Update: Civilization VI has been nominated for IGN's 2016 Game of the Year.
Every game in the legendary, 25-year-old Sid Meier’s Civilization 4X strategy series puts a new spin on the grand concept of taking a nation from a single nomadic tribe to a world-dominating superpower, one turn at a time. In that way Civilization VI looks familiar, but it’s loaded with some very smart and bold improvements that give it new levels of depth. Once I get absorbed into a campaign it becomes so engrossing it’s difficult to think about anything else.
Under its colorful, cartography-inspired art style and varied, stirring music that swells to accent what you’re doing and in what era you’re doing it, Civilization VI is crammed with an almost overwhelming number of systems. It’s got trade, it’s got religion, it’s got espionage, it’s got Great People, it’s got archeology, it’s got the kitchen sink. For the most part, that’s awesome because there are so many chances to build out your nation in different ways to take advantage of opportunities on its randomly generated maps and pursue the different victory types, and it’s all baked in at the ground level so that things like trade routes don’t feel tacked on and optional (they are, in fact, the only way to build roads in the early game). This feels like a Civ game that’s already had two expansions.That can make the first few games feel overwhelming, even with the tutorials. The tutorials are good, but the amount of decisions you’re prompted to make from the very beginning of a game that will have significant impact on your late-game success is intimidating. That said, as an experienced Civilization player I got up to speed relatively quickly and, on my second playthrough, was able to hold my own on King difficulty without understanding everything. I still feel like I’m learning more and more with every game.
A lot of depth emerges from the new city-building system.
Because we’re playing on randomized maps every time, effectively laying out your cities’ districts and Wonders is a challenging puzzle. There are loads of tradeoffs to consider, but the biggest is asking if you’d be better off building a district or a Wonder or working the tile they’d occupy for food and production resources, potentially allowing your city to grow bigger in the late game. Those are decisions that always feel like they matter.
The land-grab phase feels urgent and exciting.
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Speaking of the mid game, the changes Firaxis has made to reduce unit clutter from that point on are extremely smart. The first problem in most Civilization games has been that at a certain point you (and all the AI players) get stuck with a dozen or so automated Worker units sitting around idling with no more city tiles to improve, which just makes turns take longer to calculate if you don’t manually disband them. In Civilization VI, Workers (now called Builders) expire after they’ve been used a few times – three, by default, but that can be expanded by government policies or wonders – they’re no longer hanging around doing nothing. And if you need a new one, they’re quick to build and affordable to immediately buy with gold. They can’t be automated, either, which makes the decisions of where to spend their limited charges feel meaningful again as well.
Secondly, when Civilization V switched from allowing you to stack military units onto a single tile (as had been the custom through Civilization IV) to limiting you to one military unit per tile it created a more tactical kind of combat, but also caused an enormous traffic jam when you built a large army. Civilization VI gets that under control by finding a great compromise between stacks and one-unit-per-tile: once you research certain technologies you can combine two and then three identical military units into a single, more powerful corps or army unit (not entirely dissimilar to Civilization IV’s Warlords). Thus the number of military units taking up space and blocking paths in the late game is sharply reduced by a half or even two-thirds, if you choose to take advantage of it. AI armies are also reduced, which means they have fewer things to shuffle around on their turns.
Those AI nations are each guided by one of the 20 available leaders, and each of them has agendas that guide their behavior. That gives diplomacy some much-needed transparency that’s long been missing in Civilization games. Once you’ve established a relationship with a leader through cozying up or espionage, you can see why they’re happy or angry with you and what steps you might be able to take to change that. Egypt’s Cleopatra, for example, likes other civilizations who have strong armies, and Queen Victoria likes nations that started on the same continent as England. They also have a randomized second agenda, such as preferring countries that have a high population or hating those who have more money than they do, so they’re unpredictable in every new game. It’s a big step toward demystifying their behavior.
Some of these agendas are irrational, such as Queen Victoria disliking when you colonize a continent she has her eye on (there’s no way to know which one) or German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa getting mad when you interact with City-States (which you’d have to go out of your way not to do), so it’s basically impossible to not anger someone at some point when you’re simply going about your businesses of taking over the world. But you can mostly balance those offenses out by establishing embassies, conducting trade, respecting treaties, or just being friendly. The one downside I’ve encountered is that in order to see what their motivations are you first have to have a level of access with them, and if you meet a new country in the mid game that dislikes you for unknown reasons it’s very difficult to establish a good enough relationship to find out why they were angry in the first place. And they’re not entirely consistent – they’ll sometimes go from seemingly friendly to aggressive, presumably because they saw an opportunity they couldn’t resist. (To be fair I’ve been guilty of that one myself.) And one time I saw what must’ve been a bug, where an AI first hated me for having a small navy but then for a few turns thought I had a huge navy before realizing I’d never built a single ship and going back to hating me.But Civilization VI’s biggest weakness right now is that the AI has a bad habit of starting unprovoked wars, and that it isn’t very good at fighting them. Even on high difficulty levels it fights by attempting to overwhelm you with numbers and technologically advanced units, so the challenge is in making use of tactics and support units, such as Great Generals and anti-air guns, to outmaneuver them. Winning isn’t a cakewalk because you can crank up the difficulty until that’s hard to do, but because of the AI’s uncoordinated assaults you’re unlikely to lose cities unless you’re badly outgunned or you left them undefended. Some military victories feel unearned because the enemy army simply doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing.
Somewhat related to that is Civilization VI’s disappointing handling of religion. The process of spreading your faith to other cities for bonuses basically amounts to a very simple version of combat where there are only three units, and they don’t change at all throughout thousands of years of history. That’s not inconsistent with reality, but it’s not that much fun to play. And while it is hilarious that Apostles and Inquisitors battle each other with lightning and mystical forces, I don’t think that’ll be enough to make me chase a religious victory by spreading my faith to more than half of the cities of every civilization on the map simply because of the monotony of it.Back in the plus column we have the extremely customizable government system, which lets you assign bonus-giving policies to suit however you want to play. Each form of government, such as Monarchy, Theocracy, or Merchant Republic, is represented by a few inherent bonuses, but more importantly by a different configuration of military, economic, diplomatic, and wildcard policy slots; as you unlock new policy cards on the Civics tree (which is separate from but parallel to the Tech tree and powered by culture points) those policies can be added or removed. For instance, the Land Surveyors economic policy gives you 20% off the gold cost of buying new tiles for a city, while Public Works gives you 30% production boost toward new Builders and gives all new Builders two extra build actions. Military options include Logistics, which gives units +1 movement if starting in friendly territory and Professional Army, which gives you half off the gold cost of upgrading an obsolete military unit.
Mixing and matching policies can create a government to go with nearly any playstyle.
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Another of Civilization VI’s novel concepts is that your progress on both the Civics tree and the Tech tree is helped along by research bonuses you get just by building, improving, or fighting. For instance, founding a city on the coast will boost your research toward Sailing, which cuts the number of turns required to unlock it in half. But maybe you don’t have a good coastal location, so instead you kill three barbarian units (who can be extremely nasty harassers in the early game) and get a boost toward Bronze Working instead. This system lets the randomized map and the course of your civilization’s events influence you to go down research paths you normally might not, which increases the diversity of your playthroughs. Plus, all the quotes representing each technology and civic are narrated by the pleasurably distinctive accent of Sean Bean.
All of that translates to both online and hotseat multiplayer well, though I find the simultaneous turn-based online mode a bit messy because who attacks and who defends is determined by whoever moves that unit first, in real time. Currently there is no way to pre-make teams, and though you can just create alliances with your friends through the diplomacy screen, there’s no team victory setting – there can be only one winner. I also had my only crash in all of Civ VI during a multiplayer game, and there was no way to rejoin it.On that note, Civilization VI runs very well on most systems I’ve tried it on. Load times are a tad long when you first start or load into a saved game (it takes about a minute and 20 seconds to load into my current game off an SSD), though at least there we get to listen to Sean Bean’s narration tell us how cool our chosen leader is. Once I’m loaded in everything’s been smooth, with only that one crash to desktop so far. For the first time in a Civilization game there’s even a built-in benchmark tool, which on my GeForce GTX 970 has shown framerates between 50 and 75 per second. However, running it on a Surface Pro 4 with a Core i5 and integrated graphics was not very successful - the early game ran fine on minimum graphics settings, but loading up a late-game save was basically unplayable, even when using the cartoonish-looking tactical mode to minimize the impact on the graphics chip. That’s a shame, because Civilization VI would make an excellent tablet game.
Verdict
Civilization VI will go down in history as the most fully-featured launch version in the series. Many of those are smartly revamped versions of Civ classics, but it finds its own identity with great new ideas like spread-out cities, customizeable governments, research boosts, and leader agendas. And even though the AI has some improving to do, it can put up enough of a fight to make world domination a challenge.