Eleven months ago I spent an exorbitant amount of time playing Civilization VI and then for good measure I spent even more time writing up a post about it. It's probably one of my best posts in years, and here it is: https://back-blogged.blogspot.com/2019/02/civilization-vi.html
That post ended like this: "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!"
And fam, guess what. We got that DLC. Oh man, look out!
I'll structure this post the way I did the previous one, so...
1. Scenario - Nile (Nubia)
The first chunk of DLC I downloaded was the Nubian civilization and an accompanying Nile River map and scenario. In the scenario, you pick to play as either Egypt or Nubia and there are two victory conditions. One is the standard domination victory which requires you to capture your enemy's capital city. The other is a very specific religious victory that requires you to build seven specific temples before the other player does. Now, I just jumped head-first into this one as Nubia, and I had no intentions at all of starting a war with Egypt; I'd just focus on trying to settle seven cities and proceed through the various science and culture trees in order to unlock that very specific temple. There were two major issues with my plan! One was that this specific scenario only gives you six settler units, but you need seven cities in order to win. Which means the only path toward religious victory requires at least a little bit of military planning. I went to town on some poor city-state to my south - honestly I have no memory of who it was - and eventually found myself owning seven cities the hard way (but the only way). The other problem is that these specific temples that had to be built had prerequisite buildings in each city. And those buildings had prerequisities. This meant I had to build 21 different religious buildings, and all religious buildings required a currency called "faith" to build. But I'd been so focused on fending off barbarians and capturing a city-state with my military that I'd put almost no effort into manufacturing faith until halfway through this 125-turn game. Gah! I'll cut to the chase and say that it worked out and I completed my seventh temple and earned the W somewhere around the 115th turn or so. Close, but not too close! Egypt never attacked me and also never made a single temple, which aligns very well with my previous scenario experiences in Civilization VI - you're not playing against the CPU as much as you're playing against the very specific victory conditions that only get tighter and harder as the difficulty increases. Oh, lastly - I'm glad I picked Nubia here and not Egypt. One assymetry in this scenario was that throughout the game, foreign armies from places like Greece and Rome would arrive on the Mediterranean coast looking to expand their own empires. Apparently, this puts Egypt in a ton of unavoidable conflict, and if you play as Egypt the most important thign to do is to avoid war with Nubia to your south lest you be surrounded by enemies on all sides; meanwhile as Nubia you're actually supposed to rush Egypt early with everything you've got and shoot for that domination victory. So I did it the hard way, apparently. Well, shoot.
2. Scenario - Southeast Asian Religious War (Indonesia)
That last one was super long, so I'll keep this brief. This was a seven-civilization competition with no military conflict; the only path to victory was once again a very specific type of religious victory. Here, whichever civilization had the highest score after 50 turns would win. There were three components to scoring - how many followers your religion had throughout the world, how many total foreign cities followed your religion, and how much faith you were producing every turn. Like I said, I'll keep this brief. I was Indonesia, mostly on a whim. This put me in an isolated corner of the map, which probably helped me avoid an onslaught of foreign missionaries pouring in from all sides. While the six other civilizations fought generally omnidirectional wars, I just kept pumping out missionairies and apostles and flinging them toward Thailand and Vietnam and Burma. No real strategy beyond badgering the closest cities with my religious beliefs as often and as hard as possible. It didn't work! On Turn 49 I was still very clearly in second place to China. And then out of nowhere at all, I won. Turns out China somehow fucked up and lost like fifty points on the final turn, just the biggest choke job you've ever seen. I still don't understand what happened, and I don't care.
3. Free Play - Russia, 133% speed, standard "Europe" map, Level 5
This one's based very heavily on the "one that got away" eleven months ago: my Russian playthrough, in which I intended to eke out a meager "surviving not thriving" existence in the tundra before eventually expanding across all kinds of useless, wide open space and then establishing a totalitarian state with all the good communist perks and then winning a scientific victory by beating everyone else to outer space. You know, like the real Russia did in the version of history that ends in 1960! Back then, I was ravaged by enemies before I coudl expand past more than three or four cities and the whole thing never really got off the ground. This time around, sadly - or honestly, maybe thankfully - things only went slightly better for me, as I wasn't vanquished by AI opponents but by some shitty recurring glitch. The game kept freezing after 175 turns or so, just after I'd established my first city on the Black Sea somewhere in the medieval era. I tried to restart it four or five times and it just kept freezing no more than one turn later. There would be no space race, there would be no communism, and there would not even be a big eastward expansion. But, fuck it - I'm claiming partial success this time. When I was forced to throw in the towel, I had the second-highest score in the game and also an empire spanning from St. Petersburg and Helsinki in the north to Moscow in the east to Riga in the west and down to Kyiv and Crimea in the south. It was almost poetic, really - wasn't that the great accomplishment of Catherine the Great? Expanding Russia to the Black Sea and Crimea? Fuck it, we're done here. Shut it down!
(Be back soon for the remaining DLC, I think!)
