Civilization VI Announced, Releasing in October

[Elfgore]

Oh that graphical style choice is not one I enjoy. From the feature list this game just sounds like more Civ. So count me in once it's thirty dollars for the game and all DLCs.

 

[Joccaren]

EXPANSIVE EMPIRES: See the marvels of your empire spread across the map like never before. Each city spans multiple tiles so you can custom build your cities to take full advantage of the local terrain.

Sounds interesting. Rather than just visually being multiple tiles, having the actual city be multiple tiles could turn quite interesting, especially come sieges and defending it. Otherwise I guess the main question; What is the major difference between this, and tile improvements, and why would I choose one over the other? Or are they removing tile improvements so that the late game map isn't a giant mess of farms everywhere that isn't snow?

ACTIVE RESEARCH: Unlock boosts that speed your civilization's progress through history. To advance more quickly, use your units to actively explore, develop your environment, and discover new cultures.

Hopefully this means technology is no longer just a single income score like money tied to your civs population and number of libraries. There is a lot outside that that develops technology, and it is often a quintessential part of the game such that even going for a conquest victory in Civ V, you were stupid if you didn't get the science policy tree. Having science rewards for interacting with the world, rather than just building up your cities, would be good.

DYNAMIC DIPLOMACY: Interactions with other civilizations change over the course of the game, from primitive first interactions where conflict is a fact of life, to late game alliances and negotiations.

This could be an improvement. I've always been annoyed with Civ AI and online play where, unless you're 1 or 2 civilizations with an early unique unit, combat doesn't really occur in the early ages, more when you get to late game, and then its often a free for all shit fest game of thrones style with everyone betraying everyone, and no AI alliance being really trustworthy. Having early conflict be more prevalent would be great, and actual alliances late game too. Maybe I'm hoping too much here.

COMBINED ARMS: Expanding on the "one unit per tile" design, support units can now be embedded with other units, like anti-tank support with infantry, or a warrior with settlers. Similar units can also be combined to form powerful "Corps" units.

Eeeeh. It needed some form of multi-unit on a tile combat, but I'm not sure this was the way to do it. I guess we'll see soon.

On the other hand DEAR GOD WHAT IS WITH THOSE HORRID GRAPHICS?. Seriously, I thought Civ V's aesthetic was kinda meh when it came out, it just seems they want to get more and more kid-cartoony, which just burns my eyes. There's little detail in the terrain, it looks horrid. The units? Yeah, I think they're ok, and I'm alright with the stylised rendition of the wonders... But the terrain? Water is ok, everything else is horrible. Its like one shade per terrain tile and its just... No. More details and variety in the terrain PLEASE. Otherwise I'm waiting for mods. And the trees, oh god the trees. My eyes. Please. No. I don't want an IOS game. I want a PC game, and given how some games end up looking with today's technology, this is almost insulting.

Still, maybe the only day 1 purchase I'll make. Firaxis has fucked up their games recently, but its got new and interesting ideas, and I'm curious to find out how they work, what I'd change, and how I'll end up changing them, and to experience how it plays for myself before waiting for the numerous much needed fixes.

Oh god my eyes, what the hell am I looking at in those pictures?

Anyway I'm not particularly optimistic about this given Civ V and Beyond Earth. Getting rid of stacked units made no sense mechanically and within the context of what is happening, and I despised the massively smaller maps. That's before we get into the details of the streamlined gameplay and mechanics that ended up like 95% of such streamlining where it was to the detriment of the quality of the game.

I keep going back to Civ 4 for a reason, and I'd like a new Civ that takes what worked in that game and updates it instead of ignoring it and making it an in-name-only continuation of the series.

Eh, 1 unit per tile wasn't the best solution, but the unit stacks of death were also pretty poor to be honest. They even designed mechanics like siege unit splash damage to try and counteract it, and it really got in the way of the new combat style they went for with ranged units actually being ranged, and melee melee, which honestly I prefer to the old "First strike" system. I also prefered the non-absolute combat where you could clash multiple times before a unit died, rather than it being an all or nothing stack of death vs stack of death affair, and doing that with stacks of death would have just resulted in battles that never ended. Stacks of death needed to go, but a combined arms approach was needed from the start, rather than a 1 unit combat approach. Only thing that worries me with it is they seem to want to treat 2 units as 1 unit with combined arms, rather than just allow multiple units on the one tyle, one of each type, to more dynamically create these groups and utilise them.

Smaller maps were shit too, but it was the result of them sticking to 32 bit like chumps. You can mod in the creation of larger maps, but the game simply can't call on enough RAM and it crashes and dies. Hopefully they've learned and its a 64 bit affair now.
And yeah, way too much streamlining, even after all expansions. It made a number of improvements in my mind, but it definitely needs expanding on still, to re-reach a lot of the depth that Civ IV had, even if it came with lots of complexity.

How about fixing the AI?

I hate how increasing the difficulty doesn't incease enemy AI, it just gives them cheat mode.
Giving them bonuses and giving you penalties sucks, in my humble opinion. How about just having them play better?

Whilst I agree, its a lot easier said than done.
Imagine you had to take someone who has never played games before, and train them to consistently play Civilization at the highest level. Now imagine you only had 3-6 months to do so, and they had literally no background knowledge on how anything in game worked. That's the challenge they're under, and it'd be hard enough to teach that person to play competently in those 3-6 months, let alone at the highest level. And now imagine the highest level doesn't even exist yet, nobody has played this game outside of yourself and a handful of friends, so you don't even know what the highest level play will necessarily look like, though you have some idea of how it'll probably turn out.

Maybe not at release, but honestly I think that's what the expansions should focus on more. See the dominant strategies used, codify them and release an AI update that makes the damn things play well.

Of course there's then also the issue that they try to actually make the AI play like the leaders they're designed to be - Gengis Khan is an aggressive twat, Gandhi likes Nukes, Lincoln favours diplomacy. Doing this naturally conflicts with making the AI play as best possible, so you basically end up having to write multiple AIs entirely to deal with playing basically and like that character, playing competently and like that character, playing at a high level and like that character, then playing at a high level but not like that character, or maybe one for each difficulty where they also don't play like the character because a player wants a challenge but isn't good enough for the highest level play. Giving the AI bonuses allows them to scale challenge, whilst only needing a single subroutine. Its lazy, and on the higher difficulty levels pretty shit, but you can understand why they do it. As said, expansions should improve it with the given time and resources for them though, and they never do -.-

 

[BoogieManFL]

Civ 6 looks like it's older than Civ 5. I don't think I care much about that art style. To me it looks more like a quicker and cheaper way to do it than any real artistic intent. At best they are going for a look like some other semi recent games, a look that I don't believe fits the Civilization series as well.

After getting feature incomplete games, and then those features being sold as DLC, and Beyond Earth ending up being just a reskin of Civ 5 - I won't be looking at this until the price drops considerably.

 

[lancar]

when I saw this on steam, I was like "wait.. wut?"
Then I was like "alright, cool"
Then I watched the screenies and was like "eeey, cartoons!... wait, cartoons?"

Honestly, I'm not sure what to feel about that :/

 

[Strazdas]

Thats fine. Its been 5 years, about time for a new version i guess. I do like some of the features.

"Each city spans multiple tiles so you can custom build your cities to take full advantage of the local terrain."

But they already did? by city working many tiles around them? and cities in civ 5 already had ~6 tiles whne they got big, though they would gobble them up automatically.

"Unlock boosts that speed your civilization's progress through history."

Oh, shit, we are going to have technology bleeding arent we?

How about you actually make tech tree good for once?

"while remaining true to what makes the Civilization series so special"

You mean all the stuff the players made as mods? or are you going to continue the tradition and make it harder like you did with Civ V?

Oh god my eyes, what the hell am I looking at in those pictures?

A sprite based RTS from circa 2002? Oh, wait thats supposed to be Civ 6

and I despised the massively smaller maps.

Civ 5 had bigger maps than civ 4.

Can't play a Civ anymore without religion. After Gods and Kings, and especially after BnW, Civ V got me finally loving it instead of IV, which I also loved after BTS.

Interesting, i found religion to be utterly useless and not worth pursuing. i dont even bother converting the cities i capture anymore. Though some of the follower beliefs are nice.

Or are they removing tile improvements so that the late game map isn't a giant mess of farms everywhere that isn't snow?

you have farms late-game? its lumber mills and trading posts everywhere for me. Oh and mines where no forests available.

 

[Zontar]

Civ 5 had bigger maps than civ 4

No. It looks like the maps are bigger because everything uses a larger scale, but in terms of the amount of space you actually have to work with Civ IV is significantly larger. It only looks smaller because the tiles are smaller.

 

[Strazdas]

Civ 5 had bigger maps than civ 4

No. It looks like the maps are bigger because everything uses a larger scale, but in terms of the amount of space you actually have to work with Civ IV is significantly larger. It only looks smaller because the tiles are smaller.

\
Civ 5 maps have more tiles. The distance in the game for everything is measured in tiles. therefore the sizes are larger (and by quite a margin).

 

[xaszatm]

Oh god my eyes, what the hell am I looking at in those pictures?

Anyway I'm not particularly optimistic about this given Civ V and Beyond Earth. Getting rid of stacked units made no sense mechanically and within the context of what is happening, and I despised the massively smaller maps. That's before we get into the details of the streamlined gameplay and mechanics that ended up like 95% of such streamlining where it was to the detriment of the quality of the game.

I keep going back to Civ 4 for a reason, and I'd like a new Civ that takes what worked in that game and updates it instead of ignoring it and making it an in-name-only continuation of the series.

Can't say I like the artstyle, and I still have Civ IV with the Caveman to Cosmos mod, so I find it unlikely I'll buy this, especially without bringing back unit stacks.

I keep going back to Civ 4 for a reason.

Civ IV until death! DEEEEEEAAAATH!!!

Out of curiosity, what do you like more: Civlization IV or Alpha Centauri? I know there's a Alpha Centauri mod for Civ IV but I personally put Alpha Centauri as the best 4X game. Though honestly, I AM a huge fan of Civ V as well and think that a large mod could do a good job with Alpha Centauri as well. Like giving Mirham something that actual matches her civilization other than blind fanatics attacking.

OT: That artstyle is really off-putting. It's very similar to the tablet artstyle...oh. oh no. Please don't tell me they're going to be making this Civ for tablets as well. You guys did that for Sid Meier's Spaceships and the fact that it was built for tablets first just utterly destroyed the complexity of this series (which to be honest has been decreasing).

 

[Joccaren]

"Each city spans multiple tiles so you can custom build your cities to take full advantage of the local terrain."

But they already did? by city working many tiles around them? and cities in civ 5 already had ~6 tiles whne they got big, though they would gobble them up automatically.

That's not the city taking up those tiles though, they're just part of your nation's territory. You've got a bunch of great plains in the US where there isn't a city smack dab in the middle of it, yet they still count as part of US territory, largely because there are a bunch of cities close enough to enforce that claim. Same with territory in Civ V.
It sounds like now your actual city - that 1 tile thing that you build all your stuff from - stretches over multiple tiles. How that'll work for production or invasions or anything... No idea. It'll be interesting to find out.

Can't play a Civ anymore without religion. After Gods and Kings, and especially after BnW, Civ V got me finally loving it instead of IV, which I also loved after BTS.

Interesting, i found religion to be utterly useless and not worth pursuing. i dont even bother converting the cities i capture anymore. Though some of the follower beliefs are nice.

Yeah, gotta say that religion wasn't fully utilised in V. It was just another min/maxed thing without any semblance of balance [Tithe OP =P]. There weren't really any religious wars, because either you really liked the benefits your religion gave you, and you'd kill any missionaries that came near, or you didn't really care, and ignored it whilst everything was converted to one religion. And if anyone focused on religion after early game, when it was hardest to spread the damn stuff, then they're screwed, as they're behind in military, tech, production and everything else 'cause they wanted to convert. Stuff more along the lines of the Civ IVs approach to religion might have been more interesting, crossed with the Total War method; For secular societies having a non-state religion in your city makes them unhappy with your rule, unless you manage to convert them, and you get bonuses for having the unified religion in all cities that predominantly follow it, or other policies give no decreased happiness for non-state religions, but also reduce various bonuses, meaning that you can actually wage a war with religion, and have to manage it, or you can opt out of the religious wars if you want, but will have nation-wide reduction in various bonuses, potentially putting you behind if you already were fine with happiness.

Or are they removing tile improvements so that the late game map isn't a giant mess of farms everywhere that isn't snow?

you have farms late-game? its lumber mills and trading posts everywhere for me. Oh and mines where no forests available.

[/quote]
Eh, trading posts were useless outside of Jungles. Tithe + markets in every city, coupled with trade to city states and non-hostile players could easily give you several hundred of gold income each turn. Mines went on any hill of course, lumber mills depended on the area. If your city was in open plains there was no way you were getting any, but in heavy forested areas you'd often keep a couple to bump up production, whilst using a number of farms to maintain a high population that would both let you use all your production focused tiles, as well as field a ton of specialists that gave the city a ton of science, gold, production, culture, or whatever you needed, as well as pumping out a ton of great people. With an Ideology, you'd have a ton of specialists able to be fielded for half the food cost, and its been a while since I've played the unmodded social policy tree [Original is way too unbalanced], but I'm fairly sure a science policy gave you extra science for every specialist in a city too. May be wrong there, might have been some other specialist bonus in some other tree.

Of course there were also 'Farms' on my borders, 'farms' being what my friends and I called forts, which were often spammed along our borders as we were distrustful pieces of shit as we'd always betray each other.

 

[Joccaren]

Civ 5 had bigger maps than civ 4

No. It looks like the maps are bigger because everything uses a larger scale, but in terms of the amount of space you actually have to work with Civ IV is significantly larger. It only looks smaller because the tiles are smaller.

\
Civ 5 maps have more tiles. The distance in the game for everything is measured in tiles. therefore the sizes are larger (and by quite a margin).

Looked up numerous sources online. Unmodded, they have the same number of overall tiles. 10240, in an 128*80 grid [Or 32*20 for Civ IV, however each '1*1' was a grid of 4*4 squares, rather than just 1 tile, and thus it ended up as 128*80 in the end too].

Modded... Civ IV had far larger maps. Civ V crashed rapidly with maps exceeding 100*128, as the RAM just wasn't there. Civ IV often had stable modded maps up in the 200*200s, at least until late game. One source found something interesting in that Civ III maps apparently had a default 256*256 map size, but I never really liked 3, and stuck with Net until IV came out TBH, so I'm not sure if that's correct or not.

Either way... IV and V were the same size. Now, Civ IV maps felt bigger because the range between cities was far less - 4 hexes. Generally in Civ V you'll build at least 4 hexes away, if you want to maximise utilisation of land you'll build 6 hexes away, if you want t max resources you'll often build up to 10 hexes away. This creates a far less clustered map, which feels smaller as there aren't as many viable plots for cities to go on, even though there are the same number of tiles. Additionally, units in V moved at least 2 hexes in standard conditions, even without roads. Civ IV had 1 movement per unit, making it take far longer to cross the world, making it feel larger, whilst Civ V you could traverse the place much quicker.

 

[EbonBehelit]

Getting rid of stacked units made no sense mechanically and within the context of what is happening,

See, I've only played Civ 5, and the idea of having all military units stack into a single tile makes no sense to me. At all. There's no tactics to be had - I may as well be playing HoMM with the battles set to auto-resolve.

Anyway, I'm glad to see Firaxis trying some new things with Civ 6. After all, the worst that can happen is the changes fall flat and I go back to playing Civ 5 again.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

I think I've been too exposed to politics lately, because I read these 'features' and all I straightaway thought was 'spin spin spin'.

EXPANSIVE EMPIRES:
See the marvels of your empire spread across the map like never before. Each city spans multiple tiles so you can custom build your cities to take full advantage of the local terrain.

When I hear cities spanning multiple tiles I don't really think 'expansive empires', it sounds more like they're again pushing players to go tall rather than wide. That aside, this sounds awfully like the Endless Legend system of having add-ons to cities that expand their worker zone. I'm not convinced this is the right direction for Civ to go - it makes the map seem smaller, which is already enough of a problem with 1UPT.

ACTIVE RESEARCH:
Unlock boosts that speed your civilization's progress through history. To advance more quickly, use your units to actively explore, develop your environment, and discover new cultures.

The spin is out of control on this one. How on earth is this different to any Civ ever, where you send units out in the early game to snatch up as many huts as possible to get the tech boosts?

DYNAMIC DIPLOMACY:
Interactions with other civilizations change over the course of the game, from primitive first interactions where conflict is a fact of life, to late game alliances and negotiations.

Again, there's literally nothing here to differentiate this from existing Civ games. Is it really so revolutionary that you might go to war with Egypt in the early game and later build them up as a crucial ally? What would actually impress me is if they were to put out a game that doesn't have a diplomacy system which breaks beyond the medieval era.

COMBINED ARMS:
Expanding on the "one unit per tile" design, support units can now be embedded with other units, like anti-tank support with infantry, or a warrior with settlers. Similar units can also be combined to form powerful "Corps" units.

This is, again, not dramatically different when you consider that settlers have always been able to move on top of military units even under 1UPT. It's a small step in the right direction towards making army manoeuvrability much less of a clusterfuck than it is currently, but maybe not quite enough. I am actually a fan of 1UPT overall but it has a lot of design issues that would be abated by allowing limited stacking. 'Corps' sounds like bullshit though - just a rehash of the 'armies' in Civ 3 that were just super units with massive HP. I think I'll have to wait and see with this one.

ENHANCED MULTIPLAYER:
In addition to traditional multiplayer modes, cooperate and compete with your friends in a wide variety of situations all designed to be easily completed in a single session.

Way to be specific, guys. A 'wide variety of situations' could be just about anything. Specific time periods? Historical scenarios? Challenge maps? And what's the timeframe of 'a single session' - are we talking a single evening, day, hour? This is just marketing waffle.

A CIV FOR ALL PLAYERS:
Civilization VI provides veteran players new ways to build and tune their civilization for the greatest chance of success. New tutorial systems introduce new players to the underlying concepts so they can easily get started.

Seriously? Did they just announce a tutorial as new feature? As if the one overwhelming opinion of Civ 5 was that it was somehow unfriendly to new or casual players?

And then you get to the screenshots, which are incredibly disappointing. It's like Civ 5 and Civ Revolutions had a baby, and then they commissioned the artists from Dora the Explorer to make a portrait of their newborn. It reminds me of a mobile base-builder like Clash of the Clans, and that is not a good vibe to be giving off. No doubt it will also still run like bollocks despite looking like ass.

Gee, I sound very jaded. I'm still going to buy it after all.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

[quote="xaszatm"

 

[Strazdas]

Eh, trading posts were useless outside of Jungles. Tithe + markets in every city, coupled with trade to city states and non-hostile players could easily give you several hundred of gold income each turn. Mines went on any hill of course, lumber mills depended on the area. If your city was in open plains there was no way you were getting any, but in heavy forested areas you'd often keep a couple to bump up production, whilst using a number of farms to maintain a high population that would both let you use all your production focused tiles, as well as field a ton of specialists that gave the city a ton of science, gold, production, culture, or whatever you needed, as well as pumping out a ton of great people. With an Ideology, you'd have a ton of specialists able to be fielded for half the food cost, and its been a while since I've played the unmodded social policy tree [Original is way too unbalanced], but I'm fairly sure a science policy gave you extra science for every specialist in a city too. May be wrong there, might have been some other specialist bonus in some other tree.

Of course there were also 'Farms' on my borders, 'farms' being what my friends and I called forts, which were often spammed along our borders as we were distrustful pieces of shit as we'd always betray each other.

several hundred? thats nothing. i go for 500+, rule the city states and purchase the units i need with gold. Open plain cities were worst starting positions in civ. quite ironic. I actually didnt use specialists all that much unless i too the science social politice that gave extra science for specialists. your not worng the bonus was there.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

Otherwise I guess the main question; What is the major difference between this, and tile improvements, and why would I choose one over the other? Or are they removing tile improvements so that the late game map isn't a giant mess of farms everywhere that isn't snow?

Maybe they're going to combine tile improvements with city buildings a la Endless Legend. Could make the maps end up looking a lot more interesting but the question is whether that imposes a cap on the number of improvements per city, based on area? I'm not against it but I want more details.

Eh, 1 unit per tile wasn't the best solution, but the unit stacks of death were also pretty poor to be honest. They even designed mechanics like siege unit splash damage to try and counteract it, and it really got in the way of the new combat style they went for with ranged units actually being ranged, and melee melee, which honestly I prefer to the old "First strike" system. I also prefered the non-absolute combat where you could clash multiple times before a unit died, rather than it being an all or nothing stack of death vs stack of death affair, and doing that with stacks of death would have just resulted in battles that never ended. Stacks of death needed to go, but a combined arms approach was needed from the start, rather than a 1 unit combat approach. Only thing that worries me with it is they seem to want to treat 2 units as 1 unit with combined arms, rather than just allow multiple units on the one tyle, one of each type, to more dynamically create these groups and utilise them.

What I've long advocated for is a system where the game starts with 1 unit per tile but gradually unlocks stacking options as you get down the tech tree. 1UPT is best in the early-mid game when you don't have enough production capacity to cover the map in units, so you can manoeuvre around but some of the terrain and ranged unit design really adds tactical flair. If you could gradually unlock some stacking - say you can stack 2 units with a renaissance era tech, 3 with industrial, 4 with modern etc - then you'd be able to keep the interesting sides of the 1UPT system, but avoid both carpet of doom and stack of doom.

Maybe this new system will bring that. Maybe it won't.

 

[Mangod]

Eh, 1 unit per tile wasn't the best solution, but the unit stacks of death were also pretty poor to be honest. They even designed mechanics like siege unit splash damage to try and counteract it, and it really got in the way of the new combat style they went for with ranged units actually being ranged, and melee melee, which honestly I prefer to the old "First strike" system. I also prefered the non-absolute combat where you could clash multiple times before a unit died, rather than it being an all or nothing stack of death vs stack of death affair, and doing that with stacks of death would have just resulted in battles that never ended. Stacks of death needed to go, but a combined arms approach was needed from the start, rather than a 1 unit combat approach. Only thing that worries me with it is they seem to want to treat 2 units as 1 unit with combined arms, rather than just allow multiple units on the one tyle, one of each type, to more dynamically create these groups and utilise them.

What I've long advocated for is a system where the game starts with 1 unit per tile but gradually unlocks stacking options as you get down the tech tree. 1UPT is best in the early-mid game when you don't have enough production capacity to cover the map in units, so you can manoeuvre around but some of the terrain and ranged unit design really adds tactical flair. If you could gradually unlock some stacking - say you can stack 2 units with a renaissance era tech, 3 with industrial, 4 with modern etc - then you'd be able to keep the interesting sides of the 1UPT system, but avoid both carpet of doom and stack of doom.

Maybe this new system will bring that. Maybe it won't.

Isn't this how Endless Legend does it already? Units are stacked into armies of up to 4 (later 6 and finally 8) units, then when combat starts, the army unfolds into the individual units for the duration of combat.

As for the screenshots... is anyone else reminded of Age of Empires Online?

Spoiler

 

[Joccaren]

Eh, trading posts were useless outside of Jungles. Tithe + markets in every city, coupled with trade to city states and non-hostile players could easily give you several hundred of gold income each turn. Mines went on any hill of course, lumber mills depended on the area. If your city was in open plains there was no way you were getting any, but in heavy forested areas you'd often keep a couple to bump up production, whilst using a number of farms to maintain a high population that would both let you use all your production focused tiles, as well as field a ton of specialists that gave the city a ton of science, gold, production, culture, or whatever you needed, as well as pumping out a ton of great people. With an Ideology, you'd have a ton of specialists able to be fielded for half the food cost, and its been a while since I've played the unmodded social policy tree [Original is way too unbalanced], but I'm fairly sure a science policy gave you extra science for every specialist in a city too. May be wrong there, might have been some other specialist bonus in some other tree.

Of course there were also 'Farms' on my borders, 'farms' being what my friends and I called forts, which were often spammed along our borders as we were distrustful pieces of shit as we'd always betray each other.

several hundred? thats nothing. i go for 500+, rule the city states and purchase the units i need with gold. Open plain cities were worst starting positions in civ. quite ironic. I actually didnt use specialists all that much unless i too the science social politice that gave extra science for specialists. your not worng the bonus was there.

Several, naturally, meaning 300+, easily on the higher late game. Enough to bribe the shit out of city states, and buy units from time to time, but the boost to science from the specialists and population, as well as the boost to the number of great scientists you produce thanks to those specialist, really just turns into a dominating advantage. Its one of the main reasons the Science tree ended up OP, in addition to the 10% bonus just passively [Technically when happy, but when were you ever not happy after the stone age?]. Once you got to a sudden jump in military power with a noted 'powerful for its time' unit, spam it and go to town.

Anyway, RPS and PC Gamer have a bit more info on the exact mechanics, so...

I think I've been too exposed to politics lately, because I read these 'features' and all I straightaway thought was 'spin spin spin'.

EXPANSIVE EMPIRES:
See the marvels of your empire spread across the map like never before. Each city spans multiple tiles so you can custom build your cities to take full advantage of the local terrain.

When I hear cities spanning multiple tiles I don't really think 'expansive empires', it sounds more like they're again pushing players to go tall rather than wide. That aside, this sounds awfully like the Endless Legend system of having add-ons to cities that expand their worker zone. I'm not convinced this is the right direction for Civ to go - it makes the map seem smaller, which is already enough of a problem with 1UPT.

Not that it exactly helps with maps feeling smaller, but you can have 12 'districts' in a city. Each district has different buildings that get built in it [Say an academic district would have libraries, schools and research labs as an example], and provides different bonuses to the districts around it. Additionally, districts gain bonuses from adjacent terrain. For example, the academic district before could gain science bonuses from rainforests and mountains in its vicinity - giving it wildlife to study, and the ability to build great observatories for the sky. Or your religious district might want that mountain for more faith, worshipping god from on high.
The aim of the game as a whole it to both remove a fixed 'meta' strategy that dominates every game, and to have you pay more attention to your geography, so that it affects your civilization more.
Either way, cities will likely stay the same overall size - they'll still 'own' a maximum of 36 or whathaveyou hexes, but these 'districts' will take up some of those tiles, making it apparent exactly what a city produces [And they aim to have you specialise your cities more with this] for other players just by looking at it, and naturally meaning there's not as much room for tile improvements, though they still seem to exist.
I do want bigger maps though, and hope they're a part of it.

ACTIVE RESEARCH:
Unlock boosts that speed your civilization's progress through history. To advance more quickly, use your units to actively explore, develop your environment, and discover new cultures.

The spin is out of control on this one. How on earth is this different to any Civ ever, where you send units out in the early game to snatch up as many huts as possible to get the tech boosts?

Because they weren't really a dedicated tech boost, they were just random goody huts that'd give you a map, or a unit, or some population, or maybe if you were really lucky or playing the Shoshone, a tech.
Anyway, this system is basically a series of mini 'quests' inside the tech tree, which when completed catapult you along the tree. So if you want to research masonry, you can do it the long and slow way, or you could complete the 'quest' of building a quarry, and you'd get a reward of half the progress to Masonry outright. Same goes for boating techs, where you would have quests along the lines of getting a maritime city, which would propel you to sailing, and then you could send out work boats to gather resources and find out more about the sea. Instead of passively researching technologies with a "Tech" score, they want you to instead head out and get new technologies primarily by acting upon the world, actively researching them through these 'quests'.
And again, this tries to focus you out of a set Meta, and to make you pay attention to your geography. You can't just start up a game and go "I'm going to build an OP Horse Archer Rush", you'll start the game and see you've got bronze nearby, so you'll start heading for a spearmen rush instead as you can rapidly research them, or maybe you're lucky and you have horses nearby and you can do your horse rush, but what you're likely to research each game will depend more on your starting position and what you have nearby, theoretically at least.

DYNAMIC DIPLOMACY:
Interactions with other civilizations change over the course of the game, from primitive first interactions where conflict is a fact of life, to late game alliances and negotiations.

Again, there's literally nothing here to differentiate this from existing Civ games. Is it really so revolutionary that you might go to war with Egypt in the early game and later build them up as a crucial ally? What would actually impress me is if they were to put out a game that doesn't have a diplomacy system which breaks beyond the medieval era.

Honestly would love to say they've revamped diplomacy but... Yeah, mostly the same as what we've got, but back to the "You must unlock interactions" model, where you'll start off in the stone age with just gift giving and war, but eventually grow to full on alliances and such with unlocks, likely from the tech tree. There's also apparently "More than one way to declare war", but what the hell that means IDK.

COMBINED ARMS:
Expanding on the "one unit per tile" design, support units can now be embedded with other units, like anti-tank support with infantry, or a warrior with settlers. Similar units can also be combined to form powerful "Corps" units.

This is, again, not dramatically different when you consider that settlers have always been able to move on top of military units even under 1UPT. It's a small step in the right direction towards making army manoeuvrability much less of a clusterfuck than it is currently, but maybe not quite enough. I am actually a fan of 1UPT overall but it has a lot of design issues that would be abated by allowing limited stacking. 'Corps' sounds like bullshit though - just a rehash of the 'armies' in Civ 3 that were just super units with massive HP. I think I'll have to wait and see with this one.

Yeah, I'm pretty much with you on this one. I kind of like the idea of specialising a unit with a 'support' unit, but corps is literally just rolling 2-3 units into one for some reason, and that just sounds really lame, and kinda crap. Only POSSIBLE saving grace is that it didn't state that it merged them, more that it let you stack them only under the circumstances for creating a 'corps', but they must all be the same unit type for one, let alone what else is needed. That makes it sound less like super units, and more like limited stacking, but how it'll play out in game is likely similar, unfortunately.

ENHANCED MULTIPLAYER:
In addition to traditional multiplayer modes, cooperate and compete with your friends in a wide variety of situations all designed to be easily completed in a single session.

Way to be specific, guys. A 'wide variety of situations' could be just about anything. Specific time periods? Historical scenarios? Challenge maps? And what's the timeframe of 'a single session' - are we talking a single evening, day, hour? This is just marketing waffle.

Quick answer on the timeframe, as little as 2 hours. As for some of the variety of situations, you get more control over the eras and the victory conditions than is in the base game. So you could start in the medieval era, have the game finish upon hitting the renaissance, and make the winner the player with the dominant religion at that time. Gives you a lot more freedom in exactly what you want out of the game you're playing, though to what extent I'm not entirely sure.

A CIV FOR ALL PLAYERS:
Civilization VI provides veteran players new ways to build and tune their civilization for the greatest chance of success. New tutorial systems introduce new players to the underlying concepts so they can easily get started.

Seriously? Did they just announce a tutorial as new feature? As if the one overwhelming opinion of Civ 5 was that it was somehow unfriendly to new or casual players?

Yeah, honestly not sure here. I guess they're just saying they've revamped the tutorials. TBH the 'advisor' spam was pretty annoying, so hopefully they've improved on that a little, but I doubt it.

And then you get to the screenshots, which are incredibly disappointing. It's like Civ 5 and Civ Revolutions had a baby, and then they commissioned the artists from Dora the Explorer to make a portrait of their newborn. It reminds me of a mobile base-builder like Clash of the Clans, and that is not a good vibe to be giving off. No doubt it will also still run like bollocks despite looking like ass.

TBH, the style has actually grown on me. Except the trees, they can go fuck themselves still. Its not what I would have wanted, but its not as terrible as it first appeared. Still, yeah, not my favourite looking civ game. HOPEFULLY this means better optimisation rather than focus on... well, I guess looking pretty, though that's never truly applied, but I really doubt it. I remember Civ V at launch too. Looked like shit, ran even shitter -.-

 

[Naldan]

Can't play a Civ anymore without religion. After Gods and Kings, and especially after BnW, Civ V got me finally loving it instead of IV, which I also loved after BTS.

Interesting, i found religion to be utterly useless and not worth pursuing. i dont even bother converting the cities i capture anymore. Though some of the follower beliefs are nice.

Or are they removing tile improvements so that the late game map isn't a giant mess of farms everywhere that isn't snow?

you have farms late-game? its lumber mills and trading posts everywhere for me. Oh and mines where no forests available.

Yeah, that's my strategy the majority of games. I use farms, therefore I need money. Religion can make you filthy rich, just like in RL.

Also, they make the little diplomacy that is in Civ V a bit more interesting.

 

[Elijin]

It bothers me these systems are all basically lifted from endless legend. The endless games already have to live in civs shadow in spite of being better games...now they're stealing their ideas too? No doubt post release civ being the bigger title will mean endless is seen as the little studio copying what civ is doing, time line be damned.