Post 8 - Civilization 6 (Game)

10 Aug 2025 15postsin30days · video-games

I have been spending a few minutes every week playing the Civilization 6 game. It is a lot of fun. I am about 300 turns into a 500 turn game; the shape and size of the game world is clear to me, the major civilizations have taken shape, and now, it appears to be a race to getting the right technologies, and units, to defend territory and also, “make” it seem well-defended to the game. The game engine catches on very quickly if it notices that some part of the territory is not well-defended and spawns Barbarians right next to it. Moving troops around has also become much easier at this stage, due to the advent of modern roads and units with more movement. If you have not heard about Civilization before, then none of that would make any sense to you, and I highly recommend this game to you.

I started playing Civilization to find out more about what “strategy games” really were all about. I have an interest in history, and my thought was that these strategy games would give me a clearer idea about how planning works when there are multiple cities and 10s or 100s of people involved. That has been the case, to some extent. There are some constraints in the game which can simply not be overcome: The movement of a unit is limited, the number of turns (amount of time) that it will take to move a set of units from one part of the map to another is fixed and nothing can be done to really bring about a “sudden assault” at any time that one may wish. I am sure that I am making huge mistakes in terms of strategy; mainly, being too impulsive and eager, rather than calculating and patient.

The times that I have been patient, the game rewards the player generously: When attempting to take over a City-State in the game, for instance, a well-planned strategy with unit movements for 10-15 turns before actually firing a single round leads to a much quicker end to the take-over rather than a hapazard attempt that starts with a handful of units. I learned this by making mistakes; the game provides a satisfying visual and auditory experience (the soundtrack plays pretty much the whole time and has a hypnotic, looping feel to it: like the instrumental music that plays in a mall, it sounds vaguely familiar but is never repetitive or boring (yet)). I do take issue with the sounds that play whenever I click on a button though: these are intrusive and do not even “fade out” causing a sudden, high pitched sound, like a door slamming somewhere near your ears.

Another moment which was really stunning for me was the first time that I realized that the game world was round! The world is presented as a flat map, and one must slowly explore the map by oneself to identify where other cities and civilizations are. Looking at a flat map with the north and sound having snow and glaciers, I expected the map to be a flat rectangle. In fact, as I kept exploring to the West, I realize that the map wraps around and it was actually a circular world, just like Earth! This was a great moment: I am not sure why I did not expect this simple fact; with a game world that is not round, moving units around would be hugely inefficient and not at all similar to the way that things like trade work in the real world. The shortest route can be taken, and the game calculates this for you depending on where you want to go. Convenient!

I stopped playing for a while in the middle, while I played Last of Us: Part 2¹ and Need for Speed for a few days. (It had been a long time since I had played a car racing game, and I wanted to relive a few of my early PC gaming days! I played the same NFS game, but remastered. When I was looking through gameplay footage on YouTube, I was surprised by how many of the shortcuts I still remembered, despite not having played the original version for at least 10 years now.) I found the middle part of the game to be a bit boring: most of it is just setup for the future, where things will actually start going much faster, with each turn involving a lot of action and decisions. I let my concentration go a bit in this part, so I have probably made some mistakes here. For the city improvements that I built, I did not even realize the great improvements to Production, Housing, and Food provided by districts such as Commercial Hub or Encampment. This will be something that I will be focusing more on in my next playthrough (which might literally be a year from now!)

Another part of the game that I have mostly not explored this time is attempting to get to technologies early by boosting them. I found the constant selection of the technology to research from the Tech tree time consuming and boring at first, but it is the most important part of the game, as the difference in strengths between units of different eras is huge.

But after that small slump, I have picked it back up where I left it off, and it has been satisfying now. I am also spending less time on individual turns, and planning well ahead, by setting up production queues that last 30-40 turns for each city, and selecting items from the Tech and Civics trees for about the same duration too. This leaves only the day-to-day to be handled, and this is usually OK with units that are simply patrolling. One thing that I feel that the game does not do a good job simulating is the real-life existence of deputies, who can take over the management of a small part of the game or a few units. I don’t know if this game has a multiplayer version, but that would be really interesting: Giving over military policy and units to one player, while leaving the decision of trade routes to another player, and so on.

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I watched the movie His Girl Friday (1940) and it was very funny! Everyone in this movie talks really fast. This is something which has changed drastically: Today, I would call an actor who is talking slowly as being dramatic, but it looks like that has changed a lot since the beginning of film.