The Civilization series reminds me in some ways of Windows. After a great version a mediocre follows. This happened with Civilization VI. This game had great ambitions. But following a perfect predecessor it failed greatly.
The real problem of Civilization VI is that developers changed in this game many things. What necessarily doesn´t mean improvement. I decided to create a summary of pros and cons compared with Civilization V.
What is better?
1. Districts.
The new city building feature opens new space for strategy and city planing. This feels in many ways thrilling and realistic and lets the player carefully consider where he puts which improvement or wonder.
2. Wonders.
There are more of them and yet they are much harder to build. Now it´s impossible to harbor dozen of wonders in one mega metropolis. Now they require special conditions like terrain, resources or adjacency to a particular district. And they take a whole tile.
3. Spies.
Finally! The spying in Civilization V was painful, here it is pure fun. You can protect each district in each city and perform amazing missions - like stealing technology, artworks, sabotaging production (which is costly, because it damages production facilities), incite a revolt and at most - steal money. And you can chose perks for your leveled spies as well.
4. Great people.
They are not dummies with special abilities anymore, they are individualistic. Each great person is unique and you must compete with others to win it.
5. Stacking units.
A slight improvement is to create corps and armies of the same unit types. Those are little stronger than single units.
6. Support units.
Also a very good idea, there could be more of them!
What is worse?
1. The policies.
With adding the linear civics tree the programmers intended to create another "story line" besides the tech tree. It backfired hugely. Now you cannot collect perks and focus on certain specific areas, but you discover one policy after another to earn... cards. Your government opens you a specific number of card slots where you can insert or remove collected cards. The problem is, you earn a huge amount of them - some are important, many are worthless. Unfortunately the player cannot accumulate his cultural progress but just change cards. The Civ V civics let you steadily and permanently improve your civilization in small steps and you haven´t lost anything of it, just had to be careful where to spend your perks. Civ VI brings you a spam of useless civics just to pick few of them. A change where you (besides few exceptions) don´t feel any real improvement in your progress.
2. Diplomacy.
Diplomacy and the AI was THE weak spot of all Civilization games. The diplomacy in Civ VI is simply terrible. No matter how you behave and how you evolve, other civilizations declare war upon you in regular periods. I can fully understand that the developers wanted the player to have more action within an otherwise sim-city-like game, but this makes no sense. I experienced that even Ghandi declared war several times even when underpowered and with few outdated units. My warmonger penalty accumulated without even declaring a war myself - just with razing a city of an aggressive enemy, set directly at my borders. The behavior of all AI civs seems to follow the same erratic and unpredictable pattern. Their reactions to your achievements are sparse, mostly irrational and negative. I hoped at last that with building nukes they´ll start to fear my military power like in Civ V and change their behavior accordingly, but none of this happened.
3. Resources.
It´s a setback to older games where you needed only one resource of each to create an indifferent amount of units. Unlike to the great improvement of Civ V where the strategic resources were numbered and each unit required one. That made a thrilling hunt and competition in owning as much of them as possible. This is past now.
4. No happiness, no golden age anymore.
As written above. Happiness was a great and nicely measurable feature in Civ V. With your citizens happy you could trigger golden ages, earn more culture, enhance production, avoid stagnation, rebellions, etc. This is over now. Happiness is replaced by an abstract term "amenities". You can´t follow how much you produce, what are your needs or what it is good for (yes, the growth stagnates obligatory).
5. Civilizations themselves.
They feel extremely random and not relying on their real strengths, units or accomplishments. Most of their traits are useless or with very small effect so it practically doesn´t matte which one you choose. The same applies for their leaders. Who the hell is Catherine Medici when you can pick so many great emperors of France? The same for Jadwiga of Poland when you can have Jan Sobieski or why Harald Hardrada of Norway who failed to invade England and was killed in his fist bigger battle? Or the so overrated Friedrich Barbarossa of Holy Roman Empire (not Germany!)? The same applies for bonuses or unique units. The average P-51 Mustang of USA or failed Red Coats of England? Or even better - an outdated weak old dreadnought of the Minas Gerais class as the strongest battleship of the game? Are you serious?
Where are the mighty Zulus? Incas? Mayas? Ottomans? Since when was Congo a civilization? The choices of the leaders are truly erratic and un-authentic. It was made different only for the sake of a difference. And so on...
6. Roads.
Yep, you can´t build them by yourself anymore. Just let them be build by traders non controlled. Of course you can produce a costly military engineer just to improve 2 tiles. Just great...
7. Units leveling.
Units leveling is now more limited than before concerning the unit traits. The military improvements don´t provide additional experience, only slight experience bonus to each fight. The result is that during your game you may consider yourself lucky when your unit reaches level 3. The level bonuses are compared to Civ5 reduced and often useless.
8. Unit sight radius.
Every unit has the same sight radius. The archaeologist on boat as the nuclear submarine. This looks pretty ridiculous because there are no traits or abilities (except explorer) to enhance the sight radius of the units. And when moving them fast (not tile by tile) the fog of war remains closed and you don´t see the terrain where the unit passes. Pretty messy but I hope this is some kind of bug.
9. Costs and production cycles.
The units maintenance and their production cycles are unnecessarily too high. Later you may end up with more generals and admirals accumulated than units themselves. On the one hand developers wanted to focus more on combat thanks to many different types of war but in reality the player faces few units from everyone, because no one can afford more. After few turns of war the units are eliminated and everyone may start to build them from scratch again, taking forever. Therefore don´t expect any massive battles.
10. Tourism.
Absolutely useless.
11. Units per se.
When set on "alert" they never wake up in the presence of an enemy. Maybe a bug, but very annoying. Unable to move them via key bindings anymore, only via mouse.
Of course there are much less unit types. But I hope this will be corrected with further add-ons.
12. No production queues anymore.
13. No restart button. The game doesn´t remember your preferences when you´re starting a new game anymore.
Also the costs of purchasable items are enormous. Units and buildings cost from 1000 - 7500 gold to buy. The other option is a very long building time despite all possible production bonuses.
Well, these are my main assessments concerning Civ VI. Its is still not a bad game. It is a good game. But definitely not great anymore.