Update: Civilization VI has been nominated for IGN's 2016 Game of the Year.

Every game in the legendary, 25-year-old Sid Meier’s Civilization

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That can make the first few games feel overwhelming, even with the tutorials. The tutorials are good, but the amount of decisions you’re prompted to make from the very beginning of a game that will have significant impact on your late-game success is intimidating. That said, as an experienced Civilization player I got up to speed relatively quickly and, on my second playthrough, was able to hold my own on King difficulty without understanding everything. I still feel like I’m learning more and more with every game.

“ A lot of depth emerges from the new city-building system.

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Because we’re playing on randomized maps every time, effectively laying out your cities’ districts and Wonders is a challenging puzzle. There are loads of tradeoffs to consider, but the biggest is asking if you’d be better off building a district or a Wonder or working the tile they’d occupy for food and production resources, potentially allowing your city to grow bigger in the late game. Those are decisions that always feel like they matter.

“ The land-grab phase feels urgent and exciting.

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Speaking of the mid game, the changes Firaxis has made to reduce unit clutter from that point on are extremely smart. The first problem in most Civilization games has been that at a certain point you (and all the AI players) get stuck with a dozen or so automated Worker units sitting around idling with no more city tiles to improve, which just makes turns take longer to calculate if you don’t manually disband them. In Civilization VI, Workers (now called Builders) expire after they’ve been used a few times – three, by default, but that can be expanded by government policies or wonders – they’re no longer hanging around doing nothing. And if you need a new one, they’re quick to build and affordable to immediately buy with gold. They can’t be automated, either, which makes the decisions of where to spend their limited charges feel meaningful again as well.

Secondly, when Civilization V switched from allowing you to stack military units onto a single tile (as had been the custom through Civilization IV) to limiting you to one military unit per tile it created a more tactical kind of combat, but also caused an enormous traffic jam when you built a large army. Civilization VI gets that under control by finding a great compromise between stacks and one-unit-per-tile: once you research certain technologies you can combine two and then three identical military units into a single, more powerful corps or army unit (not entirely dissimilar to Civilization IV’s Warlords). Thus the number of military units taking up space and blocking paths in the late game is sharply reduced by a half or even two-thirds, if you choose to take advantage of it. AI armies are also reduced, which means they have fewer things to shuffle around on their turns.

Those AI nations are each guided by one of the 20 available leaders, and each of them has agendas that guide their behavior. That gives diplomacy some much-needed transparency that’s long been missing in Civilization games. Once you’ve established a relationship with a leader through cozying up or espionage, you can see why they’re happy or angry with you and what steps you might be able to take to change that. Egypt’s Cleopatra, for example, likes other civilizations who have strong armies, and Queen Victoria likes nations that started on the same continent as England. They also have a randomized second agenda, such as preferring countries that have a high population or hating those who have more money than they do, so they’re unpredictable in every new game. It’s a big step toward demystifying their behavior.

Some of these agendas are irrational, such as Queen Victoria disliking when you colonize a continent she has her eye on (there’s no way to know which one) or German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa getting mad when you interact with City-States (which you’d have to go out of your way not to do), so it’s basically impossible to not anger someone at some point when you’re simply going about your businesses of taking over the world. But you can mostly balance those offenses out by establishing embassies, conducting trade, respecting treaties, or just being friendly. The one downside I’ve encountered is that in order to see what their motivations are you first have to have a level of access with them, and if you meet a new country in the mid game that dislikes you for unknown reasons it’s very difficult to establish a good enough relationship to find out why they were angry in the first place. And they’re not entirely consistent – they’ll sometimes go from seemingly friendly to aggressive, presumably because they saw an opportunity they couldn’t resist. (To be fair I’ve been guilty of that one myself.) And one time I saw what must’ve been a bug, where an AI first hated me for having a small navy but then for a few turns thought I had a huge navy before realizing I’d never built a single ship and going back to hating me.