I’ve always been a huge fan of Civilization games. They’re the kind of games I just can get into for endless hours without a care in the world, without going to sleep even if I should, just clicking away at the ‘next turn’ button until my plans either come to fruition or the whole game comes crashing down on me. Of course, I’m not a -great- Civilization player, I just go for the easy-ish difficulty and try to min-max my civilizations into getting one of the various types of victories you can get. Nonetheless, I had a blast playing Civilization VI and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone that has even just an inkling of passion for strategy games.
I first started the tutorial, which gave me a good idea of what was new and different in this version (I had played Civilization V a bit as well!). I settled my first city, chose researches and civic projects to work toward, built a few structures in my city, looked at the government and policies section of the game, created units, explored the world a bit, was thought about the new district system, looked at some stats and then decided I was ready to go and launch my first real game of civ. The district system is a neat addition where each town can have a certain number of districts based on their population. Each district does a specific thing - increasing your production, science, culture - and you can build special buildings on top of these districts.
I decided to start with a military victory, completed by crushing all other civilizations under your army’s might. I didn’t know much about the rules of the game yet, so I went with Frederick Barbarossa of the Germans. Each civilization has their own passive bonuses, special units and buildings they can make, and they can change how you play the game, especially if (like me) you try to min-max your way into a specific type of victory. There was a lot to juggle in that first game, looking at all the available stats sometimes felt like I was just looking at a wall of meaningless numbers, but I got the hang of things fast enough. My military campaign wasn’t doing too hot at first because I had no special units and my immediate opponent - Kongo - had stronger starting fighters. Units gain experience by fighting and can unlock a bunch of special abilities like attacking twice or having more range, but it’s quite easy to lose them, especially if you’re not careful with their health and not retreating them fast enough.
Great persons of different types (generals, artists, merchants, scientists) all with special passive and active bonuses, trade routes to grow the economy of your towns, spying to learn about your rivals and sabotage enemy cities, wonders to give you massive bonuses. There are lots of layers in Civilization VI, especially if you take into account everything else you need to do - manage resources, keep your population happy or face revolts, expand to new territories without occurring the wrath of nearby empires, defend yourself against barbarians… The list of things you have to semi-focus on is pretty big, which makes a quite complex game that can be played with simple commands; you move units, you select researches and buildings and everything goes. The game has documentation for pretty much all mechanics if you’re unsure about what they do, which helped me a few times.
My military campaign took a turn for the great when I managed to research planes, which were great at just destroying everything at extremely long distances and come back unscathed to my hangars. I really didn’t enjoy how it was impossible to destroy a city without conquering it with a ground unit. Having my planes go all around the map, destroying everything in sight, but still needing to truck along a foot soldier or two slowly behind was a chore, especially with animations enabled and the raw size of my plane army. At some point I developed nukes and decided to nuke a city, but I still needed to get a solider to capture it, the nuke basically doing nothing special, a bit disappointing.
After my military victory, I went for a science victory, this was a bit weird because I got messages every few turns from my opponents, telling me how my science was low and how much I was terrible because of it. Ultimately I won without too much problems, sending my manned expedition on mars before anybody else. Disabling animations sped up the whole thing quite drastically. I then went for a religious victory where you create a religion and send missionaries to convert all the other cities in the world. I couldn’t do it. The religion system was pretty interesting - buying units with faith, creating special buildings with special powers and all of that - but it was an endless back and forth between me and the other religions, and the rising cost of my missionaries made me wary of winning that way. Finally I tried the culture victory which implies that your civilization has the most tourism of all civilizations, which you increase with Great Works (famous paintings, books, songs) and other upgrades.
I couldn’t manage it either, I was entirely focused on culture and got attacked randomly by a few power hungry opponents, even by save-scumming and trying to get around these attacks, I ultimately gave up. The computer players in Civ 6 are a bit weird, they seem really fickle and have weird goals and will judge you for random things, which took me out of it. There’s a weird system where you can have ‘reasons’ to attack someone else and you have ‘penalties’ for doing it for bad reasons, but it’s not like the united nations came to my aid when I got reduced to rubble, so these penalties are pretty toothless.
In any case, Civilization VI is just wonderful. One more turn, please?
