Perhaps Civ6 just isn't your thing, but your experience could also be exactly what Sid Meier describes: You have to grasp the different mechanics to get to the fun, strategic part of the game - which takes a while. Like in chess, where learning the game doesn't end, but actually only really starts once you know the basic rules of piece movement.
As a non-native speaker, I sometimes have a similar experience when reading English books written in a rather ornate style, i.e. where I don't know some of the vocabulary: I can follow along just fine, I get the story arc etc., but the book just isn't fun because lacking the vocabulary I can't grasp the fine details of the atmosphere, the character descriptions etc.
I think a big difference between Civ games and chess is that chess has very easy-to-learn mechanics. There are only a half dozen different pieces and the rules are pretty simple. A beginner can start playing almost immediately and have fun from the start. I think Civ’s mechanics are several orders of magnitude more complex.
Yes - chess has a relatively simple and limited ruleset, the complexity comes from the combinations possible.
Civ6 has a crazy amount of complexity to do basic actions - the complexity comes from the UI and all the rules, each city has a ton of things to build which each take many turns, there’s multiple skill trees of unclear benefits, there’s governments and policies, where you can build and what you need to build isn’t clear. During all of this kind of tedious action nothing interesting is happening.
I’d guess there’s a baked in assumption that people playing are already familiar with the game. The tutorial and in game recommended actions were not great.
I don’t mind some complexity (I like KSP, Starcraft) - Civ6 feels like a bad design problem.
Definitely! Multiple core mechanics are downright broken. Religion for example is a complete waste of time, as it has practically zero consequences outside of the mechanic itself. I can routinely beat the game while completely ignoring religion.
As a non-native speaker, I sometimes have a similar experience when reading English books written in a rather ornate style, i.e. where I don't know some of the vocabulary: I can follow along just fine, I get the story arc etc., but the book just isn't fun because lacking the vocabulary I can't grasp the fine details of the atmosphere, the character descriptions etc.