Civilization VI is a very good video game! It’s also got some weird complexities and systems that aren’t explained properly, as well as some neat little headen features, so here are some tips for getting the most out of it.

• Civ 6 Game Speed Differences And Meanings
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Civilization 6 guide, tips and tricks - how to lead your civilization to glory From leader profiles to in-depth strategies in every game phase.

ARMIES

In Civ V, cities could defend themselves, so you could concentrate on building improvements. Not here. Civ VI’s settlements won’t have their own defences until you complete some research, so in the early stages of the game it’s worth building a decent little army. On King difficulty or higher, this is an absolute priority.

You’ll need it for defence against barbarians and over-zealous AI, but it’s also handy for warmongering types; early units are cheap with the right policies, and you’ll find you can roll over quite a few neighbouring Civs early on without much trouble, especially if you take the time to build some siege engines and battering rams.

CLEARANCES

Before you build a district, send in a Builder to harvest any resources there first. Dropping the District will clear the tile of that bonus, but if you send in the Builder first you’ll get a decent cash injection for harvesting it. Oh, and always harvest a marsh, regardless of what you plan to do with it, they’re largely useless.

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Civ 6 Game Speed Differences And Meanings

URBAN PLANNING

Maybe the most important thing in the entire game is making sure your speciality districts are placed properly and working efficiently. The bonuses you can get from putting them in the right spot and assigning citizens correctly to work them can make the difference between winning and getting your ass kicked.

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Here’s an excellent video by MadDavyBones which breaks down the finer details of district planning:

EXPANSION

Don’t fear expansion in Civ VI. It’s annoying link to happiness from Civ V is gone, meaning you’re free to erect new cities as long as you can afford them and have the space/will to build them. Indeed, some opponents, like Trajan, will remind you to do this if you’re not. Early expansion is the easiest way to secure areas of the map that contain valuable resources and strategic bottlenecks.

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CAMERA PAN

Hold Alt down and you can pan the camera around. Active webcam 11.6 serial key free. It snaps back once you let go, sadly, but it’s a nice way of seeing the world from a new angle.

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NAVIES

As of February 2017, the AI cannot control navies. It can’t build good ones, and it can’t use the ones it does build properly. This gives you a huge advantage on certain styles of maps, both for pillaging coastlines and protecting invasion fleets. So if you want to get the best of the AI, especially on lower difficulty levels, take the fight to them on the seas.

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ENVOYS

Civ VI’s new city state system is neat, in that it lets you send “envoys” to them in return for favour. And while, like Civ V, there’s an ultimate end-game to this (gaining the principle favour of the city), don’t sweat it if you can’t achieve it. You get nice consolation bonuses for the 1st, 3rd and 6th envoy you send regardless of who is their best friend, so if you spread these around instead of focusing on just one or two, you can collect a nice spread of perks, on everything from faith to production to gold.

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GREAT PEOPLE

You’re no longer simply given a Great Person. Instead, you are shown one that you have earned, and asked whether you want to claim them or pass and wait for the next one. Don’t automatically claim them! Make sure to read the fine print of their requirements, because some Great People may require certain districts or tiles that you don’t have, making them useless.

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HAPPINESS

As I said in my review, happiness is a lot easier to keep on top of in Civ VI, but it just because it’s easier to manage doesn’t mean there’s no managing. Your people will still get unhappy, and if they get too unhappy they’ll riot (spawning barbarian units outside your cities). The obvious way to keep this under control is to do what the game tells you—build more amenities—but you can also get big boosts to satisfaction by diversifying your luxury resources. Each type brings happiness to your people, so if you’re surrounded by lots of different varieties, snap ‘em up. If you’re not, but you have multiples of one type, trade it with other Civs for their luxury resources.

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TRADE

In Civ V, you really only needed to set up trade routes between your own cities if one of them was starving. In Civ VI, though, it can be handy to do this, at least early on, because until you can build Military Engineers trade routes are the easiest way to build roads between your cities, since your Traders do it automatically in their wake.

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And while the trade screen (the one where you select which city to send a caravan to) can look confusing, the easiest bet for beginners is always just to pick the foreign city with the highest gold yield. Once you’ve completed a route, a little market icon will appear next to its name in the list, and you’ll get higher yields on future trips.

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ANIMATION SPEED

This tip is an oldie, but a goodie: after you’ve checked out some of Civ VI’s smooth/cute unit movement animations, turn them off. It’ll save you a lot of time, especially between turns, since the AI will animate everything moving inside your field of vision.

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You guys got any good ones you’ve discovered so far? If so drop ‘em below and I’ll add them!

We’ve had to wait longer than usual, but with Civilization VI out now a new dawn is breaking once again on the venerable 4X series, ready to give us a fresh take on the fantasy of guiding a nation from the dawn of time through to the near future.

Related: find out more about Civilization 6 in our review.

Even though the basic formula remains the same, the devs have never rested on their laurels, always rejigging the visuals and mechanics between entries in bold and drastic ways. Sometimes it’s worked, and sometimes it hasn’t. But 25 years on from its inception and going stronger than ever, it’s fair to say that Civ has – to quote the original’s box – ‘built an empire to stand the test of time.’

As you’re about to see, and then subsequently spit your cup of coffee all over your screen like a sitcom character, we’ve included the Call to Power games. We’ve also omitted Beyond Earth and Alpha Centauri, even though the former carries the Civ nomenclature and the latter carries the Meier name.

Why? Because Civ games, to us, are about guiding a people from prehistory to the future, journeying through recognisable periods of human history and doing it on Earth. While CtP deviates from that formula slightly, it’s still very recgonisable as the classic Civ experience. Beyond Earth and Alpha Centauri? Well, their names say it all.

Which entries propelled Civ to glory, and which are best left in the past? Join us as we chart the series from its ancient era to the modern day, and rank each of the Civilization games from worst to best.

8 – Civilization: Call to Power

Purists will scoff at the inclusion of Activision’s ambitious yet shambolic stab at the great empire-builder, but it marked a blip in the history of the series that’s kind of fascinating.

Call to Power arose out of legal tussles between Activision and Microprose over the board game origins of the ‘Civilization’ trademark. Made without Sid Meier, Jeff Briggs and co at the helm, it was Activision’s first stab at the Civ franchise, which perhaps explains why they seemingly crammed every idea into it that a single game could possibly hold.

Featuring outlandish ideas like space warfare and underwater cities, as well as a whole wealth of sneaky units like lawyers, slavers, televangelists with televisions for heads and, errr, steampunky blimps that beamed advertising onto enemy Civs, Call to Power was nothing if not ambitious. It was marred by a poor interface and bad implementation however, with all the extra content making the game feel bloated and unfocused, with the late-game feeling like a hellish rabble of conflicting ideas that, frankly, was a bit grim to be a part of.

Let’s just call it ‘Franken-civ’ and move on…

7 – Civilization II

Civ 2 probably deserves an apology for being put in line right next to the black sheep of the family, because it really is a far superior game. It took the series out of a top-down view into a more immersive isometric perspective, expanded the number of techs and playable civs, and deepened war and diplomacy.

Yet when I upgraded from Civ 1 to Civ 2, I remember that for all its added polish and depth, it felt somehow colder than the original; little things like the fact that leader screens were just generic portraits, the static city view, and those awful video clips of advisors dressed up like they were going to a Roman-themed uni party.

Not that those niggles stopped me from pouring half a decade of my life into it, and remembering its sweetly 90s soundtrack to this day. Just like every other Civ game – it ranks among the greatest games of its time.

6 – Civilization

Where it all began. It’s fitting that one of my enduring memories of Civ is that pixellated cutscene of a young Earth smouldering into existence, because that’s precisely the role this game played for the series – setting the scene for generations to come.

With its blocky bird’s-eye view, only seven leaders and a comparatively small tech tree, of course the original is also technically the crudest, but it had some flourishes that gave it a big personality.

Meeting each leader was a treat, and your negotiations with them would be dramatised by their contorting, shifting faces as you inevitably pissed them off for calling them an ostrich or not handing over your techs to them. The city view – fully animated by gorgeous sprites – remains the best in the series, and the different looks of the advisers when you changed government were a great touch. It had a charm that was unmatched until much later in the series.

5 – Call to Power 2

If the purists were scoffing before, they’ll be choking on their self-righteous lentils that Call to Power 2, which doesn’t even have the word ‘Civilization’ in the title, makes it onto this list among the Sid Meier thoroughbreds.

For all intents and purposes it is a Civ game, and Activision’s second and final stab at the Civ formula was a big improvement on its bloated predecessor. Yes, there are still slavers and those blasted lawyers being a nuisance, but the improved interface, better diplomacy, and ability to automate units make it much enjoyable. It even introduced a couple of innovations like cultural borders and ‘armies’, both of which were taken on in subsequent games (the latter appears in Civ VI as the ‘combined arms’ mechanic, where you can stack certain military units with others to make them more effective).

Call to Power 2 cut out its predecessor’s underwater cities and space colonisation, but still has its share of interesting features – like global warming and futuristic army units – that spiced up the gameplay. The source code for the game was released in 2003, and if you do want to give it a crack you can buy it at GOG. It’s best played with the CtP2 Apolyton patch, which fixes many of the bugs and improves AI (nice to see that there’s someone out there actually cares about the black sheep of the Civ extended family).

4 – Civilization III

The oldest Civilization game that manages to feel timeless, thanks to a spit-and-polished pixel aesthetic, lovely animations, and deep systems that remain a central part of the series to this day. Civ III introduced Civilization traits, endowing each civ with more individuality, and encouraging different strategies depending on which one you chose. It built on the idea of national borders established in CtP 2, and was also (regrettably) the last Civ game to have a city view.

Civ III had a few maverick features too. You could monopolise strategic resources and luxuries then sell them on for a premium, had to deal with corruption in distant cities, and even faced the occasional volcanic explosion. Best of all, leaders would wear clothing befitting of their era; who wouldn’t want to see Abe Lincoln wearing a fur hat and jerkin in 1000BC?.

With the Play the World and Conquests expansions, Civ III remains a rich and pleasantly pixellated entry that’s still a joy to revisit.

3 – Civilization V

In a huge overhaul, Firaxis ‘de-stacked’ units and changed the map from a square grid to a hex grid for Civ V. This helped make maps feel more geographically natural than ever before, and wars far more satisfying, as good tactics and positioning could often defeat a far bigger force. City-States were a welcome new feature too.

Civ V was far from perfect upon release. The AI was bonkers (not in the ‘fun-at-a-party’ way), vassalage from Civ IV was dropped, and espionage felt over-simplified. With the expansion packs Civ V truly came into its own, though the fact that these were required to make the it shine meant that the game felt like it went backwards before truly moving forwards.

Gods and Kings reintroduced religion, now more customisable and robust, while Brave New World added in Tourism and Ideologies, both of which combated the series’ trademark late-game lull. Check out the Civ V Community Patch Project as well if you want an interesting rejig of the rules, better AI, and the reinstatement of Civ IV features like vassal states and deeper espionage.

This is undoubtedly the most polished Civ to date, and held top spot on this list until my heart made me do a last-second u-turn. Much like Civ II to Civ I, this just lacked that extra ‘something’ in relation to its predecessor…

2 – Civilization VI

It’s not easy to rank a vanilla Civ game and compare it with entries that had a couple of expansion packs and several years to come to full fruition, but at the same time it’s kind of irresistible.

Where Civ V pared back on many of the great features introduced in its predecessor, the latest entry retains just about all of them. Religion, tourism, espionage and city-states are all here, and have been rejigged to offer the deepest Civ experience yet, which is deceived by the bold, colourful visual style that looks incredible in motion.

The big decision to de-stack cities, spreading them across several tiles with separate zones for different building types, was an inspired one, forcing you to be more tactical about city placement. The option to merge different unit types and form armies, meanwhile, gets rid of the unit clutter that oft plagued Civ V.

From the scrawled maps that have replaced the dreaded Fog of War, to the Wonders that now stand proud and massive on their own tiles, to the art style of the leaders (whose personalities are now bolstered by new ‘Agendas’), Civ VI feels a fitting celebration of the series on its 25th anniversary. The AI remains chaotic, but with patches and expansions inevitable, Civ VI has the potential to claim the throne.

For now, however, the King (or Deity?) remains unchallenged…

1 – Civilization IV

Remember the charm I prattled on about while discussing the original Civ? Well, this is where it made a triumphant return – with full 3D graphics. From that sweeping, lovely menu music (Baba Yetu), to Leonard Nimoy sagely giving you inspirational quotes each time you discovered a technology, to the fact that in the late-game you could seamlessly zoom out into space and see the whole world, Civ IV was a real charmer.

It wasn’t just superficial, either. Religion as a tool of control made its debut, and with the expansions we got fantastic features like vassal states and espionage (I’ll never forget my successful death-or-glory mission to sabotage Mansa Musa’s spaceship production and steal the Space Race victory).

For all its charms, Civ IV was still flawed. War was an unstrategic slog consisting of the infamous Stacks of Doom, the late-game dragged on (despite the inclusion of corporations in the Beyond the Sword expansion), and religion was never as effective as it could’ve been.

Even though going back to it now is surprisingly tough after playing the complete version of Civ V, the depth and presentation of Civ IV, and its role in progressing the series, wins it the top spot.

So there we have it. The definitive Civ rankings so you don’t need to do them yourself (or get enraged about how wrong we are).

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