Major esports organization Team Liquid announced today that it's making a push for the professional Civilization 6 scene with the creation of a new team. It was revealed that well known strategy game player Stephen "MrGameTheory" Takowsky is set to be the team's captain.
Team Liquid co-CEO Steve "LiQuiD112" Arhancet wrote on the organization's website that he started in competitive games with the Civilization franchise, and it was through Civ 4 that got him to pursue esports seriously.
"It was through competing in Civilization IV at the highest level that I found the confidence to jump into the world of esports and leave behind my job in the world of finance," he said. LiQuiD112 continued by talking about the virtues of competitive Civilization before focusing specifically on the player who'll lead the company's team, listing his accomplishments.
"MrGameTheory is a former world champion Civilization player who achieved the rank of #1 on the Civilization Revolution leader board, Civilization IV international league, and Civilization V international league," Arhancet detailed. "He holds the records for most 1v2, 1v3, 1v4, and 1v5 ladder victories in Civilization IV."
In a statement, MrGameTheory said that he's honored to lead Team Liquid's Civilization team and looks forward to "continue [his] contribution to one of the greatest gaming franchises."
"Participating in the competitive Civilization community with Steve Arhancet has been one of the great joys of my life," he wrote. "After we won our first Civilization Championship Cup back in 2007, with a team so small that we could barely participate in two-thirds of the events, I learned that a dedicated group of friends can accomplish the seemingly impossible. Civilization remains the most complicated game in the world, and I am thankful to be part of an organization capable of taking on the challenge."
Team Liquid will announce the addition of two more players to its Civilization 6 team on October 29, while it plans to host "a series of grueling tournaments" to try and find the "most exceptional players in the community." You can read the full post here.
With how long matches go for in the Civilization games, it'll be interesting to see if this esports push will be able to keep viewers invested and awake. As much as I like the idea of competitive Civ, it's definitely not as action-packed as games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Rocket League, and even League of Legends. Because of this, I have doubts that it'll be able to capture the attention of a wider audience.
In PC Gamer's review, critic T.J. Hafer called Civilization 6 "the liveliest, most engrossing, most rewarding, most challenging 4X in any corner of the earth."
Computer opponents in 4X are usually pretty dumb. When a game like Civilization tries to make them think and act like humans, they re about as convincing as two kids in a big coat trying to pass as Queen Victoria. Civ 6 has avoided this problem by instead focusing on making each AI leader an interesting challenge for a human player to unravel using clever systems like Agendas and the new casus belli civics, creating the most intricate and enjoyable diplomatic climate we ve ever been treated to in single-player Civ.
I talked about how game-changing AI agendas were in my discussion with Tom about the biggest new features, but it bears repeating. In previous Civ games, AI leaders were programmed to act like a friend playing with you on LAN. They d play to win, entertain mutually beneficial alliances, and often backstab you out of nowhere if they felt it would help their chances of victory.
China gets jealous when another civ builds a wonder, so I have to weigh whether the science bonus from the Great Library would be worth the economic cost of a war against them.
When a real player declares a surprise war on you and plunges the world into chaos, it creates an entertaining rivalry. But when a computer player does it, it usually seems unfair especially if you feel like you did everything right to make those duplicitous lines of code like you. We understand people being jerks and betraying us. But we understand pre-coded systems have to have rules. And we want to feel like we have the agency to play by those rules and achieve a desired outcome.
AI agendas fix this by creating a more comprehensible web of relationships with exposed knobs and levers. At the same time, it avoids the trap of making it really easy to stay best buds with everyone forever. China gets jealous when another civ builds a wonder, so I have to weigh whether the science bonus from the Great Library would be worth the economic cost of a war against them. When Germany's Barbarossa calls "dibs" on every city state, I know immediately that we re going to become foes even if we re not in competition for land or resources. I m constantly making interesting decisions between restricting the paths my empire can choose or letting relations with another leader sour. And that s not even bringing the randomized, hidden agendas (which give a new, very important role to the espionage system) into the conversation.
Pete the Great doesn't seem super stoked about this.
Why we can’t be friends
Civ 6 has also followed games like Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis by implementing casus belli: reasons to go to war. These are unlocked by civics on the new, culture-based tech tree, and lessen the diplomatic penalty you get for warmongering if you have a good reason. Unlocking Holy War allows you to rebuke someone who converted one of your cities. Unlocking Colonial War makes any civ a certain number of techs behind you fair game. You don t need a casus belli, but going to war without one requires you to either launch a Surprise War (which is likely to turn the rest of the world against you), or issue a formal Denouncement and wait five turns at which point, your opponent probably knows what s coming and has prepared their defenses.
This system not only creates a context for war and interjects some historical flavor relating to why real-world conflicts break out in the first place, but it weaves in with the agendas to create a web of friends and foes that helps the game of empires feel more complex and realistic. The other leaders aren t trying to act like your flesh-and-blood buddies. They re acting in the way that will give you the most enjoyable, challenging, and interesting experience as the sole air-breather at the table. And that design philosophy is extremely refreshing for someone like me, who spends the vast majority of his time in singleplayer.
As much as some players would like to believe that 4X is about universal symmetry between sides, it s really one of the genre s greatest myths. I d love to see more strategy devs show recognition that single and multiplayer are completely different animals, and AI should be designed around making the former the best experience it can be. What s fun and engaging for a solo conqueror is going to be very different from what makes LAN brawls great. And it s the mark of a great game when each experience is tailored to be distinct, but both perform admirably in their own way.
Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alec Meer)
Unlike Adam, I’ve not been lucky enough to spend the last month soaking in a deep Civilization VI [official site] bath, so I leave it to him to give you the complete picture. I’ve spent a big chunk of today with Firaxis’ latest historical turn-based strategy epic though, and already it’s filled me up with things to say about it. I’m genuinely surprised by how different it feels. There are reasons why I’m massively charmed by it, and there are reasons why it’s been frustrating me.
It's big-budget game season, and you know what that means: driver updates. Both AMD and Nvidia have packaged up new sets of drivers containing optimizations for several newly released and upcoming games, including Battlefield 1, Civilization 6, and Titanfall 2.
AMD released Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.10.2 for Radeon graphics card owners. The new driver set adds support for all three games mentioned above, plus Serious Sam VR Early Access and Eagle Flight VR.
There's just one new Crossfire profile in the Crimson 16.10.2, that being a DirectX 11 profile for Civ 6. Otherwise, the rest of what you'll find here are a handful of bug fixes. They include:
Fan speed may sometimes remain elevated on select Radeon RX 400 series graphics products even when an application has been exited.
Eyefinity group settings may not be retained after driver upgrade when using AMD CrossFire configurations.
Gears of War 4 may experience an application hang when using select high resolution and quality configurations in some specific game maps.
DirectX12 content may be unable to launch on some older CPUs that do not support popcnt instruction.
Battlefield 1 AMD CrossFire profile updates for game launch.
Moving on to Nvidia, its 375.57 WHQL driver package boasts Game Ready status for Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2, and Civ VI and the same two VR titles, which fall under Nvidia's Game Ready VR designation.
Nvidia's latest driver release also adds an SLI profile for Lineage Eternal: Twilight Resistance and 3D Vision profiles for Civ 6 (marked as "good") and Titanfall 2 (also "good").
Like AMD, Nvidia used the opportunity to fix a small number of issues, though there are only two specific to this driver package. They include:
[SLI, Geforce GTX 980M] Mirror's Edge Catalyst flickers on Ansel UI when image moved with mouse pointer. (Windows 10)
[GeForce GTX 650] Dots on all the characters in Grand Theft Auto 5. (Windows 7 through 8.1)
Civilization VI offers new ways to interact with your world, expand your empire across the map, advance your culture, and compete against history’s greatest leaders to build a civilization that will stand the test of time. Play as one of 20 historical leaders including Roosevelt (America) and Victoria (England).
Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Philippa Warr)
Adam banging on about Civilization VI [official site] even coming into work chat while ill to bang on about Civ VI (GO TO BED YOU FOOL!) has persuaded me that this might be the time for the return of the Mighty Pip Empire.
Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Adam Smith)
The question I’ve been trying to answer, as I spent a final few hours with Civilization VI [official site] before writing this review, is simple: is it the best game in the series, or the best game in the series bar Civ IV? After more than a hundred hours of play, I still can’t say for sure. The fourth game has had ten years to work its way into my mind and it has endured, Civ VI is still young.
What I can say is that it’s a radical redesign, true to the spirit of the series but finding new ideas in its elevation of the map from backdrop and resource-container to new plane of strategic and tactical importance. Few 4X games emphasise the importance of geography to this degree. In Civ VI, the land makes a mark on you, just as you make your mark on the land.>
Sid Meier’s Civilization® VI - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Jamie Wallace)
October is the thick of game-release season and today brought Sid Meier’s Civilization 6. It’s far too early for the game to be on sale, of course, so this week there’s a competition to win a copy below alongside the usual selection of gaming bargains. On that front, this week we ve got UK deals and we ve got deals that will work in the UK, US and presumably places outside of those two geographical boxes.
Update: It seems the original hour and a half video was missing a few songs roughly three hours worth, as the official Civilization YouTube account removed the original video and added a new one that's over four hours long. It also has correct timecodes for each song in the video description, so we've updated the embedded video above to the new version.
Original story: There's a lot to love about Civilization 6 (read our review here), but I came away truly amazed by its music. So amazed, that I made a whole video about how that music evolves through the different game eras. And now, all four versions of each civ's theme song is available to stream for free in one massive video on the official Civilization YouTube channel.
As you get started in Civ 6, I encourage you to keep your ears wide open. Firaxis told me that the music playing during a game is usually a mix of the other AI civ leaders you've met, and the version depends on what era they are in. So if you are in the classical era but meet Germany while they are still in the Ancient era, the Ancient German track will be mixed into the pool of possible music you can hear.
If, like me, you are going to listen to the whole video embedded above at least twice, you'll start hearing how the different themes shift, and then hopefully start recognizing them in the game. I don't believe this is the entire soundtrack (for example, the game's main theme is missing) but it's an impressively large collection. And pretty soon, we'll be able to mod Civ 6 to add our own tracks and make that collection even bigger.
Civilization 6 has had two expansions since 2016, and unsurprisingly that means it's a bigger and better game than it was at launch. Even if there are no more expansions in store for the future, that doesn't mean there's nothing new to check out. The modding community has pulled out all the stops tweaking graphics and gameplay, adding new civs and new units, and even improving the UI.
Here's our definitive list of the best mods for Civilization 6, updated to take 2019's Gathering Storm expansion into account.
Installing Civilization 6 mods
With the addition of Steam Workshop support, installing many mods is easy: simply subscribe to the mod on Steam. Steam will automatically download the mod, which can be enabled or disabled from the 'Additional Content' menu.
Mods that aren't on Workshop can be installed by creating a folder called ‘Mods’ in your Civilization 6 user directory: \Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization VI.
Extract mods to your new Mods folder (with each mod in its own subfolder) and then enable them from the ‘Additional Content’ menu in-game. Some mods may have extra steps, which I’ll describe in their individual entries.
If you want to make changes to Civ 6’s files yourself, the simplest way is to make direct changes to the files in Civilization 6’s install directory (after backing up the originals, of course). First, find Civ 6’s install folder. If you don't know where it is, you can right-click on the game in your Steam library and select Properties > Local Files > Browse Local Files. The default install location is Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier’s Civilization 6. Identify the file you want to mess with, save a copy, and go for it—just don’t forget what you’ve changed.
One common criticism of Civ 6 is that it’s a bit too bright and cartoonish, as compared to the more realistic look of previous games in the series. This mod, released by a Firaxis dev, strikes a really nice balance between this Civ’s visual style and that of its immediate predecessor. The saturation has been turned down and almost every basic tile type and decal has been altered in some way. It even adds new, more naturalistic models for ground clutter like trees. Pair this with something like the R.E.D. Modpack (above) to get rid of the Clash of Clans-looking armies and you’re in for a much more immersive, less board game-y feel.
Gathering Storm added labels for major geographic features on the map, which was a really cool touch. But if you play a lot, you’ve probably seen the same ones over and over. Mappa Mundi can basically eliminate that problem forever, adding over 15,000 new names of real world rivers, deserts, mountains, and more. It’s also seamlessly compatible with a lot of the most popular mods that add new civs to the game, so your Taino or Icelandic empire can put their own linguistic stamp on the map.
Gedemon brings us a Civ 6 version of one of our favorite Civ 5 mods. The R.E.D. Modpack rescales units to make them a little more like miniatures, a little less like cartoon giants stomping over the hills. Check out the mod's collection for versions that are compatible with all of Civ 6's expansions.
Graphics mods can make certain things look more realistic, but if you want the world layout itself to feel a bit less game-y, this is the mod for you. In addition to adding more coastal detail to replicate all those little coves, bays, and fjords we expect to see on a globe, it also makes the placement and size of deserts, rainforests, and marshes much more true-to-life. And if you’re all about that Nile Valley life, it improves food placement along rivers running through desert tiles as well. It comes with seven different map scripts, including Continents, Pangea, and Islands.
Yet Not Another Map Pack is another map pack from well-known modder and bundler Gedemon. YNAMP for Civilization 6 includes Earth-shaped maps with the correct start locations for each culture. If you’re tired of playing a landlocked Norway, this is your chance to create a proper Viking empire. The pack also adds new, bigger map sizes (one of which is so big it might take five or so minutes to load).
When starting a game, you’ll have new map types and size options available. Head to the post on Civfanatics for more information on how to use YNAMP, as well as known bugs and issues.
The highest disaster intensity in vanilla Civ 6 is called "Hyperreal." If that’s just not enough for you though, this mod let’s you crank it up to basically Just Plain Ridiculous. The description states that some kind of disaster will happen somewhere on the map just about every turn, and the severe versions are made more common. There is no longer any such thing as a dormant volcano. And in the late game, the number of coastal lowland tiles that can flood from climate change has been increased from the vanilla 33% all the way up to 75%. Mother Nature is coming for you and this time she’s not gonna play nice.
To Hell With The Devil: Religious units fight Rock Bands
This mod is so great we wrote an entire article about it. The premise is pretty simple: Rock Bands, Civ 6’s new, late game "culture nukes," can now engage in theological combat with religious units. For the pious, you can send apostles to keep these long-haired hooligans from corrupting the hearts and minds of your people. For the sacreligious, you can cast down the sanctimonious clerics of the Demiurge and make sure all the world gets to hear your tasty riffs and the good word of our Lord, Satan. This mod is so much fun that I have a hard time playing late game Civ 6 without it.
The struggle of having to tell Victoria you’re not interested in her weird trade proposals constantly is real. This mod forces the AI to give it a rest once in a while, whether it’s pestering you for your gems or begging for their lives in a war. The AI cooldown for trade offers is increased from 10 turns to 50, peace offers in war from 3 turns to 10, and offers of friendship from 5 turns to 30. Maybe now you can finally enjoy some peace and quiet while you plot their ultimate demise.
Adjust starting units, techs, and more
Unfortunately, starting with this many units and no treasury to support them doesn't quite work out.
While I was messing with Civ 6 to try to play a game without ever founding a city, I found that all the player and AI starting conditions are stored in a file called Eras.xml. You ll find it in the Civ 6 install directory, under \Base\Assets\Gameplay\Data.
Using what s there as an example, it s not hard to copy and paste to add starting units, or limit the AI s unit bonuses on harder difficulties. Just make sure you backup Eras.xml before you start tinkering in case you want to revert to the defaults.
The 'Repeat Route' checkbox alone makes Better Trade Screen worth it, but it brings lots of improvements, such as new sorting options to the Trade Overview screen. It's one of those quality of life improvement UI mods we'll keep checked forever.
One of the most poorly-explained mechanics in Civ 6 is the fact that certain districts, like Industrial Zones, grant their benefits to all city-centers within six tiles. (I’ll pause for the gasps of everyone who has played hundreds of hours and still didn’t know that.) What makes it even more annoying is that there isn’t an easy way to figure out which cities are close enough—you have to count out tiles individually while bouncing your cursor along. At least, there wasn’t an easy way until now. This mod adds a tool that makes it very easy to quickly display the range of these effects so you never waste land on a redundant district again.
If you love data visualization and miss the demographic graphs from previous Civs, you’re in luck. CIVIGraphs 2 adds a Civ 5-style demographics panel that lets you see info on things like army size and population for you and all of your rivals over time. Simple, lightweight, but very useful. TPS Report cover sheet not included.
Rise and Fall brought us the concepts of Era Score, Golden Ages, and Dark Ages. But there was one glaring problem: You’re never really told what actions will give you Era Score. So until you memorize all of the mini-achievements that do so, it’s a lot of guesswork and hoping. It can be even harder to keep track of which world firsts are still available. But no more! This mod adds an objective list of ways to earn Era Score, and even lets you know which moments are no longer available once they’ve been claimed by another civ. This makes it much easier to stack up those Golden Ages and let the good times roll.
Australia finally got some representation in Civ 6 after long being the only populated continent to never appear in the series, but they’re represented by the British colonizers that came along pretty recently. This mod adds an Aboriginal Australian civilization, the Anangu, under Tjilpi with two unique units, a unique tile improvement, and bonuses to setting up specialty districts in arid regions akin to their Outback home. They also benefit greatly from finding and building near natural wonders. If you own the Australia DLC, which the mod creator recommends, they will use Australia’s music tracks for added thematics.
Vlad the Impaler leads Romania in this appropriately bloody addition, and he’s all about causing chaos for his enemies. His unique unit is basically a crossbowman with the movement speed of a cavalry unit, which is already pretty crazy. But even more interesting is his unique ability that damages enemy units adjacent to a tile that’s being pillaged and sends out a wave of disloyalty to nearby cities when he captures a city, which can result in a chain revolt if you use it in the right place at the right time. You’ll need to download the Romania civ separately, which gives even more unique bonuses like a free technology for being on the winning side of an Emergency.
"A Song of Ice and Fire:" Rise and Fall of Usurper
This mod adds NINE(!) new civs based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, the basis of the television show Game of Thrones. These include Rhaegar Targaryen of the Crownlands, Eddard Stark of the North, Tywin Lannister of the Westerlands, Robert Baratheon of the Stormlands, Mace Tyrell of the Reach, Jon Arryn of the Vale, Hoster Tully of the Riverlands, Doran Martell of Dorne and Balon Greyjoy of the Iron Islands. Each have unique units and bonuses appropriate to the lore. And yes, of course, you can train dragons.
This is one of the most involved mods I’ve ever seen. It basically takes Civ 6’s gameplay and zooms way in on the Ancient and Classical eras "from the Dawn of Time to the fall of Rome," keeping the same game pace and roughly the same number of civics and technologies to unlock. This sharper focus allows Anno Domini to model things that would normally be outside the scope of a Civ game, including new Historical Moments and new government types.
Sounds cool already, but who can you play as, you might ask? Well, these beautiful, crazy bastards have gone way above and beyond to bring us THIRTY distinct leaders (some being alternates for the same civ), including Ashurbanipal of Assyria, Sargon of Akkad, Hannibal of Carthage, Hatshepsut of Egypt, Arminius of Germania, Boudica of the Iceni, Zenobia of Palmyra, Leonidas of Sparta, Helen and Hector of Troy, four new Roman emperors, and reworked versions of some vanilla favorites like Pericles, Qin Shi Huang, and Chandragupta.
