So after eight years since VI’s release, it decided to get into Civilization VI. People were often talking about how innovative this game was, and it knew the Civilization Players League had a ton of cool balancing tools to make the game really engaging.
And obviously, the fact that there’s a league for competing at all means a lot of people have found a lot of meaning in competing in the game.
The main worry it had was that 4X games are often all about knowledge checks, and you can often win with next to no experience against people who’ve played the game for years by just looking up strategies that dominate the meta if they haven’t already done so. For those who are used to competing with strategy board games that throw you into a new, random situation every game and understanding principles is more important than knowing all the knowledge checks, it can be very frustrating to play strategy video games that add a ton of complexity just to make it hard to know all the things you’re “supposed” to know.
Unfortunately, despite all the talk of innovations, Civilization VI was not much different. Just like how you had to know to Radio->Ideology in Civilization V, or that Great Scientists, Engineers, and Merchants are pooled together and so Merchants harm your science and production, you have to “just know” all kinds of things in Civilization VI and it makes for a very unpleasant experience with friends, competing over who knows more specific facts rather than whose intuition is better calibrated to the game’s underlying patterns.
Not every game needs to be almost entirely principled like Spirit Island, Sidereal Confluence, or Go, but as an example, you can make up for a lack of knowledge in games like Twilight Imperium in all kinds of ways. It’s just a very frustrating experience to know that to get to that point of making clever decisions, you and your friends are going to have to commit to like a year of doing homework so that you’re not just one-upping one another on the basis of who happened to find the best resource for understanding the game.
And then if you want to play competitively, the main competitive leagues harbor tons of abusers who regularly try and drive vulnerable members in the league out, and refuse to do anything about harassment campaigns against minorities in their community because “this is just for gaming, we won’t pick political sides” or whatever.
After playing with friends for about six months and feeling like any victories were awarded to whoever found the better tutorial for how to play the game, like it was rarely a matter of who found the insight necessary at a critical point to win, it was hard to keep going. The innovations of Civilization VI didn’t make a meaningful difference between its experience of VI and V.
If you don’t like dealing with abusers who face no consequences in CPL while those who call them out get punished, if you want to very quickly get up to date on all of the mechanics of a game and how they tie together and start just seeing who can outpace who in terms of decision-making, then Civilization VI is largely going to be a big waste of time. Obviously there are plenty of people outside of that demographic.
But for it and its friends, well, back to trying out new strategy board games. Been meaning to try out Brass: Birmingham from six years back.
One alternative strategy video game that’s really fun is Red Alert 2 (Mental Omega mod) with a fairly low required APM much like 4X games, a thriving community and easy to get friends into, and a fairly low knowledge check barrier with a lot of room for experimenting and sharpening one’s intuition.
To elaborate further on grand strategy games, pretty much all Paradox games can be played… sort of cooperatively?
Generally the maps are large enough that you can kind of just pick your corners and only rarely interact.
In a single game of Europa Universalis 4 one player might conquer all of Asia, while another consolidates Europe and a third player is in Africa. You can’t generally actually disable PvP, you can just not go to war. Same is true for Crusader Kings 2/3, and Stellaris. You can coexist and mutually stay out of each others way while possibly helping each other out.
All the Total War titles that support multiplayer (so everything past Shogun 2 in 2011) are coop friendly afaik. I’m particularly fond of the Total War: Warhammer games.
Also, I’d add some of the survival crafting/sandbox titles to the list of stuff you can play cooperatively. They don’t all work for it, but some of them are definitely friendly to a coop group play style. 7 Days To Die works brilliantly like that, though it will be absolutely trivial with multiple players unless you turn the difficulty up. Ark: Survival Evolved can be pretty fun coop (especially with the Primal Fear mod- you will need friends.)