Help me find the fun in Civilization (the game)
January 10, 2018 6:00 AM   Subscribe

I've tried to play civ repeatedly in the past and I always get to a point after 50 turns or so where I'm not doing anything besides clicking 'end turn' over and over again because everything is waiting in a queue and there are no actions to take. I eventually get tired of not doing anything and give up.

Recently I picked up the mobile game Battle of Polytopia, a minimalist 4x, and loved it which had me craving a more meaty experience. I picked up Civ VI on ipad to give it another try and, sure enough, after about 50 turns I was no longer playing the game. Am I doing something wrong? I want to get that "one more turn" addiction but the hurry up and wait is killing me.
posted by mattholomew to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (12 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
I have been a big Civ player since it first came out. But I agree with you that sometimes it can seem to bog down. In Civ 6, if you go into advanced setup you can change a lot of the parameters. You might try limiting the number of city-states, eliminating barbarians, and change the speed of the game to quick. When I play that way I can get to turn 150 or so out of a 330 turn game in about 30-45 minutes.
posted by jtexman1 at 6:22 AM on January 10, 2018 [2 favorites]


I’d leave the barbarians on but definitely change the game to quick pace with a normal or smaller sized map. And a game setting of Prince or higher difficulty.

Then maybe start of with something more fun like Polynesia (explore the whole map immediately!).

Next, I would start the game with a specific type of victory in mind (science, culture, domination etc. ). As you go through the game, you’ll be racing the AI to build the wonders toward that goal, getting to the techs first, while fending off various foes. If you maximise all the options available to you (policies, faith, great persons, city state relationships) you should be plenty busy every turn. Good luck!
posted by iamkimiam at 7:12 AM on January 10, 2018


I'm most familiar with DOS Civ where I'd speed through the slow B.C. period by mashing the Enter key (End Turn) a lot until I discovered some other civs and things got interesting. Turns took only a second or two to process and I'd get into a rhythm using keyboard shortcuts.

Seems like people in Civ 6 turn off barbarans (?!) and use the Strategic Map View to make turns faster, Quick Movement seems to help too. I'd imagine a smaller map would improve things too.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:38 AM on January 10, 2018


I suspect you're not exploring all the game systems. Are you building and using units? In the early turns there's not much to do with your city. But you should also be exploring with a couple of units, uncovering goody huts, fighting barbarians, etc. And you have a choice early on. Do you want to invest in a Settler and a second city first? Or build a few combat units and try to capture an enemy city early? There's less to do than it will be around turn 100+, but there's still enough.

(Also woah, Civ 6 is out on iPad? Looks like it's the full game too. Given how demanding the game is on system resources on a beefy PC, I'm very curious how well it works. Particularly late game.)
posted by Nelson at 7:41 AM on January 10, 2018 [1 favorite]


Which Civ are you playing? I recently got Civ 5 finally and I reached that same point where all I was doing was clicking "end turn" and there wasn't any future plans I was particularly excited about.I'm going to add the expansion packs and see if it's more fun. But I suspect maybe Civ 5 isn't the best version of the game. Are you using any expansion packs? They do add random events to the game and add extra things you can do. I barely remember the difference between Civ 4 vanilla and all the expansion packs, but I do think Civ 4 is the best version of the game so I'd try that one. I haven't tried Civ 6 yet.
posted by AppleTurnover at 7:56 AM on January 10, 2018


I mean, I know that war is not the answer, but it seems like war is probably the answer. I usually try to catch another civilization with their pants down early in the game - it gives you a free city or two, and one less competitor to worry about.
posted by Ragged Richard at 8:09 AM on January 10, 2018 [4 favorites]


I think that in many ways Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire are much better than any of the Civ games. They are essentially Civ 3.5, improvements on Civ 1,2,3 and more fun that civ 4,5.
Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire are available on GOG.com.
posted by H21 at 9:13 AM on January 10, 2018 [1 favorite]


If you play on the easiest levels, the game will let you get away with being isolationist and non-expansionist, so that you can survive on your corner of the continent, slowly developing your civ, and only facing a few ineffectual invasion attempts every few centuries in the medieval/early industrial era. Then toward the modern era, you'll either be ahead of the curve and be able to win or behind the curve and lose. It's not the wrong way to play the game, but it can get boring as you note.

The more common strategy, which the designers have in mind and have tried to make more fun, is to be very expansionist, either through exploration and then either militarism or colonialism, or both. My strategy has always been to send out several cheap military units to explore as much of the world as possible early on (including naval units), then have settlers go wherever there are good spots in unclaimed territory. This leads to more cities, more units, more contact with other civs, and means you're always developing something (rushing out military units and/or settlers to establish an outer boundary to reign in an expanding neighbor, scouting spots on the map that will be strategically important in the later game and trying to lock them down, ferrying units to other continents to find that precious open space, etc.). Your cities won't develop nearly as fast, but instead of having 2-3 big cities you can have 10-15 (or more!) smaller ones, which will way outproduce the big cities in the medium and long runs. That gives you a lot more to do, and much fewer empty turns.

Basically, the winning and more fun strategy is being very expansionist, the game is a race to create a monocultural dystopia.
posted by skewed at 9:52 AM on January 10, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yes, agree with skewed. I love Civ, but tend to play it (Civ 5) on easier difficulties and follow the 1) build massive successful economic engine 2) go on the warpath late game plan. Which is pretty boring and isolationist until the end, when you have massive superiority and just mow through your enemies.

Ratcheting up the difficulty makes it a lot harder to do this, you end up getting in wars way earlier in the game so it's far more of an active struggle for survival.
posted by so fucking future at 10:13 AM on January 10, 2018


Mr. Frass and I like to play together and Conquer the World. I am more likely to get bored on my own because I'm less interested in setting my own goals. By 50 turns, I expect I'd have two scouts and the initial warrior roaming the lands. I would have probably met another civ and maybe some city states by then. I'm generally moving toward creating a religion. In Civ VI it helps if you go into the city and focus their efforts on production. So in this picture, you would click on the city, and in the bottom right there's a small menu bar with culture/food/production/science/faith/money. I would physically check production until you're on your feet. Civ VI has some pacing issues and this can really help early game. My husband (who is a huge fan of Civ and has been since II) insists Infinite City Sprawl is the way go. Just keep accumulating land and therefore resources. CIVFanatics is a good forum of information on how to play a better game.
posted by Bistyfrass at 11:33 AM on January 10, 2018


I have a friend who comes over at least once a week and we sit around playing games together. We've been on a Civ stint for a while, starting with revisiting Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire (agree that in many ways, these were the best), Civ V, then (in a fit of madness) I persuaded him that trying Civ VI would be a great idea and we both downloaded it from Steam. We have since gone back to playing Civ V because the frustrations of Civ VI massively outweigh the novelty value.

One of the frustrations is the agonising slowness of everything in the early game - I mean, you don't expect to be doing everything immediately. But even the actual time for the AI turns to be processed and the next turn to come up is just... gah. It gets worse if you play on a larger map, so reducing the map size will help if you haven't already tried that. Of course, that increases the chances of early conflict - this may not be an issue for you, but I find early-game conflict more frustrating than interesting because of how long it takes to build a single unit, especially when the AI doesn't seem to have these problems. (Also barbarians provide me with plenty of early-game conflict!) I love the exploration part, so that keeps me going in early game - playing Norway can help; though you still need Shipbuilding to be able to embark, at least once you get it you can go through ocean tiles and explore even more.

If you got yours on Steam, it's worth checking out the Community workshop for mods that can help rebalance aspects of the gameplay that particularly frustrate you. I found some which helped a bit - but as I said, I've gone back to Civ V because to me VI just had too many insurmountable flaws that outweighed the nifty bits.
posted by Athanassiel at 2:32 PM on January 10, 2018 [1 favorite]


If you enjoy board games the Civ game that came out several years ago is pretty decent, IMO. They did a pretty good job of stripping it down the essentials of the game. And playing with real live people changes the experience.
posted by jtexman1 at 6:01 AM on January 11, 2018


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