Civilization VI

Civilization VI is a turn-based strategy video game in which one or more players compete alongside computer-controlled AI opponents to grow their individual civilization from a small tribe to control of the entire planet across several periods of development. This can be accomplished by achieving one of several victory conditions, all based on the 4X gameplay elements, "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate". Players found cities, gather nearby resources to build and expand them by adding various city improvements, and build military units to explore and attack opposing forces, while managing the technology development, culture, and government civics for their civilization and their diplomatic relationships with the other opponents.

Civilization VI builds upon the general gameplay of Civilization V, including continuing the use of the hex-based grid introduced in Civilization V. New to Civilization VI is the of idea of "city unstacking": some improvements to cities must be placed in the hexes in the bounds of the city but not within the city's space itself, whereas in previous games, all improvements were considered stacked on the same map hex or square that the city was located in. The player must assign specific hexes as "districts" in the city, which have certain limitations but grant bonuses for improvements placed in that district. For example, one district type is of military encampments, which grants bonuses to military structures, like barracks, placed within it, but such encampments may not be placed next to the main city center. Other improvements gain bonuses for being placed in appropriate terrain; universities will benefit greatly from being played in forest or jungle hexes, reflecting on scientific advance from studying the diversity of species within such biomes. Players can opt to attack specific districts of a city instead of the city center, which can affect the city's operation. However, these districts may also add new strategies to the city's defense; for example, with a military encampment in place, attacking forces approaching a city will be not only subject to ranged attacks from the city center but also from the encampment, and the attacking forces may need to take the encampment first before they can successfully strike the city center.

In order to reduce congestion on the map, players will be able to perform a limited amount of unit stacking (a change from Civilization V), but will only be able to stack similar unit types or symbiotic units. For example, a warrior unit can be assigned to a builder unit to protect that unit from barbarians in the early game.

The game's technology tree, now known as the active research system, has also been modified to help boost technology research if the player has access to appropriate improvements or resources. For example, having built a quarry will help boost the research into masonry. Technologies based on having access to water, such as sailing, would be limited if the player started in the middle of a continent. A new feature, Eureka Moments, will increase the player's progress towards certain technologies after completing a specific in-game task: for example, discovering a Natural Wonder would contribute towards the Astrology technology improvement.

Past iterations of the game were found to be difficult to win if one chose to follow a Cultural victory route, as other victory routes, such as Technology, would nearly always outplay the cultural path. To help balance the game towards Cultural victories, a new Civics tree has been introduced. The Civics tree brings in the cultural improvements that were previously part of the technology tree in earlier Civilization games, such as Drama and Philosophy, into a separate mechanic. Culture gained from cities are used to build on the Civics tree in the same manner Science from cities build up the Technology tree. Completing certain Civics will then unlock policies towards the civilization's government. In Civilization VI, the government is defined by placing appropriate and available policies, represented as policy cards, into a number of slots divided between Military, Economic, Diplomatic, and Wildcard categories. These define boosts or limitations for the civilization, such as improved attack bonuses for military units against certain types of enemies. These can be changed for free upon completing a single Civic, or at a small cost at any other time, allowing a player on the Cultural route to adapt to a new situation as needed, according to lead producer Dennis Shirk. More advanced cards, only obtainable through significant advancement in the Civics tree, can unlock improvements that give the Cultural Victory player advantages over other players, such as reducing the time or cost of producing new units. Various choices made by the player may cause unhappiness in their population as with previous games, but in Civilization VI, many of these will be localized to the city affected by the choice rather than the entire population, further aiding towards Cultural victory-style players. The Religion system introduced in Civilization V's Gods & Kings expansion is built further upon in VI, featuring more units and improvements that can lead to interreligious conflicts.

AI opponents, represented by famous historical world leaders such as Qin Shi Huang and Theodore Roosevelt, will have new agendas that will influence how the player interacts with them. Some of these will be unique to each leader, using historical aspects about how that leader generally behaved during their rule. For example, a player may gain favor with Cleopatra by showing military might against neutral barbarians. However, each AI player will also have a second hidden agenda, requiring the player to discover this themselves. Espionage will now also work towards revealing these hidden agendas.

Development

 

 

The game is being developed by the same Firaxis teams that developed the expansions on Civilization V, and it is expected that most of the new mechanics introduced in these will be present in Civilization VI at its launch. This follows from Sid Meier's "33/33/33" rule of sequel design: 33% of the game should retain established systems, 33% should feature improved systems over the previous version, and the remaining 33% should feature new material. Firaxis used "Frankenstein", a small group of dedicated Firaxis fans, to bounce ideas for gameplay improvements. Because of the larger number of systems in place, the studio expects to ship the game with a large-scale tutorial, separate but supplementing the guidance given by the player's various in-game advisors.

A major foundation of the development of Civilization VI was to prevent players from following routines in playing through a game, according to lead designer Ed Beach. The developers placed much more emphasis on the significance of the procedurally-generated map in how it would influence the player's strategy as the game progressed, so that no game of Civilization VI would be the same. For example, the redesigned technology tree was aimed to pull players away from automatically following a rote path through tree and instead adapt a path through it based on their placement on the map. Features like the unstacking of cities and city districts lead directly to support this approach, since some districts and city improvements depend specifically on what available terrain is nearby. Such changes were also the result of design choices made by Civilization V's lead designer Jon Schafer during its development, such as the unstacking of player units. These changes in Civilization V exposed other weak areas of the core gameplay of the series, specifically how cities were simply seen as places to dump improvements and Wonders with little effect on the map according to producer Dennis Shirk. Beach, as lead designer for Civilization VI, wanted to improve upon these weaknesses, desiring to make the game map "just as important as anything else in the game", and took the step to unstack the cities to accomplish this, following in how Schafer took to unstack unit tiles in Civilization V. According to Beach, these features add city management elements similar to those found in city-building games, and force players to make decisions based on the geographical location of the city, instead of sticking to a specific city improvement route.

Because of the importance of the surrounding terrain to the growth of a city, Firaxis had to review their procedural generation for game maps to meet this new approach. Beach noted that early testing with the unstacked cities on archipelagos generated by their older system made gameplay nearly impossible, and that with mountains becoming a valuable resource towards city expansion, test players would restart maps built on their old system to get the right placement of mountains to exploit them successfully. The new map generation system attempts to spread out terrain more, and in areas where one type of important terrain may be absent, makes up for this by include other valuable terrain spaces, such as a river-rich region where there is a lack of mountains.

Beach previously designed a system in the Civilization V: Brave New World expansion that gave a "Mayhem level" in the computer opponents; internally, the game tracked how much action was going on for the players, and if it determined that the player was progressing without little change, the computer would cause one or more of its controlled opponent to make erratic moves, creating a new situation for the player to deal with. The Mayhem level will be used in Civilization VI, as according to Shirk, it is a "really interesting way of making sure that there's always something that's going to pull the player away from what they're doing or what they're focused on all the time". Whereas the process of tuning this for Brave New World required manual playthroughs of the game, Firaxis had set up several computers in their offices to run Civilization VI, using only computer-controlled opponents; the results and behaviors of these games were reviewed by the part of the team dedicated to the artificial intelligence systems and used to balance the Mayhem level.

The game is being developed with a new engine that is expected to be more friendly to modification. The game's visuals and tools featured were inspired by the Age of Exploration. User-interface elements will feature elements like compasses and astrolabes. The fog of war will be rendered using a cross-hatch drawing style to replicate old maps from the Age of Exploration. The developers plan to bring back the movies they had shown players upon completion of a Wonder from Civilization IV, but will be now rendered in game, and as to make the final shot of the Wonder more impressive, they developed a day-night cycle that continues on in the game. While this cycle will not affect the core gameplay, art director Brian Busatti anticipates that this feature could be used by modders to create new tactical considerations.

The game uses a more cartoonish look than those of Civilization V, as according to Firaxis, with much deeper gameplay, they wanted to keep the visuals simple to avoid interfering the complexity of gameplay. The graphics of individual units and buildings are being developed to be both readily-detailed when viewed in a tight zoom, while still being recognizable from other similar units when viewed from a distance. This necessitated the simpler art style to allow players to quickly recognize units and buildings while looking over a city without having to resort to user interface tooltips or similar distractions, according to Shirk. Individual units will be designed to include flair associate with the given civilization, such as applying different helmet styles to the same class of footsoldier units.