![]() ![]() ![]() They’ve even solved the series’ endgame tendency to devolve into a boring click-slog, where you’re like an elected official caught in a soporific bill-signing loop. Forget Sid Meier’s games as “a series of interesting decisions,” this is design as one surprise after another. ![]() The design team told me back in May that it wanted Civilization VI to push players outside their comfort zones. It reminds me a bit of the secret finale to Jonathan Blow’s The Witness: pattern recognition and prediction only get you so far. You have to think on your feet in C ivilization VI in ways you’ve never had to before. The point of all this elasticity is pattern preemption-to destabilize players who’d otherwise slip into comfortable ruts. It’s a wonderfully intuitive way of imbuing governments with the sort of ideological dynamism it feels like the series has been nosing around for forever. Quicker production of air units and naval carriers? Grab “Strategic Air Force.” Culture point boosts linked to special districts? Select “Meritocracy.” You only get periodic shots to reshuffle the deck, so choices matter, but aren’t forever. Want more envoys? Pick the “Diplomatic League” or “Containment” cards. No longer static decisions that illogically hound you indefinitely, policies are now mini-boosts you drag-and-drop into swappable slots. Or consider the new deck of cards policy system, which ties military, economic and diplomatic perks to colored cards unlocked by cultural advances. The more you progress along certain paths, the more envoys you can dispatch to city states, the greater the odds you’ll out-woo an opponent and turn city-states into reliable surrogates (they always instantly auto-attack whoever you’re at war with). What you want to do is woo them with guileful envoys, sharing in their spoils and converting them into proxies. You can attack and overwhelm them, but that’s a waste. They’ll look after themselves but never really expand. City states are still cities unto themselves-more than barbarians but less than full opponents. You can still only tackle one project at a time, so choosing wisely (and ignoring generally wrongheaded advisor picks) is paramount. Religious Holy Sites let you add a shrine, temple and cathedral in a hex, for instance, while science-oriented Campuses let you add libraries, universities and research labs in another. Districts by themselves offer a nominal science or culture or faith or capital bonus when built, but they’re really just scaffolding for subsequent builds. Instead of municipalities getting squished into single tiles, a bit like Doctor Who’s TARDIS, they now splay across the map, each city center (one hex) surrounded by fields of districts that take up a hex a piece. Like unpacking cities, easily the boldest changeup since 2010’s Civilization V upended the game board by swapping out grids for hexes. That disappointment doubles when you contrast this with all the stuff Civilization VI gets right. While my assumptions about why the computer’s doing what it’s doing could be wrong, it shouldn’t be this easy to pull off Prince or King difficulty wins. But there’s something not quite right here. Playing on large maps with 10 civilizations for over 500 turns, paying perfunctory attention to all the new numbers and icons roosting around the interface’s frame, shouldn’t be a glide path to victory. Trouncing Civilization on the higher difficulty settings shouldn’t be this easy. ![]()
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