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(As the dotted outline there indicates, tiles are now hexagons rather
than rhombuses, which felt like an improvement.
Also, cities now take up multiple tiles: to build a library you need to
designate a tile as a “campus district”, factories go in
the “industrial zone”, and so forth.
And, as of V, apparently, units of the same
type (military, civilian, support, religious) can’t occupy the
same tile.)
Leader graphics are good—apparently
V took them in a more realistic direction than
IV, but with VI the
pendulum has swung back
.
(I did wonder why the animations had been replaced by still images,
but see the end of this post.)
As for the music—it’s worse!
One of the most memorable things about IV was
the way the music changed from era to era, and I particularly loved
the John Adams score for the modern era.
VI just plays a muzak version of
“Scarborough Fair” at you regardless of how far along
you are.
As for gameplay: I did play through the tutorial to see what was new
and to dust off fifteen years’ worth of cobwebs, but when I
started up a full game I was still struck by how much more complicated
the game had become, how many things had become automated, and how far
the design had moved in the direction of accruing a few percentage
points of advantage here and there, à la
Europa Universalis.
To spell things out a bit more:
Complexity:
There’s the geographic aspect of the game: exploring the map,
founding cities, building out those cities.
There’s your internal economy: accruing gold, spending it.
There’s also trade, among your own cities and
internationally.
There’s science: accruing lightbulbs, choosing which branches of
the tech tree to follow.
In VI, technology and cultural developments
have been separated out, so in addition to the tech tree there’s
now a parallel civics tree.
Which brings me to culture: accruing treble clefs, growing your
borders—though culture no longer pushes your
neighbors’ borders back.
Along with culture there is now a tourism rate to keep track of.
And on top of all of this there is a whole religious layer to the
game: founding religions, defining them, accruing faith points.
Those faith points can also help to recruit great historical figures
who become available.
There’s probably more I’m forgetting.
Oh, wait, there is!
There’s managing the appeal of
your tiles—you can’t just build everything up
because you’ll need some pristine areas later in the game.
And city-states!
I forgot the whole thing about earning envoys to send to the city-states,
which are new.
And there’s probably still more.
It’s complicated!
Automation:
Not only are all of the above things happening, but to a certain
extent they’re going on without you.
In prior iterations of Civilization, you
built roads yourself; now the road network grows automatically as
you send traders around.
The traders themselves are automated as well, and no longer are
you juggling caravan units around.
Land vs. sea takes care of itself, as you no longer have to build
transport ships for land units: just direct the units into the
water, and the boats magically appear.
As for the spies—oh, wait, I forgot about the whole
espionage layer to the game!
Yeah, add that to “Complexity” section.
Sheesh.
Percentages:
I forgot something else: government!
In the old Civ games, you discovered new forms
of government through the tech tree, and they had hardwired benefits
and drawbacks: Democracy might reduce your corruption and increase your
commerce, but citizens might revolt if military units left their bases,
and the Senate would accept any peace offer by the opposing side, even
mid-campaign.
In VI, the government types are earned via the
civics tree, and while they do have some hardwired effects, their main
effect is to open up slots where you can choose from among different
policies.
For instance, “Veterancy” increases the production rate
toward “encampment districts” by 30%.
Select “Bastions”, and your city defense
strength—oh yeah, cities now have built-in defenses, so
you don’t have to have military units camped in all of
them—increases by 6, e.g., from 55 to 61.
“Town Charters” takes the “commercial hub” and
doubles, not its production, but its “adjacency
bonuses”—so instead of getting an extra two gold
per turn for being next to a harbor, it would produce an extra
four.
As you can see, this is a lot of tinkering at the margins.
The change in “wonders of the world” is even more
pronounced.
Back In My Day™, wonders gave you superpowers.
The Great Wall meant that any civilization at war with you had to
offer you a peace treaty upon demand.
The Pyramids allowed you to change to any government, even
undiscovered ones, without the usual period of anarchy.
The Great Library gave you any technology that any two other
civilizations had discovered.
Whereas in VI, the Hanging Gardens…
increase your city growth rate by 15%.
The Oracle reduces the cost in faith points to recruit great people
by 25%.
The net effect is that instead of unlocking game-changing new
possibilities, wonders and government policies might increase your
budget surplus from +17.7 gold per turn to +19.3.
Hooray?
One thing I did very much like was that wonders and tech advances
do interact with other elements of the game, such as geography and
military success.
You have to build Chichen Itza on a rainforest tile.
Cristo Redentor must be built on a hill.
Building a university next to a mountain gives you a boost in
researching astronomy.
Killing a fighter jet gives you a boost in researching guidance
systems.
Meeting three city-states gives you a boost toward the political
philosophy civic.
A big thumbs-up to that game mechanic.
As for the others… I dunno, I think that rather than trying
to put together a list of observations about my experience playing
Civilization VI, I’ll just run
through my seven play-throughs and see what observations arise.
Game 1: France (Catherine de Medici) •
Level 2 (Chieftan)
Oh, here’s something I should mention: in the first two
Civ games, while the AIs had different
strategies—Genghis Khan was more aggressive, Gandhi not
so much (except when affected by a notorious bug)—you
could play however you liked, and you were encouraged to create your
own civilization and name your own cities.
(I usually played as Orange County.)
Starting with III, you were locked into doing
a bit of role-playing, because each civilization had a unique unit
that affected its optimum strategy a bit.
The Aztecs got a boost in the very earliest stages of the game, as
their unique unit, the Jaguar Warrior, replaced the most primitive
military unit.
The Americans got a boost at the very end of the game, as their
unique unit was the F‑15, which replaced the jet fighter.
Civilization VI takes this to extremes, with
not only unique units but unique buildings, unique ways to improve
the landscape, and unique bonuses for each civilization.
Catherine de Medici’s specialty is espionage, which helps not
at all in the first half of the game, when the espionage system
hasn’t come online yet.
Her tourism bonus is also only a factor in the very late game.
Thus, in the early game, France is fighting an uphill battle.
But I shouldn’t blame the randomizer for sticking me with a
low-tier civilization—there’s a very simple
reason I lost this game.
By nature I am averse to declaring war on neighboring
civilizations.
I happened to end up next to Sumeria and Brazil, both of which
expanded quickly and blocked me from expanding inland from my coastal
position.
I ended up having to create a string of coastal cities, some of them
connected only by sea routes.
I thought I’d wait until someone declared war on me and then
feast on their territory.
But here’s the thing: I was playing on the second-easiest
level.
Therefore the AI civilizations were all set to be peaceful.
They were happy to grab territory I wanted before I could get to it,
but they wouldn’t declare war.
With no hinterland to draw upon, my cities’ development was
stunted, and by the time I had run out of patience, I was so far behind
technologically that even on Chieftain level I probably
couldn’t win a war.
Lesson: getting a prime position right out the gate is crucial, and
if that means going to war not out of self-defense or even revenge but
just because “hello, I want your territory”, then
that’s what it means.
Game 2: India (Gandhi) •
Level 2 (Chieftan)
Although I was playing on the second-biggest map offered, with ten
civilizations active in the game, I wound up on a continent with only
one opponent: Russia.
A jungle-choked isthmus connected our continent to another, and I could
see a German city on the other side, but I never explored up that way
until very late in the game.
In the first few moves, when Russia and I were competing for territory,
I actually managed to found a line of cities that split the Russia in
half, with its capital on one side and all its other cities on the
other—I hoped that might cripple its development.
I did end up with a slight edge in science and production.
India’s special unit, the “Varu” war elephant,
appeared in the Classical era, much earlier than Russia’s
Industrial-era Cossack, so once I was able to start building elephant
units, I decided to press my advantage and grab a couple of Russian
cities.
I stopped at a couple because that’s the way that
Europa Universalis works: not only can you
very rarely get more than a couple of territories at a time at the
negotiating table, but even if you can, it’s a disaster.
You rack up overextension penalties, the new territories end up in a
state of near-constant revolt, and your greed ends up backfiring.
But I discovered that there’s no reason to apply the same sort of
moderation to this game.
In later rounds I would gobble up vast empires in a single war with no
ill effects.
That seems like a problem!
I saw references to things like war weariness and revolts, but even
on the harder levels none of those factors ever came into play for
me.
I seem to recall these were bigger issues in previous interations of
Civ.
I also seem to recall that coalitions of opponents would spring up to
crush you if you jumped out to a lead, but not so here.
I did get denounced for my warmongering, but to no effect.
Civilization IV offered another reason not
to wipe opponents off the map: it was generally more beneficial to let
them surrender and become your vassals.
In VI, vassalage is gone.
That seemed to me like a poor design decision, especially since
VI features city-states that you can become the
suzerain of and thereby gain unique bonuses—e.g., Mogadishu
prevents your trader units from getting plundered at sea.
Reducing an enemy civilization to a city-state and thereby getting
a unique bonus from it therefore seems like an easy mechanism to build
into the game, one that would offer players an interesting choice to
make when on the verge of capturing that final city.
Except for Game 5, I generally did keep my opponents around,
though reduced to a single small city in a fringe area.
But there was no reason to, and the game should offer a reason.
Anyway, after conquering my entire continent and jumping out to a lead
in science, I thought that I would cruise to a conventional space
victory, but my game abruptly ended when I won a culture victory
instead.
See, one of the big problems with Civ games is
that the end of any given game tends to be a slog.
If you’ve survived that long, you probably have a bunch of
cities, some of which are big producers creating your spaceship
components and modern wonders and whatnot, but most of which are
just middling cities still constructing workshops and aqueducts.
So while you wait on your big cities to get you to the finish line,
it’s new turn, randomly select new production for seven or eight
cities you don’t really care about.
New turn, randomly select new production for seven or eight cities you
don’t really care about.
Rinse, repeat.
Civilization VI tries to break up the
monotony by giving you something to do: around the time the modern age
kicks in, sites with relics from antiquity will start popping up on the
map.
You can build archaelogical museums, train archaeologists, and send
them to go dig up these artifacts.
It is cool, because they do represent things like primitive villages
and early battles that you did see at the beginning of the game!
And there’s some gameplay to it, because you get bonus points if
your museums are “themed” (three artifacts from the same
era, but from different civilizations), so you shuffle your artifacts
around your museums trying for the optimum arrangement.
The same is true for the art museums and the paintings and sculptures
your great artists generate.
Your builders also become capable of building seaside resorts on
coastal tiles that haven’t been despoiled.
So I wound up putting my late-game effort into these endeavors just
because it was something to do, and the result was that I was soon
bringing in huge quantities of tourism points, and won the game that
way.
A bit of an anticlimax.
Game 3: Aztecs (Montezuma) •
Level 3 (Warlord)
I didn’t like the way technologies whipped by so quickly on the
standard time scale, so I had lengthened my time scale to
“epic” (750 turns instead of 500; “marathon” is
1500), and correspondingly went with the “large” map (about
27% larger than the standard map).
For this game, I pumped up the number of civilizations to sixteen and
the number of city-states to twenty-two.
As a result, from the very beginning of the game there was virtually no
free land.
To expand, you had to conquer neighboring
cities.
And the problem there was that, in order to apply pressure (or just
take advantage of the few scraps of unclaimed space), civs would build
cities right on their borders with other civs, so if you did conquer
your neighbor, you’d end up with an inefficient arrangement of
cities just a few tiles from each other with overlapping
territories.
I did conquer quite a few of my neighbors, reducing them to one small
city apiece, and painted nearly the entirety of my vast continent in
the bright cyan of the Aztecs; by the end of the game I had forty-one
cities I had to tend to, few of them well-situated or especially
productive.
Every leader in the game hated me, but this had no consequences.
I wondered whether I should try to start in on the other big
continent or go for a space victory, but I won another culture victory
before I could have proceeded either way.
This was the game which won me the highest score of the seven rounds I
played, but it was probably the least fun.
Game 4: Spain (Philip II) •
Level 4 (Prince)
When Spain came up as my assigned civilization, I thought about
restarting, but then I saw that Spain was primarily oriented toward
the religion layer of the game, which I hadn’t really explored
at all.
In my previous two rounds, I had captured
enough religious buildings to earn a respectable supply of faith
points, which I could use to recruit great people and to secure a
naturalist, only able to be acquired via
faith points, who in turn could designate a national park for me.
But I had never founded a religion, created any missionaries or
apostles, or any of that.
So, Spain it was!
I had also cranked the number of civilizations down to nine, in hopes
of having a little more room to breathe at the beginning of the game,
and that paid off tremendously: I wound up on my own continent,
connected to the neighboring one by a very narrow isthmus blocked by
a city-state, and was therefore able to build eight cities in optimal
locations without running into any opposition from other civs.
I dunno—maybe my playstyle is too concerned with finding
just the right spots so that cities will have access to maximum
resources with no overlap.
I always develop every resource as soon as I am able—wheat
and rice get farmed, cows and horses get corraled, copper and iron get
mined, etc., etc.
The AIs seem less concerned about this, and I don’t know that it
actually helps much.
I think it might?
Luxury resources such as spices and dyes apparently supply your cities
with “amenities”, and that may be the secret to why I never
once had a city revolt and never once had to worry about the effects of
war weariness on my population.
In any case, while I didn’t have to worry about fending off rival
civilizations for my desired city sites, I was deluged by barbarians,
who sent waves of units (often more advanced than mine) at my fledgling
cities, and it was touch and go for a while, but eventually I found
myself on a solid footing.
I did earn enough faith points early in the game to found a religion
for the first time—and while the civilizations in the game
are hardwired, the religions are not.
You can select a prefab
religion—Spain’s default, no surprise, was
Catholicism—but you can also make your own.
I decided that Spain’s national religion would be Nihilism.
It turns out that founding a religion allows you to… get some
marginal bonuses and select an extra building type.
Again, anticlimactic!
(I went with “Work Ethic”, +1 production for each
Nihilist in my city, and “Meeting House”, which also
supplied production in addition to faith.)
And then I pretty much lost interest in the whole religion layer of
the game.
You can win a religious victory by converting every single other
civilization to your creed, and I later discovered that missionaries
can pass through closed borders and thereby act as ideal explorer
units, but as my opponents poured their efforts into converting my
Nihilists to Buddhism and Hinduism, I turned my attention elsewhere.
While I was happy to build up my own country rather than having most
of my cities be conquests—I even got to expand to some
neighboring large islands that my rivals hadn’t
discovered—by the end of the 19th century I found myself
on the verge of a loss.
China had already launched a satellite and put
a taikonaut on the moon, and I hadn’t even finished building a
spaceport.
China was also well ahead of me in the race to a culture victory.
My one hope was that China’s pursuit of science and culture might
have come at the expense of its military.
I built up a huge army and a fleet to escort it across the
ocean—not strictly necessary, I would discover, since land
units can defend themselves at sea, albeit at a
penalty.
At the moment I declared war, my military strength was 1301 compared to
China’s 105.
I effortlessly rolled across southern “Asiamerica”, where
China was located, and in ten years China went from the brink of
victory to elimination from the game.
I started using some captured Chinese cities to start in on space
projects, since they had spaceports, but I abruptly won a culture
victory before I could really get underway, and that was that.
Game 5: Greece/Sparta (Gorgo) •
Level 5 (King)
I decided to return to the standard map size for this one, since it
seemed weird that I was winning games with vast portions of the map
still blank.
I got assigned Greece—or, rather, one of the Greeces,
since there’s a Spartan version and an Athenian version.
Both benefit from “Plato’s Republic”, offering an
extra policy slot, and the hoplite unit, which appears very early on,
in the Ancient era.
I needed it, too, because I was hemmed in right from the get-go:
my starting position was up against the west coast of my continent,
with city-states to the north, east, and south, and Sumeria,
Japan, and Egypt right beyond those city-states.
Japan actually burst past its neighboring city-state to put a new
city directly on my border, so it was my first target.
But not my last—I wanted to see whether I could win
this game without getting a culture victory,
and since I was playing Sparta, domination it was.
The map turned out to consist of two boring continents—no
interesting islands or gulfs, just two big lumps—with
five civilizations, including mine, on the smaller one, and the other
three on the larger.
My hoplites gave me an advantage over Japan; conquering Japan gave me
an advantage over Sumeria (I had ten cities, all in temperate or
tropical climes, while Sumeria had five, four of them in the Arctic);
conquering Sumeria meant that I could make short work of Egypt and
finally Spain.
By 900 CE I owned my entire continent (save three city-states I
had spared for the bonuses), and had no idea what lay beyond my coastal
waters.
When I did reveal the other continent, which contained Russia,
Scythia, and Norway, I discovered that I was absurdly far ahead in
tech.
The latter two had pikemen and crossbows; Peter the Great had
cannons.
I had aircraft carriers with jet bombers on them.
I was able to take the three enemy capitals with ease and win that
domination victory.
This was the first game I played in which I did
not spend the bulk of the game with a huge
amount of cash on hand.
Like, here’s a saved game I had as Philip II.
It was 1871, and Qin Shi Huang was waaay ahead of me in
the space race.
But I wasn’t too concerned about my ability to put together an
army to stop him, because he had 269 gold in the bank and I had
46,659.
When I was conquering my home continent as Gorgo, though, I was
barely able to stay in the black.
Even so, I was usually a bit better off than my enemies.
The AIs really do not let the cash pile up.
Game 6: China (Qin Shi Huang) •
Level 6 (Emperor)
This game was a disaster.
I had three small cities, and was just barely fending off the
barbarians.
Then Sumeria rolled in and crushed me easily.
I tried reloading a few times to try to get off to a better
start, but it was hopeless.
Game 7: Greece/Athens (Pericles) •
Level 6 (Emperor)
So was Emperor level just too hard for me, then?
I tried starting over completely, and this time I got Greece again,
but the Athenian version.
This time I encountered some luck.
I was placed near two city-states, Jerusalem and Mogadishu, and
they battled the barbarians that I
couldn’t fend off myself due to the handicaps imposed by the
advanced level.
So I was able to get off to a good start.
And while once again my neighboring civilization far outclassed
me, with huge cities and advanced technology, this time around that
neighboring civilization was France.
I noticed that despite all my disadvantages, I did have a military
edge over France, 179 to 35.
I deployed my hoplites, knocked France out of the game, and
suddenly I had four impressive French cities, with wonders of the
world and access to all sorts of resources, in addition to my
four scruffier Greek ones.
My remaining neighbors were England and Rome, and while they were
far ahead of me technologically, and England also had a significantly
bigger military, I had the larger empire (101 points vs. England’s
79 and Rome’s 53).
I hoped I could ride that early advantage to a win, even on this
level.
As the game developed, I came to own about 40% of my continent, Rome
and England about 20% apiece, with 20% left empty near the poles.
By the 1400s I had discovered the other continent, home to Russia,
Sumeria, India, and Japan, and those four had divided up their
hemisphere almost perfectly evenly.
I was once again very far behind in science and pretty far behind in
culture as well, and once again had an immense amount of gold to put
together an army and try to stomp the civs ahead of me.
The difference was that when I started buying some military units, my
rivals kept pace and then some.
I see that in 1700 my military strength was 657… but
Peter’s was 860, and while Gilgamesh’s was only 415, his
Sumerians were seventeen steps ahead of me in tech—they
had nanotechnology while I’d just developed biplanes.
This was when I went the espionage route.
At first my plan was just to steal as much technology as I could,
but when I noticed that my spies could sabotage spaceports, I decided
to commission more of them.
And they were successful!
I was able to hobble all of my rivals’ space programs without
breaking a sweat.
It actually seemed to me like a weakness in the game: like, if I had
been playing France, I would have been pleased at the way I had taken
advantage of my civ’s area of specialization, but Greece had no
particular affinity for spycraft.
And then I was able to take advantage of another flaw in the
game’s design: I caught up in tech without catching up in
tech.
That is, once you finish the tech tree, you can continue to research
“future tech”, and the scoring system will oblingingly
list you as being many levels ahead of your opponents… but
none of that future tech lets you build new units.
For instance, in 1886, Gilgamesh’s science score was 164 and
mine was only 138, but he couldn’t make any units that I
couldn’t, so if I started cranking out units, he had to follow
suit instead of repairing his spaceports.
In the end, I almost ended up stumbling into another culture victory,
but fortunately I was able to use great scientist Carl Sagan to boost
me ahead in the race to Mars, and thereby win a space victory
instead.
As if Carl Sagan weren’t already my hero.
And with that, I was done.
I felt like I’d seen everything and had no interest in playing
another round.
Maybe I would if I had the expansion packs, but I’m not
particularly motivated to pay for them.
So I started this article, and got to the point where I grumbled about
the fact that in Civilization IV the
leaders were animated, while in VI you just
got still images.
And that was when, poking around on the net, I learned that in fact
there is an option hidden deep within the menu system: “Game
Options”, then “Graphics”, then “Show
Advanced Options”, then scroll all the way to the bottom, then
find “Animated Leaders”, then go to “Quality”
and select a new option from the drop-down menu.
Lo and behold, this is what leader interactions were
supposed to be like:
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