I come to you with knowledge that may help you in your quest to conquer worlds yet to be generated, and will also make the process much more appealing. All of the hours I’ve spent with Civilization 6 [official site] so far have taught me a thing or two, and I’ve filled the gaps in my learning by searching the internet for fixes and quality of life tweaks to address some of my complaints. Below, you’ll find help on managing districts, armies, amenities and the rest, as well as tips on some of the smaller things, like map rotation (yes, it’s possible!) and other camera controls. You can browse through the pages of these tweaks using the arrows above or below the image at the top, or by using the arrow keys on your own keyboard.

Map Rotation If you’ve built a wonder in Civ 6, you’ve probably enjoyed the camera panning around the construction site as the thing is finished, showing not just the scale of the wonder itself, but views of the city alongside it from every side. The cities are so handsome, and so well-worked into the terrain, that it seems a shame you can’t adjust the angle of viewing yourself, doesn’t it?

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Well, you can. Hold down alt while pressing the left mouse button and you can rotate the map to your heart’s content. It’ll snap back to the default view when you let go of the buttons, which is handy for orientation but a bit of a pain if you really like your new view on the world. There’s a fix for that already, though it’s a little rough and requires editing of game files. You can find instructions here, courtesy of Steam user reavver. (gif taken from this video)

WASD Map Scrolling & More I hate that I can’t scroll the map using the WASD keys. My right hand rests on the mouse when I’m playing and whenever that hand is on the mouse, my left hand naturally falls onto the WASD keys and their surroundings. Muscle memory makes it so. It’s the PC gaming default pose, right? Civ 6 wants me to move my left hand all the way across the keyboard to the arrow keys though, as they’re the only ones that scroll the map by default. Because my desk has a fairly small surface size, it’s actually uncomfortable to play like that, my hands bundled together as if they’re ready to be bound. Thankfully, WASD scrolling (or any other kind of scroll rebinding) can be mine and yours with a fairly simple file edit. Use any text editor to do the following (it’ll even work while you’re in-game; just make sure to save the edited file): Navigate to the game’s UI assets directory. For steam installations, this should be located at: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier’s Civilization VI\Base\Assets\UI

Open the WorldInput.lua file in a text editor.

Navigate to the DefaultKeyDownHandler function.

Navigate to the line that has the following text:

if( uiKey == Keys.VK_UP ) then

This line is a conditional statement that triggers two conditions, one of which is m_isUPpressed. This condition tells the game that the UP UI option is activated. Another function in this file then activates the appropriate camera panning. In order to trigger this condition with another keyboard key, modify the conditional statement as follows (I’ve used W for the 21st century standard WASD setup):

if( uiKey == Keys.VK_UP or uiKey == Keys.W ) then

That’s all you need to modify on that line. Repeat this step for the next three conditions in the function, using the appropriate key as necessary:

if( uiKey == Keys.VK_RIGHT or uiKey == Keys.D ) then

if( uiKey == Keys.VK_DOWN or uiKey == Keys.S ) then

if( uiKey == Keys.VK_LEFT or uiKey == Keys.A ) then

Almost done. We need to repeat these steps in the DefaultKeyUpHandler function. Luckily, the conditional statements are exactly the same. As before:

if( uiKey == Keys.VK_UP or uiKey == Keys.W ) then

if( uiKey == Keys.VK_RIGHT or uiKey == Keys.D ) then

if( uiKey == Keys.VK_DOWN or uiKey == Keys.S ) then

if( uiKey == Keys.VK_LEFT or uiKey == Keys.A ) then It’s nowhere near as complex as it looks. There are other camera control tweaks on this reddit page, created by Xacius who is responsible for the above.

Auto Unit Cycling If you’ve ever been caught up in a large land war, whether in Asia or elsewhere, you might well believe you’ve fallen into a classic blunder. Imagine you’ve set up units around a city, laying siege to it while reinforcements move up from your encampments right across the continent. And every few turns you’re churning out new units to join the train. You probably don’t want the game to keep cycling between all of those units rather than letting you pick and choose which ones you want to move and when. That automatic unit cycling can be disabled with a very swift single digit change to the options.txt file. Go to: Documents/My Games/Sid Meier’s Civilization VI/User, open Options.txt and ctrl+F “auto cycle”. That should take you to this line: ;Does the selection auto cycle to the next available unit? (0 = no, 1 = yes) AutoUnitCycle 1 Just change the last character, the 1, to a 0. Save and you’re good to go. And while we’re talking about units, I’ve noticed a few people wondering how to find a list of everything that they own. There is one: when you have a unit selected, click on its name in the bottom right area of the screen where its details live, and you’ll get a drop-down menu containing every unit you currently own.

Remove Startup Logos One last thing while we’re talking about editing files and then we’ll move on to some other business that’ll help out with management of those fancy new cities and their districts. If you want to squeeze every second out of your Civ sessions, you should disable those logos that play before the game lets you get at its menus. The actual intro can be disabled in the options menu but you’ll still have publisher and developer logos to sit through. They last a few seconds, sure, but if you can zap ’em, why not? Reddit user gruez has details on how to do that: 1) rename Sid Meiers Civilization VI\Base\Platforms\Windows\Movies\logos.bk2 to something else

2) download https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18778144/00004.bk2 and rename/move it to Sid Meiers Civilization VI\Base\Platforms\Windows\Movies\logos.bk2

3) enjoy your Now, onto something a little meatier…

District Construction I don’t mind that some things are a little opaque in Civ 6 because figuring out exactly how the systems work can be enjoyable, but some of the new features lack the kind of documentation I’d like to see. There seems to be some confusion about districts, specifically relating to how much they cost to build and why that is at various points during a playthrough. I’ve read suggestions that the cost of a new district relates to the number of districts you already own, or even the number of districts that exist globally at any one time. That seemed extremely harsh and some experimentation with hotseat play, backed up by similar research I’ve read online, seems to definitively disprove it. As far as I can tell, the cost of building districts is tied to the techs and civics any given civilization has unlocked, and isn’t affected by any global parameters at all. That means it’s best to build districts early (which might explain why your advisor recommends them constantly as soon as they become possible). That makes sense to me – although it isn’t always the case, great universities, galleries, religious buildings and commercial hubs tend to have historical associations with a city. If you want your capital to be a centre of science, it’s harder to kickstart the populace in that direction if you wait until the modern age to introduce specialised districts. The ties between district cost and techs unlocked makes it important to have a plan for your cities as early as possible.

Amenities And Happiness If your Civizens (I’ll never use that again, sorry) become too unhappy, barbarians will spawn all around your cities. It’s a horrible thing and you definitely want to avoid it, but confusion about precisely what Amenities do and how many you need might hamper your efforts. You’ve no doubt realised that your people want Amenities and that the larger a city, the more it’ll crave, but how far does a single luxury resource stretch, and is there any point in gathering multiple resources of the same type? In answer to the last question, the point of multiple resources of the same type is trade. The first instance of each luxury resource that you harvest provides four amenities, one of which can be used on a single city. That means one instance of silver, for example, can provide one amenity to four cities. A second silver resource can be mined but the resource is not converted into amenities. However, you can trade the silver with another civ for either cash or an alternative luxury that you don’t have within your own borders. That makes monopolies useful, because in the later stages of the game, everyone will be chasing the one luxury they don’t have and that you do have in abundance. Of course, they might just kill you and take it. The amenities that resources grant are dished out as needed, with cities lacking amenities taking priority over those that already have them. There are other ways to boost happiness, including entertainment districts and the abilities of some Great People. The important thing to remember with districts is that they often exert an influence across a certain area on the map, so cities placed in close proximity can sometimes benefit from their neighbours.

Citizens And Housing To grow, cities need food. Oh, and the citizens who are produced as a result of all that good eatin’ need housing, or the city won’t actually expand. Oh, and then there are citizen slots to think about as well. If you’re confused about growth and precisely what the difference is between housing and citizen slots, fear not. The answers are here. You can see how many turns remain until a city grows by clicking on it, but the green bar to the left of the city’s name on the map also gives you that information. When it’s full, the city’s size increases by one. That means one more tile can be worked (though doesn’t mean the border expands; that’s still tied to that city’s culture production and nothing else, I think, though I don’t understand the specifics yet), yielding all of its resources. Growth will stop if no surplus food is available but even if you have food, a lack of housing space means that the bar can fill all it wants, but the city won’t grow. The quickest way to get housing is to create a builder and add some improvements around the city. You won’t make a great deal of space, but you’ll get other benefits from the improvements as well. Citizen slots are the equivalent of the old ‘specialist’ workers in previous Civs. They exist within districts and their buildings, allowing multiple citizens to occupy and create resources from a single tile for true specialisation. One final tip when it comes to managing citizens – when you select a city, the buttons with the yield icons (science, faith, culture etc) on that little box in the bottom right allow you to prioritise one kind of production by clicking on it. And if you click twice, you can have your citizens entirely ignore any of the resources, which is handy when you really want to fine-tune a city’s productivity. I ban religion in many of my cities as soon as I realise it’s of no use to me, disabling all faith production.

Surplus Great Works You’ve got two Great Writers and a Great Artist milling around the place, unwilling to get real jobs and incapable of producing any art because all of your museums, galleries and the like are already full. What to do? There’s a fairly obvious solution that I failed to spot until this weekend just gone, despite having been playing the game for a month at that point. If you’re not willing to wait until a new slot for a Great Work is ready – and creating such a slot sometimes requires building an entire new city – then simply trade one of the existing Great Works with another civ so that you can move the Great Person to the building with a now-vacant slot and let him/her work the artsy magic. You can make a massive profit from those works in the right circumstances, or you can manipulate the world stage like a Machiavellian art dealer.