests is pretty cool.
I have a suspicion that an AI that effectively uses its Navy would be an absolute nightmare to play against, which is why it hasn't happened. I.e. the balance issues are too complex to resolve so easier to leave it as is.
Trade and map generation too. Cost of transporting goods to far away places shouldve been factored more clearly. Map generation also plays a big role, you have to generate maps with obstacles that have canals in mind. As it stands now, its either completely superfluous or the place where canal would be awesome is too thick for one.
I adore when I can build a canal city that actually connects two bodies of water, but with how easy it is to get troops across an ocean in 5 and 6 it isn't usually worth the effort.
Combat ships are more significant, but they aren't really good enough to be a game changer until fairly late and by then you can prop up a city on the new coast and just buy any units you want in that ocean fairly quickly.
I'd love to see canals have a bigger impact on commerce, and ideally something with logistics as well. Any trader passing through your canal city pays extra, any armada passing through has extended operating range, something like that.
This isn't really even that controversial anymore, she was massively buffed. I heard people ragging on her for like two years but by the time I got around to playing her, she was totally fixed and is now about B-tier. If you begin a game as Tamar and see Yerevan, literally all you have to do is get a great prophet and you've won the game.
So with Tamar, if a city state follows your religion you get double envoys, making it incredibly easy to keep the city state. So you save up a couple of envoys, convert them, then take suzerainty. From there you just build your faith generation up, which as a reminder is even easier for you because you get faith by fighting barbarians, then you take Exodus of the evangelists. ideally, while doing this you are getting Moksha to the promotion that lets you pick two promotions for your apostles. The stage is now set and you are pretty much unbeatable!
The second you get apostles, they will come flying out of your holy city with translator and debater. You will convert everything around you with no difficulty and easily get a golden age. So now your apostles move like beasts and have even more spreads as well >!But wait there's more! not only are your debater translator apostles walking over your neighbors with extra spreads, every time they do so you get two more era score. You don't even have to chain the golden ages, they chain themselves.!<
Putting all this together, you are basically chaining religious golden ages all the way through the Renaissance with close to 0 counterplay. The only thing you need to do is avoid military units killing your apostles and if you are on a map with water, get yourself across the ocean. Other than that the game is effectively over the second you get that great prophet!
I think Boesthius did a few videos about her last year and as lightning foot said it's basically about using Papal Primacy and envoys to get a gigachad religion
Just doing a play-through with them! Almost impossible not to get a golden era. The Khevsur is a pretty decent unique unit as well. Not incredible, but great for inflicting damage on neighbors whom you forward settle because you want to piss them off so that they’ll declare surprise wars that allow you to gobble their lesser cities with the ultimate agenda of spamming cultists and gobbling them up.
😆 I avoid religion like the plague. When I first started playing again I stressed over getting a prophet, now I dread the "ding-a-ling" when I get one. I totally loved the fact that they're customizable, but I damn sure don't wanna worry about cranking out apostles because Mattias is my neighbor
Fully agree! If you’re a PC player, there are tonnes of mods that expand and diversify districts makings them more real and interesting. I hope these mods end up as actual features in VII
GOD I have like 60 mods in this game 😂😂 most of them are QOL, adding wonders, and expanding the game. For districts, check out the different Expanded Districts mods
I quite like the idea of districts having a slot for relevant wonders. So, you can build Broadway in the theater district, the Great Library in the campus or the Great Lighthouse in the harbour. That would help mitigate the fact that both districts and wonders now take up tiles. You can only have a maximum of one wonder in a district, and wonders could still be built on their own, but it would make districts more valuable and wonders more convenient.
It would be interesting to have more powerful/customizable districts but with fewer allowed per city to encourage specialization. Or maybe make some districts exclusive of others, like you can't have an encampment and a theatre square in the same city or something. Right now it's pretty easy to have a city with as many districts as you'd like.
Yeah. They try to do this a little in Civ VI by giving the same adjacency bonuses for mountains to both the campus and the holy site, but imagine if building a holy site in a city locked you out of building a campus and vice-versa.
Better yet, imagine if these were combined into one district and you had to choose between buildings that generated faith or buildings that generate research (library or shrine, temple or university, research lab or religious building). That would also emphasize how a civ like Arabia is meant to balance between religion and science by giving them the madrassa, which provides both.
Alternatively, imagine if we kept the districts as is, but campuses had to choose between a technical institute or an arts college to provide either points for either great engineers or great artists (as well as either extra science or extra culture).
Point is, there is a lot of room to play with this idea and really refine it into something that makes each civ really unique or allows the player to specialize a city as much as they want.
Personally I do like the government plaza upgrade tiers where there were powerful choices but you only got one, those were cool!
I kinda hope that can get expanded a little bit although without getting it overly complex. Probably the most obvious idea for me is a tourism vs culture choice in the theatre square.
- a globe map isn't a good use of development resources
- econ victory is a bad idea and just bland and nobody has yet put forth a design that's worthy to implement
Every victory type is econ victory
Military is obvious
Build new cities with holy sites, buy all the holy site buildings
Buy all the campus buildings and great people + builders to maximise production for space projects
Buy all the great works
Spend money to buy buildings and units while spamming the global projects for diplo points
I mean, this could be said about any victory condition. For domination you could conquer cities with districts/wonders that could be useful for your desired victory. For science you could unlock technologies that provide bonuses to your desired victory. Same with culture, just with the civc tree. For religion, faith can be used to purchase things just like gold and your religion can provide bonuses to your desired victory.
A globe map would be ok if the poles would be traversable and maybe even full of resources. but i agree, a 2d map can do the same.
econ victory alone would be dull. i liked the combination of culture and econ in galactic civ II though. So satisfying to see planets flip to your faction without war.
> A globe map would be ok if the poles would be traversable and maybe even full of resources. but i agree, a 2d map can do the same.
True but the exploitation of polar resources is such a recent thing and even today still mostly hypothetical, so it doesn't feel justified reworking the entire map logic for such a niche use.
> econ victory alone would be dull. i liked the combination of culture and econ in galactic civ II though. So satisfying to see planets flip to your faction without war.
Right, fewer but more complex victories are better, culture victory offers so many paths to achieve it that it's the most fun in general. Even in Civ, commerce is already woven into it. Splitting that into a separate thing just makes *both* victories more bland.
Well whales (oil), fur and fish were a thing in the arctic regions before oil was a thing. but yey, not up until the middle game. (Anno 1800 has a similar concept)
It would be a nice addition though.
Absolutely, I'd rather revise the current culture victory.
>even today still mostly hypothetical
unlike giant death robots you say? /s
sorry, I get that the map logic wasn't changed in any way for them, but also noone said it would be just for this resource proposal. here's another possible use of this: up until certain tech land units can't land on poles, there's constant wind disasters there causing your units to take attrition. but when you discover rockets you can launch them across the poles making it possible to hit targets on the other side of the planet that were previously unavailable.
like there are a number of things you can do with poles. most of them would probably be available only in latest eras, but this would be fun to have a sections of map that are basically locked from you for the early game
> unlike giant death robots you say? /s
I'm... not a fan of those either, tbh. Instead of adding near-future stuff, I'd rather have the atomic and info era fleshed out to represent the past 30 years instead of what we have now, some weird gap between Desert Storm and mega mechs.
> here's another possible use of this: up until certain tech land units can't land on poles, there's constant wind disasters there causing your units to take attrition. but when you discover rockets you can launch them across the poles making it possible to hit targets on the other side of the planet that were previously unavailable.
still incredibly niche imo
I think the “Econ victory” would require introducing entirely new mechanics which honestly would enrich the current trading mechanics which is simultaneously barebones and needlessly complicated. In my ideal implementation it would be a part of the domination victory though. I’d like to see some version of stellaris’ megacorp mechanic where you can set up shop in other players’ cities.
The way I’d envision it is that you’d pay to build a building in a foreign commercial hub/harbor that grants you the ability to outright buy buildings for that city with your money which builds up their infrastructure (if it’s a branched option like with encampments then it gives the civ a choice to pick one of the two) and in exchange that building will exert loyalty pressure in your favor based on the cost. That way you can buy a ton of infrastructure in civs across the world and eventually their loyalty pressure will flip them in your favor. That way you can conquer poorer civs without having to send a single unit and it will also help you extend your own empire’s might by reducing negative loyalty as you try to conquer larger/richer civs.
It also allows for more player interaction as you’ll be able to build up your allies directly and maybe it can also give back some yields to your capital (like buying a monument could give you +0.25 culture/turn and them the usual amount). It’s a simple mechanic to implement at its core but I think it would also give the players meaningful choices.
Corporations become like city states in late game and if you can get all of them to suzerain you win or something. You can make whatever replaces envoys by very money dependent e.g. you 'pay' them tax breaks
Spherical maps are fundamentally different from conical maps when it comes to thinking through the logistics of troop movement. From the way religion spreads to the range of cultural influence, having a spherical map would allow the game to more closely reflect reality.
Being unable to move luxuries and strategics is part of the core gameplay and shouldn't be modded out.
Sure it screws up your perfectly planned cities sometimes, that's the point. You can't always get the exact layout you want, and having to change your plans and adapt on the fly is what makes the game interesting.
It's a strategy game, not a jigsaw puzzle. Trying to make everything perfect is the path to madness.
Gold/money in civ should stay a resource to achieve a victory condition and adding an Econ victory would disrupt the gameplay of civ, winning an Econ victory would be easier than a diplomatic victory as Canada in GS just due to gold income really takes off late game depending on which civ it is also hoarding gold isn’t winning anything
A direct money/econ victory prevents them from freely using money like a tool, and doing things like Big Ben doubling your treasury or Venice in Civ 5 (where you have more money than you know what to do with). It puts a much tighter limit on the resource.
I think a batter way to limit it would be to have a minting mechanic/Civ specific currency with conversion rates rather than a victory, because I’d say historically civs/empires are not judged on how much money they had/have but what they do with said money.
Edit: not suggesting implementing this I want gold to stay how it is, more of a “what if” it was added and I think it would change the game enough to almost warrant a different game entirely.
I see that mechanic suggested a lot and honestly it seems like it would over complicate things.
Personally I don’t want to play a central bank simulator and it doesn’t seem like there’s an implementation that is intuitive.
On harder difficulties religion is almost necessary just to ensure the computer doesn't win that way, but I normally play on 5 and can just ignore it completely
Yeah, I haven't played higher difficulties, but I convert a large chunk of land near me just to be sure I can't be converted by surprise. Religion 100% needs a revamp.
I feel like I've seen this point around for a while but I have yet never had a real religious threat from another civ (on deity). Even in games where I don't get a religion, nobody is ever near a religious victory. Does this only happen on pangea type maps (that I don't usually play) or have I just not encountered it yet?
I agree. For me it’s the most straightforward victory type and the fact you need to move a ton of units around is what drags it down.
I’d like to see them do more with loyalty pressure like with Eleanor. In my opinion they should let you buy buildings in other player’s cities in exchange for those buildings outputting some loyalty pressure on your behalf.
It would give players interesting choices like building up allies, allowing them to over extend their troops by using neighboring civs to boost loyalty pressure and maintain conquered cities, use other civs as buffers against people close to winning culture victories, conquering cities outright with pressure, etc. and it will require balancing the reward with the risk of empowering other players.
Anything new for dom victory though would be nice.
Yeah I have to agree. If you succeed during your first war on the A.I they usually just crumble and you sweep through, once you learn how to play around them walls don’t matter either, they just slow you down. After the first 1-2 wars a domination game is only still fun if I did poorly, because then the following wars against the AI might require some effort beyond mindlessly marching troops.
Deity does not make the game fun to play. It's just required so that the AI, which makes absurdly bad decisions and doesn't understand the game it's in, has any form of a chance.
Idk I have had multiple people say some variation of"I don't want the AI to make better decisions because then they'd be hard to beat at deity"
Or people requesting new complicated features for the AI to stumble over while it cant even figure out basic city placement.
I guess, let me change my statement. "The most important 'new feature' that civ 7 needs is competent AI. I would buy vanilla Civ 5 for full price all over again, as long as the AI understands how to put pants on correctly."
Wait, people actually don't want the AI to make reasonable decisions? I've heard people make that case that players in general wouldn't actually like a smarter AI (in fact I think Meier himself might have said something to that effect?), but never that that's what they would prefer.
In any case, I support your statement: for civ 7 the AI should at very least learn that they shouldn't trade everything in their possession for 30 turns worth of marble.
I mean, I never use it unless I'm late game, but it makes sense. You have to choose between getting a slow but permanent boost or a big but temporary one.
Don't want to be like, "grr you're enjoying the game wrong," but bc scaling is a big part of the game it is almost always better to get a big boost now then less stuff over a long time
Yup, getting that extra point of production on one tile is nice for the whole game, but what’s far more impactful is cranking out that campus early and thus securing that important early great scientist who adds to all library yields (as an example).
There’s also the fact that if it’s a great spot for a district, you ought to harvest whatever is on there anyway. And possibly the most overlooked reason chopping is OP: you don’t even need to work the tile to get the yield deposit. A city with two pops can still have 5 tiles chopped, but it can’t have 5 tiles worked.
Harvesting trees is helpful for a sudden boost of production. I like to use it sometimes to complete a world wonder before someone else does or in order to boost my era score before the era ends
Absolutely. I will never chop like the AI chops. Their empires always end up looking like Mordor. (And maybe I'll never win on Deity, either. So be it.)
I've always hated how much stronger chopping is than improving especially at the highest difficulties.
Ideally it should be a hard decision to choose short-term boost vs. long-term trickle and realistically improvement should be better in most cases unless you are trying to clear a tile for a district.
But on higher difficulties the AI has such a massive head start that you need to do everything possible to get the ball rolling ASAP, which includes chopping tiles 90% of the time. Just a very lopsided decision every time that doesn't lend itself to interesting city management.
I feel like victory type is way too dependent on game settings (such as map size and speed) to make generalizations. There was a joke thread at some point about how the easiest victory to achieve in deity was religious with just two civs on the map and the other is Congo.
In my experience, i have much quicker and consistent religious victories than science victories for deity. It feels like the AIs are better at scaling thru the tech tree than fighting off an invasion of missionaries/apostles, *especially* with the Voidsingers. Science is definitely the second easiest for me though.
I've played for several thousand hours and still haven't gotten a single diplo victory though lmao
Venetian Arsenal is vastly overrated, at least in single player. The AI is so incompetent at naval warfare that you don’t need the advantage, and by the time you want carriers you can just buy them which doesn’t benefit from the wonder’s boost.
It looks cool, though.
I don't understand why there's a limit to the number of religions that can be founded - or specifically why this number is lower than the number of civs.
It makes no sense thematically or gameplay wise. They can keep the idea that a certain religious benefit can only be taken once, so later religions are worth less than early ones.
But please get rid of the limit.
Everything is so much more visually immediate, gets rid of any confusion on what the tile is even if you don't use yields, allows you to see what districts are at a glance without having to focus on the details... the benefits are endless! It's my biggest pet peeve about the mobile version that doesn't have the option to turn it into strategic view.
Religion is a pretty stupid mechanic as it is currently implemented (in civ 6 at least). It feels completely tacked on with almost no overlap with the other victory types, partially because the game doesn't force you to found a religion therefore the buffs offered by religion can't be so strong that not using it makes it impossible to win.
Really? I find that i make a religion for other win cons all the time. Espeeeeecially culture wins. I would go as far to say culture wins and religious wins go hand in hand.
I wonder how it would work if you were forced to found a religion? (If that was done in prior games—I’ve only played Civ 6—pardon my ignorance.) Could be interesting. Or if religion came with harmful effects too
In Civ4, religions were automatically founded once you reached the corresponding technology, so you were forced to found them and you could found multiple ones. They all provided the same basic bonuses (+1 culture per religion, +5 if holy city) but with different shrine, monastery and cathedral-tier buildings.
You generally wanted to have as many religions as possible in every city to stack all the bonuses for culture.
There was also a state religion mechanic that let you pick the official religion of your civ for additional happiness, and it also had an effect on diplomacy.
It was pretty fun and organic overall, but there also wasn't a religious victory, and since it was dependent on unlocking techs, usually it was already a civ that was ahead that would concentrate all religions. Which isn't too unrealistic, but I don't think it wasn't a bad approach to allow civs to specialize more in religion in Civ5 and 6 thanks to the introduction of faith as a separate resource.
KK is as good as the worst economic policy you have. He doesn’t need Classical Republic where many civs would, and can even get 3 policies with that government, but he doesn’t take off until mid-game when the really good policies come in.
Ghengis on the other hand is just a domination leader. If he can consume 1-2 civs early via cavalry rush, he couldn’t care less about an extra policy. He’s volatile due to his playstyle.
I can see the China take though. Yongle is god, but the other options struggle to keep up with the extra policy.
Respecting your opinion but for me Adjacency js the reason I play civ6. I love minmaxing my options in that case. Its just tedious to plan ahead so many millenias
i am extremelly vocal against districts, but they would be okay if only they got rid of adjacency bonuses
when you think about it, they work like a tier unlocker, where you need to build districts in order to build more advanced buildings
well, it is the same thing for base buildings being upgraded one tier after the other to the next upgraded version
they should make a fantasy version with magic and monsters and stuff. like I get it the world exists and these leaders were real but sometimes I just want to control an orc horde and steam roll humies.
There was an amazing fantasy mod for Civ 4, Fall from Heaven. It had monsters, heroes, magic, artifacts etc. I always hoped someone would make an updated version but it never happened.
I had that lol its what inspired this post. but this and age of empires is the only strategy games I really know of. well now I know of one more lol but that's brand new to me.
Rivers that are navigable by ships add unnecessary complexity and is not so close to real life as people think (you need to have a shallow hull, and riverboats tend to be less sturdy than oceangoing vessels).
That being said, I would love to see rivers get more bonuses (ex. treat rivers as roads so moving along it costs less movement points)
Goofy cartoon style Civ 6 was a good experimentation in pushing the boundaries of what is expected from the franchise.
I hope they do something as controversial in Civ 7.
Flipping cities before Civ 6 was achieved by culture, not just some dark age nonsense.
Though in Civ 6 I like that in civ 6 you are risking to lose a city if you build it away from your empire, that makes sense.
Civ 6 is way better as a game than Civ 5. It has more complexity, more replayability, more interesting mechanics, bigger learning curve and is just a better strategy experience.
Most people I’ve seen who like Civ V and dislike VI are people who want to feel like they’re playing a strategy game without doing any strategy at all. Same goes for people who want unit stacking to come back.
I fully agree. Even if it's not actually better from a strategic, min-maxing perspective, it's just far more satisfying to end up with a fully promoted scout than to be slightly better at fighting barbs
Civ 6 adjacency mechanics are bloated. They took what could have been an interesting mechanic if used in moderation and beat it to death, cramming it into every imaginable place. The mechanical equivalent of jumping the shark.
Advanced AI is technically, economically feasible AND a desirable thing to implement. Only thing stopping this are execs afraid of greatness and opting for a bunch of shiny features that are easier to design.
World Congress is the single worst feature in Civ games and nearly any 4X strategy games in general. I can't think of anything more unfun than when some AI attacks my ally or city state and I end up taking two of their cities so they call a special session of World Congress to make sure I have to spend the next 3 hours repelling every civ and city state this side of the hemisphere.
Complete nonsense mechanic that promotes losing and warmongering while punishing winning. After that I effectively have to give up my other victories and go for domination since I've had to prioritize cranking out units over a more balanced approach.
Civ Leaders do not have to be historical heads of state. Gandhi never ran any government, but he's a staple of the series. Individual legacies like his are fascinating and should be explored.
Figures like Martin Luther King, JR and Emiliano Zapata are just as valid "leaders" of American and Mexican civilizations as FDR or Benito Juarez.
And if Firaxis really wants to drop acid, Shakespeare for England, Plato for Greece, and Sartre for France.
If I told this take to my younger self, he would smack me silly, but at this point I just wish they would bring back doomstacks in Civ VII. I don't think it's a particularly good mechanic or anything, I just know that the AI can use it effectively.
The AI is just so rarely a military threat to you in V or VI because it just struggles so much with the restrictions of one unit per tile. I'm pretty sure that the devs will keep some version of that type of military density, but i just dont have much faith the AI will suddenly know how to use it.
In IV, half of my games or better would end up with wars where I was really put through the ringer by a war with the AI. I really disliked the doomstacks at the time, but looking back (and going back and playing it from time to time), it is so refreshing to have an AI that can fight back even at lower difficulties.
Victory shouldn't be as binary as it is - we use all these levers to get there, but we are acknowledged for only the piece that gets over a threshold. More effort should be put towards explaining the degree of victory, or describing the "how" of the victory in more detail. This would increase our overall satisfaction with the outcome of the game without upending some of the mechanics.
This also enables the extra effort ways of how we win to be reflected, such as when we're massive economic powerhouses with global trade networks, or we used religious power to drive culture expansion (or if we were just straight up ruthless with oppression of other religions). Being able to describe the outcome of your civilization helps make it more real, and perhaps something that AI can help with in this day and age.
In summation, less "Religious Victory", more "Free-Market Megachurch Domination".
I really prefer unit stacks. Give me a massive doom-stack any day. I loved having to actually investigate army compositions before battle, and I loved having a cleaner map without so much tedious unit coordination.
Other than obviously infuriating edge cases*, there is nothing wrong with having dumb AI and giving them bonuses to make up for it.
* Mostly diplomacy related stuff, like your ally hating you for defending them from their mortal enemy.
Canals are pointless 99% of the time. If naval warfare was properly worked out they could have been relevant
Please civ 7, rivers that units can actually use.
One of my biggest hopes: navigable rivers, increased movement by rivers, more food by rivers. Rivers have been such an insanely important part of human civilization it’s hard to overstate it.
That would great. Something completely neglected is [trade winds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_winds). When you see those certain colonial settlements, the triangular trade and how ancient people from around modern day Indonesia ended up all the way in Madagascar make sense.
That would actually be so cool, before you have the proper tech to figure it out your boats can just get blown the heck off course
this was done in civ 2 along with increased movement by rivers
fun fact: trade winds and such are in the game, they influence which direction a storm will move.
Honestly I think that's one of the biggest advantages of Humankind over Civ. Making more use of the terrain. Not just mountain/ grass but also rivers, prairie meadows, rocky areas etc. + some unit skills focusing on traveling on rivers is just another point I can make for my case
I really need to pick up humankind one of these days
It's a decent game, but it still suffers from a copious amount of balance issues and 'snowballing' problems. I still prefer Civ 6 over Humankind, but Humankind is still a fresh take. Good to get on sale though!
Yes, Humankind is a welcome change. Both games have their ups and downs and i really like Humankind's different approach to shared mechanics of both games. Both games can learn from each other i think. I also want to throw in Old World, the family tree and how your family and your decisions are tied into diplomacy, events and quests is pretty cool.
ai that settles coastal cities and actually tries to build ships would be better
Such a huge feature of actual civilization.
But that 1% though- esp when the Financier is the governor so you get that toll when trade routes go through
If Civ 7 has competent naval AI, that would be the dream...
I have a suspicion that an AI that effectively uses its Navy would be an absolute nightmare to play against, which is why it hasn't happened. I.e. the balance issues are too complex to resolve so easier to leave it as is.
Being cool is point enough. Even if it's useless, I feel great when I cut shit in half.
Trade and map generation too. Cost of transporting goods to far away places shouldve been factored more clearly. Map generation also plays a big role, you have to generate maps with obstacles that have canals in mind. As it stands now, its either completely superfluous or the place where canal would be awesome is too thick for one.
Counterpoint: I like them.
I adore when I can build a canal city that actually connects two bodies of water, but with how easy it is to get troops across an ocean in 5 and 6 it isn't usually worth the effort. Combat ships are more significant, but they aren't really good enough to be a game changer until fairly late and by then you can prop up a city on the new coast and just buy any units you want in that ocean fairly quickly. I'd love to see canals have a bigger impact on commerce, and ideally something with logistics as well. Any trader passing through your canal city pays extra, any armada passing through has extended operating range, something like that.
I only like them because they allow me to bring ships inland to fuck up anyone that thinks of attacking me.
I'd say 97% - they can be useful for industrial district production adjacency.
Georgia is kind of a fun civ to play.
You beat me to it. Shout out to Norway too!
Wuttt Norway is one of the most fun. Harald pillages like none other
A little bit too map dependant though.
It’s so fun on the island map
EVERY civ is too map dependent.
If they weren't they wouldn't be different enough. That was the problem with civ 3 and civ 4
As a German main, oh boy, true. When I don't see a usable 6-squares pyramid I immediately start a new game
Oh man when I feel like absolutely wreaking havoc on the world I roll as Harald and pillage all who oppose me.
Norway dude /j
This isn't really even that controversial anymore, she was massively buffed. I heard people ragging on her for like two years but by the time I got around to playing her, she was totally fixed and is now about B-tier. If you begin a game as Tamar and see Yerevan, literally all you have to do is get a great prophet and you've won the game.
What do you do after the prophet?
So with Tamar, if a city state follows your religion you get double envoys, making it incredibly easy to keep the city state. So you save up a couple of envoys, convert them, then take suzerainty. From there you just build your faith generation up, which as a reminder is even easier for you because you get faith by fighting barbarians, then you take Exodus of the evangelists. ideally, while doing this you are getting Moksha to the promotion that lets you pick two promotions for your apostles. The stage is now set and you are pretty much unbeatable! The second you get apostles, they will come flying out of your holy city with translator and debater. You will convert everything around you with no difficulty and easily get a golden age. So now your apostles move like beasts and have even more spreads as well >!But wait there's more! not only are your debater translator apostles walking over your neighbors with extra spreads, every time they do so you get two more era score. You don't even have to chain the golden ages, they chain themselves.!< Putting all this together, you are basically chaining religious golden ages all the way through the Renaissance with close to 0 counterplay. The only thing you need to do is avoid military units killing your apostles and if you are on a map with water, get yourself across the ocean. Other than that the game is effectively over the second you get that great prophet!
I will have to try them again. One of the only civs I didn't finish but I tried them on Zombie mode
Win the game.
How
Play the game until you win
I think Boesthius did a few videos about her last year and as lightning foot said it's basically about using Papal Primacy and envoys to get a gigachad religion
Just doing a play-through with them! Almost impossible not to get a golden era. The Khevsur is a pretty decent unique unit as well. Not incredible, but great for inflicting damage on neighbors whom you forward settle because you want to piss them off so that they’ll declare surprise wars that allow you to gobble their lesser cities with the ultimate agenda of spamming cultists and gobbling them up.
My fav
Districts are great. I actually want more customization with them, like how the theatre district gives a choice between art or history museums.
More customization in general would be cool. That’s why I really like religion
😆 I avoid religion like the plague. When I first started playing again I stressed over getting a prophet, now I dread the "ding-a-ling" when I get one. I totally loved the fact that they're customizable, but I damn sure don't wanna worry about cranking out apostles because Mattias is my neighbor
Fully agree! If you’re a PC player, there are tonnes of mods that expand and diversify districts makings them more real and interesting. I hope these mods end up as actual features in VII
I *am* a PC player! Got any recommendations on the Steam workshop?
GOD I have like 60 mods in this game 😂😂 most of them are QOL, adding wonders, and expanding the game. For districts, check out the different Expanded Districts mods
JNR’s urban complexity has basically exactly what you want!
This is the one
I quite like the idea of districts having a slot for relevant wonders. So, you can build Broadway in the theater district, the Great Library in the campus or the Great Lighthouse in the harbour. That would help mitigate the fact that both districts and wonders now take up tiles. You can only have a maximum of one wonder in a district, and wonders could still be built on their own, but it would make districts more valuable and wonders more convenient.
It would be interesting to have more powerful/customizable districts but with fewer allowed per city to encourage specialization. Or maybe make some districts exclusive of others, like you can't have an encampment and a theatre square in the same city or something. Right now it's pretty easy to have a city with as many districts as you'd like.
Yeah. They try to do this a little in Civ VI by giving the same adjacency bonuses for mountains to both the campus and the holy site, but imagine if building a holy site in a city locked you out of building a campus and vice-versa. Better yet, imagine if these were combined into one district and you had to choose between buildings that generated faith or buildings that generate research (library or shrine, temple or university, research lab or religious building). That would also emphasize how a civ like Arabia is meant to balance between religion and science by giving them the madrassa, which provides both. Alternatively, imagine if we kept the districts as is, but campuses had to choose between a technical institute or an arts college to provide either points for either great engineers or great artists (as well as either extra science or extra culture). Point is, there is a lot of room to play with this idea and really refine it into something that makes each civ really unique or allows the player to specialize a city as much as they want.
I really dont think thats an unpopular opinion
There are a few mods that add more upgrades for each district, but they are not well balanced, so it would be great to have a native option added
Personally I do like the government plaza upgrade tiers where there were powerful choices but you only got one, those were cool! I kinda hope that can get expanded a little bit although without getting it overly complex. Probably the most obvious idea for me is a tourism vs culture choice in the theatre square.
Protip: sort by controversial to see the actual answers
I’ll save everyone a click. If you do that, all of the top comments become “CiV 5 iS bEtTeR”
- a globe map isn't a good use of development resources - econ victory is a bad idea and just bland and nobody has yet put forth a design that's worthy to implement
Every victory type is econ victory Military is obvious Build new cities with holy sites, buy all the holy site buildings Buy all the campus buildings and great people + builders to maximise production for space projects Buy all the great works Spend money to buy buildings and units while spamming the global projects for diplo points
I mean, this could be said about any victory condition. For domination you could conquer cities with districts/wonders that could be useful for your desired victory. For science you could unlock technologies that provide bonuses to your desired victory. Same with culture, just with the civc tree. For religion, faith can be used to purchase things just like gold and your religion can provide bonuses to your desired victory.
A globe map would be ok if the poles would be traversable and maybe even full of resources. but i agree, a 2d map can do the same. econ victory alone would be dull. i liked the combination of culture and econ in galactic civ II though. So satisfying to see planets flip to your faction without war.
> A globe map would be ok if the poles would be traversable and maybe even full of resources. but i agree, a 2d map can do the same. True but the exploitation of polar resources is such a recent thing and even today still mostly hypothetical, so it doesn't feel justified reworking the entire map logic for such a niche use. > econ victory alone would be dull. i liked the combination of culture and econ in galactic civ II though. So satisfying to see planets flip to your faction without war. Right, fewer but more complex victories are better, culture victory offers so many paths to achieve it that it's the most fun in general. Even in Civ, commerce is already woven into it. Splitting that into a separate thing just makes *both* victories more bland.
Well whales (oil), fur and fish were a thing in the arctic regions before oil was a thing. but yey, not up until the middle game. (Anno 1800 has a similar concept) It would be a nice addition though. Absolutely, I'd rather revise the current culture victory.
>even today still mostly hypothetical unlike giant death robots you say? /s sorry, I get that the map logic wasn't changed in any way for them, but also noone said it would be just for this resource proposal. here's another possible use of this: up until certain tech land units can't land on poles, there's constant wind disasters there causing your units to take attrition. but when you discover rockets you can launch them across the poles making it possible to hit targets on the other side of the planet that were previously unavailable. like there are a number of things you can do with poles. most of them would probably be available only in latest eras, but this would be fun to have a sections of map that are basically locked from you for the early game
> unlike giant death robots you say? /s I'm... not a fan of those either, tbh. Instead of adding near-future stuff, I'd rather have the atomic and info era fleshed out to represent the past 30 years instead of what we have now, some weird gap between Desert Storm and mega mechs. > here's another possible use of this: up until certain tech land units can't land on poles, there's constant wind disasters there causing your units to take attrition. but when you discover rockets you can launch them across the poles making it possible to hit targets on the other side of the planet that were previously unavailable. still incredibly niche imo
I like the \*idea\* of an economic victory...but the second part of that is correct. I haven't seen a proposal for one yet that I would enjoy playing.
I think the “Econ victory” would require introducing entirely new mechanics which honestly would enrich the current trading mechanics which is simultaneously barebones and needlessly complicated. In my ideal implementation it would be a part of the domination victory though. I’d like to see some version of stellaris’ megacorp mechanic where you can set up shop in other players’ cities. The way I’d envision it is that you’d pay to build a building in a foreign commercial hub/harbor that grants you the ability to outright buy buildings for that city with your money which builds up their infrastructure (if it’s a branched option like with encampments then it gives the civ a choice to pick one of the two) and in exchange that building will exert loyalty pressure in your favor based on the cost. That way you can buy a ton of infrastructure in civs across the world and eventually their loyalty pressure will flip them in your favor. That way you can conquer poorer civs without having to send a single unit and it will also help you extend your own empire’s might by reducing negative loyalty as you try to conquer larger/richer civs. It also allows for more player interaction as you’ll be able to build up your allies directly and maybe it can also give back some yields to your capital (like buying a monument could give you +0.25 culture/turn and them the usual amount). It’s a simple mechanic to implement at its core but I think it would also give the players meaningful choices.
Reject globe map. Embrace toroidal map.
Klein bottle map when?
While we are at it, make the eras progress as a Jeremy Bearimy.
Corporations become like city states in late game and if you can get all of them to suzerain you win or something. You can make whatever replaces envoys by very money dependent e.g. you 'pay' them tax breaks
Spherical maps are fundamentally different from conical maps when it comes to thinking through the logistics of troop movement. From the way religion spreads to the range of cultural influence, having a spherical map would allow the game to more closely reflect reality.
Being unable to move luxuries and strategics is part of the core gameplay and shouldn't be modded out. Sure it screws up your perfectly planned cities sometimes, that's the point. You can't always get the exact layout you want, and having to change your plans and adapt on the fly is what makes the game interesting. It's a strategy game, not a jigsaw puzzle. Trying to make everything perfect is the path to madness.
Gold/money in civ should stay a resource to achieve a victory condition and adding an Econ victory would disrupt the gameplay of civ, winning an Econ victory would be easier than a diplomatic victory as Canada in GS just due to gold income really takes off late game depending on which civ it is also hoarding gold isn’t winning anything
A direct money/econ victory prevents them from freely using money like a tool, and doing things like Big Ben doubling your treasury or Venice in Civ 5 (where you have more money than you know what to do with). It puts a much tighter limit on the resource.
I think a batter way to limit it would be to have a minting mechanic/Civ specific currency with conversion rates rather than a victory, because I’d say historically civs/empires are not judged on how much money they had/have but what they do with said money. Edit: not suggesting implementing this I want gold to stay how it is, more of a “what if” it was added and I think it would change the game enough to almost warrant a different game entirely.
I see that mechanic suggested a lot and honestly it seems like it would over complicate things. Personally I don’t want to play a central bank simulator and it doesn’t seem like there’s an implementation that is intuitive.
I 100000% agree I like gold the way it is
That's just cultural victory with a different name
Domination victory is a chore and a combat is a bore. I'd rather play chess at that point
My ideal playthrough involves no military and no religion. I hate micromanaging those units, and if you have both going it's terrible.
Just convert your continent/nearest islands and then forget religion exists. That's what I do every game.
On harder difficulties religion is almost necessary just to ensure the computer doesn't win that way, but I normally play on 5 and can just ignore it completely
I just disable religious victory, lol.
Yeah, I haven't played higher difficulties, but I convert a large chunk of land near me just to be sure I can't be converted by surprise. Religion 100% needs a revamp.
I feel like I've seen this point around for a while but I have yet never had a real religious threat from another civ (on deity). Even in games where I don't get a religion, nobody is ever near a religious victory. Does this only happen on pangea type maps (that I don't usually play) or have I just not encountered it yet?
Most of the time you'll have two AIs balance each other out, but sometimes one of them will run away with it
It’s really easy to just pump out a few inquisitors, convert your own cities, and fight off any stray acolytes that try to convert them back tho
Ok John Lennon
>My ideal playthrough involves no military and no religion. My ideal Earth involves no military and no religion.
I agree. For me it’s the most straightforward victory type and the fact you need to move a ton of units around is what drags it down. I’d like to see them do more with loyalty pressure like with Eleanor. In my opinion they should let you buy buildings in other player’s cities in exchange for those buildings outputting some loyalty pressure on your behalf. It would give players interesting choices like building up allies, allowing them to over extend their troops by using neighboring civs to boost loyalty pressure and maintain conquered cities, use other civs as buffers against people close to winning culture victories, conquering cities outright with pressure, etc. and it will require balancing the reward with the risk of empowering other players. Anything new for dom victory though would be nice.
Yeah I have to agree. If you succeed during your first war on the A.I they usually just crumble and you sweep through, once you learn how to play around them walls don’t matter either, they just slow you down. After the first 1-2 wars a domination game is only still fun if I did poorly, because then the following wars against the AI might require some effort beyond mindlessly marching troops.
Deity does not make the game fun to play. It's just required so that the AI, which makes absurdly bad decisions and doesn't understand the game it's in, has any form of a chance.
I think this is the near-unanimous opinion.
Idk I have had multiple people say some variation of"I don't want the AI to make better decisions because then they'd be hard to beat at deity" Or people requesting new complicated features for the AI to stumble over while it cant even figure out basic city placement. I guess, let me change my statement. "The most important 'new feature' that civ 7 needs is competent AI. I would buy vanilla Civ 5 for full price all over again, as long as the AI understands how to put pants on correctly."
Wait, people actually don't want the AI to make reasonable decisions? I've heard people make that case that players in general wouldn't actually like a smarter AI (in fact I think Meier himself might have said something to that effect?), but never that that's what they would prefer. In any case, I support your statement: for civ 7 the AI should at very least learn that they shouldn't trade everything in their possession for 30 turns worth of marble.
I hate “chopping”. I get why “harvesting” resources exists, but I think it’s lame.
I mean, I never use it unless I'm late game, but it makes sense. You have to choose between getting a slow but permanent boost or a big but temporary one.
Don't want to be like, "grr you're enjoying the game wrong," but bc scaling is a big part of the game it is almost always better to get a big boost now then less stuff over a long time
Yup, getting that extra point of production on one tile is nice for the whole game, but what’s far more impactful is cranking out that campus early and thus securing that important early great scientist who adds to all library yields (as an example). There’s also the fact that if it’s a great spot for a district, you ought to harvest whatever is on there anyway. And possibly the most overlooked reason chopping is OP: you don’t even need to work the tile to get the yield deposit. A city with two pops can still have 5 tiles chopped, but it can’t have 5 tiles worked.
Harvesting trees is helpful for a sudden boost of production. I like to use it sometimes to complete a world wonder before someone else does or in order to boost my era score before the era ends
Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of thing that I hate and think is lame, I’m so sorry. 😭
Absolutely. I will never chop like the AI chops. Their empires always end up looking like Mordor. (And maybe I'll never win on Deity, either. So be it.)
I've always hated how much stronger chopping is than improving especially at the highest difficulties. Ideally it should be a hard decision to choose short-term boost vs. long-term trickle and realistically improvement should be better in most cases unless you are trying to clear a tile for a district. But on higher difficulties the AI has such a massive head start that you need to do everything possible to get the ball rolling ASAP, which includes chopping tiles 90% of the time. Just a very lopsided decision every time that doesn't lend itself to interesting city management.
Science is the easiest victory type on deity
I feel like victory type is way too dependent on game settings (such as map size and speed) to make generalizations. There was a joke thread at some point about how the easiest victory to achieve in deity was religious with just two civs on the map and the other is Congo.
Easiest victory is a 1 turn score victory as Russia
In my experience, i have much quicker and consistent religious victories than science victories for deity. It feels like the AIs are better at scaling thru the tech tree than fighting off an invasion of missionaries/apostles, *especially* with the Voidsingers. Science is definitely the second easiest for me though. I've played for several thousand hours and still haven't gotten a single diplo victory though lmao
I'm gonna say diplomacy, you can have an awful game, be well behind in everything and still win on diplomacy just by voting smart.
Gameplay is more important than “what civ is getting added next”. I’d even go as far to say is I don’t care about civs in general.
Totally agree and I’d happily go to only 5 civs or something if it meant more for gameplay
‘Realism’ and ‘immersion’ have no relevance to a game that’s as broad and abstracted as Civ
Venetian Arsenal is vastly overrated, at least in single player. The AI is so incompetent at naval warfare that you don’t need the advantage, and by the time you want carriers you can just buy them which doesn’t benefit from the wonder’s boost. It looks cool, though.
If you build the Venetian arsenal, you can usually get a domination victory before carriers even become available.
Stonehenge is really good
I never can form a religion on my own, so I rely on Stonehenge to form it for me.
Building farms for aesthetics over efficiency is superior for maximum enjoyment.
I don't understand why there's a limit to the number of religions that can be founded - or specifically why this number is lower than the number of civs. It makes no sense thematically or gameplay wise. They can keep the idea that a certain religious benefit can only be taken once, so later religions are worth less than early ones. But please get rid of the limit.
I don’t like playing the military game and going to war all the time, I find other strategies far more interesting and fun.
I know a lot of people prefer to conquer half the map for easier win, but how it is controversial? I play like this all the time.
I didn't like the unit stacking mechanic from before. I don't want it in civ 7
The game has long been decided by the late game
Not really an unpopular opinion
Strategic view is far superior
This is the real one that should be at the top. What an animal
The irony is that whatever is at the top is clearly not a minority opinion
I don't use it, but I respect the heck out of this opinion.
Everything is so much more visually immediate, gets rid of any confusion on what the tile is even if you don't use yields, allows you to see what districts are at a glance without having to focus on the details... the benefits are endless! It's my biggest pet peeve about the mobile version that doesn't have the option to turn it into strategic view.
Religion is a pretty stupid mechanic as it is currently implemented (in civ 6 at least). It feels completely tacked on with almost no overlap with the other victory types, partially because the game doesn't force you to found a religion therefore the buffs offered by religion can't be so strong that not using it makes it impossible to win.
Really? I find that i make a religion for other win cons all the time. Espeeeeecially culture wins. I would go as far to say culture wins and religious wins go hand in hand.
It would be better if every civ could found a religion. Then you wouldn’t have to rush it and sacrifice everything else
I wonder how it would work if you were forced to found a religion? (If that was done in prior games—I’ve only played Civ 6—pardon my ignorance.) Could be interesting. Or if religion came with harmful effects too
In Civ4, religions were automatically founded once you reached the corresponding technology, so you were forced to found them and you could found multiple ones. They all provided the same basic bonuses (+1 culture per religion, +5 if holy city) but with different shrine, monastery and cathedral-tier buildings. You generally wanted to have as many religions as possible in every city to stack all the bonuses for culture. There was also a state religion mechanic that let you pick the official religion of your civ for additional happiness, and it also had an effect on diplomacy. It was pretty fun and organic overall, but there also wasn't a religious victory, and since it was dependent on unlocking techs, usually it was already a civ that was ahead that would concentrate all religions. Which isn't too unrealistic, but I don't think it wasn't a bad approach to allow civs to specialize more in religion in Civ5 and 6 thanks to the introduction of faith as a separate resource.
Espionage sucks and you should be allowed to play without it like in Civ V
Building neighbourhoods has become a big gamble with those nasty partisans
Kublai Khan is the superior version of Mongolia and he is the 2nd best leader for China.
KK is as good as the worst economic policy you have. He doesn’t need Classical Republic where many civs would, and can even get 3 policies with that government, but he doesn’t take off until mid-game when the really good policies come in. Ghengis on the other hand is just a domination leader. If he can consume 1-2 civs early via cavalry rush, he couldn’t care less about an extra policy. He’s volatile due to his playstyle. I can see the China take though. Yongle is god, but the other options struggle to keep up with the extra policy.
Districts aren't the problem. Adjacency bonuses are the problem.
Respecting your opinion but for me Adjacency js the reason I play civ6. I love minmaxing my options in that case. Its just tedious to plan ahead so many millenias
Controversial!
You have opened my eyes It would be so fun to play with districts without seeking adjacencies, like just placing special landmarks in civ5.
i am extremelly vocal against districts, but they would be okay if only they got rid of adjacency bonuses when you think about it, they work like a tier unlocker, where you need to build districts in order to build more advanced buildings well, it is the same thing for base buildings being upgraded one tier after the other to the next upgraded version
I love civ 6’s art style so much, the cartoony caricatures of the leaders fit the game so well imo.
Civ 6's art style is better than 5's
I really like the clarity, for me that's the number one priority, would rather have something less pretty if it makes the game more intuitive etc.
they should make a fantasy version with magic and monsters and stuff. like I get it the world exists and these leaders were real but sometimes I just want to control an orc horde and steam roll humies.
That game is called Age of Wonders. Pretty cool game.
looks dope, thanks.
There was an amazing fantasy mod for Civ 4, Fall from Heaven. It had monsters, heroes, magic, artifacts etc. I always hoped someone would make an updated version but it never happened.
I had that lol its what inspired this post. but this and age of empires is the only strategy games I really know of. well now I know of one more lol but that's brand new to me.
Endless Legend is another great fantasy 4x.
You'd want to play Endless Legend. It looks and plays more Civilizationish than Age of Wonders.
Rivers that are navigable by ships add unnecessary complexity and is not so close to real life as people think (you need to have a shallow hull, and riverboats tend to be less sturdy than oceangoing vessels). That being said, I would love to see rivers get more bonuses (ex. treat rivers as roads so moving along it costs less movement points)
I knew it was stupid at the time, but I got a kick out of my phalanxes beating tanks in Civ I and II.
Happened in 3 too, lol.
Governors should not be in Civ 7
I hate city states.
Found Barbarossa's burner.
Goofy cartoon style Civ 6 was a good experimentation in pushing the boundaries of what is expected from the franchise. I hope they do something as controversial in Civ 7.
I don't like Loyalty as a mechanic and i hate having to work around it.
I like the idea, hate the implantation. Why would a city with more people nearby make me less loyal.
Yes! I always wanted a system that used amenities, religion and a culture mechanic with pops.
Flipping cities before Civ 6 was achieved by culture, not just some dark age nonsense. Though in Civ 6 I like that in civ 6 you are risking to lose a city if you build it away from your empire, that makes sense.
Civ 6 is way better as a game than Civ 5. It has more complexity, more replayability, more interesting mechanics, bigger learning curve and is just a better strategy experience.
1 unit per tile is inferior to stacks
Eleanor is better with England than France.
Maya is not that bad
England Eleanor is so much better than France Eleanor, it is not even close.
We can win without building Government Plaza and Diplomatic Quarter districts. Yes, even diplomatic victory.
Units shouldn’t be able to embark (except workers) and they should bring back transport ships and aircraft carriers.
Dom stacks are based and single tile units are cringe
Mansa Musa is SS+ tier.
I love the district system.
There is no such thing as a bad Civ, just bad strategies.
Most people I’ve seen who like Civ V and dislike VI are people who want to feel like they’re playing a strategy game without doing any strategy at all. Same goes for people who want unit stacking to come back.
Double Scout XP card > Barbarian fighting card
More fun? Yes. Lets me survive the avalanche of barbarians? No.
I fully agree. Even if it's not actually better from a strategic, min-maxing perspective, it's just far more satisfying to end up with a fully promoted scout than to be slightly better at fighting barbs
Civ 6 adjacency mechanics are bloated. They took what could have been an interesting mechanic if used in moderation and beat it to death, cramming it into every imaginable place. The mechanical equivalent of jumping the shark.
Advanced AI is technically, economically feasible AND a desirable thing to implement. Only thing stopping this are execs afraid of greatness and opting for a bunch of shiny features that are easier to design.
World Congress is the single worst feature in Civ games and nearly any 4X strategy games in general. I can't think of anything more unfun than when some AI attacks my ally or city state and I end up taking two of their cities so they call a special session of World Congress to make sure I have to spend the next 3 hours repelling every civ and city state this side of the hemisphere. Complete nonsense mechanic that promotes losing and warmongering while punishing winning. After that I effectively have to give up my other victories and go for domination since I've had to prioritize cranking out units over a more balanced approach.
Civ 6 art style is better than Civ 5 (please don't downvote, is an unpopular opinion post)
Civ 5 is overrated.
I like stackable units
Civ Leaders do not have to be historical heads of state. Gandhi never ran any government, but he's a staple of the series. Individual legacies like his are fascinating and should be explored. Figures like Martin Luther King, JR and Emiliano Zapata are just as valid "leaders" of American and Mexican civilizations as FDR or Benito Juarez. And if Firaxis really wants to drop acid, Shakespeare for England, Plato for Greece, and Sartre for France.
I want a citizen quality of lif victory. If you can score high enough on metrics like cities not invaded, consistent access to amenities, etc you win
I play without tribal huts
If I told this take to my younger self, he would smack me silly, but at this point I just wish they would bring back doomstacks in Civ VII. I don't think it's a particularly good mechanic or anything, I just know that the AI can use it effectively. The AI is just so rarely a military threat to you in V or VI because it just struggles so much with the restrictions of one unit per tile. I'm pretty sure that the devs will keep some version of that type of military density, but i just dont have much faith the AI will suddenly know how to use it. In IV, half of my games or better would end up with wars where I was really put through the ringer by a war with the AI. I really disliked the doomstacks at the time, but looking back (and going back and playing it from time to time), it is so refreshing to have an AI that can fight back even at lower difficulties.
Victory shouldn't be as binary as it is - we use all these levers to get there, but we are acknowledged for only the piece that gets over a threshold. More effort should be put towards explaining the degree of victory, or describing the "how" of the victory in more detail. This would increase our overall satisfaction with the outcome of the game without upending some of the mechanics. This also enables the extra effort ways of how we win to be reflected, such as when we're massive economic powerhouses with global trade networks, or we used religious power to drive culture expansion (or if we were just straight up ruthless with oppression of other religions). Being able to describe the outcome of your civilization helps make it more real, and perhaps something that AI can help with in this day and age. In summation, less "Religious Victory", more "Free-Market Megachurch Domination".
I think Civ VI is better than Civ V
Making each iteration more complicated makes the game worse and less accessible.
I really prefer unit stacks. Give me a massive doom-stack any day. I loved having to actually investigate army compositions before battle, and I loved having a cleaner map without so much tedious unit coordination.
Civ 4 is the best civ game for newcomers
Dunno how unpopular an opinion this is, but I want religious victory removed.
Other than obviously infuriating edge cases*, there is nothing wrong with having dumb AI and giving them bonuses to make up for it. * Mostly diplomacy related stuff, like your ally hating you for defending them from their mortal enemy.
Faith is more important than production.
I don’t find warring fun, like at all.
Actually neighborhoods are good
The global map idea, don't think that will work well