Civ 6 First Impressions
I watched the trailer for Civ 6 a long while back, but avoided reading anything about the game after that so I can form unbiased first-hand impressions. These are my thoughts.
Good
This has lots of features for a vanilla release of a new Civ game. I see most major parts of Civ 5 in here. In contrast, vanilla Civ 3-4-5 each felt like two steps forward, one step back — especially compared to all the innovations of Alpha Centauri.
- I’m reminded once again of the fantastic art and sound team at Firaxis. The art style is beautiful, and characters have a lot of visual personality. I actually enjoy listening to the music in their games, while most other developers have minimal, often repetitive soundtracks.
- The overall look and feel of the game is very classy. I like the map theme for the art.
- Specific AI agendas. This was something I liked in Stellaris. It makes them feel more lifelike than the old preferences system.
- I like how easy it is to swap out policies. It allows the player to experiment and learn what policies work best for the current situation.
- I like the little improvements here and there, such as completed techs stating they “just finished” instead of “0 turns remaining.”
- Traders form roads, like how roads appeared historically.
- Land value is now a thing. It makes sense people don’t want to live in a swamp.
- Boosts make research more complex than simply queuing up 10 items. It encourages you to adapt to the circumstances of your enviornment.
- Individual workers and improvements feel more important now, since they’re less common.
- Wonder-building animations returned! Woohoo! I loved that in Civ 4.
- Landlocked cities can build ships from a Harbor on the coast.
Neutral
- Sean Bean ironically can’t die because he’s the immortal narrator.
- Moving onto a tile now requires the full movement cost for units. This is a dramatic change for the Civ series. We can’t spend our last 0.5 move points to enter a 3-cost forested hill, for example. Rivers feel particularly difficult to cross now compared to the past.
- Cities appear to automatically provide a bridge over adjacent rivers.
- Every new Civ game has a new approach to great people. It’ll be interesting to see how this one affects things.
- Splitting physical and social techs is a fascinating idea. I’m unsure what ramifications this will have.
- I think they move the minimap around the screen with each new version of civ.
- I was surprised when my friendly neighbor China declared war and defeated me in my first game on King difficulty. This never happened in a past Civ game. I clearly need to change my opening strategy to deal with the higher AI aggressiveness.
Bad
There’s numerous problems with the interface. In particular, tooltips are sparse or non-existent, making detailed information frustratingly difficult to find. This really stands out after playing Stellaris, which has a great interface and plentiful tooltips.
- It took me half an hour to figure out the red tent icon on my capital means it grows slower and produces less yields. I never got a tutorial popup about amenities, the “low amenities” notification did not appear on the right, and neither the on-map city bar nor bottom-right city panel has a tooltip explaining the concept.
- The dark, irregularly textured background of the Civilopedia makes lengthy articles difficult to read. It may look pretty, but there’s a reason most text in the world is high-contrast black-on-white or vice versa.
- I can’t find ingame information about the chance for missionaries or apostles to fail to spread religion.
- Can’t figure out how to form an alliance with friends after getting Civil Service. I looked all over the Diplomacy window, including deal options, and could not find an alliance button. I also tried giving my friends absurdly nice gifts, but it didn’t increase their opinion of me further or unlock an alliance. (Update: it appears my friend was at war, which blocked the alliance without announcing this fact anywhere.)
- No hotkey information on tooltips. Several commands are missing a hotkey entirely, like “heal until fortified” or “toggle yield display.”
- If I’m looking at the Civics Tree and press T to switch to the Tech Tree, it still shows Civics, with Techs hidden behind it.
Cities: Skylines
If you like city-building games, I highly recommend Cities: Skylines. I maintain a collection of my favorite mods and assets here: Thal’s Picks
Starships and Raising Hell
I had the opportunity to watch Sid’s Starships demo at PAX South last weekend, which was fun!
It’s tempting to compare the game to XCOM’s turn-based tactical movement, but Starships looks different enough to be a unique new game, particularly the story and galactic strategic view. I love how it continues Beyond Earth’s storyline, something I really enjoyed once I delved into the Civilopedia backstory for BE units, buildings, and techs. Starships reminds me more of a turn-based Sword of the Stars, another cool game I enjoyed. I have a Starships poster on my wall now, and I’m looking forward to it!
I was at the convention with an indie game team I founded with some new friends last year. We had a table at the Texas Indie Showcase booth featuring our first game, Raising Hell! As an exhibitor, you gotta be enthusiastic and outgoing for hours with thousands of strangers, which was both exciting and exhausting!
In the game, Hell’s freezing over and a devil named Damian has to escape. Various angels and demonic creatures try to stop you. It’s a challenging touchscreen platformer where you rapidly teleport to move. We progressed from creation to release of the game in just half a year, which is very quick, for those of you who know how indie development normally goes.
I’m currently the lead designer/producer. I set out to make a more difficult and mature experience than most touchscreen games, with a fun, collaborative team culture at our office.
The free demo’s available on all app stores for phones and tablets – just search for “Raising Hell”, and tell your friends to spread the word!
mishmashmachine.com/raising-hell
We’re currently investigating a few Unity and memory-loading issues on Android phones running v4.4 KitKat, so try out the free Lite version to see if your phone can play the game. We’re hoping to have those issues solved this weekend.
Welcome
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
– Leonardo DaVinchi
Civ V: Communitas is a community-made expansion pack for Civilization V.
Communitas is a collaboration of work from dozens of authors, plus an incredible community of forumgoers on CivFanatics.com. Click “Install” at right to try it out.
Projects are never perfect, and I wish I’d been able to do more, but I feel we put our best effort into it as a community. Great job everyone!
It’s been a thrilling four years working on this. Steam says I’ve worked over 5,000 hours on Communitas, which is wild to think about, and I feel that was time well spent. It’s provided invaluable lessons for my game design career. The most important part for me was the community we built. So many game developers distance themselves from their audience through community reps and press releases. I feel direct conversations between designers and players helps build a better game, like we did here.
I don’t have much free time to mod games anymore, sadly. This is likely farewell. I’m spending most of my time working on indie game development now. I might end up making a small Beyond Earth mod anyway. What can I say, I just can’t help myself. It’s so much fun!
Click to read my Beyond Earth review, or scroll down to see more thoughts about the game.
Thank you, everyone who’s helped and played Communitas over the years. I’m grateful!
~ Thalassicus
Civ:BE – Biomes and Multiplayer
I discovered something interesting today. Every biome has unique music!
There’s 8-9 soundtracks for each biome, and another 15 that can play on any biome. I’m really happy with the music in this game. It’s more variety in sights and sounds than I got in Civ 5. I tended to play one or two civs most of the time, so I heard just their soundtracks, and all the Civ 5 “continent” terrain sets looked more similar than Beyond Earth biomes.
Multiplayer’s a lot of fun!
I’m playing 2-person coop with a friend vs bots. It’s interesting how trade between teammates counts as internal trade. I also like how the game scales tech costs to keep us from outpacing our opponents (like Civ 5). I noticed an odd tendency to start near teammates in coop. I wonder if that placement is intended, or just random good luck?
Beyond Earth Mods
I recommend trying the Colorful Tech Web mod. It helps identify things on the tech tree at a quick glance, much more easily than the subtle variation of icon borders between different types of items.
I recommend avoiding the temptation to install an “unlimited experience” mod. It sounds cool, but when 200xp units fight enemies with only 1 promotion, it makes the game super easy, which I find boring. I like a challenge. The experience cap keeps things on a more even playing field.
There’s also a “Beyond Balance” mod that looks promising. The goal is to make the game more fun and balanced like we did with Civ V: Communitas, while staying close to the core vanilla game. It’s a community-driven mod with a strong focus on responding to feedback, so if you don’t like a change, talk about it.
Beyond Earth – Harmony
My first three games started next to lots of xenomass, so I’ve given quite a lot of thought to the harmony path.
I realized harmony is subtly different from the preservation-focused philosophy of the Gaians in Alpha Centauri. The affinities are more like….
- Purity – Turn our new world into Earth.
- Harmony – Adapt to the new world.
- Supremacy – Ignore the biological worlds to become cybernetic.
Harmony uses resources native to our new planet. Consider the Alien Domestication tech. The essence of this is similar to what happened on earth. We turned hostile wolves into dogs, aurochs into cows, and so on. The pre-transformation species have very little presence on Earth (or none with Aurochs). We adapted the native wildlife to suit our purposes. It makes sense we’d do the same on a new world, as human nature doesn’t change much over time.
Harmony does something similar. We might fight the wild animals because they’re a threat for us, but also domesticate them into creatures useful for our purposes. It’s more complex than a philosophy of pure preservation. I like the depth of this story.
Beyond Earth – Explorers
Explorers become a tremendously useful long-term asset when you get rank 1 in Purity affinity. This prevents aliens from attacking explorers. I simply thought of the exploration benefits… while my friends thought of much more clever strategies:
- Escorting colonists through alien territory.
- Guarding workers or important improvements.
- Herding siege worms into rival armies. Fremen worm riders!
Beyond Earth – Strategic Units & Improvements
I realized in Beyond Earth strategic units are more powerful than normal units (vs Civ 5), and no longer spammable. In Civ 5 we could get 1 huge deposit of horses and we’re set for the game. In Beyond Earth a deposit of 8 resources can only buy you one late-game affinity unit. This makes strategic units a rare, elite core of your army – supported by a larger number of weaker spammable units.
This was a design goal of the Civ 5 Communitas mod. I’m happy to see it as a core feature now! They made strategic units cost more resources (up to 6), while I spawned fewer resources instead. Either way, you can build fewer of them, but they’re incredibly powerful.
With the wide variety of improvements added in Beyond Earth, I realized we can use them to plug gaps in our empire.
In my current game, I have ridiculous amounts of gold, and I’m running out of things to build in cities. It suddenly struck me – I can build Academies to balance the scales! They will turn my excess gold into science, researching faster, unlocking new things to build in cities. Academies are like a building that costs 2 gold and gives 3 science. Now imagine you can build lots of this on your tiles! Improvements that cost maintenance sound weird at first, until you think of them as spammable buildings.
Beyond Earth – Xenomass & Aliens
I’m collecting some of my thoughts here while I continue playing. 🙂
While this game looks similar on the surface to Civ 5, there’s an incredible amount of changes and depth in the details, things you can’t see in a quick gameplay video. I covered some of the most obvious things in my earlier review. One small thing I noticed today is alien nest balance.
Xenomass is the resource used by Harmony, the relatively peaceful part at the top-right of the tech web. So you might naturally think, when starting near xenomass, you’ll have a peaceful harmony game. Right? Hold on!
Now consider the fact alien nests appear most often on tiles with both miasma+xenomass. That tile regularly respawns nests. This gives you a constant early source of farmable experience for military games.
So while techs favor peaceful Harmony, the world favors warlike Harmony. These two factors combine to create a balance so players can choose which route they want to take. Brilliant!
I also figured out some details about alien thought patterns.
They will always attack if you approach their children. This is typically within 2 tiles of a nest, so you might not see the nest. If you’re not threatening their kids, and alien aggression levels are low, they will almost never attack you.
Siege worms think differently. They remain docile, wandering around the map, and won’t directly go for your units. However, if you tempt them by standing right under their mouth at the end of a turn, they WILL eat you. They won’t pass up a free lunch.
Since the aliens are closer to wild animals than sentient beings, knowing their behavior patterns helps you manage them. You can control which units they attack if farming them for experience. If you’re trying to play a peaceful game, and know how to avoid their territory, they will leave you alone.
These skills are very important for early game exploration. Explorers are extremely vulnerable, and will rarely survive a battle with aliens.
Beyond Earth Review
I’ve played every Civilization game, and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri was one of my favorite games of all time. Beyond Earth is very different and incredibly fun. I’ve completed 2 victories so far, and I feel it captures the inspiring science-fiction feeling of SMAC, while adding modern gameplay and aesthetic features.
The game also appeals to people who don’t play many strategy games. My best friend never played any Civilization before Civ 5, played it briefly, then was absolutely blown away the fun of Beyond Earth. She’s hooked! Even my brother is addicted, and both of them are mainly action/shooter gamers.
Beyond Earth brings brings an open-world roleplaying feel to the series. There’s many more choices than previous Civ titles, which I suspect will provide an incredible level of replayability long into the future. You can play each game in totally different ways.
- 9/10 Gameplay – The affinities, tech web, and quests make BE more open and fun than Civ 5.
- 10/10 Visuals – The Firaxis art team does a fantastic job with every game they make.
- 10/10 Sound – The music has a wonderfully epic scifi feel, more inspiring than SMAC or Civ.
- 5/10 Story – I wish there was more character development and dialogue for the main leaders.
- 7/10 AI – Civilization games have mediocre AI, a problem with most of the game industry.
- 9/10 Overall – I’m enjoying this game as much as I did Civ 5.
Roleplaying
You start with colony seeding choices like character creation in an RPG. You get to pick traits of your faction. Some of these are really fun. I love the retrograde thrusters, since I like having lots of knowledge about my starting area.
Decisions you make throughout the game shape your Affinity. This is like your roleplaying personality. It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen before in the Civ series.
Affinities give your faction unique bonuses, unit upgrades, victory conditions, and change the visual style of your faction. Increasing affinity levels lets you pick abilities to upgrade your army. Going deep in one affinity gives big rewards, but there’s also great bonuses to unlock by picking up some easy points in the other affinities.
You receive frequent roleplaying decisions from world events and building construction. These “quests” are like the “opportunities” in the Civ V Communitas mod. They provide a choice between two moral options, neither of which is necessarily right or wrong, with different gameplay effects.
Not just a war game
My biggest surprise is you can play a completely peaceful empire focused on economics, trade, and construction. As someone who was a total warmonger in Civ 5, a peaceful game is shockingly fun!
It’s made possible by the greater depth and complexity of peaceful empire building. Trade routes, technologies, quests, improvements… there’s so much to do! The aliens won’t attack you if you respect their territory, and many strategic resources are used for buildings.
This is radically different from previous Civ games where barbarians were always hostile, resources are for war, there were few improvement options, and no moral decisions.
The tech web gives vastly more freedom than the rigid and linear tech tree of previous Civ games or Alpha Centauri.
Virtues (policies) provide bonuses for going either deep in one tree or wide across many trees, giving a choice between those options. The virtue setup was clearly inspired by the Communitas and Civilization NiGHTS mods for Civ 5. The wide-or-deep choice was a strong focus of Communitas, and the visual style of the trees resembles NiGHTS.
The designers may have solved the difficulty curve problem. Civilization was notoriously hard in the first 50 turns, where you must identify possible city sites ASAP and claim them immediately.
The early game of Beyond Earth focuses on exploration before expansion. You don’t have the techs or health you need to expand right away, providing time to assess the situation around you. It also takes time to get cities up and running. You can’t pop a fully defensible city in a dangerous area and build stuff right away.
Room for Improvement
My main disappointment is dialogue. The faction leaders have very few lines, so there’s less NPC character development than XCOM or SMAC. Their sole trade dialogue line gets repetitive quickly.
The open-ended story is less linear than SMAC, which was set on one specific planet with a certain set of factions and personalities. This gives us more freedom, which is good, though I miss the fascinating characterization of Planet. You can still get some of that by focusing on the Harmony affinity, similar to the Gaians of SMAC. I still wish the latest Civ games had victory/wonder movies, though I can understand why – those are expensive to produce. It’s better to focus that effort on gameplay, art, and playtesting.
I’m also disappointed they didn’t improve the building tips. It looks like they’re still written by hand, which is slow and error-prone, and follows 3 different inconsistent formatting styles for the yield, icon, and quantity. It’s sometimes difficult to figure out what buildings do. Most tooltips don’t automatically show their hotkey, either, so you have to look up hotkeys online.
Conclusion
I’m very satisfied with Beyond Earth. It lived up to my expectations, and captures the feeling of Alpha Centauri, while bringing in many modern gameplay elements from the mainline Civ series.
I haven’t encountered any crashes or problems, unlike a lot of other titles full of bugs on release. It just WORKS! (I’m looking at you, SimCity. Grrr.)
For a game this amazing on release day, I can’t wait to see what Firaxis has in store for us in future patches and expansions. They have a good record of releasing fantastic updates to their games, even in free patches, and the expansions always add new and interesting features.
Thank you, Firaxis, for always making well-polished games.
Comparisons
Beyond Earth is better than Alpha Centauri in these ways:
- Factions are not forced into one playstyle, set of civil policies, or unit design. I felt there were “best options” I always had to pick in SMAC. There’s so much freedom in Beyond Earth.
- Amazing music and opening cinematic really set the epic scifi mood.
- The trade system is vastly more fun than similar attempts at trade in Civ 1-4 or SMAC.
- More interesting city expansion and development than SMAC’s city spam.
- One unit per tile is more tactically complex than moving units in a big stack.
- Open-ended tech web gives lots of research freedom.
- Interesting unit upgrade choices. SMAC’s unit workshop was cool in theory, but in reality there were just a few good ways to design units.
- Health is more complex than the old hab complex/dome system of limiting population.
- Cities expand more naturally.
It’s better than Civ 5 in these ways:
- Open-ended tech web.
- Immersive roleplaying experience.
- Early game focuses on exploration before expansion.
- Moral choices for affinities, colony seeding, and quests.
- Choosing abilities to instantly upgrade your whole army.
- Bigger focus on the trade system.
- Energy and air units available right away, providing more economic & military options.
Tips
- If you want a truly alien visual experience, in game setup click the advanced options button at top right, and choose the Fungal biome. You can then go back to the normal colony setup.
- Harmony is more peaceful, while Supremacy and Purity are warlike.
- You can see which lategame resources are good for which affinity by hovering over the affinities at the top-left of the screen. Affinities give a few free copies of the resource they need for their units.
- The tech web has helpful search and filter features in the top-left.
- Resist the temptation to build new cities right away. Filter the tech tree by “health” if you want to mass colonize.
- If you like to immerse yourself in this scifi universe, read the civilopedia articles! There’s a tremendous amount of backstory there.
Beyond Earth
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
– Leonardo DaVinchi
I’ve been quietly fixing a few things with the Communitas Expansion Pack in recent months on steam. I haven’t had time to fully devote myself to the project like I used to, but I’m doing my best to polish some things before Beyond Earth releases. It will never be perfect, and I wish I’d been able to do more, but I feel we put our best effort into it as a community. Great job everyone!
It’s been a thrilling four years with the project. Steam says I’ve worked over 5,000 hours on Communitas, which is wild to think about, and I feel that was time well spent. It’s provided invaluable lessons for my game design career. The most important part for me was the community we built. So many game developers distance themselves from their audience through community reps and press releases. I feel direct conversations between designers and players helps build a better game, like we did here.
Thank you, everyone who’s helped and played Communitas over the years. I’m grateful!
I don’t really have enough free time to mod anymore, but will probably end up making a small Beyond Earth mod anyway. What can I say, I just can’t help myself. It’s so much fun!
Settlers of Catan
If you play the Settlers of Catan strategy board game, I modified that game to improve its fun and balance too. 😉
These rule variants help players who get extremely unlucky rolls, and speed up the Cities & Knights expansion.
v3.16 – Policy & Leader Balance
This update balances policies based on feedback in the Strongest and Weakest Policies thread. Several weak policies are stronger, and some strong policies are weaker. We also improved the least-favorite 25% of leaders from the leader polls (originals and extras), among other various changes.
v3.13
This update improves army and research balance, among other changes. I released the test version to github. I will upload the new version to the Steam Workshop after a week or so of testing.
v3.12.2
This update fixes several bugs. Citystate capture bonuses should work now.
Illness
I’ve had the flu the past few days, delaying work on the project. I hope to get back to it soon.
New polls!
Click below to vote in the polls. The results will directly influence the course of the project!
Communitas v3.12 – Promotion Icons
This update reactivates the promotion icon feature from Civup, and fixes several bugs.
v3.11.1 Steam Release
I released the project to the Steam Workshop. You can now subscribe to it on steam to get the “Update” button on the Mods menu ingame, without needing to manually download and install files anymore.
I will continue releasing the project here for those who prefer the old method of installation, or who need access to older versions.
Communitas v3.11 – Stories
This update reactivates the Stories from GEM. Each story presents a moral choice between compassion, ruthlessness, or detachment as we decide how to lead our empire through turning points in history. This is a small step towards adding narrative to the Civilization series.
Visit the issue tracker if you discover a bug, or drop by the discussion forum to talk about the update. We made several improvements in this update based on community feedback.
Civ V: Communitas 