Octopus Overlords

Originally created by legendary game designer Sid Meier, Civilization is a turn-based strategy game in which you attempt to build an empire to stand the test of time. Become Ruler of the World by establishing and leading a civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age. Wage war, conduct diplomacy, advance your culture, and go head-to-head with history’s greatest leaders as you attempt to build the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

Civilization VI offers new ways to engage with your world: cities now physically expand across the map, active research in technology and culture unlocks new potential, and competing leaders will pursue their own agendas based on their historical traits as you race for one of five ways to achieve victory in the game.

EXPANSIVE EMPIRES:
See the marvels of your empire spread across the map like never before. Each city spans multiple tiles so you can custom build your cities to take full advantage of the local terrain.

ACTIVE RESEARCH:
Unlock boosts that speed your civilization’s progress through history. To advance more quickly, use your units to actively explore, develop your environment, and discover new cultures.

DYNAMIC DIPLOMACY:
Interactions with other civilizations change over the course of the game, from primitive first interactions where conflict is a fact of life, to late game alliances and negotiations.
COMBINED ARMS:
Expanding on the “one unit per tile” design, support units can now be embedded with other units, like anti-tank support with infantry, or a warrior with settlers. Similar units can also be combined to form powerful “Corps” units.

ENHANCED MULTIPLAYER:
In addition to traditional multiplayer modes, cooperate and compete with your friends in a wide variety of situations all designed to be easily completed in a single session.

A CIV FOR ALL PLAYERS:
Civilization VI provides veteran players new ways to build and tune their civilization for the greatest chance of success. New tutorial systems introduce new players to the underlying concepts so they can easily get started.

Smoove_B wrote:It's not very often that STEAM surprises me with a game announcement:

Originally created by legendary game designer Sid Meier, Civilization is a turn-based strategy game in which you attempt to build an empire to stand the test of time. Become Ruler of the World by establishing and leading a civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age. Wage war, conduct diplomacy, advance your culture, and go head-to-head with history’s greatest leaders as you attempt to build the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

Civilization VI offers new ways to engage with your world: cities now physically expand across the map, active research in technology and culture unlocks new potential, and competing leaders will pursue their own agendas based on their historical traits as you race for one of five ways to achieve victory in the game.

EXPANSIVE EMPIRES:
See the marvels of your empire spread across the map like never before. Each city spans multiple tiles so you can custom build your cities to take full advantage of the local terrain.

ACTIVE RESEARCH:
Unlock boosts that speed your civilization’s progress through history. To advance more quickly, use your units to actively explore, develop your environment, and discover new cultures.

DYNAMIC DIPLOMACY:
Interactions with other civilizations change over the course of the game, from primitive first interactions where conflict is a fact of life, to late game alliances and negotiations.
COMBINED ARMS:
Expanding on the “one unit per tile” design, support units can now be embedded with other units, like anti-tank support with infantry, or a warrior with settlers. Similar units can also be combined to form powerful “Corps” units.

ENHANCED MULTIPLAYER:
In addition to traditional multiplayer modes, cooperate and compete with your friends in a wide variety of situations all designed to be easily completed in a single session.

A CIV FOR ALL PLAYERS:
Civilization VI provides veteran players new ways to build and tune their civilization for the greatest chance of success. New tutorial systems introduce new players to the underlying concepts so they can easily get started.

Official announcement trailer, coming October 21st, 2016

LordMortis wrote:Maybe it's almost time to rebuy Civ V in a complete form and give it another try.

He says that the "number one" problem the team has identified about Civ 5 is that players often settle on certain strategic paths, and they play the same way every time. For example, when I build cities, I'm almost always looking at Monument, Shrine, Granary, Library, Walls, Coliseum. I rarely change this formula, nor others theirs.

This is why Civ 6's cities are different. "It’s as big a change for the economic side of the game as unstacking the armies was with Civ 5," says Beach. "We want to throw different things at the player at different times and make them have to adapt."

A city's surrounding countryside will still be a maximum of 36 hexes, but they will now host buildings and improvements, beyond farms, mines, camps, etc. Beach calls these "districts."

"When we unstacked the armies in Civ 5, all the tactical nuances of having cavalry and archers and melee units separated on separate tiles created little rock-paper-scissors combinations that were very clear for players to understand," says Beach. "That was a beautiful win.

"The problem was we had too much congestion on the map. All those spread-out units took up too much real estate. We wanted to think about clever ways to combine the units, which didn’t lose that tactical mini-game. We found that there were two or three areas we could combine units together and it didn’t hurt the tactical nature of the game.

"The first was that there were a lot of units that were just additional equipment for your units. It might be a battering ram or a siege tower or an anti-aircraft gun or an anti-tank gun. In Civ 5 those were all special units that took up a whole dedicated tile. In Civ 6, we call them support units. They can stack with other military units without you having to worry about managing them on a tile by themselves.

Isgrimnur wrote:I have a friend of a friend that has 8,728 hours played on Civ V. That's the equivalent of 4.2 years of a full time job. For a game that was released 5 2/3 years ago.

Rip wrote:So turn based is back?

Sepiche wrote:

Rip wrote:So turn based is back?

Back?

Rip wrote: but V<IV by far in my book.

Rip wrote:

Sepiche wrote:

Rip wrote:So turn based is back?

Back?

Perhaps I am misremembering. I never could get into V and I thought I recalled one of the reason being it was realtime, perhaps not. Must have been something else. Either way I hope whatever I didn't like about V is fixed in VI. I do love a Civ game but V<IV by far in my book.

Carpet_pissr wrote:Heh.

You write that in jest, but having put more hours into Civ IV than I will ever admit, I actually did hit a point some time last year I think, where after closing the game, I thought to myself "I think I've had enough of Civ IV" - never thought I would hear myself think that, but there it is.

And I think it happened because for the first time, I felt...impatient, even if just in the back of my mind, I was thinking there was probably something else I would enjoy more than this in my ridiculous backlog, if only for the novelty of something different.

Not that I was not enjoying it, but something in me clicked to say "again?!". I remember hitting that point with HOMM III as well, another game I never thought would get old. But again, just the massive amount of hours I poured into HOMM III...oof.

Sepiche wrote:I wish I had that kind of focus when it comes to games, but with rare exception I have the gaming attention span of a small goldfish.

Smoove_B wrote:It's not very often that STEAM surprises me with a game announcement:

tgb wrote: I remain cautiously optimistic that a) this will be a return to the glory that is Civ, and b)my three-year-old rig can run it.

tgb wrote:Fingers crossed.

Like the Star Trek movies, the even numbered ones seem to be the most highly regarded. I remain cautiously optimistic that a) this will be a return to the glory that is Civ, and b)my three-year-old rig can run it.

Kraken wrote: I never did buy that Civ-in-space game. People didn't seem very enthused about it.

dbt1949 wrote:Civ 5 didn't hit it's stride with me until the mods came out. Assuming my rig can play it I'll be waiting for the mod community to reach it's stride.

baelthazar wrote:Nobody other than me thinks the "unstacking of the cities" is a blatant theft of Endless Legends and the way it does cities?

baelthazar wrote:Nobody other than me thinks the "unstacking of the cities" is a blatant theft of Endless Legends and the way it does cities?

Kraken wrote:I hope and expect that someone will do a graphics conversion very quickly, the same way that Blue Marble improved CIV. Reaction to the art style has been polite at best.

Probably won't be Day One for me, even if my rig can run it; I remember how disappointing Civ 5's initial release was, and it didn't really hit its stride until the second expansion. Plus Oct. 21 is just a week before the xmas season starts and my gaming time between Halloween and New Years is pretty limited. I'll most likely wait until after the first of next year.

Jeff V wrote:

dbt1949 wrote:Civ 5 didn't hit it's stride with me until the mods came out. Assuming my rig can play it I'll be waiting for the mod community to reach it's stride.

Which mods do you find compelling and why? I've installed most of the DLC and expansions, but none of the mods.

Fitzy wrote: If I recall, CIV V cut a lot of features from CIV IV. The articles so far seem to be implying that CIV 6 will contain everything CIV V did as far as major game play features. Will be interesting to see if that's the case.

Kraken wrote:

Jeff V wrote:

dbt1949 wrote:Civ 5 didn't hit it's stride with me until the mods came out. Assuming my rig can play it I'll be waiting for the mod community to reach it's stride.

Which mods do you find compelling and why? I've installed most of the DLC and expansions, but none of the mods.

I play with:

Strange Religions - Just because who doesn't want Octopus Overlords? (OK, they call it "Cult of Cthulhu" but you can rename it);
Beyond the future - Extends the tech tree;
City limits - Makes it easier to see zones of control;
Civilization selection bonus tooltips - Shows each civ's bonuses in the setup screen;
InfoAddict - restores all of the reports that got stripped out of CIV. This is a must-have for me;
Perfect World - generate more realistic maps based on plate tectonics.

Note that using *any* mod prevents your game scores from being recorded. They really should have implemented a separate scoreboard for modded games.

Fitzy wrote: If I recall, CIV V cut a lot of features from CIV IV. The articles so far seem to be implying that CIV 6 will contain everything CIV V did as far as major game play features. Will be interesting to see if that's the case.

One of my favorite CIV features was building huts that grew over time into villages and then towns, improving trade and making your cities sprawl while giving you a strong incentive to defend surrounding hexes. It sounds like "unstacking cities" brings that back in spirit, and then some.