Three and Out – ‘Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Gathering Storm’

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Gathering Storm introduces a load of new content for players to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. The first major change to Civilizations 6 is climate change along with natural disasters. Both of these systems intertwine as civilizations emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere causing natural disasters to increase in severity and frequency. As civilizations increase the warmth of the planet, causing the sea level to rise, whole tiles will partially flood before completely disappearing, removing anything on that tile. While you can mitigate these factors later in the game, you are, before that point, completely vulnerable to the whims of nature. If you fail to properly plan your city placement, and place an important expansion for a city on the coast, it can cripple that city if that tile floods, and possibly your entire civilization if it was a key city. Along with tile flooding, Gathering Storm adds blizzards, droughts, hurricanes, tornados, sandstorms, all of which can severely damage your cities. There is also river flooding and volcanoes, which serve as risk reward systems. Floods and volcanic ash will add bonus fertility to the tiles near them but can also damage or even kill your city’s  population. The addition of these features adds new depth to city placement in Civilization that was sorely missing. No longer can you settle a city just based on what resources are nearby. Previously great settle spots are now much riskier. Overall, this forces a civilization to think about how the environment will affect a new city before they place it.

Gathering Storms brings back the diplomatic World Congress, and with it, the diplomatic victory condition. The World Congress, starting from the medieval era, allows civilizations to meet after a certain amount of turns have passed – with meetings happening more frequently later in the game – and democratically vote on world policies. These policies range from promoting a world religion to the banning of nuclear power. Unlike in Civilization V policies that will be voted upon are randomly chosen by the game. Civilizations then vote on an “A” and “B” choice on two different policies with the “A” choice usually being positive, and the “B” choice being a negative version. In order to vote on these choices, civilizations need to accrue a new diplomatic currency called “Diplomatic Favour.” Civilizations can get Diplomatic Favour through a few methods: the easiest and most common way to do so is by allying city-states to your civilization. Each city-state civilization has allied gains that give them additional Diplomatic Favour per turn. Civilizations can also trade Diplomatic Favour between each other. Starting in the modern era of the game, civilizations will start voting on a world leader. Each of these votes allows civilizations to gain two out of a needed ten points to win a diplomatic victory. It is also possible for other civilizations to vote for a player to lose a point.  player can increase their Diplomatic Favour, which in theory should increase their chances at a diplomatic victory. In practice, this is not enough. Currently, the diplomatic victory lacks a consistent way to proactively increase your own progress towards the victory. The science, domination, culture, and religious victory allows players to increase progress proactively be it from building units, buildings and other systems already in the game that increase a players progress to victory. The diplomatic victory lacks this with the exception of two techs and one wonder (the Statue of Liberty), which are unlocked near the end of the game each giving a single point. However, by this point, most players will already be plenty close to a different victory type. This, along with the fact that a player can not increase the frequency of the world congress, makes it so that nine times out of ten it is a better idea to go for any other victory condition.

Civilization wouldn’t be its name sake without new playable civilizations. Gathering Storm adds eight new civilizations in Hungry, Canada, The Mayori, The Ottomans, Phoenicia, Sweden, The Mali, and one new leader in Eleanor of Aquitaine, who can lead both France and England. A majority of these new civilizations feel viable. From the war-focused Ottomans to the culturally focused Maori, each civilization carves out a unique space in the game. With the new civilizations comes a change to the old warmonger system. Before Gathering Storm, aggressive actions were remembered and reacted upon based on an unknown number an action would garner. However, these actions would never be forgotten by the A.I, leading  them to hate a civilization for taking a city 2000 years prior. This has been replaced by a new system, called “Grievances,” which acts as a diminishing currency accumulated by acting aggressively toward other players, or by breaking promises. The amount of Grievances is now clearly indicated to the player, allowing players to clearly see just how much a civilization dislikes them. Along with this change, the AI has has seen smaller,overall improvements which has led to it being more realistically aggressive, and not total pushovers even on easier difficulties.