Civilization VI
Gather around children as holographic great, great granddaddy TJ Hafer describes how all this here rocketport used to be fields.
Gather around, children, as holographic great, great granddaddy TJ Hafer describes how all this here rocket port used to be fields.
CivilizationVI is the ultimate digital board game. More than ever in the series, the board – the world – is the soul of every opportunity and challenge. As usual for Civ, we build empires, compete for a set of victory conditions, and fend off warmongering leaders like that scoundrel Peter the Great. But we’re also playing for, with, and against the board. Forests and deserts and resource-rich tundras each influence the flow of our civilisation, granting us boons and burdening us with lasting weaknesses. Bands of barbarians put our farms in crisis, but also open up opportunities to speed the development of our military techs. The glorious, challenging dynamics that emerge from CivVI’s redesigned maps left us with no question that the storied series has crowned a new king.
While CivVI is probably the most transformative step forward for the series, its changes shouldn’t trip up longtime players too much. You still settle cities, develop tiles, train military units, wage turn-based warfare, and conduct diplomacy. It mirrored our memories of past Civs closely enough that hints from the in-game adviser were all we needed to course-correct when something we hadn’t seen before came our way.
But there are so many of these new features that it could feel overwhelming at times. The depth and variety of systems resembles a Civ game that’s already had two or three expansions added on top – from the new Districts that perform specific tasks and spread cities out into an often messy but somehow pleasing sprawl, to a whole separate ‘tech’ tree for civic and cultural progress that ties into a sort of collectible card game for mixing policy bonuses to build a unique government.
What binds everything together is the map; the map itself, and its cities, iron mines, and festival squares, is more alive than ever. Unworked fields lie barren, and you can tell how many citizen slots in a commercial district are taken up by the level of bustle occupying its streets. It’s a pretty brilliant way of keeping you engrossed and focused on what matters.
The tech trees and the leader interaction screen are the only parts of the UI that hide your soaring cities from view. The latter of the two involves fully animated, 3D representations of everyone from Montezuma to that jerk Peter the Great who thinks his moustache and his science bonus from tundra tiles are so cool, even though they’re not and we’ve had bombers in range of his second largest city since the Atomic Age, ready to wipe that stupid grin off his face. They’re all very well voice-acted, with the return of native language dialogue from CivV.
There’s never a time that you can feel you’ve filled every tile with the most obvious ‘correct’ district or improvement and call it a day. The need for foresight is unending. There are always sacrifices to make, like when we fell behind in culture because the only eligible tile for a theatre square was the one we’d been saving to build a rocket launch site to clinch a science victory. It’s a fantastic, richly realised way of forcing difficult decisions at every bend in the river and ensuring no two cities you build will ever look or feel the same.
“The map binds everything together. It’s more alive than ever.”
There is a level of trial and error that could cause some legitimate frustration in the first few races to the space age. When everything is fresh and new, you might not realise that you’re plopping down a university campus in a place you should have waited to build a neighbourhood several centuries later. Some type of city planning tool enabling mockups of where everything was going would be a boon.
Another way the map has become a much more important part of CivVI is in how it ties into the tech and civics tree. Every tech and civic has an associated mini objective that will trigger a “Eureka” moment and pay off half the cost immediately. Founding a city next to an ocean tile speeds up progress toward Sailing. Building three industrial districts with factories jumps you ahead in a quest to embrace communism. (Viva la Economic Policy Slots!)
It’s not all a reinvented wheel, though. The Civ staples of war and diplomacy have returned recognisable, but honed to the sharpest edge we’ve ever seen. We particularly enjoyed the way AI leaders are now given agendas (one public, and one that must be uncovered through espionage, building a positive relationship, or observing context). These overtly tell you what the leaders like and don’t like, and make it theoretically possible to stay on everyone’s good side through the whole game if you’re willing to jump through a lot of hoops.
In the event that hostilities do break out, CivVI has split the difference between V’s one unit per tile and IV’s Clash of the Doomstacks to reach a happy middle. Support units such as medics and Great Generals can attach to and occupy the same tile as a regular combat unit like a pikeman. In the mid and late game, you also gain the ability to combine two combat units into a Corps, and later you can add a third to make an Army, which is a more powerful version of that unit that only takes up a single tile. This adds some new layers and tactics to a model of warfare that could get predictable and repetitive as in CivV.
Civ’s score breathes life into all these conflicts and conferences. Christopher Tin’s new main theme, SognodiVolare, is just as sweeping, catchy, and beautiful as BabaYetu. The real magic happens past the menu screen, however, where each and every civ has a main theme that grows more complex and epic as you go through the ages.
When we looked down upon everything we’d built as our Mars colonists blasted off to barely snatch victory away from Peter and his doubtlessly mustachioed cronies, every tile struck us with a sense of history. The sprawl of the Dehli-Calcutta metroplex reflected moments from the windows of its skyscrapers. There was the little tentacle we’d made by purchasing tiles to get access to coal. There was the 3,000-year old farmland we had to bulldoze to place an industrial-era wonder. And just beside where our first settler had spawned, at the foot of the soaring peaks that had protected us from marauding armies for generations, was the new growth forest we’d planted on the site of a former lumber mill to have enough uninterrupted nature for a National Park. For each valley and steppe and oasis, we could tell you why we had developed it the way we did, much more meaningfully than “Because hills are a good place for mines.” As the board shaped our empire, and we shaped it, the history of the civilisation and our decisions accumulated and followed us right up to the threshold of the stars. And that, more than anything, is why we’ll never need another Civ game in our life besides this one.