Looks like when designing Gilgamesh, they remembered that this guy had sex with all the women in Uruk and the earliest sources make it sound like only their husbands had a problem with it.
REVIVE!!!!
So I've been watching videos and news about this game and the more I watch the more I approve of all their big changes.
1. You have cassus belli for wars now, just like Paradox games:
2. Unstacked cities:
3. Roads built by trading:
4. Diplomacy looks more interesting, since information is now going to be a premium commodity:
5. Units can be stacked again:
6. The civs are so distinct and different:
7. Great people are all unique, dependent on the era, with their own abilities and you have to compete for them:
8. You don't just buy city states any more:
Seems like literally all eight points are directly copied from other games. Which is... I mean, it's good that they're not getting left behind by the industry, and I like a lot of the implementation, but when you list it out like this it winds up sounding like a lot of just "copy stuff from Stardock and Amplitude".
Yeah, for all that I loved Civ III, the AI doomstacks can stay fucked off.
Still probably not going to buy VI though, because my money is on their AI still being dumb as a bag of bricks and the difficulty modes still just being extra multipliers to brute-force it into outproducing the player. Honestly baffled that nobody has managed to copy what Stardock managed all the way back in GalCivII.
They managed it there for three reasons:
1. The game was relatively simple. Computers are good at simple games.
2. They use many threads effectively, so the AI can make expensive calculations in the background.
3. The guy who does AI is the CEO, and at the time the company was pretty small, so he could do what he wanted, even if that was continue working on AI constantly for a game after it was released, and incorporate player strategies and responses.
Civilization is trying to be less simple, although it's not super super deep. They don't necessarily have a top-tier multi-threaded AI coder, because that's such a niche skill that the people who are exemplary at it are quite rare. Even if they do, they probably don't have one working on the game constantly and also playing and following community strategies.