Every once in a while, a gamer should try an unfamiliar gaming genre. Y’know, just to shake things up a bit. Either it will be a big success and you’ll expand your gaming repertoire, or it’ll be so-so or a failure, and then you’ve learned more about yourself and what works for you. Since I have the Switch for another two weeks, this is a good chance to try games I’m sort of curious about, but not enough to shell out good money for.

Hence Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, which according to Wikipedia, belongs to the category of “Turn-based strategy” and “4X.” I’ve played a 4X demo before (a vaporware game known as Territoire). It was a really boring, pointless and disappointing experience for me, but it was just a game in development. Civilization VI, on the other hand, is the latest game in the best-known series in the 4X genre. There’s no better game to play if I want to know what 4X is all about.

Buuuut, as you can guess from the title, I did discover what it was about, and I did discover that it’s not for me. I only played an hour or so of the tutorial, but even that was a struggle to get through, for a few reasons:

• I don’t like sitting idle for a long time. You have to spend the first 50 or so turns producing a variety of units, researching technology and exploring the world, all of which takes a lot of time but doesn’t produce any immediate results. It’s not like you click “Gimme a scout” and immediately get a scout. You ask for something, wait for several turns and eventually get it many turns later when you’ve even forgotten what you wanted it for.
• I don’t like games where I have to think too far ahead. It’s the same reason why I don’t like chess, or any strategy game that actually requires, you know, strategizing. The easy JRPGs known as “turn-based strategy games” like Fire Emblem don’t really count. And even those are too tedious for me to play these days.
• I don’t like micromanaging. There are too many elements to think about in this game. You need to produce food, produce all kinds of units, research technology, explore the map, fight enemies, defend your cities, build new settlements, meet new NPCs, form diplomatic relationships, establish trade routes, etc etc. That’s the little I got through in under one hour in Civilization VI, but it was already too much for me.
• I don’t like development games where enemies attack me out of the blue. In fact, I don’t like development games where enemies attack me at all. It really stresses me out in every such game I’ve played, and I just realized I mentioned it back in 2014 when I played Territoire… and re-reading that post, I discovered I own Civilization IV? Where did I put those CDs? I’d love to play Anno 1404 again… Back on topic, the prospect of combat was the dealbreaker for me, TBH. Everything else I could have figured out with time and experience, but I just didn’t like the thought of random marauders showing up to ruin my hard work. I prefer the kind of turn-based strategy where the enemies kindly and politely wait for me to arrange and equip all my units and click “Okay now you can attack” before they come. I mean, that’s just me.
• TL;DR 4X games just aren’t for me. I don’t even think it would be fun to watch it being played because it takes so long for anything to happen. But I’m glad I tried it, because I do see the quality, at least in theory. And it makes me appreciate the Anno-type games more, which take the same idea but let everything happen sharpish so I don’t get bored.

What’s next before the Switch goes away: I started playing the expansion of Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Torna the Golden Country or something like that. IIRC it’s the first expansion to a game I’ve ever played? Maybe I can think of it like a fan disk. Either way I soooo don’t care about the game and the characters. I don’t know why the Xenoblade games always elicit that reactions from me, it’s kind of crazy. Maybe they try too hard to make me care, and so the rebel in me goes “Nyeh!” Anyway, as long as the exploration and combat are good, I’ll take what fun I can get. I also need to give Dragon Quest 11 the ol’ One Hour try, so I’ll probably post about that before too long. See ya.

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