Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is the latest entry in a venerated strategy series. Released in 2016, the simulator tasks you with building a dominant empire from the seeds of a single settler. Over a set number of turns you’ll vie for victory with other iconic leaders. We discussed the game on OiO Game Pass Forever, a standalone segment of the Outside is Overrated Podcast.
After establishing a city with your first settler, or wandering around aimlessly if you are new to games, you build and expand your empire. From your first city you can create units or build infrastructure to increase your output. For example, you could create a builder to improve the tiles around your city, generating more resources and increasing output. Or you could create warriors or slingers to deal with marauding barbarians. Meanwhile, you will research scientific and civic upgrades to shape your civilization and unlock new units and city districts.
Over time you’ll expand to multiple cities while vying for one of four different victory conditions: domination, science, culture or religion. If no one claims one of the victories, before the last turn, the player with the most victory points wins. Sounds easy, right?
In reality, Civilization VI has an intense number of layers. After my first standard game – 500 turns of largely inefficient action on my part – there were still entire systems I failed to grasp. I largely ignored religion and built speciality districts with next to no planning. I did, however, know what most of the buttons did by the end and that was a big improvement from where I started.
In future playthroughs I tried to make more focused efforts, although I failed to finish a second 500-turn game before we recorded the segment.
What is Sid Meier’s Civilization VI?
Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is a turn-based strategy game where you attempt to build a civilization that will stand the test of time. At the start of the game you choose a leader with unique abilities and units.
A standard game is 500 turns, but there are numerous options to customize your settings. You can change the map size and number of leaders, emulate earth or set things up for more direct confrontations. Depending on the expansions you have access to, there are also a number of shorter scenarios to play through.
Being new to the franchise, everything was shiny and new to me. If you’ve played Civ before, you may be interested in this Washington Post article about the new features in this entry.
If you are new to the franchise, we highly recommend checking out the tutorial. I did not use it and struggled with many aspects of the game over more than 15 hours of playtime.
What Are Amenities?
I mentioned not knowing how certain systems work and amenities came up during the podcast. According to the 190-page manual for the game:
“Amenities are like a currency for happiness – the higher your amenities, the more content your citizens. Additionally, the more amenities you have, the more your citizens will grow and the better your yields will be. Of course, an unhappy city will not grow very much at all, and you’ll see a negative impact on your yields.”
The manual also details how luxury resources, entertainment, religion and civics can improve amenities, while other factors deplete them.
It sounds so simple – like many of the systems in the game. Each technology has conditions that will cut its research time in half, like having a certain number of units. Or needing a source of freshwater for your cities. On their own, pretty much every system makes sense. If you just jump into your first game – like I did – and try to parse it all out on your own, there will likely be some struggles. Check out that tutorial!
Is Civilization VI Offline?
Civilization VI is whatever you want it to be – the game supports both online and offline modes. For the podcast, we each played offline games and gathered together for a pair of online sessions on Xbox.
In my opinion, Civ VI is better offline. You can take as long as you need with each turn. If you want to go into the deepthink and meticulously plan your production and tech queues, go nuts! This game will have you saying “just one more turn” for hours.
If you do play online, one of the most challenging aspects is the timer. We used the dynamic timer in our first session, but we constantly found ourselves rushed with basic tasks like managing multiple units or setting government policies. In our second playthrough, we moved to a standard three minute timer which helped. It might have been less efficient overall, but it mostly mitigated our frustrations from the first session.
One of the biggest benefits of playing online with other players is the increased stakes. Humans are more cunning and less predictable than the AI. While I enjoyed my offline sessions, it was a little weird to take my eight main military units and move from city to city wiping entire civilizations off the map without anyone taking action besides condemning me. Even an empire I was at war with from the beginning of the game took little direct action against me as I rolled my artillery up to their gates.
In our multiplayer session though, Hobby Box engaged in theological war with Poland, leading to a physical confrontation. As the Polish army rolled into Washington D.C., the Box was saved by my Mayan technology.
I enjoyed both modes of play but I plan to stick to offline single player. It was fun to check it out with my friends, but much of the game involves thinking about how you are going to maximize things for your preferred mode of victory, and there isn’t a ton of interaction with other human players.
Civ VI Crossplay Options
If you want to play Civilization VI with your friends, make sure you all get it on the same platform. While the game is available on virtually everything – and for this segment I played it on PC, Xbox and Switch – crossplay is only available for Mac, Linux and PC players. Xbox Game Pass is a great way to check out the game, but you won’t be able to connect with your friends who play on Steam.
Can I Share Civilization VI with My Partner?
I would not recommend sharing Civilization VI with your wife, girlfriend or partner unless they have a deep love for strategy games and/or a history with the franchise. Civ VI is a great game but I have no delusions of ever sharing it with my wife. There is a steep learning curve and if your gaming time is limited I would look for other drop-in options.