Rome in a Day: Civilization VI and the One More Turn Effect

The vast majority of product slogans are either not consciously noticed by their targets or are understandably received as empty, corporate fluff. Yet, Civilization's audience fervently repeats its unofficial tagline in chorus: "One more turn". I believe players opened their arms to welcome this axiom because they came up with it; that's why it's authentic to them. If you're one of those players, then you'll want to know what keeps us turning the pages in a game of this classic turn-based strategy. Here, I want to deconstruct Civilization VI's power to grab you like a claw machine. This blog will mostly be about the vanilla version of the game, that is, Civ VI, without any expansions. Let's dive in.

Any task you can complete quickly will take a light application of effort, potentially making it feel trivial. To prevent the little jobs from feeling insignificant, game designers chain them together so that collectively, their output can fulfil medium or even long-term goals. Medium-term goals can also be part of something bigger when they contribute to longitudinal objectives. Alone, medium and long-term objectives can also be so overwhelming that they demotivate us, and if they are our only sources of rewards, we're going to starve for praise for long periods. By taking goals on the horizon and giving us closely-spaced mile marker objectives that lead towards them, our quest feels more manageable and more frequently pays out. Games often have greater than three timeframes (short, medium, long) over which we approach our targets, but by using this rough framework, we get the gist of how goals interact across time.

Let's use Civilization VI's Religious Victory as an example of the division and concatenation of goals. In Civ, each civilisation can found one religion, and the prerequisite for a Religious Victory is that at least 50% of all cities in every civilisation follow the religion we established. A settlement "follows" a faith when at least 50% of its population believes in it. So, we can split the ultimate goal of the Religious Victory into the slightly shorter-term goals of converting each other society. We may then chop the goal of changing a nation's predominant religion into the missions of subsuming each of its cities. To win a city over to our way of thinking then requires ticking off the bullet points of training missionaries, commanding those preachers, and proselytising in cities. Again, I'm simplifying these systems, but we're capturing the essence of them. We can visualise the goals in their temporal categories like this:

At standard speed, one Civ VI match lasts 500 turns. If the only goal in sight was 500 turns away, the player probably wouldn't think it was worth taking the first step. The game needs you to want "just one more turn" because keeping you focused on completing the next turn instead of completing the next 500 is how it becomes manageable. Making the game manageable is how it gets us to play matches on the scale of all human history.

You'll notice that unlike turn-based titles, most genres of game (think brawlers or driving games) do not split sessions into tiny spurts of activity with clearly marked edges. Real-time games, by their nature, encourage you to keep participating by requiring continuous input. Many also regularly kick you back to menus, presenting you with a natural exit point. The exit ramps with which we could turn off of Civ are less obvious. As a turn-based game, it must also find solutions to keep us interacting with it that don't require us to continuously react to punches or steer a moving vehicle.

Ultimately, the smallest goals in Civ are always issuing commands to units, cities, and upgrade trees. As much as Civ keeps the thought "one more turn" bouncing off the sides of your skull, it also keeps you cycling the idea of "one more command" through your head. Civ eases you into putting one foot in front of the other by prompting you to issue an order to the next city or unit immediately after you've made your previous. At the start of a turn and after issuing a command, the game will drag the camera over to the next settlement or person awaiting orders and ask you what their king would have them do. That way, you don't have to find all the entities in your empire that need instruction.

It's the compulsion to keep issuing commands that ziplines you to the end of a turn, and it's at that precipice where it's so easy to say "One more turn" because all you have to do by that point is click the button to advance. That Civ sectionalises its goals does not make it remarkable and wouldn't be enough to ingrain any title with excitement. All games, including this one, become energising by including the right balance of goals of each length, even when RNG and player autonomy threaten to uncentre the pacing.

In my absolutely cooked head, Civilization also entices using some of the same rubrics as idlers. You engage with Civ more actively than you do a clicker, giving you a stronger sense that your works came from your own two hands. The most satisfying empire is the one you bake yourself. However, like an idler, Civ has lots of little pots simmering away on the back burners to reward play and pique the expectation of further bonuses. At any one time, we could have multiple armadas sailing to foreign ports, trade routes plying our wares, cities all producing new districts and buildings, and tech and civics trees researching the next great invention and philosophy.

Firaxis keeps a common progression design technique at their side. They run various meters that will output a reward when filled and make sure that the fill rate of those meters is not synchronised. If all your citizens completed jobs every 15 turns, you'd get one bumper piñata of rewards, but then no more for a long time. If jobs completed on some factor of 15 turns (e.g. Every 5 or 10 turns), many would also come due at the same time. If, however, one operation takes 13 turns to complete, another takes 5, and another takes 8, our eggs don't all hatch at once, and we have a little something to look forward to every few turns. Designers don't always want meters to avoid lining up, however. There is a balance to be struck.

If you're not familiar with game design, you might think that the job of the systems is to provide perfectly consistent rewards, but that's actually anathema to fun. Keep handing over trophies of the same worth at the same intervals, and the audience becomes numb to them. Variation is integral to engagement. In Civ, pure chance means that two or more of your meters will sometimes fill to the top on the same turn: a spike of progress. If it happened every time, it wouldn't be special, but because we know it can happen but won't always happen, we have a reason to keep engaging the game.

There will be turns where not a whole lot occurs. However, games with turns of variable lengths have a self-correcting mechanism for droughts of events. Turns where we do little pass quickly, while turns that are busy, we linger in for a hot minute. Because decision-light terms consume less time, that also means that the game can make up for a lack of commands to issue by packing more of those low-command turns into one time period. Here's a chart to clarify:

Civ, especially Civ VI, also gives us a sense of sway over our progress by allowing us to reduce the time it takes to complete assignments. As is standard for the management format, we can make efficiency tweaks that speed up or slow down developments, but VI also introduces "Eurekas" and "Inspirations". Eurekas are objectives attached to most Technologies, and inspirations are objectives attached to Civics. In either case, if we complete the outlined objective, we get a 50% boost towards the pursuant upgrade. For example, the Natural History Civic has an "Inspiration" that asks us to build an Archaeological Museum. Say it would typically take 14 turns to develop Natural History. If we have the Museum, it would only take 7. I feel deliciously devious whenever I take one of these shortcuts. I'm a dirty little squirrel skipping through the undergrowth.

When considering pleasant surprises and variable rewards, we can also fall into the trap of thinking that they come only or primarily through RNG effects like drop tables or randomised AI behaviour. The truth is that the following sources also generate undulations in reward and unexpected encounters:

• Spontaneous alignments of rewards (as described above).
• The actions of enemy players (which are never entirely predictable).
• Hidden level or system elements. In Civ, those hidden level elements are geographic features and settlements hiding in the fog of war, like friendly villages, enemy cities, and water sources.

Unexpected encounters are manna for games that test skill. A designer could let us win when we master a sliver of a whole system and memorise a rote series of actions, but they wouldn't be challenging us and play would become repetitive. However, if we have a plan that exploits one set of commands and one county of the system, and that plan is suddenly scuppered, we must display mastery of other commands and other parts of the system. If you don't know how the game will force you to change up your strategy, you must swot up on all elements of it, ready to exploit any of them to overcome adversity.

In a systems construction game like Civ, we must act through our buildings and units, meaning that their development serves as a cap on our ability to execute plans. We can expand their functionality, but it takes time to grow that capacity. Therefore, we must exercise forethought and planning in this and other management games so that when we eventually face a problem, we have the solutions at our disposal. If an enemy declares war on us and we haven't spent time building Barracks and training Swordsmen, we will be up the creek without a paddle. If we are pushing eastwards but find that there is an ocean on that border and we don't have seafaring Technologies, we can fall behind other leaders as we take the time to adapt. We won't waste time, however, if we braced for this eventuality beforehand.

By turning up the difficulty temporarily, a game can also issue us a hardship that, with some quick reflexes or ingenious thinking, we can endure in the short term but that we'd buckle under if it was permanent. In Civilization, these hardships manifest as Barbarians bearing down on our capital until we wipe out their camp or a city underproducing until we can stock it with the amenities its citizens cry out for. Provisional drops in difficulty are also an under-discussed reward in games. In Civ, such an alleviation of challenge can look like only having one item to research next on an upgrade tree and, therefore, not having to make a decision that will leave you rubbing your temples. It could also be finding an unprotected city whose worshippers you'll be able to convert with no resistance. In other games, a relaxing of the difficulty may even consist of breathing room where you can walk from one place to another or sell your vendor junk.

As ever, it matters not just what mechanics the software implements but how it surfaces their effects through the UI. Where most progression-based games sequester data on our achievements in menus, or at best, on a map you can access by pressing "Back/Select", Civilization makes just sweeping your camera over the regular view a safari of your achievements: Districts, tile improvements, units. You gaze down on an immeasurable carpet of sublime architecture and industry stretching across continents.

We've got all the parts for at a least a partial theory of why Civ is sticky. Now, let's put them together:

1. Civilization splits long-term goals into shorter-term goals and those goals into shorter goals, etc.
2. It lets progress towards goals continue automatically in the background, meaning more goals met with less effort spent.
3. It ensures we regularly command background tasks and make decisions about them, so we have a sense of ownership over what we produce.
4. It rewards and punishes us by letting our actions dictate how long it takes production to complete.
5. It descynchronises goals to output rewards at regular and varying intervals.
6. It uses unexpected events and the occasional alignment of positive events for pleasant surprises.
7. It gives us natural and easy-to-execute "next steps" in each turn to supportively carry us from the beginning to the end of each turn.
8. Long turns have more to do in them, but the system can pack multiple decision-light turns into the space of one very long turn.
9. The map becomes a display case for our trophies.

Often, games are held in high regard for being "addictive". That word has fallen out of favour with reviewers for its unhealthy connotations, but media remains prized for its ability to capture our time. "Just one more turn" is a phrase that smiles on a game swallowing up our leisure hours, and it's not always a positive when a product gets that gluttonous. We've all been in a flow state with a game at one time or another, only to emerge from the trance and feel like we wasted valuable hours. We are inundated with expiring battle passes and live services that pin us to daily quests.

Still, in the majority of Civilization sessions, the systems don't just engage me with skinner box tricks; they give me substance. If I stay up late developing my empire, I don't usually feel manipulated. I feel like I've gotten to make decisions that make waves, that I've been able to make my mark on a blank tablet, and that I've touched some of the most astonishing structures and ideas humans have conceived of. Civilization is engaging, but it's also something more important: it's a worthwhile use of my time. Thanks for reading.