Civilization 6 is back with a new free patch that's due to drop next week, and it offers another optional game mode, some AI balance changes, as well as the ability to finally ban Ghandi forever.
The new 'Barbarian Clans' mode replaces the generic barbarian NPCS with six distinct clans, which can be interacted with in whole new ways. Different clans will be found in different map areas, much like how different Civ 6 civilisations can be tied to certain areas as part of their 'start bias'. The 'Hill Clan', for example, will live near hill tiles.
Clans are also able to 'claim' and build units from civilisations not present in a particular game. Clans make progress towards conversion into a city-state every turn, and players can either add to or subtract from this depending on how they interact with individual entities. Barbarian interactions can include the usual wiping them from the face of the earth, but you can also 'raid' them, or pay them gold to either leave you alone, hire them as mercenaries, or incite them to attack someone else. These latter options will speed up the rate of their conversion.
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The concept of 'yield porn' is not new to Civilization games - there's even an entire subreddit devoted to the subject. Ever since the new preserve district dropped in to Civilization 6 as part of the Vietnam and Kublai Khan Civ 6 DLC pack, players have really been pushing what they can do with crazy Civ 6 tile yields.
But tile yields are so 2020 - how about some building yield porn instead? User MiniatureWumbo recently posted on the r/civ subreddit about some interesting yields they've managed to achieve just via districts and buildings within one of their cities - they're pretty impressive.
If you're interested in the specifics of how this was achieved MiniatureWumbo was playing as Vietnam. The civilisation's unique ability restricts where a player can place their land-based speciality districts, but also provides different buffs depending on where they're placed. From there, it was a case of using various great people and choosing the right policies. MiniatureWumbo goes into more detail in the thread. Unlike general tile yield shots, not many more players have come forward to share other interesting building-specific yields, but we'll update this story if any more crop up.
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Looking for the lowdown on Civ 6 leaders and agendas? Sid Meier's Civilization VI is the latest in the beloved series of 4X games. For those new to this titan of turn-based strategy, the premise is as follows: assume the position of a notorious historical leader, and carry your people all the way from the early days of man to world domination via money, diplomacy, and more often than not, a very large battering ram.
In previous Civilization games, leaders and civilisations were one and the same - not so in Civ 6, where some civs have multiple leaders (Greece, India), representing different points in their history - and some leaders have multiple civs (Eleanor, Kublai Khan), applying their unique leader abilities to different nations. There hasn't been a huge amount of official content along these lines - as Firaxis have stated it hoped the modding community would fill in the gaps - but it does mean 'leaders' are now a distinct entity within Civ 6, separate from the civs.
Each leader, has their own unique ability, and has a specific agenda which partly informs their AI behaviour when you play against them offline.
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There are plenty of reasons why a game could crash. Maybe your rig isn't actually up to the task, maybe the game was poorly designed so it's still riddled with bugs... or maybe it just can't handle the truth, as seems to be the case regarding a Civilization VI bug that's recently surfaced (the image below is NSFW, folks).
User Nerodmc posted a screenshot of something that recently caused their game to crash on the strategy game's subreddit. A shot from the diplomacy screen showing Kupe - the leader for the Maori in Civ 6 - naked as the day he was born. Well, aside from the fact that he doesn't appear to have any genitals.
It seems leader models not only have clothes as an independent graphical asset, separate from their bodies, but also that the body itself is left largely featureless. This truth was apparently too much for Nerodmc's computer, because it caused an 'unhandled exception' that crashed the game. The specific error was 'exception_access_violation', if you're curious. I wouldn't care to speculate what happens if this graphical bug triggers with a female leader, but we can guess there'd be similar results. So, Civ 6 leaders are basically like Ken dolls. You truly do learn something every day.
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