They're adding the World Congress in, finally. The problem is that the AI has been broken since this game launched, so unless they make any decent strides with fixing it then the whole diplomatic angle that the features for this expansion are built around will be totally pointless.
I'm still not 100% sold on the climate stuff but it is good to hear that lategame it doesn't have a massive effect.
Re: Civilization VI: Gathering Storm
Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2019 10:33 pm
by The Jackal
Still haven't bought R&F.
Re: Civilization VI: Gathering Storm
Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2019 7:21 pm
by Mantis
Are the expansions independent of one another or do you need to own R&F for this to work? I'm really not keen on a lot of the stuff I heard about the first one but this second installment is getting a lot of praise from the Civ community so far.
Re: Civilization VI: Gathering Storm
Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2019 11:35 pm
by Medicine Man
As far as I know you only need the base game.
Re: Civilization VI: Gathering Storm
Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2019 7:11 pm
by Mantis
I've played a fair chunk of this now and it is quite interesting. The global warming mechanics are kind of a boon and a curse, they add a little more excitement to the later game but the tech tree is designed in such a way that it's basically impossible to stop the CO2 levels reaching maximum and all the ice caps melting; particularly because the AI does not give the slightest crap about avoiding it. The end result is that you get a few coastal tiles permanently lost (which you are warned about whenever you settle a city on the coast so you know to not build a city on a tile that will sink in 200 turns) and a ton of disaster events which are actually more annoying than anything.
There are no interesting mechanics like desertification where tiles swap their type from grassland to desert or tundra melting to form grassland, which I think would have made for some very interesting playstyles with leaders that could play into that. The end point is simply that you just get a whole load of floods along rivers and tornado events that trash all your improvements and districts, which slow the game down when you need to keep devoting resources into fixing them. So it makes the game slightly less style in the later eras, but not necessarily in a positive way. It would have been cool if the coastal flooding mechanic had been a bit more significant too, not a great deal of the map is lost and I was kind of looking forward to the idea of everyone losing a poorly settled city here or there.
The new grievances system makes it easier to develop good relations with the AI, which was sorely needed, but the AI is still overall a big step back from Civ 5 and could stand to be improved a lot.
The introduction of quite a lot of new late game tech and civic policies is very welcome; whilst generally by this point the game is pretty much over it is still nice to be able to keep developing new things, particularly the cool steadfasts and offshore power techs. And giant death robots are always a welcome return to the series, they are hilariously overpowered against pretty much everything but airstrikes.
Overall I'd say it has definitely improved the base game, but we're still a few tweaks off it being the best Civ it can be.