Sid Meier's Civilization VI

I’ll get round to talking about it in more detail some day, but straight off the bat & in the interests of full disclosure, I would like to open with an embarrassing admission. I have clocked 1,142 hours in Civ 5. 

That’s approx 45 and a half days worth of my life spent in a single video game, I could have probably learnt another language in that time or developed some other skill. But the thing is, I don’t think I actually gained mastery of Civ 5 or even sought to during that time, it’s a chill out game. It has been a good few years since I last played it regularly (say around 2014/5) but I feel it’s fair to say that it’s one of my favourite games of all time. A game that has helped me kill a lot of time for a long long time, and one in which it’s expansions really brought the game together later in life. Entertaining, Longevity and a lovely waste of time. 

Did I ever actually get any good at Civ 5? No, not really; I could hang with the AI on some of the harder difficulties but that level of play in Civ just doesn’t appeal to me, the strategising and picking an approach, a plan to tackle a certain victory condition, knowing the systems inside and out, which wonders to target etc. Civ for me at least was a sit back and enjoy the experience of settling and getting established, taking each turn as it comes, role playing the moment - It’s not about the ‘game’ if that makes sense. 

There’s something about these games (and Civ 6 is no exception) that have an overwhelming powerful pull of “Just one more turn” that affects someone like me, no stranger to procrastination, like a moth to a flame. I’ve put in a ‘mere’ 111 hours into Civ 6 since I started playing it once more after I had finished with Void Bastards (I bought civ 6 when it came on offer shortly after Rise and Fall was released - I didn’t bite at launch because I didn’t have a PC/Mac at the time, the pattern repeats itself. That said, I’m much more confident about kicking the habit on Civ 6 pretty much the moment I hit post on this review. 

Civ 6 is so much more than 5 in many ways, there is a great deal more mechanical complexity, especially around managing your cities, culture, civilisation & religion. The game has a lovely cartography theme to the game’s visuals - discovery and that first 100 turns are in my opinion the games greatest strengths, oh and the soundtrack - man the Scottish and Zulu themes in particular are hair raising. Yeah the presentation in general is top notch and easily the best in a strategy game I’ve personally played. I’m not super sold on the Leader art style, but the world, the buildings, the units and effects are the best they’ve ever been in a Civ game. 

But I’m not a fan of the U.I., there’s a lot of mechanics that I really don’t care for, Religion, management of great works, espionage and diplomacy. I never feel like I have a good grasp on how well I’m doing turn to turn and often find myself performing actions I didn’t intend to do. Big caveat is that I’ve mostly been playing civ 6 on my mac. And to say the least, the magic mouse is hardly magic when it comes to video games, or even as a basic mouse in all fairness. As I mentioned earlier, the presentation is top notch, in terms of how it looks to be clear, its surprisingly difficult to parse what you are looking at. How strong are your units relative to that barbarian? Well be careful, enemy units are on the left, and yours are on the right in the strength comparison panel. It can be difficult to select the units you want, doubly so when trying to select a ranged attack from a city that has a garrisoned unit or two in it. The aforementioned strength comparison panel doesn’t update until you’ve completely reflected a unit after an attack, so say you are queuing up a few attacks on a unit, you’ll be shown a prediction based upon the targets original strength, which given the prior attack animation on the unit may have already ended by that point is a bit annoying.

The world map is gorgeous, and I see what they were going for, it’s your window into the world, so you should be able to tell most things at a glance, whether a district is active or not for example. But as unsubtle as it was, I find myself missing the Civ 5 U.I. - that score leaderboard ever present for that at a glance reference point for how you are doing against the other players, nice big fat chunky icons. I just have a general nagging feeling that I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m at, the information is there if you go searching for it, but it’s not quite right, for me at least. Even… err 113 hours in now, when the production screen pops up (where you choose what your city will build next) I still need to search the screen to figure out which city I’m actually at. 

As par the course for Civ games, the final phases of the game, turn 250 onwards become a relentless grind, but even so that relentless ‘just one more turn’ feeling remains, that micro progress each and every turn is one helluva drug folks. While I’m at it here are a couple of other things I don’t quite get. 

So other players have two agendas, one known to you, one random. This does help inject a bit more variety into the various games and a pretty cool idea. But these agendas don’t really make much sense to me, What should be a cause of competition and increased conflict is often not the case and I’ll try and explain why. So take the vikings, one of Harald’s agendas is having a powerful navy. So if you begin strengthening your navy, he’ll actually start liking you more!? Which intuitively seems against his best interests. Same for say, a particularly pious civ - they’ll start liking you if you too are producing a preposterous amount of faith. Feels rather counter intuitive to say the least. 

Great works management and religion are deeper micromanagement aspects that really don’t appeal to me but feel more important in this game as opposed to civ 5. It’s not especially gratifying to conduct a parallel holy war alongside everything else that’s going on and the constant trade requests for works of art later on in the game gets tedious fast. 

So far, this has been a bit of whiny post. I paid good money for this game and it has certainly provided the entertainment bang for my buck. And I have nothing but admiration for the guys and gals at Firaxis games, I would definitely not want to be in their shoes tasked with making sequels for such an institution. Changes are bound to upset a lot of folks and this game has a lot going for it in my opinion, I preferred 5 for sure, but 6 is absolutely a worthy entry in the series. There are a few bugs knocking about, and the game not updating fast enough when combat animations are in progress gets annoying, but this is absolutely a quality product and did I mention the music is fantastic? 

Every Civ is different and brings new stuff to the table, might irk losers like myself with minor changes, but may it long continue I say… with big gaps between the series entries - I think I could do with another 5 or 6 years until my next bout of crippling Civ addiction. And it’s that reason that I won’t be investing in the latest expansion either, there’s always more games to play and frankly I need to stop spending so much time on this damned game. 

Oh and the Mac port is excellent, runs like a charm even at 4k on my 5k iMac, keep up the good work Aspyr! Nature of the beast I suppose but if you play on Mac, a lot of the modding action will be unavailable to you. Which was something that really helped Civ 5’s longevity for me (playing that on windows mostly).

All in all, if Mac is your main desktop games machine of choice go for Civ 6, but if you have a PC - go for 5 all the way,