I picked up Civ 6 within the last year or so plus some of the DLC. It was just sitting there, unused, as I was still trying to clear Civ 5 of all achievements. I only have 7 achievements left for Civ 5 but they are all the absolute hardest ones.
So with Civ 7 on the horizon (Feb 2025) and spotting that Civ 6 was on sale for 6 euro on Steam a few days ago, I bought a copy for Cathy as a 'Christmas present' and we played our first game ever.
I went for Peter of Russia because in this version he is the leader/civ with extra added border expansion upon founding a city. Build a city, start with extra territory. Love that. The Shoshone in Civ 5 were my faves because they could do that. Cathy went for Catherine de Medici of France.
It was OK, some initial confusion on both our parts but we managed to push through as far as the renaissance or just before the industrial era, I can't recall exactly.
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I played another couple games after that by myself, one as Russia and one as the Netherlands on an islands map.
I won the second game and my first ever victory by Diplomacy somehow? I had launched the spaceship and was waiting for it to land and then randomly I had acquired enough Diplomatic votes or whatever to win. None of the drama of Civ 4 where it's a binary choice for Diplomatic Victory and you can see the votes tallied afterward, or the very clear tomfoolery of Civ 5 with city-states inflating your votes. It just sort of happens. The Congress in 6 is worse than 5 for sure.
I won my second game (barely) by score; Archipelago, Standard, Quick, Netherlands (randomly chosen). It's an islands game so no one was anywhere near productive enough for space. There were less than 50 turns left and I spotted I was maybe 100 points or so behind Genghis Khan who had settled all over the map. I just settled 3-4 towns on random scraggly islands to inflate my score and destroyed a bunch of districts to build Wonders and took the lead.
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Warfare is difficult, not that it's hard to do but units last way longer, cities are almost impossible to reduce health/have shields now because of walls and stuff. I fired a nuke at someone after my Diplomatic Victory and I spotted it reduced health and shields to 0 so that was good I guess. I also fired a nuke at a volcano near St. Petersburg for the craic, damn thing kept going off.
Natural disasters kind of suck, I think they're cool it's pretty ominous when the game suddenly zooms in on them happening but I find the penalties seem to outweigh the benefits. In that Russia game I had a volcano next to my capital and had 4 cities around it and built my Campus districts around it so every time it rumbled it would blow them up. My science rate didn't suffer that badly as I could rebuild them quickly but was tedious.
I LOVE Eurekas. Adds a lot of incentive to try and do a whole load of different things in order to speed up a discovery of a tech or civic.
Districts and governors are kind of cool but after a while it all boils down to my main takeaway from 2 and a half games played:
It's just like Civ 5, but not as good (so far). I'll keep at it for a while but I'm not blown away.
