I wish I could say the first thing I noticed about Civilization VI was one of its many changes over the last game. I wish I immediately saw the deep "leader traits" that lend each civilization a distinct flavor and powers or the terrain-based city building that forced me to consider the whole hex-based world when planting my wonders, settlements, and the "districts" new to the sequel.

Really, though, the first thing I noticed were the terrifying faces of the civ leaders themselves. With their photorealistic hands, skin, and hair planted under bulbous, cartoonish heads, these new leaders are clearly meant to evoke Civilization Revolution. I actually recoiled during the opening animation when the first speaking character came on-screen. Gilgamesh's perfectly conditioned, uncannily human beard just doesn't work as intended under those massive, Pixar-like eyes.

Uncanny Valley leaders aside, the game itself seems pretty good after working through a single, 500-turn match on the standard difficulty. That game length is pretty rare for me in a Civ title; normally, I crank up the number of landmasses and set the total turns to the maximum allowed, the better to properly take my time grinding through the series' midgame.

I do this partly because I'm usually not actually interested in winning games of Civilization. For me, it's the journey—building world wonders and seeing what new things I can develop—not the destination. Besides that, Civilization's endgame tends to be a bit of a chore. Grinding out Space Race research every turn just doesn't do it for me.

I can already see that Civ VI's AI seems to have some funny ideas about the endgame itself. This time around, each civilization is tuned in its own specific way. Queen Victoria, Gandhi, Philip II, and the gang get a heaping helping of more unique abilities and bonuses than in Civ V. This helps funnel NPCs (non-player civilizations) down single-minded paths to victory, or at least coexistence.

In my opening match, for instance, Qin Shi Huang was pretty wonder-centric—to the point that he'd spend the entire game trashing my superior diplomatic reputation. That turned out to be a problem because I'll be damned if I let someone else build the Terracotta Army. Or the Great Pyramid. Or the Hanging Gardens. (I like my wonders, you see.)

The total effect is that civilizations don't rely on one unique unit, or one special bonus, but instead a myriad of special abilities that usually work toward a common goal. This makes each leader feel very distinct, with a concrete personality designed to mimic their historical inspirations. I’m particularly interested in leading a civilization as Queen Victoria, for instance, since all of her traits make her military stronger on continents she hasn't settled and her unique naval unit can straight-up steal everybody else's boats. That's some good old British colonialism right there.













The AI's seeming determination to play it their way and only their way can also be a problem, though. Expansion-focused civilizations might spend half the game building up redundant settlers so they can build cities on land that's already occupied. Meanwhile, military powers are going to flood land, sea, and air with more units than you can mathematically keep up with.

That's especially true since, now more than ever, Civilization forces the player to make the tough choices. I can't just plop down those wonders I'm so fond of willy nilly anymore. They, like almost everything in Civilization VI, now depend on terrain. The Great Pyramids can only be built on unoccupied desert tiles, for instance, while the Great Lighthouse must be adjacent to a Harbor District with its own lighthouse.

What's a Harbor District? Why, that's one of Civ VI's other new developments. Rather than grinding out invisible Monopoly hotels inside settlements, Civilization VI has you build city upgrades inside of districts. These are placed on spaces near your cities that also need to meet certain requirements and can receive bonuses—like generating extra gold, culture, science, etc.—for exceeding them.

The cost is that districts eat up whatever natural resources those nearby tiles were generating. So if you want to build a neighborhood that houses more people, you might have to sacrifice the food those nearby grassy plains would be producing. That's just the cost of development.

As such, Civilization's midgame (thus far, at least) feels completely different from Civilization V. Rather than clicking "Next Turn" half a hundred times to develop invisible structures that will aid you later in the game, you're constantly working to extend your borders first. If you want X, Y, or Z upgrade from that wonder, you'll need a city with open space near both a hill and a mountain to do it.

It goes beyond just building wonders. The new city-building system is intricately woven into just about every corner of Civ VI. In order to build that wonder in under 200 turns, for instance, you'll also need to develop that new city. That means you'll need a trade route between it and your capital to boost production. But if you don't have enough capacity for another trade route, you'll have to build a Commercial District elsewhere to open up a slot. Meanwhile, the route itself will create roads over time (which means you don't need to build them manually, as in previous Civ games), which your own troops, settlers, builders, and the like can use to get around faster.

That last example is part of a general "smoothing" of the experience in Civilization VI. The influence of Civilization Revolution—the simpler, more accessible approach to Civ created for consoles and mobile devices—is reflected in more than Civ VI’s cartoonish art style. While a few of Civ Rev’s quality-of-life improvements found their way into Civilization V, I already feel them much more deeply in Civ VI.

In Civ VI, for instance, vital in-game information about cities and their citizens is displayed without having to dip into a single menu. More detailed information (like the exact rate a city's population growth is slowed by a lack of housing) is hinted at using color and other smart visual tricks. Finding the full details is only ever one click away rather than the two or three it may have taken before. Menu diving is now at a minimum.

Those small interface tweaks are vastly important even if you're a Civilization veteran. The new terrain-based building, district system, and decks of card-based government policies are just different enough to take some getting used to. Meanwhile, all these new features are so deeply ingrained into the Civ VI experience that they absolutely cannot be ignored, unlike some of the more minor additions to past games in the series.

I'll need to play quite a lot more to get a feel for the positive and negative impacts these ground-up changes have had on the classic Civ formula. So far, however, things look to have mostly changed for the better. More than that, the changes seem just drastic enough to make the fantastic Civilization V almost seem like a temporary step on the road from Civ IV to VI in retrospect.

Even after 500 turns in one sitting, I'm plenty interested to keep at it long enough to find out.