Civilization 6 falls quite short of the high expectations of a long term fan of the series

Being a long term fan of the Civilization franchise I yet had to play every part of the series. I played Civilization 1 for countless hours back in the 1990s, and then it went on and on. With much less time and quite late I now gave the latest installment in the series Civilization 6 a try. Testing it 5 years after the initial release and with all available addons/expansions should have advantages though. I expected to see beautiful graphics on a medium powered PC and a polished gameplay with lots of game features. And indeed it looks and sounds gorgeous (at least to me)...

Civilization 6 on difficulty level Immortal a few turns before a science victory without any war at all

I totally buy in the somewhat cartonish, but very polished look of the map. Exploring the map, improving the land, expanding cities with special areas, all that has been fun to me. And I really like the title music. And the terrain generator is really great with so much detail, especially in the naming department.

Nevertheless, I only played it for a couple of weeks, playing maybe three full games and some scenarios and I do not plan to play it any more than that. It's quite a disappointment after all. And here is why:

War is so much Civilization 1-5 (but not 6)

In none of the different attempts at playing the game, war was a big topic! It's just nothing somebody really does except maybe for some fainthearted attempts in early eras and the occasional occupation of a city state. In my last attempt on the second highest difficulty level (implausibly called Immortal) I could achieve a relatively simple science victory without firing a single shoot at anyone and I also think none of the six civilizations did so against each other. This might account to very civilized behavior (by modern standards) but feels so un-Civilization like, it's hard to digest. Actually I felt very bored over the course of the game. It's mostly some linear to exponential growth and the one with the largest growth factor wins in the end, which can quite reliably be predicted once all the areas in the world suitable for settlements are used up. And finally, it might just be me, but military units seem to be too expensive to really wage a war against strongly fortified cities and military areas.

AI opponents are not very smart and quite passive

They don't send much ships around, or settle on a second continent until very late. Or do anything much. They seem to have some agendas and if you fullfill them they're happy. War (if it happens at all) is still not their strong point. But they happily pay lots of gold per turn if you sell them a bit of diplomatic favor or other strategic ressources, even on very high difficulty levels.

Wonders of the World are a dime a dozen

There are really so many of them, in no game all players will build them all. And since they take up space (which I think is the right decision overall) it's often not a bargain to build them, their yield might be much lower than one could obtain from the tile otherwise. Some wonders are really useful and have an effect that scales favorably, but maybe only 10 of them, the remaining ~50 may give you a meagre 4 belief (really not a lot). Often enough a standard building will give a greater benefit.

Horribly, horribly imbalanced scenarios (and not much choice either)

There is a small number of scenarios included (with the base game and the two expansions) and the scenario ideas of some are quite interesting (spreading religion, peaceful expansion, fighting the plague) but the implementation is a big disappointment. Scenario lengths are too short (60 turns) and it's impossible to continue afterwards. For example the religious war scenario could be much longer. And the Plague scenario is a massive hyperbole: everyone died out (me last with about -1000 belief). That felt like an Excel sheet calculation that somehow wasn't tweaked very well.

Summary

Unfortunately, I decided to stop playing Civilization 6. It has too many major flaws to justify spending more time on it. It's surprising that a game that is that old, can appear to be so imbalanced  and unpolished. The multi-player mode (which I didn't test) might still be fun though because between humans many of the critical points listed above might not apply.

Still, it's worthwhile to ask the question: how could Civilization 6 be improved to make it much more playable than now. I think the main points would be:

• Make war more lucrative and make AIs more prone to conduct war.
• AI opponents should stop overpaying for diplomatic influence points or strategic resources.
• Reduce the number of World Wonders massively (like maybe a third of them) and increase their yields (but maybe also their production costs).
• Really polish and balance the scenarios and add more.