For 25 years, Sid Meier’s Civilization series has been a pillar of PC gaming. Few games, if any, have captured its epic scope, spanning the whole world and the entirety of human history. Civilization VI launches later in October, but we have been fortunate enough to get our hands on a preview build and tinker with it for the last week.
Join me live on Twitch at 11 a.m. ET and we will rewrite history together. We’ll check out this long-anticipated game in action and give you a preview of my still-forming opinions about it in anticipation of our full review and guide when it arrives fully in October.
The jump from Civilization V to VI is perhaps less dramatic than we’ve seen in previous games, but there are definitely some fundamental changes to how the game is played. Most notably, cities have been unstacked, with all of your buildings spread out on the map in specialized districts, along with world wonders also taking up a tile. This makes the puzzle of growing and specializing your cities much crunchier, with the particular layout of the map mattering more than ever before.
The second major change is that Civ V‘s cultural policies have been fleshed out into a full cultural tree, absorbing some of the less technological milestones from the extant science tree. Much of the new culture tree is filled with policy cards that can be slotted into a new system of government types that can be unlocked over the course of play. The net result is a richer game for players that like to focus on the more humanistic elements of civilization.
There are plenty of other changes, big and small, throughout this complex game’s many systems. The preview build we currently have features 10 of the 20 leaders that will be available at launch. As a preview, keep in mind that things are still subject to change, so we’ll be reserving real judgement until we have the final version.
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