All of this cuts down on previous games’ Wonder spam, where one high-production city could crank out wonders quickly, and forces you to build them around your more diverse empire. It creates a lot of possible paths.What’s more, Wonder buildings (which can only exist in one city in the world and grant big bonuses) also occupy tiles, and many are limited by geography because they must be placed next to a river or a mountain or other terrain, or they have prerequisite buildings you have to build first or adjacent to.

You might have one city that’s focused on generating science for researching new technology, another focused on creating wealth, and another that builds your military units with experience boosts – or maybe you go full military and build an Encampment in all of them. Those districts must be placed on tiles within a city’s borders, and the number of districts you can build is limited by the population of a city, so you’re forced to specialize each city’s function. “A lot of depth emerges from one of the key factors that distinguishes this Civilization from the five that came before it: the new city-building system, in which key buildings like markets, temples, and barracks that have traditionally been built in nearly every city to give them basic functionality have now been broken out into 11 types of “districts” (Commercial Hub, Holy Site, and Encampment, among others). This feels like a Civ game that’s already had two expansions. For the most part, that’s awesome because there are so many chances to build out your nation in different ways to take advantage of opportunities on its randomly generated maps and pursue the different victory types, and it’s all baked in at the ground level so that things like trade routes don’t feel tacked on and optional (they are, in fact, the only way to build roads in the early game).

It’s got trade, it’s got religion, it’s got espionage, it’s got Great People, it’s got archeology, it’s got the kitchen sink. Once I get absorbed into a campaign it becomes so engrossing it’s difficult to think about anything else.Under its colorful, cartography-inspired art style and varied, stirring music that swells to accent what you’re doing and in what era you’re doing it, Civilization VI is crammed with an almost overwhelming number of systems. In that way Civilization VI looks familiar, but it’s loaded with some very smart and bold improvements that give it new levels of depth.

Update: Civilization VI has been nominated for IGN's 2016 Game of the Year.Įvery game in the legendary, 25-year-old Sid Meier’s Civilization 4X strategy series puts a new spin on the grand concept of taking a nation from a single nomadic tribe to a world-dominating superpower, one turn at a time.

Civilization vi ps4 review