Civilization VI

Aside from a  few sessions of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate here and there, the lone video game I played in January was Civilization VI. And holy hell, did I play the everloving fuck out of it. Civilization is famously and ridiculously addicting - the type of game you can spend hours on end playing, long into the night, pretty easily while watching TV in the background. So over the course of January I spent some 70-something hours playing ten different games of Civilization VI, and I may as well recap them all here.

1. Tutorial - Babylon

I'm very familiar with the basics of Civilization, but playing on a Nintendo Switch I decided to try out the tutorial before jumping into a full-fledged game. The tutorial walks you through several functions of the game you'll need to learn how to manage and master, and then leaves you to your own devices to capture the only other civilization's capital city. Here, I was Babylon, the other civilization was Egypt, and due to my own fuck-ups left and right (part of the learning curve, my friends!) this tutorial took me two hours to finish - wow! Civilization VI does not fuck around!

2. Free play - India, standard settings

After the tutorial I jumped straight into a "quick play" game and was randomly assigned a civilization - India. I was Ghandi. Cool! No war for me! The map I ended up on had two giant continents, one bigger than the other, and four civilizations, two on each continent. I was stuck on the smaller continent with Arabia while China and Babylon shared the larger one. I ran into some trouble right away as Arabia's AI decided to aggressively push its religion (Islam) on my people and resist me for spreading my own religion (Hinduism) to theirs. They declared war on me multiple times throughout the early stages of the game, but I was able to hold them at bay on their side of the continent without losing any cities. Finally, I got to a point where my own army was large enough that I felt I could take on some of Arabia's cities, and so I declared war on them in the mid-to-late game and pretty quickly and easily wiped them out. This left me with control over an entire continent, but I was also lagging behind the other two civilizations in science and culture, which put me in a weird kind of last place as the game headed into its homestretch. I reviewed the various victory conditions again and, weirdly, settled on a religious victory, which requires that all other civilizations in the game follow your religion. I say "weirdly" because at this point my own civilization wasn't majority Hindu; thanks to Arabia's aggressive gospel spreading I was an Islamic civilization and each of the other two civilizations followed a third religion. So I got to work pumping out apostles and inquisitors and missionaries and, in time, converted my own cities back to Hinduism before spreading it across the sea to the other continent. My victory was never really in doubt once I realized I could go down this path - especially since China and Babylon were at war with each other, stalling one another's progress on the science and culture fronts. Cool - not the cleanest path to victory in a Civilization game, but I'll take it after mostly fucking around and playing defensively (and still figuring out certain game mechanics on the fly). I think this took me 350 or 400 turns out of a possible 500.

3. Scenario - Macedonia

After my first foray into free play, I decided to try out one of the game's baked in scenarios - 60-turn games based on real historical situations. In this one, I was Alexander the Great of Macedonia, and I had to capture every city on the world map in 60 turns. This was an all out military game and I can't even remember if culture or science existed - instead it was all about moving an army at maximum speed, with minimal casualties, all the way from Greece to the Nile River and to the mountains of Afghanistan. I restarted this game once, early on, after making a terrible and costly decision in the early game that wiped half of my army out right away. On my second try, I was able to finish it on standard difficulty (level 4 of 8) pretty easily, albeit with a real slog toward the endgame in the mountainous regions of Afghanistan. The thing about playing the military game in any Civilization game is that it's just so fucking time-consuming. If you've got 20 or 30 units, each turn consists of moving each of those 20 to 30 units in addition to managing your own cities and diplomacy and science and culture and everything else. I think this is why I tend to "turtle" in these games, and reduce my armies as much as possible - streamlined turns! Despite being 60 turns, this game probably took as long to finish as my ~350-turn Ghandi game. Yikes.

4. Scenario - Vikings (Norway)

Next up in the scenario pack was a Viking conquest scenario where you had to play as one of three viking kingdoms (Norway, Sweden, or Denmark) and then you got points for pillaging tiles, capturing cities, discovering Vinland, and converting to Christianity. It was a confusing game, to say the least, and even though I never captured a single city I beat the other two AI viking kingdoms running away by discovering Vinland first. In fact it almost felt wrong to me to obliterate the competition despite so many of my own fuck ups; I determined here to play the rest of my games at increased difficulty levels.

5. Scenario - Lithuania (Poland), Level 5

Here's another scenario in which I competed for points with two other civilizations. The gist here is that all three of us were central European allies defending against onslaughts of barbarians. Thus this too was a very military-heavy campaign. I won it in a landslide once again. Why? How? Perhaps these AI teams just weren't optimized to play the scenarios. Whatever, I only had one more scenario after this anyway.

6. Scenario - Australia, Level 6

This was an interesting one! This was an overtly military-free game in which the goal is just to turn an Australian colony into the most profitable colony you can by Turn 60. The default goal was to hit 500 gold per turn by Turn 60; by ramping up the difficulty to Level 6, I had to hit 700 gold per turn. But like I said, this was an interesting one. Once Turn 45 hits, you've entered World War I - this doesn't do anything military-wise, but it unlocks this gold-per-turn enhancement that the game is stupid hard to win without exploiting. And then by Turn 53, it's World War II, and the same enhancement doubles the gold-per-turn bonuses provided by these enhancements. What's all this mean? In simple terms, it means I was all the way back at, like, 50 gold per turn as late as Turn 45, and completely lost as to how you were supposed to beat this scenario. And then this exponential explosion occurred and I started increasing my gold-per-turn output by like 20, then 30, then 40 or 50 gold per turn... per turn. (Gold per turn squared? Whatever.) The arrival of these enormous perks seemed heavily and precisely tuned to the game's 60-turn limit. I would have lost the game, failing to hit 700 gold per turn, had it lasted 59 turns; by contrast, I would have probably surpassed 800 gold per turn had it lasted 61 turns. I can't really tell if this was a well-designed scenario or not, but at least now I'd finished them all, and was ready to return to free play to have some fun with modifications.

7. Free play - England, 150% speed, huge "islands" map, Level 6

Newly emboldened by my success on the scenarios at higher levels, I went ahead and set up a Level 6 game on an "island" map, playing as England, and ready to exploit all kinds of British perks to win (naval power, bonus production on cities founded outside of your main continent, etc.) I went for a "huge map," which includes the maximum map size and 12 total civilizations. I also went ahead and increased the play speed to 150% (so, a 333-turn game instead of the default 500). This combination was a total mistake! It turns out massive maps don't play well with accelerated playthroughs; when you send a ship across the sea, for instance, by the time it gets to where it's going some 20 turns later you're already like an entire scientific era beyond where you were when you sent the ship out! This meant I was virtually unable to wage war with overseas nations the way the actual British Empire did, because by the time my swordsmen got across the world, everyone had moved on to an era of gunpowder. It was just a bad overall fit! And by focusing so much of my resources and early strategy on overseas military, I'd neglected science, which meant I'd fallen too far behind the other civilizations to have any potential path to victory. I spent a lot of time on this playthrough, but ultimately abandoned it once the time between turns (in other words, the time it took for the other 11 civilizations to move all of their units and enact all of their policies) started exceeding multiple minutes. No reason to play out a losing effort when doing so is going to take literal hours, right?

8. Free play - Russia, 67% speed, large "real world" map, Level 6

For what I thought might end up being my final game of Civilization VI, I decided to play as Russia on a large map at a decelerated pace. I had epic visions of struggling through the early portions of the game on production-starved tundra tiles, ruling vast swaths of shitty nothingness while focusing on my science and culture and then ultimately making a totalitarian regime-style space race push to win a scientific victory after what I imagined could be as much as ten or fifteen hours of gameplay. It was a noble idea! Instead, here is what happened. I lasted maybe 100 turns before a raging Babylonian army made mincemeat out of my paltry defenses and took over three of my five hard-settled cities, long before concepts like communism or a space race were anywhere on my radar. I never stood a chance! Seriously, the handicaps associated with the Level 6 difficulty, the shitty tundra tiles I had to work with, and the Babylonian AI tendency to make early and expansive war meant that my mere vicinity to Babylon had me doomed form the start on this map. Oh well!

9. Free play - America, 67% speed, large "real world" map, Level 5

I dragged the difficulty level back down a notch and started my epic playthrough all over again, this time opting for a civilization I figured would have a little more breathing room - the Americans! Unfortunately, one of the other seven randomly chosen civilizations ended up being the Aztecs, and I was boxed in territorially from a very early point in the game. I went to war with the Aztecs right away to try to push them back south after they settled a city in Texas, but it was to no avail. They ended up owning everything on the Pacific Coast from Mexico up through Alaska, confining me entirely to the east of the Rocky Mountains. But! Their fatal flaw was in never expanding southward. To my great surprise, the entire continent of South America was uninhabited when I first landed an explorer there, and so I quickly put everything I had into setting up shop across that continent. I didn't end up owning the whole thing - Greece eventually made its way over from Europe and settled a few cities on the Brazilian coast, and we nearly got into a few wars over our proximity - but with Eastern North America and Western South America under my control, I had more than enough of an overall population to go after my main goal: a cultural victory. See, America's major perks all come into play in the late game, with advanced airplane units and tourism-boosting buildings and perks. Once I'd expanded my empire accordingly I played nice with all other civilizations to avoid wars and just put everything I had into getting as many tourists as possible to visit my cities. Before too long - just kidding, after like fifteen hours - I had triggered a cultural victory. Cool! And exhausting - this took like 600 turns to do, and by the end of the game the inter-turn wait times were upwards of one minute, just as they'd been in the British game I abandoned.

10. Free play - Germany, 200% speed, small "snowflake" map, Level 6

I knew my time with this game was coming to an end, but there were two major things I still wanted to do. One, achieve a scientific victory, the only type I'd been unable to achieve thus far. Two, win a game on that Level 6 difficulty where I'd sputtered out as England and gotten absolutely smoked as Russia. I opted for Germany, a civilization without any science bonuses, but with some very good production bonuses; to win the space race, you don't just have to discover technologies, you need to build spaceships! And I opted for a "snowflake" map, a six-spoked landmass with equal resources and tiles on each spoke for a perfectly balanced game. I also maxed out the speed because folks, I was goddamn sick of wasting hours on this game. A 250-turn game it would be! So I started out and almost immediately I fucked up real bad. One of Germany's perks is a substantial combat benefit against city states - independent, one-city civilizations that exist in every game that mostly just mind their own business. So I decided I'd go to war with one or two of these civilizations early on to try to expand my empire quickly. But on Level 6 difficulty you get so many combat handicaps, and the city states existed on little islands in the sea that made them extra fortified from attack. So I wasted substantial time and effort on a fruitless effort to capture those cities, and waste isn't a something you can tolerate in a 250-turn game on a hard difficulty where every turn counts! Long and short of it, I nearly restarted my game, then thought better of it, then got to a point where other civilizations were beginning to build their spaceports and spacecrafts while I was researching like, flight. But through an absolute concentration of effort onto the scientific research side of things, I eventually caught up on the technologies I needed and got to work building spaceports and spaceships. And baby... I won! I won by like one, maybe two turns tops, as at least one other civilization - Russia? - was one spacecraft project away from winning back when I was, shit, three away. Those insane production perks, coupled with some others I found during my playthrough, gave me the ability to come back from what felt like an impossible hole and to finally win a scientific victory - ostensibly the easiest type of victory to win.

So yeah. Just way too many hours spent on this game, and way too many nights where I'd look at the clock and go "holy shit, how is it two in the morning already?" and then still stay up until three. I've put the game back in its case and on the shelf, and I just don't see myself going back anytime soon. That said, if there's any DLC for this game in the future...  oh man, look out!