Aw, been a while since someone's complimented me, thank you!

Yes, I too fucked up the city planning stuff a good deal until eventually... it clicked.

It isn't the same game as Civ, a lot of the sort of ingrained ideas you don't even realize are baked into your subconcious from playing Civ a lot... will lead you to knee jerk, make the kind of 'well obviously i do this in this situation' decisions...

and yeah, then get slapped with 'nope, no workey'.

But... if you stick with it... just like you probably did, many moons ago, with Civ, you can absolutely get much more skilled.

Its funny you bring up stellaris... i spent like a month just utterly failing until that 'click' moment.

Then, a few months of 'i am actually decent at this' and then a few more months till 'actually this is boring because i win by stupid margins every time on anything but the most absurd difficulties, and in those games its pretty much a completely random dice roll of surviving early game or not due to the absurd early game ai bonuses... and then by mid to late game, the AI is just literally too stupid to engage in 80% of the micromanagement strategies i am using to snowball'.

Civ 7 is out?

Same with Paradox games. 4X in general is just really hard to get right on release because of how many interlinking systems there are, so waiting for balance updates at a minimum is never a bad idea.

Um, firaxis

My first was Civ1 and I've played hell out of bith 1 and 3. Perhaps feel the same about 3 as you about 5.

Has there ever been a finished civ game on launch since DLC existed?

I can't find it anywhere, I must have mis-remembered

From what I've seen, Civ 7 is trying too hard to be Humankind. I don't really want try it.

Nope. Paradox and EA are the same.

It may have not caused that much panic, but Amplitude consistently put out interesting ideas and enhancements to the Civ-likes in their games, so no wonder Firaxis might use these as templates and negate any unique features their competition might have over them. Plus, the Civ genre has to move in some way, anyway.

Isn't this the rule with every civ launch? They're all somewhat half-baked on launch (although 7 admittedly looks quite a bit less baked than the others).

That said, I feel Civ formula seems to be in decline. To me Call To Power was peak civ ( yeah, fight me ), but while 3,4 and 5 were great "second-bests", I couldn't really get into 6, and I"m not really planning on playing 7, not with this 3-age format anyway.

I never even knew you could mod it

I mostly play on a Linux computer, buy that should work. Thanks!

I mean, the ages thing grew on me. It was way too common in other civs to just snowball early and dominate the rest. Any modern civilization was just bad, because by the time they got online it was over.

Yeah, I am enjoying the age mechanic as a new approach to the formula. It's not without its flaws, but in previous Civs after a certain point I just stopped playing/didn't finish games when the outcome was clear. I'm doing that less now.

Yeah releasing an unfinished game without any exciting new changes and adding more dlc each iteration has been killing new civ releases and burning many long term fans who get hyped for a new civ. Paradox, Ubisoft, MicroProse, etc pull the same predatory monetization shit and when the price tag is 70 USD their half baked, missing ingredients cake just doesn't look appetizing to most.

Honestly the flaws I have the biggest complaints about is the God awful UI.

Incorrect tool tips, no drag and drop, no ui for city connectivity, no renaming cities, disappearing entities.

It's genuinely painful at times.

Big agree. Figuring out over building with the interface was so frustrating! Seeing city connectivity too.

What makes you think that? It's possible that they did it in-house, of course, but there's no precedent for it. No previous Civ had a linux version done in-house.

I'm sure I'll move on at some point, but I'm currently running maybe 30 mods on civ 6, and they are mostly QoL.
Parts of both gameplay and UI are just poorly thought out even to this day.
So I was expecting the new game to be released in a state I'd dislike. It might take longer to improve than I thought, though.