Civ V or VI?

[The Sorrow]

So I was looking to pick up either Civ V complete edition or Civ VI (base game only) in the sale. It seems to be widely accepted that Civ V is the better game, but is it really?

It's just I find usually in this situation it's like one user had a legitimate issue with a game a single time and the whole community jumps on the bandwagon for the rest of the games lifespan giving the game in question an unfair reputation.

I also understand there was a thing with the EULA which caused some negativity?

So is Civ VI THAT bad? Or has most of the issues been fixed with updates or in the form of dlc? For a new player to Civ, would you recommend V complete edition or VI but the base game only (with a view to get dlc in the future perhaps).

Thanks in advance.

[WingedKagouti]

Publicado originalmente por ashvandam_uk:

the good thing about Civ 6, factions, is they have a unique leader abilty AND a uninque civ ability. Which makes each Civ feel a lot more different. In Civ 5 they just had the 1 civ ability.

Which only matters for 4 civs: England, France, Greece and India since they're the only civs with multiple leaders. And there is only one leader that can head more than one civ: Eleanor (France or England).

For every other civ it's essentially just having a single ability that's split into two instead of just showing as one.

At least until some new DLC/expansion is released or if you use mods.

[ashvandam_uk]

Publicado originalmente por WingedKagouti:

Publicado originalmente por ashvandam_uk:

the good thing about Civ 6, factions, is they have a unique leader abilty AND a uninque civ ability. Which makes each Civ feel a lot more different. In Civ 5 they just had the 1 civ ability.

Which only matters for 4 civs: England, France, Greece and India since they're the only civs with multiple leaders.

At least until some new DLC/expansion is released or if you use mods.

Sorry you may be confused with how my post was read, i didnt even mention that England get a 2nd leader in Civ 6... the example, was about Victoria only, and what you get when you choose her.

The 2 abilities victoria gets where marked with * and **. Eleanor, (which i didnt include) would offer EVEN MORE playability to England. yes, only a couple of civs have a 2nd leader at the moment, but Civ 5 had ZERO 2nd leaders.

Yes, i agree none of the games are perfect, but Civ 5'S England is TERRIBLE in comparrison

[WingedKagouti]

Publicado originalmente por ashvandam_uk:

Publicado originalmente por WingedKagouti:

Which only matters for 4 civs: England, France, Greece and India since they're the only civs with multiple leaders.

At least until some new DLC/expansion is released or if you use mods.

Sorry you may be confused with how my post was read, i didnt even mention that England get a 2nd leader in Civ 6... the example, was about Victoria only, and what you get when you choose her.

The 2 abilities victoria gets where marked with * and **.

That could just as well have been one single ability, even if it has multiple effects. Them being different abilities only matter for the 4 civs I mentioned.

[ashvandam_uk]

All of those conclusions makes sense to me.

If it helps before I got Civ 6, i watched a lot of youtube videos

Some good youtubbers you might want to check out playing the game are;

The Saxy Gamer

TheGameMechanic


But if you only watch one video, make sure you watch this video from Gamerzakh who explains all the Civs that start of in the base game.

the link, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02NnBilglpk
or paste the title of the video into youtube; the title of the video is:
Civilization VI ► ALL 19 Civilizations - Overview & Strategies in Civ 6!

or this video by Drew on his take, on the same thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq7LNEr_7FY

[The Sorrow]

Thanks, I have watched a few tutorials etc. but i'll check those out soon.

[Hazen]

Publicado originalmente por ashvandam_uk:

My vote goes to Civ 6. The reasons,
1) I love having district tiles, (rather than the city just being 1 tile), -this is Civ 6 base Game ADVANTAGE.
2) the Govenours (this is dlc feature though)
3) Rock bands! (this is dlc feature though)
4)I love that each civ has a very specialized leader ability, not just the civilization ability, so having TWO unique abilitites, it makes each Civ feel a lot MORE DIFFERENT/better to play. Cic 5 does not have leader abilities, only civ abilities, so the Civs in 5 only feel half as unique imo. - This point is a Civ 6 base game Advantage.
5) the hapiness system in Civ 5 ruins the game.

the things i dont like,
That Civ 5 has 1 more faction than Civ 6..... 5 has 43, and civ 6 has 42. HOWEVER rumours are that 4 DLC are being made, and one of them is a double DLC pack, which means 5 leaders that would take Civ 6 up to 47.

For me personally, all these things are why I prefer Civ 5. Civ 6 seemed unnecessarily convoluted in almost every aspect. Granted, I'm not a master Civ player but I do enjoy binges of Civ every now and then, but 6 just seemed like it was almost trolling with the amounts of complexity illusion.

[zorkman]

Civ 5 + Expansions + Vox Populi is far superior to Civ 6 + expansions, which is a shallow game in comparison. If Civ 7 is ever released virtually all the player base of present game will move to the new game, as its predecessor has nothing to keep them, whilst previous versions have great mods which enhance the games.

[Traveler]

Five is just more fun.

[Ghadaro]

Civ 6 for me is like eurojank with a bit more polish (that's polish not Polish although Poland is in the game so take it as both if you like).

Visuals

The look of a game isn't the most important thing but does have an impact on the feel the game especially when it comes to the UI.
The visuals in Civ 6 have been especially polarising, some people love the Disney-like look of the leaders, over the top animations and bright flashy interface, others not so much.
Personally speaking I think the cartoony look, bright interface and touch-centric design makes the game look and feel somewhat like a mobile port but thats fine its just a shame the whole thing isn't kept consistent.

Map wise I'll use 5 as a comparison. In 5 explored terrain is darkened but shown in full while unexplored terrain is covered by a thick fog.
In 6 explored terrain is covered by a flat brown mapscroll which shows the terrain and features but some things like hills are very difficult to make out, unexplored terrain is represented by a tea-stain brown sheet.
This bland brown on brown map is in stark contrast to everything else and to me is rather like having a new white and chrome kitchen and placing a brown wooden Edwardian cabinet in the middle of the room. While I would have much preferred a more serious tone the map is the only visual part I really take issue with due to the inconsistency.

Interface wise things get a bit weird, for some reason they've opted to move large amounts of information from floating tooltips to subscreens and lenses.
The lenses are a somewhat interesting idea, I like the option of the Settler lens for example which shows where you can and can't settle and availability of water (affects available housing).
I don't however want it to switch to that lens every single time I select a settler, 1 check tells me where I plan to settle.
The religion lens highlights both these UI issues, when you select a religious unit you are forced into the religion lens and note you can only disable the auto lens change by deleting lines of code from the game files or modding it out.
The religion lens itself is less clear on whats happening than the regular view but if you want to know how many people follow each religion in a city you need to go to the religion view, click the icon below the city name to open out a new overlay and that tells you how many.
Areas are coloured based on religion (for religious combat) but you can already see what religion a city follows in regular view, seeing where enemy religious unit are becomes harder which makes religious combat more time consuming than it should be and the main benefit of religion lens is seeing how many turns until a city flips. Again you only want 1 check when you want to know that information not everytime you select a religious unit.
In civ 5 you just mouse over the city and a floating tooltip gives you the information.

Not only are you expected to continually go from one screen to the next there is a lot of scrolling and in some cases this is painfully slow with the mousewheel while the navigation bar is tiny.

This inefficient layout is a running theme in the game and while it isn't a deal breaker it is an annoyance. Fortunately there are now a lot of UI mods about to help in this regard.

Lastly on the UI (If you've read this far you're probably bored of me talking about it), as I said it has a touch screen focused UI. But select a city and the arrows to cycle cities is tiny and easy to miss, open pretty much any screen and the cross or back arrow to close it is a small red button again easy to miss and given the size is really inconsistent with the touch interface.

Research/Civics

We've previously had government, social policies etc which had a separate system to research. Now civics uses a tech tree the same as has been used for science in the series only requiring culture, this is alongside a tech tree requiring science of course.
Culture research unlocks governments and policy cards which can be slotted into those governments.
Some people don't like this honestly I don't really care but the Science and civic trees do suffer from a terribly inefficient layout, there is so much blank space in the tech and civic screen making the left to right scroll at least twice as long as it needs to be and less readable as a result.
At least they remembered to include tooltips in this case.

A new feature of both is the boost system. Performing a related task gives a research boost for example killing an enemy with a sling gives a boost towards researching archery. I like the idea behind it but with a bonus of 50% of the research it is too much. This completely throws off the game pacing and means even on Marathon speed you can easily find your shiny new units are obsolete before they reach the enemy.

Cities

Districts are a new system which brings part of the city out onto the map as opposed to previous systems where buildings were internal, wonders likewise are built on the map and have placement requirements.
I like the idea and the Wonder system does work well unfortunately the implementation and balance of districts leaves a bit more to be desired.
Districts cannot be worked but apply a bonus directly to the city many having a positioning bonus. The AI doesn't understand city planning, you'll see AI cities in the arctic or desert with unworkable districts covering most of the normally workable tiles leaving the inhospitable tiles free to (not) be worked.
They will sometimes place districts with the correct adjacency and other times the nice tile with 3 mountains perfect for a holy site is occupied by a market while the river running to the harbour that's perfect for the market has a holy site.

The happiness and housing system prevents the food spam that was common in Civ 5 and encourages the settlement of cities on coasts and rivers. The AI doesn't really get city placement though. It knows wide play is an advantage in 6 so just spams cities and tries to forward settle you.
The AI in civ has never been good, the trouble in 6 is that with more that the AI needs to do those shortfalls are all the more glaringly obvious. There have however been significant improvements since the game's release.

Barbarians

Yep I'm giving them an entire heading. In Civ 4 as well as barbarians there were wild animals. In 5 the animals were removed going back to just barbarians. Its a small thing but something I found extremely disappointing when combined with the reduced threat posed by barbarians.

In 6 the barbarians now use scouts. If a scout spots your city and gets back to camp the camp will start to rapidly spawn a barbarian horde which will then descend on your city when it gets large enough.
It splits opinions but I like it as it adds a bit of extra threat to the early game. Unfortunately the barbarians have the attention span of a gnat. If they successfully get to a city chances are they will surround the city, make a couple of attacks then wander off in random directions, improvements are going to be pillaged but there's little threat to the city itself unlike Civ 4 and earlier games where failure to defend a city was disastrous.

[/h1]Diplomacy[/h1]
Diplomacy has never been that great in civ games. 6 again has a couple of interesting ideas but poor implementation.
AI opinion is based on agendas, fulfil their agenda and they like you, fail to and they hate you. Most of these agendas are to do well in a certain area. Have a high population, have high culture, have high faith production etc.
While I like the idea of having a series of agendas that can be randomised to create variety this means a civ that is behind is pretty much universally hated while a civ thats ahead is pretty much universally liked short of a hefty warmonger penalty. In previous games if you were pushing towards victory relationships with all but your closest allies would collapse and civs would be more likely to declare war. In 6 if you are pushing towards victory the AI loves it.

Oh and then there's the first impressions score, around 1/3rd of the civs you meet will denounce you the turn after meeting without a gold injection due to the first meeting modifier which is just pure RNG. Theres been a lot of criticism over how picky the AI could be in previous games and how easily negative modifiers built but this time you can literally be hated over a dice roll.
Trade wise it flips to the extreme, rather than using a base market value and adjusting AI demands based on opinion the offer seems to be based on relative development/power and need, in some ways this makes sense in others its just ludicrous especially the extreme to which offers range.

If the AI needs amenities they will offer more for luxuries, makes sense. The amount offered to small empires however is just silly, this imbalance is especially noticeable when it comes to open borders where they offer peanuts to access territory they need access to while vastly overvaluing access to territory thats out of the way and of no benefit.
Get an early relic on Deity and there's every chance a civ that hates you will offer to pay you to swap relics. A few turns later they will offer to pay to swap the relics back.

Again this is an area which has improved but there are still a lot of nonsensical extremes.

It probably sounds at this point that I hate Civ 6 as there's a lot of criticism, I've only covered a few aspects of the game so far and I feel like I'm rambling but I've played everything from Civilization to Civnet to Alpha Centauri(my personal favourite) to Civ 6.
Having put so many hours into Civilization games I can tell you all of the games have noticeable flaws but in Civ 5 and 6 they just seem to stand out more. The fact that the AI cannot handle the one unit per tile system very well doesn't help in this regard.

I would say that currently Civ 5 is still a better game than 6 but between those 2 games it largely comes down to personal opinion and 6 like 5 and 4 before it is reliant on DLC.
As you've probably noticed there are wildly differing opinions on which is better.

If you are new to civ go for 6, you aren't going to be familiar with the older games so you wont be annoyed by the removal of quality of life features, you wont be comparing mechanics and thinking you preferred the old way, if you have any issues you will have more active support and the game is still being updated.


There's a lot of nice ideas in 6 albeit not always so well implemented and its nice to see a few older mechanics being re-introduced in a new way but like with 4 and 5 its going to take the modding community to iron out a lot of the flaws and bring the most out of the game.
Civ 5 was terrible at release, it took years to fix. Civ 6 was terrible at release and has improved a lot but is still in its development cycle.
Unfortunately the way of modern games is to use the paying customers as beta testers and fix the product after the fact.


I hope this gave a bit of insight into how people who are critical of the game and went back to older titles are looking at things.

[Venusaisha]

Civilization V(more creation) has more mods & much more, Civilization VI(hexed bad omen) is too politic cartoony peace of a gun(who put a spell on u). Me prefer Beyond earth(Party down with the aliens) more. And think VII will be more whole complete me hope.

[Danone]

In my opinion, I would recommend and resume as follows:
If you want to enjoy a better and more stable multiplayer -> Civ VI
For a deeper and meaningful single player -> Civ V

[phaoray]

Civ V would be my suggestion, but that's mainly if you want a decent AI opponent. Civ 6 AI is...really crappy. Now, I have some friends who just want to build up their nation and cities and steamroll the AI so they are happy with it as a building game. But if you want any challenge, Civ 6 is not the game for you past the opening turns.

[Scorpio]

Publicado originalmente por phaoray:

Civ V would be my suggestion, but that's mainly if you want a decent AI opponent. Civ 6 AI is...really crappy. Now, I have some friends who just want to build up their nation and cities and steamroll the AI so they are happy with it as a building game. But if you want any challenge, Civ 6 is not the game for you past the opening turns.

this pretty much , most of the new stuff is half baked and really poor implementation on some features .

CIV5 has way better single player experience than CIV6 , if MP is your thing go with CIV6
If playing with mods is also part of your ideas go with CIV5 because of Dev and publisher greed mooders dont have proper tools to fix most glaring issues with the game

[Ghadaro]

Publicado originalmente por Scorpio:

this pretty much , most of the new stuff is half baked and really poor implementation on some features .

CIV5 has way better single player experience than CIV6 , if MP is your thing go with CIV6
If playing with mods is also part of your ideas go with CIV5 because of Dev and publisher greed mooders dont have proper tools to fix most glaring issues with the game

I wouldn't even consider multiplayer in 6 until they fix the pantheon stacking exploit.

[Scorpio]

Publicado originalmente por Ghadaro:

Publicado originalmente por Scorpio:

this pretty much , most of the new stuff is half baked and really poor implementation on some features .

CIV5 has way better single player experience than CIV6 , if MP is your thing go with CIV6
If playing with mods is also part of your ideas go with CIV5 because of Dev and publisher greed mooders dont have proper tools to fix most glaring issues with the game

I wouldn't even consider multiplayer in 6 until they fix the pantheon stacking exploit.

sadly thats not the only big exploit on the game thats been ignored for ages the one that allows for multiple districts of the same type is really bad as well .
The devs so far have a really poor track record of fixing the game it takes too dam long for them to put patches trough and improvements are just so little and far between .
i said this before and say again civ6 feels like a cash grab and not a proper civ game