Civilization VI is a 4X strategy game in the long-running series of Civilization titles. 4X, for those who are uninitiated with the genre, refers to (generally) turn based strategy games in which you must compete with other players to excel at the four x's, explore, expand, exploit, exterminate to become the dominant player in your universe.
I have a Ph.D. in political science. I have an armchair fascination with political and military history. I love strategy games. And yet, I had never sunk any time into Sid Meier's legendary Civilization series until very recently. I never owned a copy of the game, I had slid away from PC gaming in recent years, and had plenty of other games to keep me busy, but this title was always on the edge of my mind. Then, Epic Games gave away this entry in the series for free a few months back, and I added it to my mental queue. When the time is right, I was going to give it a shot.
When the time became right, I quickly discovered the reason that this game had endured for decades, and it can be expressed in three words - one more turn. The game is designed both to engage your brain for the present turn, but also to allow it to wander towards a point in the future when you will be able to truly unveil your brilliant strategy to all the world. It does this with a genius system of research and civics which allows the player to direct his civilization towards a specific technological or political goal at all times. The game begins in the ancient era, with you struggling to ward off barbarian attacks and accomplish simple feats such as figuring out how to make pottery, and developing a system of irrigation to improve your farming. But you'll quickly be presented with a bombardment of options for how to develop your civilization, and realize that you can't be the best at everything. Determining your planned end game, while warding off the attempts of your foes to dominate you, will demand that you direct an inordinate amount of effort on developing in a few key areas, rather than accomplishing them all at once. With so many pots on the fire, you'll always want to be playing for the next big pop of achievement, whether it's improving your nautical mastery so that you can sail away from the shallows and across the wide ocean, or developing your civilization's mastery of ballet.
Winning the game requires that you achieve one of the end-game conditions, or can endure until the final turn with the generally most impressive civilization (while thwarting your opponents' attempts to win the game outright before then). The conditions that will immediately end the game are divided into several categories, cultural, religious, military, and scientific. Winning the game with culture demands that you develop your civilization's production of great works of art, music, and archaeology to the point that other civilizations view yours as the dominant one and begin to adopt your cultural practices. The religious victory will be triggered when more than half of the world follows the religion that you have founded. Military victory is the most straightforward-crush your opponents' civilizations with your military might and conquer the world! The scientific victory requires you to achieve certain technological achievements into the post-modern future, including landing on the moon and starting a martian colony.
As a professional political scientist, the thing that I adore the most is how nicely the game simulates the real experience of leading civilization throughout history. One way in which it does this is forcing the player to think about path dependency, an idea that argues that each civilization or outcome is as much dependent on the decisions that led up to the current situation as it is about current decisions. Once set on a certain path, it is very difficult to depart from it, and this game nails that idea. If you've spent time becoming a scientific powerhouse and ignoring your culture and civic institutions, you won't be able to get the kind of support from the state that you may need to accomplish your goals. If you never spent time learning astrology (a religious perk), then your sailors will take more time to be able to learn how to navigate in deeper waters away from familiar coastlines. Each civic and technology that your develop will shorten the time necessary to develop later discoveries, and keeping your end game in mind is helpful in plotting the shortest path to achieving your aims. In addition to path dependency, the game also forces you to appreciate the value that technology brings to human life. The game begins with you landlocked, with the wheel barely invented, and as a result, your experience is bound by what is directly near you, geographically speaking. But, as you develop your technology, you'll spread far and wide throughout the world, seeing more of it, and being able to travel further and further each turn.
The controls can be a little weird sometimes. It's a game that thrives on strategy and thoughtfulness, not on its UI or the controls. Commanding your troops to move and attack can be wonky, and the game is so deep that novices may not realize why they can't do something that they think they ought to. There are good resources in the game for learning these, but it just takes a lot of play to get up to speed.
I won at least one game using each win condition, and enjoyed most of them. The one that was dull was the religious victory, which feels like an addition that wasn't particularly well thought out. Developing your religion gives benefits, but it seems too easy to counter your opponents' attempts to spread their religion, and if two or more civilizations are spreading religions, it's nearly impossible for either of them to win.
The game's AI is also really dreadful. I'll give an example to illustrate. I was playing on a pretty high difficulty level in a game, and had war declared on me by two civilizations early in the game. So I developed my military, sailed across the sea, and crushed them. Neither of these civilizations had built their military in the slightest (something that you might think would be important before declaring war), so they rolled over easily. With two of my five competitors out of the way, I noticed that another civilization lie directly to my west, that 40% of my conquering was completed already, and declared war on that civilization. I conquered that one, moved to the west some more, conquered the fourth, and finally turned my eye towards the last other civilization left in the world, the one that began the game directly bordering me. Conquering these four civilizations had taken me about 150 turns. What, do you think, the remaining civilization had been up to in those 150 turns? Building up walls on their cities in preparation? Developing their military to stand against me? Garrisoning troops in all of their cities? Racing me to develop their culture for a win condition before I could turn my greedy eyes on them? No. They just were peacefully sending trade routes into my territory for 150 turns, with no culture to speak of, a small handful of ancient military units, no navy, and no religion! Any creditable leader would have prepared, but the AI in this game just doesn't think that way. This game will entertain when playing against AI for a while, but it eventually becomes pretty dull. Playing with real people is the way to go.
I really, really enjoyed this game, despite some of the minor flaws. It's super fun, and actually promotes real thought in the player. I haven't played any other titles in the Civilization series, but when they come out with the seventh entry in the series, I'm going to be there. I'll give it a 9.2/10.
Up next is a quick little title I squeezed in during some downtime. Check back soon for a review!
-TRO
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