Sid Meier's Civilization VI News

Prolific Civ 6 modder Sukritact has filled the oceans with life

Ahh, the sea. Yup, there it is, that's definitely the sea. Lots of water in the sea, isn't there? There's one major problem with the ocean in granddaddy 4X game Civilization VI, though - it's a bit dull. One of Civilization's most popular modders has decided its oceans needed a bit of a glow-up, and his latest mod does just that.

Sukritact's Oceans mod adds enough new resources and features to the strategy game that it could be considered a whole new game mode. Install it, and you'll find brand new coastal luxuries, which are different for each continent on the map. The oceans contain teeming kelp forests, which can speed up growth but will slow down your ships.

You'll also be able to exploit new resources, including seals, squid, and coral, straight from the ocean. Caviar, a new luxury resource, adds +3 gold and will spawn (literally!) in lakes. New bonus resource squid provide +1 food, +1 gold, and will spawn on coastlines, in kelp, or reefs.

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Civilization 6's AI has been going mad for science thanks to a few lines of code

Civilization 6 players have been noticing something odd with AI civs ever since the big April balance patch, which capped off the year-long New Frontier season pass of micro-expansions and free updates. For the past few months, the AI has been going gaga over science, to the exclusion of all other concerns.

I mean, who needs wealth, public health, or even a functioning military when you can just science your way out of a problem, right? One enterprising member of the community on CivFanatics decided to go investigate, and discovered that a few lines of code had been changed in the Victories.xml file. You can also read a summary on this thread over on r/civ, which goes into more detail as to why some players feel this is a problem.

Two of the code changes are to do with favoured districts, but the ring-leader of this mad science rush is a line that essentially increases the internal value of science yields by 150%. This means that all AI civs will prioritise science generation over other concerns pretty much from the start of the game, and this bias remains in place until the end.

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This Civilization VI mod simplifies trade with "quick deals"

Sooner or later in any game of Civilization VI, you're going to run into issues that have to do with having too much or too little of something. That's where trade comes in, but that means calling all the 4X game's rival leaders up and finding out what kinds of prices they're willing to offer you. With the Quick Deals mod, you can look at all available trade options in a single panel and select the ones that are most advantageous with a single click.

Quick Deals by user wltk puts all your potential trade deals in a single menu panel, which is an elegant way to save time and effort on the part of the player. You'll see new buttons on the main screen that take you to the panel, and they even have notification badges that pop up to let you know about any new potential deals that have popped up.

Pull up the Quick Deals menu, and you'll see options for sale and purchase. The sale screen lists the resources and great works you have available to sell, as well as the leaders who are willing to make offers on those goods. The purchase screen shows you what leaders are offering as well as their minimum price. You simply click 'accept deal' to establish the trade agreement.

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This Civilization fan played their first Deity game in 20 years - and won

Different strategy games approach the concept of 'difficulty' in different ways, but most, like 4X game Civilization VI, use the tried and tested method of different settings. As we highlighted in a recent exploration of Civilization's AI, the highest difficulty setting - Deity - comes with some major stat buffs for computer opponents, as well as boosted starting conditions.

It means you really have to play your cards right from the off, and in terms of a challenge it can put off even the most hardy of fans. Reddit user Open_Communication16 has been playing Civilization games since 1993 (they played the original Civilization game on the SNES, of all things), and only recently tried out Deity difficulty, and won, if this screengrab is anything to go by.

They described their winning strategy as, "Pick a neighbouring civ and take their cities, this is better than settling your own cities. Use horsemen and archers before walls are up. I sent all luxury bonuses to the other civs as gifts so they wouldn't denounce or attack me. Eventually they liked me enough to become friends and eventually allies."

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Civilization fan plots each Civ 6 civ's unique feature, and when they unlock

Civilisations in Civilization VI express their unique offerings in a number of ways: the bonuses associated with a specific Civ 6 leader (which are usually expressed via an ability, but can also be other things), the unique ability of the civilisation itself, and the unique units and infrastructure that come with each civ.

Different civs draw their core strengths from different parts of this holy trinity, but every civ's unique units and infrastructure always have an active impact on the game. Now that we're at 50 civilisations as of the end of the New Frontier pass, Civilization fan Mobius_Peverell has put together an infographic showing when each civilisation's unique infrastructure and unique unit unlock.

There are some pretty interesting things to note about the results, which have been ordered so that unlocks are grouped via era. America is the only civ to unlock something in the Atomic era (the unique unit), and no civilisation has an unlock after that. The most unique unlocks occur in the Ancient era with 28, and there is a slow, then sharp, decline as you go through the eras: 24 in Classical, 20 in Medieval, down to 13 in Renaissance and by the time you get to the Atomic there's only one.

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