Five times now over the past 25 years, Sid Meier and his teams of expert strategy game designers have created the Earth and populated it with competing nations. Each iteration of the notoriously addictive Sid Meier’s Civilization series has taken the same concept of reenacting variations on humanity’s history of conflict and technological development and built a similar, but distinctly different turn-based strategy game around it from the mind of a new lead designer.

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“ Firaxis aims to fix one of its biggest issues with Civilization 5.

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“ The number of Districts a city can support is limited by its population.

Coastal cities will have a boost to naval research.

“ Existing outside the city walls gives the Military Encampment tactical advantages.

Pink districts house culture buildings, the blue ones house science.

Super Science

“ Every technology on the tree will have an activity associated with it that will improve your research rate.

Now that's a Wonder.

“ If you’re going to out-Wonder the Wonder-obsessed guy, you’re going to go to war with him.

Wonders now have room to breathe and be impressive.

Today, publisher 2K and developer Firaxis announced that the sixth iteration of the series will arrive in just six months on October 21, 2016; for Civilization 6 First, the groundwork must be laid. Notably, this is the first Civ game since Civilization 4 in 2004 to launch with a completely new game engine – one Firaxis says it’s designed from the ground up with deep mod support in mind. Despite being rebuilt from the ground up, Beach promises that unlike most of its predecessors, Civilization 6 won’t be stripped down to its bare essentials in its initial release form. We can expect a set of features that’s comparable to what’s currently in Civilization V in its post-expansion state, including trade, religion, archeology, espionage, Great Works, Culture Victory, and more. “We have almost all of that in there,” he says.Firaxis is also starting from a better place with the AI, which had some issues when we first played Civilization 5’s busier one-unit-per-tile combat. “We started with all the know-how and a lot of the lessons learned of what worked and what didn’t,” says Beach. “There’s a lot we learned about player expectation, for how an AI should behave and which moves the AI might have failed to make early on in Civ 5 that players were anticipating. You know like, players always like that if you could capture one of their civilians, they expect to see that happen.” In other words, this AI already knows the tricks Civ 5 had to learn over time.“We wanted to make people think on their feet,” he said, describing the mantra for his team at the Maryland-based development studio as they set out to reinvent this classic game yet again. “We want them to have to adjust to the map and play the map that is presented to them, which is going to make them have to rethink their strategies.”Among many changes, Beach highlights two that he believes will make the biggest difference. The first is what he calls “Unstacking the cities,” a reference to the way Civilization 5 flattened out the “Stack of Doom” armies that ruled Civilization 1 through 4 and limited each tile to having just one military unit on it at a time. “All of the sudden the military side of the game got much more interesting,” he observes. “There’s all sort of tactical complexity that was unlocked by putting the units out on the map.” So for Civilization 6 Beach’s team has applied the same concept to cities, which in all previous games have always existed on a single tile, cramming every building into that space.Instead, Firaxis has created the concept of 12 different types of color-coded Districts (five or six of which will be available from the beginning) that exist on their own tiles on the map, outside the city center and will house specific building types. “A science district, which we’ve called a campus, once constructed will allow you to put a library and a university and a research lab out on that tile. And now your city is sort of specialized toward being a really good science city,” says Beach.“Every city is a handcrafted, hex-by-hex layout puzzle,” adds Beach, pointing out that you’ll have to go back and reevaluate your land use choices in the late game when new options become available.These changes obviously have a big impact not only on production, but on warfare and intelligence-gathering. “Scouting and approaching an enemy is a very very meaningful activity,” says Beach. “You can see if they have Wonders that they’ve started because they’ll be constructing in front of your eyes right there on the map. You can see if you have two or three cities on the border, which one might be his heavy industry city and which is where his science research is going on.” This allows you to make educated tactical decisions on what areas of the enemy you want to cripple first – take down unit production, halt scientific advancement to maintain a technological advantage, cripple food production, etc. On the other side, in the late game you’ll have to decide which districts to defend best against ground or bombing attacks.Warfare is largely consistent with the hex-based battles we saw in Civilization 5, but with some important tweaks. In that post-mortem, Firaxis’ team found they loved the tactical nuance of one-unit-per-tile combat and didn't want to lose it, but they did want to reduce congestion as many military units tried to navigate terrain crowded. The first change implemented in Civilization 6 is the concept of support units, wherein something like a siege tower, battering ram, or anti-tank or anti-aircraft gun can stack with a typical military unit.Second, the concept of grouping into formations. Calling it a long-requested feature, Shirk says you’ll be able to link two units (one military and one civilian) together and will be able to move them around together with a single movement command. “That’s really nice with civilian units, as you can escort settlers or builders or missionaries around the map.”Finally, to minimize late-game unit bloat, Firaxis has created Corps and Armies: two or three of the same unit type (a Rifleman, for instance) combined into a single, more powerful version of that same unit. A Rifleman Corps unit would be roughly 40% more powerful than an individual, which means they’re less potent than the two component Riflemen would be by themselves, but together they’re more survivable and potent in a single attack. Having the option to create Corps (unlocked in the Napoleonic era), and then later add a third unit to create an Army (unlocked around 100 years later), is designed to open up new tactics and reduce overcrowding on the map.Another major change is what Firaxis is calling Active Research. Where in all past Civilizations a landlocked empire could unlock the secrets of seafaring technology at the exact same pace as an island people, in Civ 6 we’ll see technological progress tied to your environment and the actions you’re taking in it. “In previous Civs research was up on the side, and it didn’t matter what was going on in the game world. You could kind of move through that tech tree however you felt like in a very independent manner. It was a very passive activity; you could click on the technology you wanted to work toward, and it might be two or three layers deep in that tree, so you wouldn’t have to make another decision for 25 or 30 turns. We wanted to break people out of that,” says Beach.Finally, the diplomatic game has also been reworked. “In Civ 5, different civilizations felt very different when you were playing as them, but when they were AI opponents they felt very similar in that they had the same way they go about playing the game. You didn’t have to react as strongly as we would’ve liked to the fact that, wow, Ghengis is next to me, or one of these leaders who might have a crazy idea about what might be a nice thing to do in the Civilization world. We had Gandhi and a few other people that definitely have some quirks to them, but not as far as we wanted,” says Beach.But that might be too simplistic, so on top of the historically accurate personality trait there’s a secret, random agenda trait that’s assigned to every AI opponent in each game. To fully understand their motivations you’ll have to uncover those through hints via the diplomatic and trade systems.To help you with that, Shirk says we’ll have a much-improved diplomatic screen. “The Diplomacy system in Civ 5 was kind of existing in a box. You went in, there was no information, so you left (or you used one of those amazing mods). “But the new Diplomacy UI is beautiful - there’s a plethora of information so you can make informed decisions when you’re going through a trade or just need information on the fly.”Firaxis played coy about the end-game tweaks they’re working on, but Beach did confirm there will be an entirely new victory condition, and one of the traditional victory conditions has been radically reworked to change the way you go about achieving it. “We’ve definitely looked at that and shaken it up.”Regarding that promised mod support, Beach as assurances and some encouraging hints. “We’re going to talk about this in depth later, but what we have done is added a whole bunch of flexibility in terms of how game rules are built, and created, and linked to the different subsystems in our game. And that sort of fresh approach to things is going to make the modders be able to go nuts right out of the gate in terms of adding things.”Expect much more on Civilization 6 on IGN this week, including a look at today’s trailer from the developers’ perspective and a chat about the new art style.