Sid Meier’s Civilization is a popular turn-based strategy video game series. The first of this series was released in 1991 with the latest installment, Civilization VI, being released in 2016. In these games you control the fate of a civilization as it progresses through time and competes with other civilizations for land and resources. You start as a tribe of wandering nomads ready to find their first permanent settlement. As your city grows you make decisions on what to build and how to manage your resources always looking to expand your borders by settling new cities. You decide what new technologies and ideas to focus your civilization’s research on, each unlocking the ability to build new buildings and units. To be competitive with other nations you must learn to manage the resources provided by the land you control as well as those that are produced by what you decide to build in each city. But don’t get too focused on increasing your production and research for it is a dangerous and competitive world your people inhabit. You must maintain an army to defend yourself from wild barbarians and other civilized nations that wish to claim your land for their own.
The first obvious difference between these two games made 25 years apart is the graphics. The units in Civ I are simple rectangular cards with a picture on them and the cities are similarly represented but instead of a picture, they are given a number to represent population. The landscape is also simple 2-D graphics with some drawn mountains and hills trying to it some texture. Thanks to advances videos game design and processing power Civ VI utilizes 3-D graphics and motion to help bring the world to life. The units are animated 3-D characters and the landscape is amazingly 3-D textured terrain.
Although the base game is still pretty much the same concept many of the features have evolved over the numerous releases of the game. One only needs to open the civilpedia from each game to see just how much has been added and changed. The civilpedia is an encyclopedia of all the features and concepts that can be accessed any time in game. Just with a quick look through all the tabs in Civ VI’s civilpedia gives you an idea of just how much information is stored within. Since the first game, they have greatly increased the number of units, buildings, wonders, terrain types, and resources. They have also added completely new features like government policy cards which are basically government policies you can change throughout the game to aid you depending on what your current goals are.
Civ I had five basic governments each with its own boons and constraints. This was a simple system that you could change to suit your needs. Civ VI gives a much more complex governing system that utilizes the policy cards mentioned earlier. There is now a total of seven different types of governments each with its own inherent benefits. Each government type also allows access to a certain number and type of policies. There are four types of policies, military, economic, diplomatic, and wild card. As you advance through the Civics tree, which is similar to the technology tree but more focused on cultural development, you unlock new available policies.
A major part of any Civ game is combat. This has evolved in a couple of ways. The map in the original game was a square grid but Civ VI uses a hexagonal grid so you must be mindful of that as you strategize your war plans. A major change in the combat system has to do with unit stacking. In the original, you could have as many units occupying the same space as you wanted. A popular war strategy with this then is to keep producing units until you have a massive force that can be moved together as one to invade your target’s city thus simply overwhelming the opponent. In Civ VI however, you cannot stack units like this. Only one unit can occupy a space, so you must plan your attack more strategically. Also, your siege units and ranged units cannot actively take a city, so you need a melee unit to capture a city. Also, in Civ VI city walls allow a ranged attack at invading armies so siege weapons are very important for bringing those walls down quickly. Civ VI also features an experience system for combat units allowing the selection of different perks as units level. These experienced units become valuable, so you always want to make sure they have an escape root when invading an enemy city.
City building has also changed greatly throughout the series. In Civ I, you could build any available building right in the city center and the land around was used to gather available resources (food, production and income). The buildings would give you bonuses to these resources or other aspects of your game. In Civ VI only certain buildings can be built in the city center. A new feature in Civ VI is “districts”. These districts must be built on one of the tiles within the cities zone of influence thus making that tile unusable for collecting its resources. Each district has specific buildings that can be built within that district then. For example, a Science district specializes in research bonuses. The district itself gives certain bonuses depending on what is located in its surrounding tiles. It then allows access to research related buildings such as libraries and universities. These districts allow a little more nuance when city planning since one can no longer just build every building in the city center. Instead, you will probably have cities specializing in one or a few things such as military, research, or culture.
Civilization was one of the first PC games I enjoyed as a child and I have played most of the games in the series as it evolved. It has been really cool playing through the many changes of the game while still enjoying the same base concept. I must say that I am enjoying all of the new features in Civilization VI and think it is a great part in the series. I cannot wait to try out the new expansion to see what that adds to this great franchise.
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