Sid Meier’s Civilization IV can be really intimidating for newcomers to the series – myself included – and they don’t do a really good job teaching you how to play. But once you understand how the game works by your own trial and error, you find one of the deepest and most satisfying experiences you could ask for in a game.

Are you new here? So am I

I was hesitant on making a review for Civilization VI because this is my first in the series and my first type of game in this genre so I couldn’t speak on past experiences. Most reviews I saw compared it to the previous games, but what if you’re new to the series like myself and don’t know that the previous games are like? So I decided to write this up and after playing my first full game, which lasted about 20-25 hours. I thought I should let people know how great this game really is and how they shouldn’t be intimidated by this extremely deep and complex system it carries. I will also do my best to explain all the important aspects clearly in the earlier sections, but you can scroll down to the A Whole New World section if you just want my thoughts on the game or check out a video review I’m testing out here.

This is my Empire

Before starting Civilization VI, you have the option to choose a leader to control and set options like difficulty, how fast the game will be, the map type, and the map size or you can hit ‘Play Now’ and have everything randomized (this is what I did). Each of the leaders has abilities that correlate to the country they are from. For example, Qin Shi Huang – the leader of China and the leader I ended up playing – has the ability to construct a ‘Great Wall’ around their city which is unique to China. After choosing all the beginning settings and choosing your leader, you begin your first game with one group of settlers for creating your first city- aka the capital of your empire – and warriors you can use to search the area around you and fight if need be.

There are 3 main components to a city; citizen growth, amenities, and housing. Citizen growth depends on how much food you’re bringing and how much housing is available, the more food and housing the quicker your population grows, but if you don’t have enough food your people will start to starve and eventually die one by one. Amenities are essentially the happiness of your people and probably the most important aspect of your city, the more amenities you have the happy your people will be. You gain amenities by having luxury resources, entertainment districts, and more. Amenities are affected by war as well so if you’re are currently at war your capital will suffer “war weariness” and if they are extremely unhappy, they will revolt and start attacking the city. Housing is very basic if you don’t have enough housing your growth rate is slowed, but where the strategy comes in is when you decide where to build your houses and other districts.

Tiles, Resources, Districts OH MY

Civilization VI is based on a tile system. Each tile gives you food and production and building farm on that land will give you the food and production of said tile. Production is used to increase the speed in which you build things, the more production you have the fast your building speed will be. Tiles might also have various resources on them scattered throughout the map like wheat (a bonus resource), silver (a luxury resource), or iron (a strategic resource) as examples. It would be best to start a city where you have a lot of good resources around you so you don’t have to go far when you need a specific resource. Tiles are also important when building things such as neighborhoods, entertainment districts, wonders, etc. because some of these places have requirements or are better to build in specific parts of your city. For example, when building a campus, I would get more points building it adjacent to a mountain and district tile or when building a neighborhood, it would serve you better to build next to the water for more housing from that neighborhood.

The Trees of the Future

Civilization VI has two trees that you use to develop either your technology and civics. Advancing in these trees will allow you to enter into different eras of time which will then allow you to upgrade your empire and the districts within.

The technology tree allows you upgrade your city and troops to the era you are currently in. For example, if you are in the Medieval Era you will be able to acquire knights, medieval walls for your city, or a university, but when you progress to the Modern Era, your knights can become tanks, you gain the ability to make an airport, and you gain access to electricity. The civics tree works the same way but the rewards are somewhat different. You still get building schematics related to that era, but you also get new forms of government along with policy cards that you can attach to the current government you have for perks.

Each tree is based on turns, as the entire game is. It takes a certain amount of turns to unlock that part of the tree and the further the era the more turns it takes to unlock. Although each section of the tree has a side objective you can do to lower the turns needed to unlock. This is where I went wrong, I didn’t bother with the side objectives and because of that, I was behind most of the civilizations around me in terms of progress. While I was sitting with my knights, Greece strolls by my city with a tank.

Victory?

The way you win the game is to have the most points by the end of the standard 500 turns. As you can see above I’m 455 turns in and I’m losing significantly to Brazil while Greece was slightly ahead of me. To increase your score, you must surpass other civilizations’ developments in the 4 main categories; science, culture, domination, and religion. To win in science you must make it to the Moon (I wasn’t even close to that), to win in culture you must have an abundance of tourists (I was close in this category), to win in religion you must convert other cities to your religion, and to win in domination you must take over other cities with your army. I lost the religion category very earlier on because I was still learning the game. What happened was an Islamic priest came into my city and converted all my people to Islam and once too many have been converted your own religion disappears.

The only category I actually won was domination because of Saladin, King of the Arabians, who decided to go to war with me not knowing that I was focusing on my army in the late game, but this was probably the reason I lost. While focusing on one thing and ignoring the others, it allowed the other civilizations around me to exceed me in the other developments making me lose whatever lead I had in those categories.

A Whole New World

This is one of the few games that made think… A LOT. Every decision you make or have to make on every turn is important towards your end goal and can either destroy or expand your empire. Making hard decisions isn’t something I’m good at – some might even call me indecisive (It’s me, I call myself that) – but this game really pushed me to make tough choices for the good of my people. All the components mentioned above blend together seamlessly it’s hard to think why I haven’t jumped into these type of games before especially when I had friends telling me how great it was.

I think the reason I lost my first game was because of my advisor. Most of the time I was building what she recommended in each of my cities but by the end, I realized I shouldn’t have been building everything in all my cities, I should have been focusing on certain things in different cities like culture in one and science in another. She was also constantly telling me to build trade routes when I had enough and it really put me behind on my building early on.

The AI/other leaders in this game are relatively smart and know what is going on. When I moved some of my archers close to the border of Greece, Pericles, leader of the Greek Empire, asked me what my intents were. I told him to relax I was merely passing by. Although there were times where they didn’t act until very late. For example, when I was at war with the Arabians, I had their capital surrounded and I had one shot before I would destroy their city and take over, but only then is when the Arabian king offered peace with everything he owned. I felt like he should have offered peace sooner and maybe if he did, I would have shown him mercy. With that minor complaint in mind, interacting with these other leaders was entertaining, to say the least, and having them react to my movements brought more life to the game, not that it needed it.

Verdict

These type of strategy games like the Civilization series always scared me away because every time I would look at someone else play it I would think to myself “what the hell is going on”. After playing Sid Meier’s Civilization VI for roughly 25 hours and really trying to learn how everything works myself, I found a very deep and satisfying experience, where every move counts and the choices you make will end up building a stronger empire or burn it down to the ground. I can’t wait to hop back in with a different leader and a harder difficulty with my knowledge from my first play through and have my empire that will one day be victorious.

PROS:

Beautifully Crafted Gameplay

High Replay Value

Packed With Content

CONS:

AI Could Use Tweaking

SCORE: 9/10