Bigger cities, better graphics, but no massive changes
Civilization VI is launching in October | The Verge
Civilization VI is launching in October | The Verge
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While Firaxis isn't talking about all of the new features coming to Civilization VI, the studio has highlighted a few key changes for the game. Chief among them is that cities will play a bigger role, by, well, being bigger. Instead of taking up a single tile, cities can now expand across multiple tiles, and where you place them is now of greater importance. The key to this is districts, important sections of a city that now take up their own tile. A campus district, for example, will be home to all science buildings, so you can't build a library or research lab until you have the right district. Location also matters: for example, by putting a city near a body of water you'll get a huge bonus when it comes to researching new water-related technologies like sailing.
"Every tech in the game has these boosts, so that the way that you play, the things that you do in the world actually help you go down certain paths in the tech tree, which to us felt a lot more interesting," says Shirk. It might not sound like a major change, but Shirk says that the new cities add a different layer of strategy to the game. "When you place that first city, after you've played a few times, your mind really starts going and the gears start turning, when you're looking at the area around your city and deciding what kind of city it's going to be," he says. "You don't have room for everything, so you're going to have decisions to make."
Another big change comes from the historical figures you'll be playing against. Civilization VI introduces a new concept dubbed "dynamic diplomacy," in which the motivations of the AI characters will change over the course of a game, based largely on how you interact with them. "Each leader has a historical agenda that's associated with them, that reflects in some way who they were in history," says Andrew Garrett, lead AI designer on the game.
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