I like the so-called "Play-Doh" graphics although they do turn some people off. I assume someone will create replacement texture mods as happened in previous iterations.
I agree. The Civilization game is too depend on the technology. It just kind of technology race game. While in reality, there were a lot of technological advanced kingdoms that was ransacked by less technological hordes in the history. Rome, Persian, China....
Part of that is the result of the way the tech tree is set up. You can't just ignore certain branches for centuries the way that real life civilizations did. So you have to unlock Tech A which leads to Tech B which leads to tech C which unlocks Era F which allows you to build unit K when in reality plenty of earlier civilizations had versions of unit K and unit K isn't even all that effective in Era F.
It didn't work for a lot of people until it was patched. And that patch came months late. On the forums they just ignored all the help tickets. This is the company that created Alpha Centauri and Civ 2. They knew better. This product did not live up to what they released nearly twenty years before. Eva Marie releasing Alpha Centauri with updates from civilization 5 such as scrolling to move and enhanced graphics would have been preferable to Beyond Earth. That in the series as a whole has actually lower production values than it used to. No more voice acting or cinematics.
I found Beyond Earth tedious and boring and I soon gave up on it. I'm not sure exactly what it was about Alpha Centauri that made it so much more replayable but one thing I enjoyed doing was designing units with special abilities such as stealthy water-borne spy units or hover terraformers that could be dropped into position from orbit. The design of the factions and technologies seemed so much better as well. Beyond Earth's were pretty meh.
I think this is a great new Civ. I really like the way they've both redone and kept stuff. This is a good game for an initial release. Civ IV & V both needed major fixes and some DLC add-ons for the game to take off and be good. This one's good on the initial release, so I'm impressed as hell.
The AI effectively cheats in the higher difficulty settings so no change there from previous releases of Civ. Would it have killed the developers to improve the AI?
So now that Civ 6 has been out for a while, how is it? Is it fun? Does it play differently from previous civ games?
I got bored with it after a few games and much more quickly than with the previous Civs. It's a little bit tweaked from previous incarnations -- not significantly so in my opinion but others might disagree. The barbarians are complete raging psycho cases and appear to generate multiple units instantly without the necessary resources or any apparent source of income. They're okay as distractions for a couple of games and then become annoying and suck the life out of the game for me. As previously, the diplomacy engine results in stupid interactions and the AI levels are implemented by a handicap system. I'll probably return to the game occasionally if I want to pass some time so I don't consider it a complete waste of money. I expect patches might be forthcoming to address the gameplay shortcomings.
Thanks for the review, I was on the wall about buying it during the steam black friday sale. But between what you've said and the minimal discount, I think I'll put it on hold for now. I still want to play Civ 6, but I rather wait for patches and fixes to be in place, and for the price to drop further.
Civilization VI is being ported to the PS4 and Xbox One in November: Also, the Rise and Fall and Gathering Storm expansions are being released for these two editions, as well as for the Nintendo Switch incarnation which was released last year, on the same date. On a side note, is there any word on how well the game plays on the Switch Lite, relative to the regular-sized Switch?