6 has many mechanics dumbed down, trade is just completely bugged, and it came wrapped in a very cartoonish style including several world leaders who were straight up mythological figures.

Comparing the Civs steals the joy they bring for their various reasons.

• Civ 1 was unlike anything else and so legendary it created the 4X genre.
• Civ 2 had the best espionage until an expansion for 4. Civ2 also defined the scope for all future Civs.
• Civ 3 was fine. Resources were a good addition and tile quirks, like Floodplains on top of another base tile like desert, helped bring tons strategy and gave the ability to grow Tall.
• Civ 4 was probably peak Civ for many people, especially including DLCs.
• Civ 5 removed unit stacking and made happiness a resource.
• Civ 6 emphasized the city development aspect and brought back the climate stuff from 2, 3, and 4.

They are all good but they are not collectively suitable for every person. Civ6 is amazing but it took me literally 30 hours to finally have it click. I also have 550 hours in Civ 6 and over 1200 in Civ 5. CiV is also a high water mark but it overshadows the real value and fun in 6.

It’s a shame most folks will ignore us and say 6 was bad for being too game like.

Yeah I prefer 6 over 5 any day, but there are a few small things that 5 does do better imo. I do prefer the more serious art style of 5, and I noticed that there is a lot less actual dialogue in a civs respective language compared to 5. While I do like automatic road creation, I do also miss being able to build it manually to have more control over where units can go. Finally, I think the happiness system in Civ 6 is a bit too easy, as it can be mostly ignored and very easily fixed compared to 5. Keeping your citizens happy was much more of a challenge there.

Civ 6 was made much more to be a digital board game. The combination of little to no multiplicative bonuses and generally small adjacency bonuses means you have to micro manage city planning all the time. It bombards the player with so many individual decisions that each make little impact.

Civ 5 felt much more like an empire simulator. The biggest bonuses come from making “big” decisions, like which policy tree, who/when to war, which ideology. As the game progressed, there was typically no need to micromanage.

The combat in civ 6 is atrocious after they removed the ability to build roads offensively for war until you unlock military engies (way too late in the game). Civ 5’s road system took ages to get up and running, but the payoff was immense.

The civics tree system is better, but the policy card system is broken. It gives players too much flexibility, so everyone ends up running the same/similar set of cards every time. Tradition + Rationalism is a meme in Civ 5, but it did offer more esoteric strategies with different trees.

5 had better pacing for mechanics, 6 bombards players with lots of things from the start and then goes a but flat.

It’s the micromanagement. When earlier games became tedious, I could just pick a quicker game speed, and I would suddenly feel like I was playing with more momentum. But in VI, it actually kills momentum, as if driving the slightly faster route to work at the cost of particularly frustrating traffic, since the most tedious micro isn’t turn-based, but city-based. You only have to plan districts/improvements once per city, so I find I can still have fun with VI if I play suboptimally (i.e., tall) on tiny maps and with mods that let me cram more civilizations into the game. I’ve probably put in a few hundred hours this way.

But I’d rather just play IV or V.

I like playing tall and I’m not a huge fan of the micromanagement that comes with the sprawling empires. Civ 5 limits this through happiness. Civ 6 doesnt. Throw in an artstyle that i dont like and i just dont want to play it as much