Sid Meier's Civilization VI News

From Civilization to Stellaris, how strategy games struggle against player power

It's safe to say that the endgame is the hardest part to get right in strategy games, as it's an area full of design contradictions. As Civilization VI's lead designer Ed Beach points out, "you want to reward players who are making smart decisions during their course of play," but at the same time, Civilization (and plenty of other 4X games) suffer a common complaint: those smart decisions usually result in the player 'snowballing', and becoming so strong that they're able to defeat almost any AI opponent.

There are other issues as well. Sometimes, if an AI faction is left in isolation to snowball themselves, they can become too powerful for the player to deal with once encountered. More often than not, though, human ingenuity and the inherently exploitable nature of strategy games means that challenging the player into the endgame, in a fair and meaningful way, is the true final boss for designers in this genre.

The Civilization series has tried to solve this problem through asymmetric victory conditions. In Civilization VI, most civs are able to flex into a second victory type in case they get muscled out of plan A. "To that end," Beach explains, "you see that as you come to the end of our technology and culture trees, the options present in the Future Era are very carefully designed to power you towards a specific victory."

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This Civ 6 modder has made games last much, much longer

If 'one more turn' is good, then hundreds more turns is better, right? Well, if you're left wishing your Civilization VI games lasted longer, Civ Reimagined 6.9 is the Civ 6 mod for you. It extends the vanilla game's playtime by expanding on each historical era, and it packs loads of new tech and mechanical tweaks into the 4X game to make sure you can settle in for the long haul each time you fire up a new game.

Civ Reimagined incorporates a few pre-existing mods, including elements of Steel and Thunder and Warfare Expanded - so you'll need to install those mods in order to run this one. Modder wbwillis has reworked the entire Civ 6 tech tree in order to better incorporate that new units added by KrumStrashni and Kizkiyahu in the Warfare expanded mod series. This mod adds 120 new techs, 50 new buildings, 45 new civics, and 65 new policy cards.

Wbwillis explains that the new policy cards, for example, are designed to make for tougher decisions. Instead of only providing benefits to your nation, each one also includes downsides as well. Civ Reimagined also adds penalties for growth that prevent nations from steamrolling - as you expand, maintenance costs will increase and you'll run into negative bonuses for moving into new eras.

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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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