Saladin and Gandhi declared war on me, and I thwarted their invasion and made peace. Now, for some asinine reason, most of the world is calling me a warmonger. My friends in Rome, meanwhile, have used our open borders agreement to pointlessly surround my capital with swordsmen, forcing me to break our friendship agreement and declare war just so I can move my own troops around again. I guess I am a warmonger, at least when I can no longer play the game without going to war.
The foreign policy of Civilization 6’s AI leaders is absurd, but as irritating as those stories are, there’s a lot of good in the grand strategy series update. The new district system is one of my favorite additions to any Civilization. Cities are no longer a single tile with a few farms and a mine nearby, and can be properly sprawling and unique. It’s much more fun to play with just a few metropolises, carefully managing land usage and bonuses, nestling a campus in a valley beneath a mountain range and linking a harbor with a commerce district.
While they could use work, I’m glad systems like caravans and religion have been carried over from the Civilization 5 expansions. I don’t play Civilization for the discombobulating foreign affairs, but for the design and management of a network of cities—which is what Civ 6 has excelled at improving.
My only big disappointment is the time it s taking to release mod tools, which Firaxis still hasn t announced progress on.
There’s every reason to be hopeful that Civ 6 will get better, too. When Civ 5 came out, there was a contingent (which I was a part of) which said that, sure, it looks nicer and it’s more accessible, but Civilization 4 is obviouslysuperior. History is repeating itself with Civ 6, and while there are reasons to hold off for now (the inevitable price drop one of them), I’m optimistic that within a few years it will obtain the status Civ 5 eventually did after that initial shunning.
My only big disappointment is the time it’s taking to release mod tools, which Firaxis still hasn’t announced progress on. Not that the lack of tools has stopped modders from tinkering with Civ 6’s files: So far I’ve installed mods to increase the yield of ocean tiles, add useful information to the UI, and simplify my trade route decisions. When proper tools do come, through, it should be a boon for Civ's community of creative historians.
I’m certain we’ll see an official expansion next year, as well, but what I’d like more from Firaxis are free updates to aspects that won’t necessarily be touched by an expansion. Adding new civs and systems is nice and all, but first, the AI should really be more fun to play against—and it looks like that's happening. An update just yesterday claims to have “improved AI deal negotiations and analysis.” I haven’t had a chance to test that claim just yet, but at least Firaxis is on the case.
I m glad my fascination with miniatures is satisfied digitally, or I d be buried in tiny plastic trees and farms and cathedrals.
For the most part, Civ 6 is a collection of great ideas that could each use tweaking and improving. I like the new policies system, for instance, which adds a welcome layer of governance, though the abstractions can be odd—why does class struggle eliminate war weariness? I mostly ignore religion because I find dispersing missionaries tedious, but trade remains a priority for me, and I love seeing roads develop along routes (if any bit of micromanagement deserved to be cut from Civ 5, building roads was it).
I initially recoiled from Civ 6’s more colorful, cartoony graphics—I was all set to call it an unworthy successor to Civ 5—but now I love zooming in on my little mines and markets and harbors to see them work. I’m glad my fascination with miniatures is satisfied digitally, or I’d be buried in tiny plastic trees and farms and cathedrals. Civ 6 saves me space while I waste my time, and for that I am grateful.
If you're yet to play Civilization 6, here's what strategy guru T.J. Hafer wished he knew prior to conquering the world. If you have played, you'll know Firaxis and 2K's latest slant on the esteemed world domination sim comes packing a pretty impressive roster of world leaders. It's now added Jadwiga of Poland to that list via its first portion of premium DLC.
For £3.99/$4.99, you now have the opportunity to lead Poland into war—a force which can gain control of rival civ's tiles after they've fortified their borders. Furthermore, leader Jadwiga leverages her power to increase the value of Relics and likewise make Holy Sites more effective.
The DLC also includes a new scenario: "Stand at the crossroads of Europe protecting the fertile Polish homelands from those who would seize it to empower themselves," reads its Steam page description. "Can you stand as a bulwark against this threat?"
A new Vikings Scenario Pack lets players rule Europe for 100 turns as a Viking Lord. Playing as either Harald Hardrada of Norway, King Canute of Denmark or Olof Skotkonung of Sweden, you'll get to grips with six new City-States as well as three new Natural Wonders—both as part of the DLC and within the base game. This also costs £3.99/$4.99.
Both DLCs launch alongside a free and expansive 'Winter Update' which introduces a new Earth map, an 'Alert' action for units, new scenario menu options, and a new replay option to Wonder completion movies, among a host of other balance changes and AI and bug fixes.
Full details for the respective DLCs can be found here and here, while full patch notes for Civilization 6's Winter Update can be found in this direction.
So this is interesting. Proving that yes, we can all just get along, AMD and Intel have teamed up to offer gamers a pretty sweet deal on a hardware and games bundle.
"Radeon has joined forces with Intel to serve up a compelling, limited time holiday bundle through Newegg that delivers the excellent power efficiency of Intel’s 6th Generation Core-i5 6600K CPU with the powerful, future-ready performance of the MSI Radeon RX 480 Armor 8GB OC (overclocked) video card," AMD's Jason Evangelho announced on the company's Radeon Technologies Group blog.
AMD is hoping to restore parity in the processor space when it releases its next-generation Zen architecture next year. If Zen had already launched, it would be tough to imagine AMD promoting a bundle with rival Intel, but it hasn't launched yet and so here we are.
The bundle sells for $450 and includes the CPU and graphics card mentioned above, along with two free games, Civilization 6 and Doom. If purchased separately, the tally would come to a few pennies shy of $620. The savings add up to about $170, plus there's a $15 mail-in-rebate available (courtesy of MSI), bring the total saved to $185.
Even without factoring in the games, the bundle saves buyers $50 upfront over buying the CPU and graphics card separately, plus another $15 when the mail-in-rebate arrives. So, it's a pretty good deal no matter how you slice it.
The ruggedly mellifluous Sean Bean drew many a manly tear as the narrator of the Civilization 6 launch trailer. Even though it was a multi-generational affair, spanning eons of human history, it looked as though, for once, he wouldn't die at the end—until he ate a hail of 7.92mm machine gun fire in the skies over England. Unfortunately, it seems like nobody thought to mention that fact to Sean. And he really, really thought he made it through this time.
Actually, he took the news pretty well, all things considered. I suppose he's used to it by now.
"I was in the dark, which was quite good for me because I didn't know what was going on. I just learned as I was going, and therefore it was quite a surprise to me. It was very fresh and very spontaneous," Bean says in the trailer, comparing the experience of voice acting with his more regular work in film. "You just try to be as truthful as you are in filming, but you have the luxury of having all the lines in front of you, so that's great!"
Civilization 6 isn't actually Bean's first foray into the realm of videogames: He's previously appeared as Martin Septim in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and last year narrated the bizarre adventure Kholat.
Civilization 6 received a substantial update today in the form of its 'Fall Update' patch, ushering in DirectX 12 support as well as a host of sweet gameplay additions. As far as the latter is concerned, there's a new multiplayer scenario called 'Cavalry and Cannonades', as well as two new map types in the form of Four-Leaf Clover and Six-Armed Snowflake. According to the patch notes, these map types are "designed to encourage more conflict".
As the first major patch for the game, the list of updates and tweaks is extensive. The user interface has received a number of fixes and improvements; AI is better tuned, and the list of bug fixes is very long. You can read the whole spiel over here, and then compare and contrast with some of the beefs Evan had with the game earlier this week.
As far as DirectX 12 support goes, the patch starts with AMD cards, as well as Nvidia Maxwell series cards and upwards. Firaxis advises to make sure your GPU drivers are updated before booting the game.
AMD has a new hotfix (16.11.4) available for Radeon graphics card owners and guess what? It introduces DirectX 12 support for Civilization 6! Just kidding (apologies to anyone who just spit coffee onto their monitor in surprised delight), Firaxis and AMD are still working on that.Update: The DirectX 12 patch finally went live, just half a day later than expected. Along with Civ6 getting DX12 support, this driver release helps to ensure everything works optimally with the new DX12 code.
Besides Civ6 tuning and support, the driver release notes mention other items, one of which applies to Titanfall 2. Here are the bugs it stomps out:
H.264 content playback may experience playback issues on internet browsers with hardware acceleration when also running gaming applications or content.
Radeon R9 Fury Series products may experience minor graphical corruption in Titanfall 2 when inside a titan.
There are some known issues AMD continues to work on. They include:
A few game titles may fail to launch, experience performance issues or crash if the third party application "Raptr" has its game overlay enabled. A workaround is to disable the overlay if this is experienced.
DOOM may experience a crash when launched using the Vulkan API on some Graphics Core Next products.
DOTA 2 may experience a crash when launched using the Vulkan API on some Graphics Core Next products.
Flickering may be experience while playing Overwatch in the main menu or viewing character models using AMD CrossFire mode.
FIFA 17 may experience an application hang or black screen on launch for some select Hybrid Graphics or AMD PowerXpress mobile configurations.
H.264 content may experience blocky corruption when streaming using P2P content players on some Radeon RX 400 series graphics products.t
#15: Gilgamesh's superfluous second pinky fingers.
Civ 6 is real good. I agree with most of the stuff that T.J. had to say about it in his enthusiastic review. I think Civ 6's elegant map breathes a ton of life into the series, and I love the Pixar-quality expressions of the leaders. I like most of the UI, how much individual tiles matter, and that barbarians are smart and annoying. I think the changes to combat are smart.
But alongside these improvements are a pile of annoyances that I am compelled to put on the internet. Here are some discomforts that've sapped my enthusiasm for Sid's Sixth.
This is the big one. When you're about to build a district, Civ 6 tells you what bonuses you'll get for that tile immediately if I drop a campus beside two mountains, I'll get two bonus science per turn, for example. But you can't really check in on those adjacency bonuses mid-game. Is my aqueduct boosting my theater district? How much are my mines helping my industrial zone? It's bonkers that I can't just hover over a tile and have it tell me in detail what benefits it's giving me.
2. My kingdom for a tooltip
Likewise, some of Civ's biggest nuances go un- or under-explained. For my first playthrough, I struggled to figure out why a city I'd conquered was suffering occupation penalties hundreds of turns later because the (I guess) inconsequential topic of city conquering is afforded a single sentence in Civilopedia, which itself has tons of information gaps. What do you do with captured spies? If I agree to not move too close to my neighbor's borders, will I violate that promise if their borders advance, or if a scout passes by? What determines which type of artifacts spawn from an antiquity site? What's the threshold for gaining or losing the war weariness penalty? If I found a city atop a luxury resource, do I get it?
3. Amenity allocation
On that note: I like amenities. I think they're an interesting counterweight to population growth. But they aren't well explained. Civ tells you that amenities are distributed evenly between cities, automatically. But if I have four cities and five amenities, with equal population, who gets the fifth one? Again, it's frustrating to not have perfect information when you're deciding whether to build a zoo or a spy. It also took me too long to understand that duplicate luxury resources provide no benefit, other than being tradable extras.
4. UI scaling doesn't work at 1440p
5. Distance-based benefits
Some buildings and wonders, like zoos, or a power plant, grant their benefits to all owned cities within six tiles. Getting two improvements for the price of one can be game-changing. Unfortunately, Civ 6 gives no indication of how that six-tile range is determined. If my neighboring city is four tiles north and two tiles east, does that mean it also gains the benefit? You can calculate it out yourself after a building is completed, but again, why isn't there any visualization of this when you're making a building decision?
6. Camera snapping to units
You can disable this easily by tweaking a text file, but the default camera behavior can be pretty aggravating depending on how many 'awake' units you have and how widely they're distributed over the map.
7. Tourism is the loneliest number
I enjoyed my run as Teddy Roosevelt. I founded New York and Yosemite on the same turn! Hell yeah. Accumulating great works and great people remains a satisfying part of Civ: deploying Chopin or Mary Shelley or Dvorak and seeing their creations spring to life, fullscreen, feels like grabbing epic loot off a boss in Diablo.
Ultimately, though, tourism in Civ 6 is a number that you watch go up until you win. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there's no visualization to help me delight in the idea of citizens visiting my museums and resorts. I don't get the same visual payoff that I do with a science victory, where I get to see each stage of the Mars mission shot into space. That's a shame because Civ 6 has some wonderful, handcrafted details: if you build Cristo Redentor, for example, its appearance changes depending on the time of day. But there's no expression of Berlin or Jerusalem being thriving hubs of travel and culture.
Broken record time: tourism's nuances are also poorly explained. I have to do a lot of mouse-hovering over icons to figure out that India's religion is boosting the tourists I get from them, or that, because Germany grabbed the Enlightenment civic, I'm getting fewer tourists from them. Culture also doesn't interact with many of the game's other systems, other than spies. What if tourists had a negative impact on housing?
8. The religious endgame
For many of the same reasons, I find Civ 6's religious victory unsatisfying. Because you've only got three units, it's attrition with very little strategy underneath it. Although some civs like Kongo have interesting interactions with religion, and the 'faith race' to earn a great prophet is interesting, religious warfare essentially operates on a parallel plane from the rest of the game, disconnected from Civ's other systems and goals.
9. The spy assignment UI
Please, just let me click on the tile I'd like to place my spy.
10. The hidden unit selection menu
"Now where did I put Leonardo da Vinci?" Seriously, I had to help two different people find this thing.
11. The ancient secret of tile swapping
It's strange that the Very Useful ability to swap tiles between bordering cities is buried under the citizen management button. Swapping a big farm or production tile can make all the difference when you're managing population growth or wonder progress.
12. And Civ's secret spreadsheets
Blame this on my own illiteracy (or on #4), but I didn't find the incredibly useful "View Reports" button until about 40 hours in. It's right there, staring at you in the top-middle of the screen, ready to table a bunch of valuable info your cities' output.
13. Diplomacy menu 'lag'
I can click on things within the diplomacy menu while a turn is processing, but that my inputs don't resolve until the turn is done processing. It's weird to be able to push these buttons and have them not immediately respond. Likewise, visualizations like the worker allocation view aren't usable while a turn's being processed.
14. Housing isn't visualized
Housing becomes a big concern in the mid-game before you unlock neighborhoods, and yet Civ 6 hides where housing is distributed across your tiles. There is a UI mod for this, but it's not great.
...And, yeah, the AI, which T.J. dug into in greater detail at the bottom of his review.
Ubisoft is having an open beta for Steep this weekend, its open world extreme sports game that has players grabbing life by the horns like in Point Break, minus the illegal activities, of course. If you're planning to partake and own a GeForce graphics card, there's a new Game Ready driver release ready, version 375.86.
"Game Ready drivers provide the best possible gaming experience for all major new releases, including virtual reality games. Prior to a new title launching, our driver team works until the last minute to ensure every performance tweak and bug fix is included for the best gameplay on day one," Nvidia says, in case anyone needs a refresher.
In addition to being optimized for the Steep beta, the 375.86 driver release also provides tweaks for The Division Survival DLC, Battlefield 1, and Civilization 6. Nvidia also added a temporal SLI profile for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and fixed a handful of issues, several of which are carryovers from previous driver releases. Here are the ones the release notes list for Windows 10:
[375.70] Smearing and ghosting reported with latest NVIDIA drivers.
[375.63, GeForce GTX 980 Ti] Artifacts in GIFs after driver update.
[SLI, GeForce GTX 1080] Unable to enable Surround with SLI HB bridge; single ribbon SLI bridge works fine.
Battle Carnival is falsely detected as Bionic Commando.
[G-SYNC, 372.70, GeForce GTX 1080] G-SYNC monitor flickers at 144Hz, not reproduced with 368.81.
[SLI, 372.54] Wrong memory usage values in games on Pascal GPUs in SLI mode.
[G-SYNC, GP102] Periodic flickering on desktop at 165Hz when dragging or resizing windows with G-SYNC enabled.
And here are the two that apply to Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 7:
GeForce Experience icon missing on system notification tray.
[GeForce GTX 980 Ti] Unable to detect multiple TV models from Loewe Technologies GmbH.
There are several open issues that Nvidia is working to fix. One of them is a bug that crashes The Division Survival when changing from full-screen to windowed full-screen, which only seems to happen in Windows 10.
I first fell in love with Civilizationafter I was destroyed.
On a giant, fractal map I cultivated a tiny, city-state-like paradise on a remote island, completely (and happily) cut off from the rest in the world. Turn after turn, I invested heavy into culture without building anything as much as a spearman to fortify the small force you spawn in with. My isolationist utopia was cranking towards victory, until one day I was discovered by Otto Von Bismarck and the rest of his German aircraft carriers.
He declared war on me, and an incomprehensibly huge German fleet emerged from the enveloping fog of war. My island, stocked with all the world s wonders and great people of nearly every designation, was shelled to death in about three turns. Just brutal, remorseless technocratic natural selection, and I was laughing so hard as all my hard work burned to the ground.
That s the great thing about Civilization. History is brutish and unfair, but it can also be hilarious. With simple graphics and complex systems, Sid Meier's flagship franchise has given us so many vivid stories grudges against famous world leaders, tales of terrible slides into despotism, classic cases of AI gone haywire all from the privacy of our own bedrooms. With the release of Civilization 6, I reached out to some of Civilization s oldest fans and asked them to tell me about their favorite memory on the tiles.
Bless our proxy states
I was playing as Alexander/Greece in Civilization 5. I was hidden behind a huge mountain range that cut my empire off from the rest of the continent. Mongolia was one of three other civs just East of these mountains. There was a small valley that opened up my territory to the rest of the landmass, but it was controlled by a city-state. As the eras went by, I watch Genghis Khan kill every other Civ one by one as I hide behind this huge mountain range. Mongolia took over the entire continent by the industrial era. He then declared war on the city-state controlling the pass through the mountains. I gifted that little city-state at least a dozen units to help keep them alive during their war against Mongolia. I eventually hit the point where I had no military unit left because I was fighting a proxy war to keep Mongolia from controlling this pass.
The city-state eventually fell to Mongolia only a few turns before I won a science victory. I remember feeling remorse as I left the planet thinking about the city-state that kept me safe. I imaged the spaceship with the name of the city-state written on the front of it; Toronto. YouTuber Drew Durnil
The reverse colonization
I've told this story on my channel before but it's the first one that pops into my mind anytime I think of fun Civ games. It was back in the Civilization 2 days and I started out all alone on a decent-sized island. With no need to put any focus into military I could go all in on tech and economy and thought I was doing really well, I could just imagine myself, once I learned to build caravels and could visit the other islands, marching through their primitive civilizations with my mighty knights. Once that day came I loaded up a couple caravels with knights (and a worker to improve my soon to be lands) and sailed off to discover across the sea. Turns out, all but one other civ was on one massive continent. With the tech sharing of the old Civ games they far surpassed me, and now that they knew of me, and how weak I was, my knights were no match for their tanks and artillery and I was quickly destroyed. YouTuber Nookrium
I was playing Civilization 2 as America, and was going for a domination victory. Japan was the other powerful Civilization remaining in the game. I had been at war with them for some time. The war was dragging on and I did not yet have nuclear weapons.
While I was transporting units across the ocean to hopefully close them out, they dropped a nuke on Washington.
In 1945.
The random irony killed me. I only wish I had captured as screenshot. Reddit user JackFunk
The false flag
My best story would have to be from Civ IV. I was playing a multiplayer game with two friends, and as you may be aware, Civ IV features a multitude of random events that may happen throughout the game, most of which we were unfamiliar with. One such event popped up around the renaissance era stating that the dread pirate Blackbeard was ravaging the seas.Not long after, I happened to chance upon his ship... and easily sunk it with my own Frigates. That was a little underwhelming, I thought. But then the most unscrupulous idea occurred to me my friends were still quite unaware that I'd made the villain walk the plank, and in Civ IV, you can build Privateers, which hide their nationality from other players. You can also rename units... see where I'm going with this?
And so, a great fleet of a dozen "Blackbeards" set sail from my ports, aiming straight for my "allied" friends, and started plundering their coasts, sinking their transports carrying settlers to newly discovered continents and blockading their ports. And they bought the ruse hook, lure and sinker! For maybe 30 turns our Skype voice chat was filled with rage at the horrible computer-controlled corsair wrecking their stuff, as I struggled to contain my giggles. Reddit user TakFloyd
This was in Civ V. I was playing as Harald Bluetooth and spawned on the coast. Immediately to the south of me, Montezuma and the Aztecs popped up. Even if I was sharing a continent with the Aztecs, that wouldn't have been TOO bad, except the diplomatic tooltip told me that Montezuma had "coveted lands that I currently own." Which probably meant my seaport.
This should have been a red flag, telling me to just say "fuck it" and restart the game. But I didn't do that.
Cut to a few turns later (still in the Ancient Era), and suddenly, out of the blue, the Aztecs declare war on me with the intent to invade me. My Viking army is constantly being zerg rushed by Aztec Jaguar warriors and other troops. I beat them back every time, even with a military as pitiful as mine. Despite this, Montezuma refuses to make peace with me. Ever.
It is now the medieval era. Both the Vikings (myself) and the Aztecs have been fighting against each other in a fruitless war for 2000 years. There can be no peace. Only constant, senseless bloodshed conducted in the name of both Odin and Quetzalcoatl. My people face a constant Aztec onslaught, wondering each turn whether they will survive for much longer. No matter how many of his troops I kill, Montezuma always comes back with more jaguars, spearmen, and siege engines. He refuses to negotiate peace. Ever. This war can end only with the destruction of one side, and it probably won't be his. Reddit user Willie5000
Attrition
I remember playing Civ 3, going for a science victory and generally minding my own business. I didn't really explore all that much and considered myself safe, since my small island nation was isolated and defended by mech infantry at the time when everyone else was fielding muskets.Well, lo and behold, I get [a declaration of war] by the Zulu. I pretty much scoff at the notion and proceed as usual, waiting for them to send some sacrificial units that I can easily blow to kingdom come. A turn passes, then several, then I forget about the war entirely and switch back to building stuff.
And then I lose the goddamn game.
How, you ask? Well, my small island nation had some fog of war in the far left corner. Nothing there but empty tundra, so who cares. Apparently, Mr. Shaka used that spot as a disembarkation point for what I can only assume were an INFINITE number of cavalry. I just sat there and stared at the never-ending line of cavalry units running at my cities and getting slaughtered, over and over and over again, occasionally chipping some hp from the defenders until they won. I counted at least 30 units before I lost track. I still don t know how many he actually had.
To this day, the very first thought in my head when somebody mentions Civilization, is that damn sound loop of: pa-tup pa-tup, pa-tup pa-tup, blam blam, boom, bleaaargh, flop. Reddit user Grumpy_Hedgehog
The Siberian war machine
When I was a kid I broke my leg playing hockey. I was going to be laid up all summer and I was really bummed about it. My brother surprised me by buying me Civilization 1. On my first game I was playing as America on Earth. I took over all of the US and Canada and thought I was doing just oh-so-great. I had a solid garrison of archers and spearmen in every city, tons of tile improvements, etc. Suddenly a civ I haven't met unloads about four dozen freakin tanks onto the shores of New York, and THIS GUY and his epic 8-bit music pops up telling me I'm about to die.
Turns out that if left alone, the Civ 1 Russia on Earth could leverage Siberia like crazy since it was all "forest" rather than ice or tundra tiles. So Stalin had many dozens of cities and tanks while everyone else is fielding knights. The red armies of Mother Russia overran my paltry forces in days and that music has forever after given me chills.
It was then that I knew I'd be hooked on this game series for life. Played every version, including Alpha Centauri, and I've loved them all. So far Civ 6 is as outstanding as I had hoped. Reddit user JonesitUp
Mandatory fun
I was playing a ring map with some friends as Egypt.
I was basically wonder spamming (Egypt's unique ability lets them build wonders faster) and was getting close to a cultural victory. Ultimately it was me and one other guy playing the game, once the less competitive people dropped out.
I was something like 99% influential over him when I got a Great Musician. Normally you can send a GM into another Civ's lands, but I didn't have an open borders agreement with him. Knowing I was going for the culture win, he refused to make that deal for obvious reasons.So I did what any culturally enriched dictator would do I declared war on him and held a CONCERT BY FORCE.
YOU WILL SIT AND YOU WILL FUCKING LISTEN TO THIS BEAUTIFUL MUSIC GERMANY
I won the game as a result and we died laughing in the process. RIP. Reddit user Patientbearr
The Trojan horse
I was playing vanilla Civ 5 with Japan (me) China and France and some other civilization that I can remember.
So we were on this big continent, China made a bunch of cities so its territory took like 3/5 of the continent, France and I shared the last 2/5. France was above me and China was below me.
During the whole game I was trying to go in the pacifist route, going for a cultural or technological win so I had little to no army, so I tried my hardest to get China to be friends with me so it could protect me just in case. China was at the modern era when we were still in the Renaissance with France, and had a bunch of Helicopters, tanks and a lot of other units.
France declared war on me for some reason, probably wanted a bigger territory but thankfully China came to the rescue and absolutely destroyed the French, who only had its capital remaining. France offered a peace treaty to me alongside a bunch of gold per turn and stuff so of course, being the pacifist that I was, I accepted. China didn't, however, and asked me to open my borders so it could destroy the French civ. Once again I said yes.
So China moved all of its army in my border to get to the French civ and suddenly declared war on me. The AI used the fact that France was above me to trick me into letting its army in my border. I was amazed at how smart the AI was (or how stupid I was to trust China) and I got destroyed in one turn. Reddit user RobbertFruit
Civilization 6 might be the most complete-feeling Civ game on its release in series history. I commented in my review that it feels like it already has about an expansion and a half worth of features compared to the launch build of Civ 5, and it s the most transformative step from one game to the next Firaxis has ever taken. Yet, there are still huge opportunities to be seized and threadbare or just plain boring systems that could be fleshed out or retooled. Here s where I think the devs should focus their efforts with upcoming expansions:
Make the map more dynamic
Civ 6 is all about that beautiful, detailed map and how you interact with it. There s only one problem: It remains largely static and passive as an entity, changing only based on what you and your competing civs choose to build on it. In the real world, continents can undergo significant changes in 6000 years, both as a result of human activity and the whims of nature. For example, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that followed it saw significant changes in global climate between about 900 and 1900 CE. Swelling and receding tundra could upset or give a boost to food production in marginal regions.
There are plenty of other examples: The desertification of the African sahel. The disappearance of the Aral Sea. The Roman city of Pompeii being buried under ash. The devastating damage to urban centers by hurricanes, fires, and earthquakes in the 20th and 21st Centuries. And of course, the present age of global warming (which was even modeled in some previous Civ games by rising sea levels I miss stuff like that!) I ve talked before about how acts of the gods can be a hard thing to balance in terms of fun factor, but I think a well-designed expansion that takes this living map and makes it feel even more alive could be a huge win.And if we re going to shoot for the stars, I d adore a mechanic or scenario that allows the world to end in a nuclear apocalypse, unlocking a Post-Apocalyptic era with new units, techs, civics, and victory conditions.
Religion and culture need some love
Civ 6 launched with in-depth religion and culture systems, as well as a religious victory condition for the first time in the series. There s just one problem: they re not very fun. The religious game basically boils down to spamming missionaries faster than your opponents, and theological combat is a shallow affair, with only three unit types and no real tactics or planning involved. Culture also seems to be a pretty basic port of the tourism system from Civ 5 s expansions, and while it has some nifty late-game tie-ins like archaeology and national parks, it s still not really a victory I get excited about. More than once, I ve won with culture when I wasn t even trying to do so on the Prince difficulty.
Both of these systems need a dose of added strategy and excitement. Maybe instead of missionary spam, preachers and apostles could act like spies that you station in enemy cities to perform missions? If we re going to keep theological combat, we could at least use some kind of rock-paper-scissors dynamic with a few new units, and maybe some support options (like a 'Grand Inquisitor' who gives an attack buff to all your inquisitors in a small radius). Culture-wise, I d love to see some kind of endgame project or mission to secure victory, instead of just waiting for a number to tick up. It s entirely passive and anticlimactic at this point. It doesn t require much decision-making, nor does it inspire late-game drama the same way a military victory or a neck-and-neck space race might.
Expand on the already great diplomacy system
Diplomatic interactions with other leaders are a major strength of Civ 6. Firaxis would be wise to build on this. The one victory condition from Civ 5 we re missing so far is the Diplomatic one, and we also lack the late-game shake-up that was the United Nations. Such an addition could mesh beautifully with AI agendas and the casus belli system. Perhaps the UN could pass a motion that makes religious war justification unlawful, for example. It would also be great to see late-game treaty alliances like NATO or the Warsaw Pact in a Civ game. Perhaps even a shared Diplomatic Victory condition, if that s not too blasphemous?
While we re at it, I think Civ could benefit from adopting a few more things from the grand strategy genre, like deeper diplomatic relationships. Maybe you don t want to conquer a neighbor s cities, but rather make them into a vassal or tributary state. Maybe diplomacy-focused countries could establish something like a sphere of influence, granting benefits to their allies but also allowing them to spread their culture to sphered civs more easily? If there s one thing Civ 6 is primed for, it s building upon the diplomacy game to create a volatile and stimulating ecosystem of trade deals, multinational organizations, and political skullduggery.
