Take-Two Interactive‘s 2K label and Firaxis Games are hard at work on Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, which debuts for PC on October 21. But I was lucky to get a sneak peek at the first 50 turns at a recent preview event.
And I have to say that this turn-based strategy game — the next entry in the award-winning Civilization franchise that Sid Meier created 25 years ago — is going to be a drastic change from Civilization V, which came out in 2010 on the PC. Just how different is an important question, as the Civilization franchise has sold more than 33 million copies since Meier’s original released in 1991.
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Civ VI lead designer Ed Beach said in an interview with GamesBeat that the transition from V to VI wasn’t a small one, like the launch of a new expansion pack. It was a big one, and so the team had to take some risks like “unstacking” the cities and allowing them to spread their districts across multiple hexagons. With Civilization V, the designers previously unstacked military units, so that only one unit occupied each hex. Now the cities can spill over the map, and you can’t build everything you’d like in them. That means the cities get very specialized.
Dealing with a new sense of scale
Above: Civilization VI will force you to decide what a particular city will specialize in.
This system comes with a lot of restrictions. You might drop a harbor into a tile on the water. If you do, you can’t build something else in that tile, like a Wonder. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the maps will be huge, with armies and cities spread out. You may wind up with a few cities or lots of burgs.
When I interviewed Beach, I told him that this change disrupted my sense of scale on the maps. He felt that way at first, too. “It’s something I’ve had to come to terms with as well,” Beach said. “I live in the mid-Atlantic area. If you think of Washington D.C. as the city for that area, there are lots of regional pieces nearby. Norfolk might be the harbor. That’s where the Navy is based. There are great universities like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. That might be the campus district. West Virginia is where all the mining goes, a couple of tiles away. That might be the industrial zone. If you think about it in those terms, it’s OK. I’m not saying it’s perfect. It’s still an abstraction, for sure.
“You could do the same thing with the U.K., the Benelux, things like that. Antwerp is the huge port for Belgium, but Brussels or Bruges is more the cultural capital. You can take any place in the world and divide it up like that.”
Defending a city can be complicated. But Beach pointed out that you can now make use of natural barriers, like mountains or the shoreline, so that you don’t have to commit a lot of military units just for defense.
I’ll have to get used to this change, as it throws me off. Now the defense of a single city could play out over hundreds of miles and a couple of centuries. That’s a pretty long military engagement, and it could just be a battle in a much larger war. What happens if the technology era changes during that time? That would be really screwed up.
The idea is to take full advantage of the terrain. Each hex that is near another can modify how your tile grows. You may get a bonus based on what is adjacent to the tile. Before, you could put down a building in a city and be done with it. Your districts can be containers for additional buildings. You can create a holy site that will eventually house religious buildings such as churches or temples. If you have a mountain pass, you may want to put a military encampment there to create an easily defended zone. You can put a science building near a mountain and discover astronomy more easily.
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Hands-on with the Chinese society
Above: Civilization VI
Firaxis’ Pete Murray showed us a couple of civilizations in our first play session. I started out as the Chinese, with a single settler and a scout in the Stone Age. I created my first city on a coast, near some good resources. The first unit I made was a warrior, but that was a mistake. I should have made a scout instead, as it takes only one turn to do that. I sent my warrior and my scout out to explore. I built a worker and started creating a couple of farms. My city’s borders and population expanded slowly. The Chinese architecture with curved roofs looked beautiful.
In my short playthrough, I didn’t get a feel for what made the Chinese unique. But I did get a sense for the action. I ran into barbarians pretty quickly. I was too weak to attack them, and that may have been a mistake. Knowing what I know now, I should have created a strong military force quickly, and pushed out with scouts.
Beach told me that if you run into barbarians and then leave them alone, they will be much smarter and start their own preparations.
“We haven’t talked about this yet, but this is something that I can clue you in on as far as how it’s working,” he said. “Barbarians can generate scouts now. You may have seen some of those around. If you leave a camp around long enough, it generates a scout. The scout explores the map just like you do. But what it’s looking for is targets. If a scout comes up to the outskirts of your city, that means he knows you’re there, and he’s going back to his camp to tell his buddies that they have a target.”
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This is a significant departure in how barbarians worked in past Civs.
“It’s important to watch that. You can know, ‘OK, if the scout came from four turns away, it’ll take him four turns to go home and five or six more to build an army.’ But eventually, 10 or 15 turns down the line, that scout reporting back is going to be bad news for you. You can prepare for that, though.”
I created a slinger military unit, which is a ranged attacker. I sent that one south and mopped up one barbarian camp pretty quickly. But in the north, the barbarians multiplied. Three units approached toward my cities. I had to build up my military fast and send my main force north. This took a lot of turns to do, since you can only move one or two hexagons at a time.
By the time I got there, it was all over but the shouting. The Americans had come into the region, and they wiped out the barbarians. I was finally ready for war, but peace had broken out.
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The A.I. seems smarter
Above: Teddy Roosevelt is one of the leaders in Civilization VI.
The experience of dealing with the barbarians made an impression on me. The artificial intelligence of the computer-controlled players are improved from the previous game.
And that is visible in more ways than one. This time, the non-player A.I. will always have some kind of agenda that drives their behavior. You can’t really change someone’s agenda, such as Manifest Destiny. But you can change their attitude toward you quickly if you invade them.
This means that diplomacy could be dynamic, changing as the ages evolve and as the leaders show their character.
“We have a system that has a historical agenda linked to a leader, but they also have random leaders, chosen game by game, that are hidden from the player,” said Andrew Garrett, an A.I. expert on the Civilization VI team.
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When I expanded into new regions, I ran into the Americans, headed by Teddy Roosevelt. He talks softly and carries a big stick. That means that he will be wary of anyone amassing military troops on his borders, and he will do his utmost to defend his territory aggressively. That kind of agenda was clear to see.
You can find out what the agenda of a particular leader is by spying or just understanding their behavior. If a leader is obsessed with Wonders, he or she will strive to out-build the other societies when it comes to creating wonders. If you challenge that leader in the Wonder race, you’ll likely come into conflict. You may even be able to set leaders against each other through careful observation. Civilization VI will have a new espionage system, but Firaxis isn’t describing it yet.
I didn’t face off against Roosevelt for long. After his initial alarm at my armies drawing near, he made a peace treaty with me, and we coexisted on that border.
The art style matches the map changes
Above: Civilization VI has a “color language” for distinguishing buildings and terrain.
The visual style is distinct from past games. I loved the way that Civilization V looked, with its shift toward greater realism. It really made me feel immersed in another world. I also like the art in this game, but in a completely different way.
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Things are spread out more on the map. Every building in the game is modeled. You’ll see birds flying around the buildings. You’ll be able to zoom in and see the fruits of your labor now. The world is more vivid and alive. The leaders will be more expressive and realistic, all with the aim of making you believe the world is real.
This new art style is geared toward enabling you to zoom all the way on your units and districts. I enjoyed going in close and then pulling back to get a better perspective.
I did recognize one flaw in the graphics. If you explore an area, it can go a little dark on you once your units leave that area. When it goes darker, you can still see some of the general outlines like mountains. The map goes from colorful to a drab brown in these areas. But the borders of the darkened region look like jagged coastlines. In the watery region that I was exploring, this effect fooled me. I thought that there were jagged coastlines in parts of the map — which I had already previously explored — when in fact this was really just open ocean. I think Firaxis needs to fix this flaw.
Conclusion
Above: Civilization VI debuts on October 21, 2016.
So far, I have barely scratched the surface on Civilization VI. And the flaws are the tiniest of flaws. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot more of this game, and I can see that Firaxis has put a lot of thought into the way the game plays. There are crucial tests yet to come, like how fast the game runs on modern computers. But most of it looks good so far.