Not long after I made my post about Total War: Shogun 2, I was telling my brother about how I didn’t like the game, and his reaction was to buy me this for my birthday. Eh, I gave it a shot, but I’m still not a 4X fan.

• Sid Meier's Civilization VI
  

  13 hours playtime

  4 of 246 achievements

I already explained much of what I don’t like about the 4X genre in my Total War post, and again, if you actually like the genre, you’ll probably like this game, too, so this will mainly just be a quickfire post about differences between the two and what I think of them.

First thing to note is that loading times are just as long, though you won’t have to sit through it as often since there’s no shifting back and forth between battle mode and management mode: everything is turn-based. Once you start playing, you’ll notice there’s no WASD support and no way to turn it on in the options. I thought that was standard for PC games that use keyboard and mouse simultaneously, but apparently not for this game.

I played through the tutorial, and similar to Total War, it doesn’t go over half of what’s actually in the game, instead making players look stuff up in the in-game encyclopedia as they go. Then again, some stuff isn’t even touched on there, like warmonger penalties: practically all it says about them is that they exist. I would have at least preferred a simple “warmonger penalties make it harder to forge alliances and trade with other nations” or whatever it does. I also felt mislead about how the tutorial described some things, like the barracks: I distinctly remember the VA saying that it would make my army stronger, but the encyclopedia said nothing about actually increasing stats of my units (not even the units made in the city with the barracks).

Plus, rather than being broken up into separate chunks like Total War’s tutorial, the tutorial is a solid THREE HOURS with no option to stop and resume from where you were (there’s no save option in the pause menu during the tutorial, and I found out the hard way that it doesn’t use auto-save, either). I also encountered a bug where my scout discovered a barbarian outpost and a natural wonder at the same time, causing both voice clips to play over each other.

As for the main game, I do think it’s much better than Total War since no action is reliant on percent chances; in fact, just selecting one of your units and hovering the mouse over another allegiance’s unit will tell you exactly how the battle will play out. Then again, it doesn’t seem like you can use non-combat units against enemy civilizations (which is what Total War used percent chances for). However, there’s still randomness to the game, and that’s in how the map is set up. Sure, you can pick from several different types of maps, but the game applies a random seed to them when you start (though you have the option to change the seed ID as well).

Besides the fully-turn-based game-play, I think the biggest difference between this and Shogun 2 is that, in this game, you have to settle your own cities, even down to your very first one (whereas Shogun 2 had cities in fixed locations on the hand-crafted map, and you never have the option to build more cities). Personally, I’m not a fan of this since it takes the already-long-term game-play of 4Xs and drags it out further by starting you off with just one city (meaning you can only have one unit queued at a time, and each individual unit takes several turns AT MINIMUM to be built), then you wait for its population to grow enough so you can build another settler, then wait several turns for it to be finished so you can spend another several turns moving to a decent location to found a second city so that you can FINALLY queue two units at once, except the new city has a turn penalty for building units at first, so they can take twice to thrice as long to make. I feel like the “just one more turn” mentality comes 100% from the fact that it takes so damn long for anything to get done in this game. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure soldiers in Shogun 2 only took two to three turns to build, giving that game another point in its favor.

Overall, I think I did like it a bit more than Shogun 2, but I still haven’t been won over by the 4X genre. Honestly, I’m kinda surprised there wasn’t something similar to the Scenario Mode in the SNES port of Sim City, where you’re given a pre-set map, leader, and civilization, and are tasked with accomplishing a very specific objective in a specific amount of time (like, for example, “defend your capital city for 10 turns” and it starts you off at war with enemy units nearby). Not only could the easier scenarios serve as bite-sized tutorials (fixing my issue with the game not letting you stop in the middle of them), but the harder ones would provide the exact kind of structured challenge I like and maybe even serve as a fun distraction for long-term fans.

P.S. I also had some issue with input: I had archers (who have a range of two) exactly two units away from an enemy unit, but when I right-clicked on the enemy, they instead moved next to it, spending their entire turn because that spot had a high movement cost.

P.P.S. I guess another major difference is that other civilizations aren’t so quick to declare war on you (likely since there are other ways to win besides “conquer the other nations”), with the game even having a “denounce” mechanic that has other nations forecast their intent to find an excuse to declare war on you instead of just having it happen abruptly.