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Comment by ordinaryperson | Hacker News Reader

In some ways I prefer the simplicity of Civ 1 over the current Civ 6.

For example, in Civ 6 establishing trade routes becomes really important, but it's impossible to automate. So EVERY time a trader finishes a route you must MANUALLY select which city to trade with. By endgame you're clicking through a dozen trade routes every turn.

Also, unless you decide to annihilate everyone prepare for NPCs to constantly pester you with stupid requests, like trading your capital for a resource of peaches. And then they can keep repeating the same requests. Why can't I just set my disposition to always automatically deny all incoming requests?

The waging war by religion seems incomplete too, you only have two unit types: apostles and missionaries.

I recommend 6 overall but Civ 1 doesn't overcomplicate it, it's still as great today as it was back then.

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> The waging war by religion seems incomplete too, you only have two unit types: apostles and missionaries.

There are actually four or five: missionaries (inexpensive weak offensive unit), apostles (expensive strong offensive unit with random unique bonuses), inquisitors (defensive unit), and gurus (support unit, heals adjacent units). There are also warrior monks, which only one religion may have and, despite being melee units rather than religious units, will spread their religion when defeating another unit in combat.

I'm still a little torn on the religious mechanics in 6, but it's certainly the most involved the series has ever made it, and probably strictly better than 5's implementation. Your points about AI trading are true to home, though there have been a few improvements to trade routes in patches and the recent expansion (by adding a "repeat route" button to the trader menu, and also generally by nerfing trade routes so you generally have fewer of them).

I introduced my girlfriend to Civ 6 after seeing her play a bunch of similarly-veined strategy games on her phone. She was hooked within days so we started a 'hot-seat' campaign via Steamcast and passed the controller back and forth for hours on the couch.

At some point it became clear that my path to victory was an all out religious assault, and effectively all I was doing was micromanaging my missionaries and apostles.

This got old extremely quickly in the hot seat format. I'd kill for an engaging 2 player couch-coop gameplay mode in here that didn't make us hate each other.

> I'm still a little torn on the religious mechanics in 6, but it's certainly the most involved the series has ever made it

I think it is far too complicated for something that is entirely optional. In v6, you either do an early bet of going all-in on religion or you ignore it completely, just keeping in mind that a military intervention might be necessary if someone gets too close to a religious victory.

I'm generally not too fond of the multitude of victory conditions: space player vs religion player vs culture player isn't the most exciting game imho. Imagine a race where all the contestants run off in different directions, towards different goalposts. "It looked like it would become a close finish between the swimmer reaching Dover and the runner arriving at Athens, but then the weather changed and the cyclist got up Mount Ventoux much faster than expected, so he won", that's not how triathlon works.

Civ 3 feels like the right version with the level of detail vs fun.

Civ 2 is better, it's got a bit less detail (i.e. less endless managing of cities...), and got the more aged graphics to boot. Then again, it's already got the the isometric perspective.

Civ 3 was good, I played way too much of that.

The one big improvement of Civ 6 I can attest to is not having to build individual boats/ships for melee units once you have the appropriate skills -- just direct your helicopters to the oceans and they turn into transports.

All good games. But a few simple adjustments would just really relieve a lot of the small annoyances.

Civ 3 was great fun. I actually installed windows to play it when it came out. I remember one game, I was doing well, better than my neighbours, then oil appeared on the map. But not in my terrortry. This required an unprovoked war of expansion into a neighbour, and quickly, to gain control over this critical resource.

Call to power was quite good too - with undersea, space, and future tech.

I think the current sweet spot is Civ5 with the Vox Populi mod that fixes many AI and gameplay oddities of the vanilla version. I hope Civ6 will overtake at some point, but it seems to still have a long way to go before being good enough.

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