Civilization VI: Return of the stack
For stacking addicts, the last Civilization game was hard. Well, it was worse than hard. It was a desert. Stacking verboten. Stacking null. You can stick your stack up your ... well you get the idea. No slack on stack.
Civilization VI however brings a new system that first allows you to merge two units into corps - in the Renaissance era - and later three units into armies as the game progresses. As a big fan of "Doom Stacking" in Civs I to IV, I always felt somewhat limited in Civilization V. Essentially, taking out other civs got that bit harder and a city placed in difficult terrain became a tough proposition to seize or raze, even with vast technological superiority and military numbers.
Well by now you've guessed - I'm a Domination victory player. Those who prefer subtler routes to victory, you have my condolences.
There are a lot of changes in the new Civ - and most of them for the good. First of all there is that new districts system. I had heard and read about it before, but you don't get what it really means until you start playing. For example I read that you can only build a limited number of districts, but nonetheless I was disappointed when an attempt to build a military district in one of my cities was blocked because the district limit had been reached.
Nevertheless, for us martial-minded types, it is a good thing to learn that military districts reduce the number of resources needed to build a unit. Let's say you want to build a knight. In a city with a military district you will need one horse resource, but in a city lacking a military district, you will need two of the horse resource to build a knight.
Also there is no more automating workers and letting them build improvements for you. You will have to manually plan and build your cities. And workers get three "charges" or uses before they are expended.
Being the combative type, in my first game I played as Rome, and went full out to get multiple Legion units and to build up on my commercial districts and get that gold flow in to fund the centuries of war I had planned. And I did manage to get all of it - neglecting to found my own religion.
So I started out on the path of early game aggression, destroying AI civs with my Legions to great success. As before, other civs won't such warlike ways, and the denouncements flowed in. Sticks and stones though, because the words weren't backed up with enough military power to challenge me, even combined.
At the very end of the game England got really close to a religious victory - so I had to take them down. As they had only two cities and I had just got Cavalry and the Musketman, it was going to be an easy win. Or at least I thought so. At the very moment when I was taking their last city I got a nice little popup saying that "you are defeated". The English god botherers had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
From a technical aspect, the game looked really nice although some may find the different views overlapping sometimes and it was often hard to find where to close them as the interface wasn't very intuitive. For example when in city view, when pressing the ESC key it would close the city view and open up the game's main menu.
All in all I am really happy with how the new Civ has turned out. My favourite Civilization until now was Civilization III. Maybe I am just being nostalgic or something but I spent the most time playing Civ III and I still like to run it. But I really like Civ VI and depending on how it turns out when the game is released and after a few patches, I'm happy to say it could become my new favourite Civilization game.
