Civilization games take a long time to properly judge. Expecting a full-fledged review that’s analysed all aspects of the game, from religious spread rates to city state envoys to cultural civics, is absurd. It takes hundreds of hours to even come close to mastering all the aspects of a Civilization game and I’ve only gotten about a day and a half’s worth from Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, hence the first impressions.
Civilization VI, for those of you unaware, is Firaxis’ latest in the popular turn-based 4X strategy gaming series. You start your single player or multiplayer games by choosing a civilization to play as, with each Civ’s leader (some have more than one) having different buffs and advantages that enable them to better pursue one of the many victory conditions available. For instance, picking France sets you on the road for a tourism victory whilst picking Spain gives you a religious victory, albeit one that’s close to the warpath.
Despite the various changes in Civilization VI compared to previous Civ games, it’s ultimately still the same Civilization game we’ve loved (Beyond Earth shall not be spoken of); you settle cities, build improvements, send out trade routes, practice the art of diplomacy and try to sneak in the occasional tourism victory. However, there are some drastic changes.
Let’s start with the visuals. Civ 6 has gotten a lot of flak for its cartoonish visuals as soon as the first screenshots of the game started leaking out into the Civ community. It isn’t as realistic as the graphics in Civ V for instance but I’ll be damned if I don’t like them. The cartoonish and colourful visuals may deter some from taking the game seriously but I would argue it adds more character to the game. But it isn’t just graphics that are visually pleasing, the minute animations of your units, from attacking archers to hard working builders are incredible in their detail. The revolving light at the top of your lighthouse, to the bronze sheen on the Colossus on the edge of your coastal capital to the structures in you Campus district show the amount of detail placed in the aesthetics of this game. The leaders of the civilizations themselves look fabulous and their character is not just brought out in the way they visually look at you in the diplomacy screen but also by how they speak to you.
And much like the visuals of the game, the sound of Civilization VI will transport you back in time. Whether it’s the sound of the waves, the twanging of an arrow being loosed by a Scythian horse archer or the satisfying noise of building an improvement, I found myself for the first time, turning up the volume of a game. And credit is due to Sean Bean. The man may have a death sentence when it comes to acting, but his narration of my success whilst playing Civ VI is what kept me going through the eight-hour gaming sessions I had.
The UI may seem confusing at first, especially to newcomers of the game, but you’ll quickly orientate to it, with each of the game’s mechanics having their own detailed panels, tabs or windows. However, while the diplomacy window might be aesthetically pleasing, I find the fact that it blocks out most of the game whilst accessing it to be mildly infuriating.
When it comes to gameplay, Civilization VI has some big changes to its name. For one thing, city placement has never been as important. In previous titles, the settling of a city was quite simple. The more workable tiles and resources nearby, the better. However, in Civ VI it’s a bit more complicated. For instance, cities now have a housing limitation that prevents them from growing at an exponential rate. The base housing limit depends on the availability of freshwater; park your settler next to a river and you will have the max base housing limit. If you choose to settle on the coast and not next to a river estuary, you get a penalty due to the lack of water but you do still get some housing. Settling in the middle of the desert on the assumption you could miraculously build Petra is foolish. It’s a great change, one that actually reflects history; man in primitive times would often settle near a source of fresh water.
Another subtle change to reflect the historical accuracy of the game are roads. In Civ V, you’d stick a worker down, automate him to construct roads in between your cities, come back after a few turns to realise he’s been plonking down farms on hills and mines on plains or something similarly silly. In Civ VI, it’s your traders that build your roads. After all, what were roads but paths traders forged in between cities? Sure, later in the game, you can start building military engineers to build more strategic roads, but early game Civ VI mechanics promote trade which is great.
Backtracking a bit to city placement; you can’t just place down improvements willy-nilly. Well, you can, but it wouldn’t be the best way of optimising a city and that’s because Civ VI has introduced a new feature called districts. In previous Civilization games, all the buildings a city could construct were built in the city centre, with the tiles around often having improvements built on them. In Civ VI, you’ll have to carefully plan your city’s districts many turns in advance as the placement of those districts can have a drastic impact on the output of that district and in turn the city. For instance, placing a Campus or Holy Site district adjacent to mountains provides a boost to the output of science and religion points respectively. Meanwhile, Commercial districts output more gold when placed next to a river and Harbour district. You get the idea. As a result, you often have to optimise cities to perform certain tasks, much like back in Civ IV, such as science-focused or production-focused cities. The reason being is that the number of districts you can place have a soft cap depending on the population of that city.
Happiness is no longer solely dictated by the amount of luxury resources you have. In fact, it isn’t even called happiness. “Amenities” are now a city-by-city factor you have to consider, as opposed to the empire-wide happiness factor in Civ V. It’s a crucial bit of game mechanics you have to keep an eye on. Much like the old “happiness”, you can increase the number of amenities a city has by improving and harvesting any of the luxury resources available throughout your empire, though there is a catch. A luxury resource will only be spread to the four cities that need amenities the most. As a result, if you have two luxury “cocoa” resources, the second one can be traded away. But luxury resources aren’t the only thing that contributes to amenities and here’s where we come full circle back to districts, specifically the entertainment district. This district’s sole purpose is to give amenities to the city it’s built in and (through researching certain techs and building wonders) to later spread those amenities to other cities in range.
Combat is another aspect that’s been heavily reworked and I love Firaxis for doing so. In Civilisation V you were often faced with the hard reality of someone who’s dozens of turns ahead of you when it comes to the tech tree and whose production powerhouse of an empire churns out enough units to steamroll half the map. Nothing can really stop this sort of snowball to victory. Things are a bit different in Civilization VI. First of all, declaring war in Civ VI for no reason comes with heavy penalties, which will affect how AI civs and city-states interact with you. Doing so, incurs a “warmongering” penalty, something that can only be sidestepped if you have a valid casus belli. You can research and unlock a variety of casus belli’s which will let you initiate a war without too much of a penalty to you. Such casus belli’s will let you start a number of wars such as a holy or liberation war.
But it’s “war weariness” that stops people from snowballing in Civilization VI. War weariness is a penalty to each of your cities amenities which is compounded when you lose units. As a result, you’ll often see your cities growths’ slow to a crawl, with cultural, religious, scientific and production outputs heavily penalised as well. Continue to wage wars and barbarians will start popping up all over your empire and start pillaging your lands.
Advancing your Civilization used to be solely dictated through the technology tree, but Civ VI also introduces the Civic tree, and with it, governments. There are many types of governments available, each letting you min-max certain play types by letting you utilise “policy cards”. Policy cards are a new addition, with each card buffing a certain aspect of the game, such as more production towards settlers or more points towards recruiting great generals. Each government has a finite amount of policy slots so you’ll have to decide in advance what you buffs you want. Thankfully you’ll be able to switch out policies every time you research a new Civic in the Civic Tree.
City-States are a bit more useful in Civilization VI as well. Players have to opportunity to send envoys to city-states in order to levy bonuses at different envoy tiers. For instance, you get a simple buff when you have a single envoy in a city-state; you can get more buffs with more envoys. Having more envoy’s in a city-state than any other player grants you suzerainty over the city-state, ensuring they fight for you in your wars and give you their resources.
When it comes to the Civilizations themselves, you have a large variety to choose from, each with their own respective strengths and each with a different leader who has their own unique agendas. These agendas give each leader a different personality, something you more often see when AI’s control them (human players tend to do their own thing). For instance, Philip of Spain hates Civs that follow other religions.
Victory conditions have also been subtly changed. First of all, the rankings panel offers a much cleaner view of everyone’s standing in the game when it comes to the different victories, ensuring no one can sneak away with a tourism victory. The diplomatic victory is no more, instead, it’s been replaced by a religious victory. Gone too is the world congress from Civ V’s Brave New World expansion.
Civilization VI is the first Civilization game in awhile that I found to actually be worth playing from day one. Civ V needed a few expansions to make it worth playing, as did Beyond Earth and Civ IV. I found Civ VI, on the other hand, to be immersive, immensely fun and worthy of being the next successor the Civilization series (sorry Beyond Earth). The subtle changes made throughout the game have grander ramifications than you may think, which actually forces players to think dozens of turns ahead when it comes to city planning. However, that said, there are some aspects that could do with a bit of work, such as UI fixes including the ability to turn of auto-cycle units and letting me rename my cities.
