Sid Meier’s Civilization VI – PC

Successors within the series have all dealt with the share of changing manufacturers, game improvements, game setbacks, and even WTF (looking at you Beyond Earth). No, Civ VI is not without it’s launch flaws – just like all major releases of any franchise game. However, the do not take away from the extremely satisfy gameplay experience:

I’m running an older homemade rig: MSI gaming board; AMD FX 6300; Nvidia Geoforce GTX 960. Certainly not the most screaming system, but more than enough to run every setting on High with no lag and high frame rate. There is a benchmark test option in menu, in which computer plays itself to make sure it’s set up correctly for you.

Pro: Great graphics for this kind of game. Reflections, shadows, sunlight glare off of the water, waves, topography detail, even an option to allow game to track time of day and ambience accordingly. Best of any Civ game yet. One must dedicate districts next to cities form many improvements, which makes original city placement more important than ever before. Every city can’t be an equal monster, so you have to pick and choose carefully.

Pro: Satisfying game play with challenges even for long time veteran players. Changes to how Civics work, builder vs workers (huge improvement), Trade caravans build roads automatically as they travel a route for the first time.

Pro: I bought physical disc from Amazon presale. Loaded very quickly from disk (yes – still requires Steam, but I’m not seeing any problems).

Con: Even a veteran like me has been struggling on Prince level. I backed it down to Warlord and later even Chiefdom for my first game. It’s a harder play, at least until you get used to it.

Con: A/I would be one of biggest complaints. Not nuanced enough. Even when I do everything another Civ seemingly wants, they end up launching surprise wars for which I’m usually not ready. Really have to pay attention to their personalities and game engine desire to oppose your progress, so they throw things like this at you.

Con: Effing Barbarians! New model sends out barbarian scouts, which upon finding your city race back to their hideout and spawn a non-stop army until camp is found and defeated. Barbarians can also immediately spawn several weapon characters beyond your own abilities. There’s no option yet other than on/off for barbarians, so early in game dedicate heavily in scouts and find them before they find you. Kill their scouts before the return, and camp won’t spawn (unless they’ve found another Civ).

Pro/Con: Mod community will fix all of this in time with added nuance and options. That will make this a tremendous game instead of just a very good one. We just need to wait awhile for Mod community to start cranking out all the fun stuff we enjoyed applying to Civ 5.

Conclusion: If you are a Civ series fan, then buy this without delay. You’ll be very satisfied. There’s no other title on the planet (turn based or otherwise) that is as satisfying to me as the feeling one gets from waging war, embracing pacifism and economics, or anything in between with this series. As an aside, Civ games are what always prompted me to buy or build new systems. I don’t want to miss anything. As the requirements aren’t that intensive, my older rig does just fine. However, have an older gaming laptop which always crashed CIV 5, so can’t speak to how will the game will run on integrated graphics or mobile graphics cards.

"Yes honey, I’m coming up to bed now," ….just….one……more…..turn….. Hahah!

I play this on MacOS, actually. I booted up Windows 10 in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine, inserted the disc and began to install. After entering the serial number it was then registered in my Steam library so I canceled the installer. From there I was able to download and play it in my Mac Steam. Good stuff!

Great purchase and a great game.