Sid Meier's Civilization VI (2016)

Civilization is one of my all-time favorite games, and the leap from the fifth to the sixth game is epic. It offers new mechanics, tons of stuff to do and build and a fresh new look over the older games. There is some new and relaxing music, more factions and overall, it is a huge improvement over the previous game.

Civilization has always been a turned based game in which you can build, move, attack or improve buildings in your turn. Every faction does their move simultaneously and after that, a new round starts. You win the game by conquering all the capitals, achieve cultural victory, science victory or a religious victory. This means that you are not bound to one specific goal. If your military sucks for example, you can try to build as many museums, theaters and zoo’s as possible, to get victorious on tourism and culture. You can trade with other factions/people, build alliances, open your borders, make some shady deals, it is just great.

You can play as many different world leaders from the days of old to the modern era. Alexander the Great, Saladin, Queen Victoria, and many more, they are all there. They all have their special bonusses and you should take advantage of them by building your empire accordingly. For example, Saladin is more focused on religion and trade and only in the starting eras, his military is strong. When the modern age arrives, you really struggle to achieve military successes. Every character has a little backstory that is historically accurate and fun to read.

The game is meant to be played online against friends or other people but offers some scenarios and a skirmish mode for you to play solo. You can always play against the AI factions, which are really well done. The balance of the AI is great and if you want a challenge, you will surely get it.

This installment in the series offer new mechanics like natural disasters, new ways of collecting resources from the map and a new system in which your era score determines if you are entering a golden age or a dark age. With a golden age, you prosper and thrive, with a dark age, you struggle to come around. You earn era score by discovering great inventions, doing research and achieve eureka moments. These new mechanics do require some DLC tough. I really liked the natural disaster mechanic, but sometimes, it got a little over the top. When you see your towns melt away by an active volcano, your harbor washed away by the twelfth million flood and see Darude with his sandstorm, raving over your farmlands, you know, they got no mercy on you.

The graphics and animations are beautiful. The map is blooming with life and movement, and I really like that everything is just so colorful and detailed. Many times, I zoom in close on my empire to see all the different quarries, lumber mills and dams spin and turn.

The sound effects and music are perfect. They are well designed for this game, and I think this is one of the better sound and music designs I have seen. The ambient music is really relaxing and when your units engage in combat, the shots and hits sound just great.

Like usual, Civilization is a hard game. It takes strategy, practice and management to master this game and even then, factors like starting point, barbarians and aggression from other players or states weigh even heavier. However, the game does offer excellent tutorials and gives you a fair chance to learn it.

Civilization VI is a game that I play to relax, with or without friends. Just taking my time, slowly building and developing my empire. I feel no stress, no time pressure, just pure joy and chill. It is one of the few games that I can always pick up and play, without it ever boring me. Maybe Civilization VII will be even better, I don’t know, but for now, this is just a masterpiece of a game that will always be one of my favorites.

Definitely recommend this gem.

I got into the Civ series with Civilization Revolution on the PS3. I enjoyed the strategy and the history aspect, so I bought Civ 5 for my computer and quickly learned Civ Revolution was Civilization on easy mode. Still, I enjoyed the deeper gameplay and so when Civ 6 was on sale I picked it up.

The first thing to talk about is the world leaders. While Civ 5 went for a more realistic character design, Civ 6 took cues from Revolution’s cartoonier designs. They’re not overdesigned or goofy by any means, but the world leaders look like they’ve walked out of a Pixar movie. While I know some people weren’t crazy about the change, I don’t mind it. The leaders have fun designs and inhabit their larger than life characteristics. The one thing I do consider a step down from Civ 5 is where the leaders are placed. All of them simply stand in a black void with a piece of artwork behind them. I much preferred Civ 5’s version that had the leaders in an actual appropriate setting; Washington in his study, Ramses on his throne, Napoleon on horseback. Those little flourishes did much for my immersion.

The leaders in Civ 6 are quieter than I remember. When you first encounter them they’ll have a nice speech, but outside of a few rare occasions they just seem to nod or grunt when interacting with them. I see how having a bunch of canned lines they repeat each time you visit them could be an issue, but I also just miss hearing all the different languages. There’s also a wide selection of leaders to pick from. There’s some usual staples like Kublai Khan, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, who's a fox, and Gandhi. But there’s also plenty of less well-known leaders, at least less well know to this Western historian. Along with Montezuma there are several Mesoamerican leaders and a large smattering of Southeast Asian and African leaders. Some of the bigger countries have sorta wildcard leaders. Instead of a Founding Father, or Lincoln, America is governed by Teddy Roosevelt. Trajan was chosen as the Caesar of Rome.

That’s what draws me the most to the Civ series, the historical aspect. You get to interact with lots of historic leaders, and famous figures in the guise of Great Artists, General, Writers, Scientists, etc. Each nation has their own unique units that relate to what they’re known for, like the Roman Legion or the p-51 Mustang. There’s a large selection of world wonders from all eras of history. Each new technology you learn is marked with a quote from a historic person, or just funny movie quotes. And the game is narrated by Sean Bean, which was a great choice. I often find myself doing outside reading on some of the people or places that struck my interest.

The world map looks great. You have grasslands that naturally fade into deserts or tundra. Mountains chains are imposing, the oceans look… oceany. The only natural feature that can be a bit lacking is the forests. They look more like a Christmas tree farm than an old growth forest. The Gathering Storm expansion added some dynamic shiftiness to the world. You can suffer droughts that dry up your crops, or volcano eruptions that set the surrounding area ablaze. Hurricanes roll in from the sea, and as your civilization advances into combustion engines global warming becomes an issue. I have a habit of building cities on the coasts, which becomes a liability for cities found pre-global warming. Luckily they give you flood walls you can construct, but I definitely lost parts of my cities to the briny blue. Your cities also look good here. You can make out the different districts and their buildings. The architecture changes with the time period. The world wonders are detailed and fun to build.

One thing this game added for city building that I enjoy is the ability to create districts that are adjacent to your city capital. Instead of just building an Industrial district that inhabits a small part of the tile your city center sits on, you build a legit addon to your city. It makes your more populated and prosperous cities look like actual sprawling metropolises. You can see all the buildings in your Entertainment Square instead of just having to imagine them. It adds a new element of strategy as well. You have to found cities while thinking ahead of how you want to expand it. On top of the already established considerations of building near valuable resources; like iron deposits, silver mines, fishing spots, cattle and horses, etc. If your not lucky enough to have a certain resource you’ve got to make a trade deal for it. As your population grows, your city borders expanded, and if you need a quick expansion, you can buy a tile for some gold. Unfortunately, the game gives you only certain tiles you can buy on your border which don’t seem to have a rhyme or reason. My coastal city could’ve expanded to include a tile with a coal mine, but it would only let me buy a pointless ocean tile.

That resource management in a large portion of the game, but the other portion involves making nice with your neighbors. Starting out, you come across barbarians that you can kill guilt free, but when you encounter other civilizations and city states, shooting first isn’t always the best idea. You can obviously go for a Domination Victory, but you’ve got to be prepared to be a social pariah of the world stage. The system of balancing political favors, grievances, truces, and deals is robust enough to support the game, but the AI players aren’t always up to snuff. Each leader has certain likes and dislikes, so if you play enough to learn them, you can metagame a little there. These do seem like the most sensible AI in a Civ game I’ve played. They don’t all automatically declare war on you once you’ve discovered space flight or the bomb. They are bound to the same rules as you, so waging wars willy-nilly will lose them allies just like you would lose them. There’s also more paths available to resolve issues without a fight.

Since I played on one of the easier difficulty, the AI leaders were much more lenient with me. I still had to manage my empire smartly to ensure I won. There are several victory conditions. The typical domination victory never appealed to me, because my army always seemed to just a few steps behind everyone else’s army, so most my war’s end in a loss. The science victory hasn’t changed much, it’s all about getting to space and setting up a space colony over several years. The cultural victory is all about spreading your nation’s culture to other nations using tourism, I don’t understand all the details of it. I also believe there’s a way to achieve a religious victory. I ended up winning a Diplomatic victory which seems like the easy way to win. You slowly gain diplomat points as you play nice with the world leaders, and there’s special events where you compete for Nobel prizes to earn a boost to your diplomat points. Another aspect of it is the World Council you participate in. They can grant certain bonuses or disadvantages to types of units or buildings or be used to give a certain character a handicap or advantage. It’s not super deep, but it give you something else to manage. One victory condition they got rid of that I miss is the Economic Victory. My Civ games often end with me being an economic powerhouse more than anything else, so losing the ability to use money to win hurt my strategy.

All in all, I really enjoy this iteration of the Civilization series. It’s got the right amount of depth and strategy and the AI seems the most balanced of the three Civ games I’ve played. There’s so many ways you can build your nation to make it distinct from your opponents and even distinct from other playthroughs. The leaders are all fun to interact with and like any good Civ game, I was telling myself "just one more turn".

• Year played: 2019
• Playtime: 40+ hours
• Completion level: a few completed rounds

I think it's kind of telling that I defined my completion of this game as "a few rounds" and yet my playtime is dozens of hours. Civ 6 is a game that really needs no introduction, it's the classic turn-based 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate) game of building up your civilization while trying not to get nuked by Gandhi.

I don't really have much to say about the game that hasn't been said before, so I'll just put in a few words about the switch port:

In general, it plays fairly well, and they did an excellent job of adapting the game to be playable with a controller. They did as well as they could with the performance all things considered - it's obviously going to run slower than on my PC (I own it there too), but it wasn't quite as bad as I expected. However, I do tend to favor playing more sparse maps and don't warmonger much, which helps.

If you like playing densely populated maps and managing large armies, you will hit slow loading times more often. Turning off unit attack animations and similar settings does help. Since it has cross-save, sometimes I'd move my save file to my PC and finish a round there if I got too annoyed with the loading times. Still, it's definitely playable, and on a portable console it's one of my favorite things to have with me on a long flight. Just "one more turn..." and suddenly you're landing at your destination.

One last thing to call out is that like all Civ games, the initial release is fairly weak and it needs the expansions to be a fully fleshed out game. They are available on the switch as an additional DLC and I would not recommend buying the game without them - which makes this a bit of an expensive purchase.

Well this was a nice surprise! Discovering a new series, loving it and even getting totally hooked! After a rocky start and not knowing what I was doing, everything clicked by the end and I was able to turn things around and pull out the science victory while taking steps to hinder a near cultural victory for my nearest rival. What felt like insignificant events turned out to be key and had lasting effects. I immediately want to do another playthrough with all the knowledge I have now but I've got other stuff to play so I'm going to leave it for a bit. But man, I was hooked!

Only downside on Switch is a bit of input lag.

And I had to turn the music off. I can't be walking around with Waltzing Matilda in my head all day!

I have over 400 hours in Civ V and now just got around to putting some time in Civ VI. There are huge changes in this, the biggest being the district system. I'm sure it will take some time to determine whether I like them or not, but it's clear that my strategies from Civ V don't rotate over.

Largely I find combat more fun in this and as I understand the boosts and inspirations I expect I'll be able to better plan out my moves. I think I've squandered focusing certain cities by not understanding how the terrain and resources affect things.

I've played at least 4 different iterations of Civilizations, including 3, 4, Colonization and now 6. They all seem very very similar. Civ 6 copies the district system of Endless Legend, has an extra tech tree and changes some other minor stuff but it doesn't feel that different from Civ 4. Combat sucks, your options are very limited, luck is a huge factor, et cetera.

Civ seems primitive not just next to other 4X series but even to games like Age of Empires 3. The main problem with Civ is that it's set up as a board game. There's only a handful of cities, units, grid spaces, heroes and the like. Having a slightly worse location can make a big difference. Losing a single unit can set you back immensily, especially because they make up the entire army. Because luck is such a big factor they have to compensate by balancing the factions to such a degree that they're barely different. Especially coming from Stellaris it's really glaring.

Every game just feels the same. It doesn't help that the early game is boring compared to other 4X games too. No anomalies, the same random barbarians every time, the same 2-3 research options every time, the same sleep-inducing combat. It's basically the "Ameritrash vs Eurotrash" situation. Some people voluntarily play Catan, other people want a grown-up game like Agricola. Some people voluntarily play Civ, other people want a game that isn't a slightly-more advanced parcheesi. :-P

Civilization is one of my favourite game franchises of all time, and I was stoked when I heard it was coming to the Switch. Because it's a very addicting and time-consuming game, I waited until the Christmas holidays to start up a campaign, and I just spent three nights in a row playing until 2 am to finish it.

I played as Australia, and not long after I landed a man on the moon, pushing myself ahead in a very tight space race, Russia came out of nowhere and won with a cultural victory. Needless to say, I was chapped.

Civilization VI adds a lot to the classic Civ gameplay, making for a slightly different game experience, but I'm undecided whether I prefer it to Civ V, which currently sits at number 15 on my top games of all time list.

Right off the bat, one of the changes I didn't like was that you can no longer automate builders. I believe the reason for this change is that builders disappear after three improvements, so automating them wouldn't really be great. This change forces you to micromanage your cities a lot more, paying attention to their food and production levels, constantly buying more builders and telling them what to improve. I found this tedious and annoying, and I wish I could have just let them keep track of my farms for me like before. I can say, however, that it added an extra layer of strategy, simply because I had to pay attention to when my cities were starving.

On a similar note, housing and amenities seemed to play a larger role in this game. Maybe it was simply because my builders took care of everything in Civ V, but in this campaign I had to pay a lot more attention to the housing and amenities in each city, and it really impacted what choices I made when building new buildings and districts.

That leads me to the next big change: districts. In previous entries, the game would just place new buildings and wonders somewhere on the city's tile; now each type of city improvement has to be on its own tile beside the city. These are called districts, and there are a whole bunch of them, from entertainment and commerce, to military and wonders. I liked this concept because it was kind of like building little suburbs, but it was also kind of annoying because you could run out of space. In the late game, I often had to destroy improvements like mines and seaside resorts in order to build neighbourhoods and spaceports. In one case, I built a city too close to my capital, and it ended up having nowhere to grow, so I could never expand the city at all. Again, I like the concept, but I'm not sure I prefer it mechanically to the old way.

The other big change I wanted to mention was the Civics tree. In this game, on top of choosing technologies to Research, you also have to choose Civics to research, the advancing of which is based on your culture. I actually liked this a lot. It was annoying at first having to work with both trees, but it allowed for more customization, and it actually made culture meaningful. Tourism was added to help with the cultural victory. Both trees could be boosted by performing specific tasks, called eureka moments. This made working towards the science victory a lot more active and fun.

Playing Civilization on the Switch was great because I could bring it with me, and the Switch is more powerful than my Mac, so it was faster and smoother. However, the controls took some getting used to, and I didn't feel like they were very intuitive. Other than that, it was a great experience.

If you liked the Civilization franchise in the past, and you own a Switch, definitely get this game. Just make sure you have a lot of time to spare, because you will get addicted.