Malf on 25/10/2016 at 10:48
Okay, further play has revealed that while carefully placing districts in the early game is indeed important, the rhetoric that "You no longer build everything" in all of your cities isn't quite true. In the late game, I'm finding that cities where I haven't built all the districts and their associated upgrades suffer in one way or another (mostly through ridiculously long build times on virtually everything), and the the bonuses from late game district upgrades tend to override the adjacency bonuses you may have been reliant on early on.
So, for long-term planning purposes, lay down all of your districts as soon as possible unless you want to pay for it in the late game. You can't accelerate building of districts, only their constituent upgrades, and they take 50+ turns to build each (at Marathon speed).
Slasher on 26/10/2016 at 01:37
How is the late game performance on big maps?
Malf on 26/10/2016 at 05:02
Nowhere near as bad as in Civ V.
Late game saves do take an absolute age to load, but once you're in, the time between turns is significantly better, and you never see the graphical hitching you saw in Civ V.
You do pay for this increased performance however. Huge maps are noticeably smaller than they were in the previous game. Apparently this can be changed in some config files, but people report that the game becomes incredibly unstable if you increase past the default setting.
Edit: Some additions now I'm not rushing to get out the door.
I think another reason for the increased performance is that they've limited the maximum zoom level. It's not uncomfortable, but you can't zoom out to the same degree as you could in Civ V. With one caveat... the new "Strategic" view which you can switch to instantly and renders everything in stylised, top-down 2D provides a larger view of the map. Still not the entire map, but significantly more than the maximum zoom level.
Personally, I'm kind of ambivalent about the strategic view. Where it's been praised in most reviews, and I can certainly appreciate how pretty it is, in practice I've found it to be of limited use. I think if I just stop being lazy and learn the keyboard shortcut for it, I'll probably use it more often, but even then, I think it has problems.
Ostensibly, it's supposed to be a cleaner display of the world so you can quickly find things, but the lack of hard hex lines limits the value. And of course, your brain has to adjust on the fly from knowing exactly what a 3D model of something is to how that's represented in 2D, and it's not always easy.
I'm loath to repeat this, as it sounds like whinging, but while they learned a lot from Endless Legend for Civ VI, someone pointed out that they didn't learn the most important lesson: a clear and consistent user interface. RPS go on about the UI at some length in their RPS verdict, and I can't help but agree. Too often, critical information about a concept or unit is nested away and not immediately accessible.
The biggest offender for me so far has been regarding repairing Districts.
Districts, like any other tile surrounding your city, can be pillaged by enemy troops.
With any other tile, as with any previous version of Civ, you use a builder to repair damage to them. A nice touch here is that the repair is instant and doesn't use one of your builder's "Build" charges.
However, none of these concepts translate to districts, and nowhere in the game does it tell you how to repair them. I had to Google it to find out.
Districts are repaired through the Construction queue for the city, and worse, you may have three or four buildings in a district, all of which require repairing before the district works again. The repair times are lengthy (even in a high production city, I've not seen repair times under ten turns per building), and they can't be accelerated.
Random_Taffer on 27/10/2016 at 12:12
Damn, 10 turns for repar?
I think it was 2 turns in V. Seems like there should be some sort of social policy to adjust that or something. Hopefully they'll patch it, that seems way too long.
Malf on 27/10/2016 at 14:21
Well, no turns for standard tile improvements, but multiple turns for repairing the district and its constituent buildings.
A note on the load performance: something changed last night, because now the game loads really quickly, so actual performance for the game overall is now pretty much flawless for me. I think a slightly smaller map is a worthwhile trade-off if this performance is the result.
