Current Distraction: quick start guide to Civ 6

I’m just going to go ahead and assume that you have sunk 300+ hours into Civ5. The good news is Civ6 seems to add some interesting layers of strategy to that glorious Civ gameplay. The bad news is that a lot of your tactical habits are going to actively undermine you.

Movement

Civ6 has reverse movement rules from Civ5. In 5, a unit could enter difficult terrain even if it didn’t have enough movement points. For example, a unit with only one 1 movement remaining could enter a hill (req 2 movement). No longer so. Now a unit needs its full budget of movement points in order to enter difficult terrain. This *greatly* increases the utility of scouts in the early game of Civ6. Before your early axemen unit could regularly move two hexes at a time by making sure their first movement was in a plains. Also, rivers are a lot more annoying since your unit has to come to a complete stop before them and it takes an entire turn to move one hex across them.

Civics Tree

The old culture tree is gone, replaced by Civics research. Culture points (from cities, monuments, what-have-you) act like research as you work your way up through concepts like Foreign Trade, God-King, etc. Each civic researched unlocks cards that you can equipment to your government. There are Military (red), Infrastructure (yellow), religious/ethic (green) and great person (purple). Sample boosts include +5 vs barbarians, +50% to building Settlers, +2 Great Writer points etc. Depending on your form of government, you can have different numbers of each equipped. So if you’re a military dictatorship, you could have 3 reds and a yellow, where as an early republic can choose from 2 yellows, a green, and a wildcard. It’s a pretty slick system.

Inspiration

Both civic and traditional research have ‘inspirations’. You can get up to half the research ability *if* you accomplish some task in the game. Masonry normally takes 12 turns to research, but if you’ve built a quarry it only takes 6. It’s a 50% boost! The various inspirations include slaying barbarians, contacting other civilizations, building a city on the coast, and so forth. It’s a pretty slick way to guide your building priority.

Districts

Arguably the biggest change in Civ6 is the introduction of districts. Instead of your city being just one hex, you can now build it out with specialized districts like Campus, Holy Site, Commercial, etc. You pick a hex (hopefully one you don’t like very much) and plop down a district. Districts can expand the maximum number of citizens the city can hold and unlock different buildings (e.g. you can’t build a shrine without a holy site district built). I haven’t done much with this so far but it adds a neat dimension.

Some Misc

Worker units (now known as ‘builders’) have three charges with which to create improvements. Then they vanish. On the plus side, the improvements now only take one turn to build.

Slingers (early range 1 unit) are great at picking off barbarian scouts that are constantly running around.

Speaking of, barbarian units sure do spawn pretty rapidly.