Quick Look: Civilization VI - Gathering Storm

The first bit in that opening cutscene is straight up exactly how the movie The Day After Tomorrow opens. And then in both cases it cuts to a person speaking dramatically to the UN.

Lol, Saint John. It's wild that the city I grew up in is a default option in Civ now. Also fitting that Charlottetown is on a tiny island :P

Anyone else hoping this ended up being a Quiet Man continuation

Looks pretty shitty to be honest. I've played quite a lot of Civ 6 and R&F and none of the new features seem interesting. I already knew I wouldn't care for the disaster stuff which is for some reason always shoved into sim games, but I was excited for the diplomacy rehaul. Just by reading the tutorial I'm already underwhelmed. Definitely not going to buy for 39,90.

I keep hearing "the gathering storm" in a Churchill voice.

Suddenly realizing they're playing some version of the Swedish drinking / toasting song "Helan Går" at 31:58. Weird.

our giant death robot is a bunch of zambonis forming like voltron

Playing this after not having played a Civ past 4, so I'm not sure what all is new to the expansion(s), but man... I'm *really* liking the myriad improvements and just the look of the game in general.

Might even play enough of this one to git gud instead of bumbling through a bunch of matches and moving on like with past Civs.

Canada in Civilization, count me in!

Winter is coming eh

I had to turn down the bass on my system for this video, Alex doesn't use a pop filter apparently.

Seems like this helps to make Civ VI feel a bit more feature complete. Fully onboard with the ability to build Metal Gear in Civ.

Huh, can Alex really be correct about wind power not affecting the citizens? That mechanic was already basically in there in the original release of Civ VI after all, with the tile appeal ratings that affected how many housing units a Neighborhood district would give you, so I'd find it really surprising if they don't let tile appeal account for those kinds of improvements.

Either way, I'm happy with most of the additions this expansion seems to add, environmental impact has been sorely missing since they removed it around Civ III or IV, making the later games just feel like playing plain board games instead of something approximating actual history, and the implementation here seems pretty good. I'd say Call to Power II seems to have handled some aspects of it better, with both a global meter and regional pollution that could cause local disasters in a way that seems to be absent here, but I think Gathering Storm seems to make up for it by natural disasters tied to specific tile types and natural wonders, and I'm pretty excited to pick this up.

I'm so confused about whether or not Civ6 removed its spyware. Articles say it got taken out, but users are still reviewing the game saying its there.

@mick_fulton: Yeah that is my big questions also - although the large cost for expansion compared to past Civ expansions (that I recall at least) is also a bit of a concern...

@crazy_tinker: $40 for a Civ expansion is a lot to ask yeah. I'll probably just keep playing 5 for another year until I can buy a complete 6 bundle for around $30 on a steam sale

Maple Gear!?

The entire time I was listening to that intro cutscene narration, I just kept hearing that same voice in my head saying "Let strength be granted so the world might be mended... so the world might be mended."

Also, did they just pull a shot directly from Moana with that Maori navigator on his sailboat?

I had to stand at attention when Alex started singing our national anthem at the there. So good. I'm probably gonna end up getting this whole pack at some point...

Civ IV + Beyond the Sword + Mods is still the best Civ experience one can have in my opinion.

This seems a lot like adding unnecessary RNG to a strategy game. It would be really frustrating to spend 40 turns building your strategy (as one does in a CIV game) only to have sone natural disaster fuck up all your hard work through no fault of your own... I wonder if you can add the new civs and disable natural disasters - if not I'll probably pass.

So does Canada conquer barbarians via residential schools?

@darkcaedus: I suspect that is...rather the whole idea. Of course a natural disaster is scary and unpredictable. Of course it's there to shove over one of your carefully placed dominoes. That's Nature.

Anyway to the question you cannot outright disable disasters or bring the new leaders into the different rulesets. That said the disasters are on a 0-4 slider and I left it defaulted to 2. At that setting they have been very infrequent and hardly game changing so I would imagine if you set it down to 0 you'd more or less get what you want. Assuming 0 does not in fact disable them entirely, the text doesn't suggest that but I've not tried.

I love that menu music so much. Not gonna get this though until it's all bundled at a reasonable price. 5/4 is good for now, or 2. Fuck 3.

@ahgunsillyo: Possibly, though that imagery strongly relates to Maui the mythological figure in Maori culture (he fishes up the North Island of New Zealand, and the South Island is his boat). So it's probably a combination of the myth, and representations of him in popular culture (like Moana)!

Hmmm... this video got me itching to try Civ 6. The gold edition is on sale for $40. How good was the rise and fall expansion? I don't think I'll pick up this expansion until it goes on sale.

I've played about ten hours of this, and it is amazing. It feels like a wholly fresh Civ experience, and I think it added more than the Civ 5 expansions did. This ties Civ 6 with Civ 4 for my personal favourite now =]

@axl159: ouch

The last good Civ was Alpha Centauri

Where's Dan?

These are my favorite GB quick looks. I really enjoy watching the crew play something, especially strategy games and RPGs that they are invested in.

Wow the music in this game sounds amazing

It looks interesting but I just hate the fog of war in Civ 6, can't get over it. It's probably the only thing that keeps me from playing the game

@zerocrescent:

This comment deserves love.

Having played two campaigns of this now I'm fairly torn on this expansion. There is some good stuff in there, like the new buildings and units etc, but a lot of the new features miss the mark pretty hard. The new diplomatic victory is just awful to drudge through, and even if you're not going for it diplomacy overall becomes incredibly overbearing towards the end of the game. The world congress is also still very bland.

I also feel like they toned down the AI (which might be tied with the increased tendency towards diplomacy), and it seems like they've sped up the tech and culture trees so you're just speeding through them way too quick. I like the disaster stuff though, it adds some much needed adversity.

And lastly, the new Civs are sorta interesting, but ultimately more flash than function. So far I've found the most impactful thing about them to be the spawn bias. In almost all cases if you want to aim for a certain victory or playstyle there are already other Civs that does the job better. Even Mali with its extreme focus on gold ends up feeling bland since you're still just ending up spending the gold on science or culture or whatever you need to achieve your goal.

@darkcaedus: Well, you know going into it that you're playing with risk when you go for ultra-fertile floodplains and whatnot.

Civ does have a problem on higher difficulties that one slipup can start snowballing into failure down the line, and this could exacerbate the issue for sure.

I am shocked -- SHOCKED -- and more than a little saddened that neither @alex nor @vinny sent the giant-fucking-death-robot to scare (and then vaporize) the ever-living crap out of Mongolia's 17th-century cannon crew. :(

It's good that they're addressing environmental issues into the game, but the fact it seemingly doesn't figure into diplomacy at all is pretty disappointing. Perhaps the excuse is that it would be difficult to make work from a design perspective, and putting climate change to the fore is a good thing in general, but ignoring the fact that it can really only be addressed by global co-operation seems like a pretty gross misrepresentation.

I don't mean to say that the game is bad for this, or that I'm surprised (4X and city builder games routinely have pretty suspect political assumptions; most notably, the blank slate starting point). I just thought it worth mentioning. I'm sure I'd have fun playing it.

Haha, yeah, I noticed that too. It took a moment because of how weirdly sedate it was. Still, cool.

Real missed opportunity for Canada's unique building. Hockey arena is fine, but where are the Tim Horton's!? +2 gold, +2 productivity. The gameplay system writes itself.

Er, quoi? The "blank starting point" is one of the most appealing aspects of real-world-based 4x games. It allows the player to engage their imagination and create an alternate-history-Earth where, for example, the Mayan Empire becomes the dominant world power in the 22nd century, or the (in)famous Civilization 2 bug where Mahatma Ghandi would invariably scream, "fuck everyone! I'ma purge this world in nuclear fire!"

@dasakamov:Oh, that's for sure part of the appeal, and definitely deliberate, and I'm not saying that it should be any different, but it's worth being aware that it's a pretty sanitised notion of how large civilizations emerge, and who was around before they came to dominance.

Like, I get it: Civilization is obviously a game of hugely abstracted systems, and it's trying to find balance in all these asymmetrical factions, and it's not about telling that story, and so on. That's all fine, but it does play into some national myths that avoid the darker sides of their origins.

In short, I'm being very tedious and you're free to ignore me if you like.

Fast movement off AND using the move to button instead of right click to move? Alex must take days to finish a game of civ.

@mick_fulton:

I would argue that the data they were collecting really wasn't worth getting worked up about, but if it makes you feel better it's been reported to have been removed and the patch notes say so.

I would be interested in a city builder and diplomacy, but less interested in the warfare portion of it. Do you have to be in conflict with other civs or can you only focus on technology, diplomacy, etc?

I've never felt so over-represented as a Canadian in a quick look before - the national anthem in the background, Wilfred Laurier, hockey rinks, all the Canadian city names (freakin' Hamilton? are you kidding me?), mentions of the Calgary Flames and The Tragically Hip, giant death robo- oh wait.

Anyways, this is pretty cool.

@heatdrive88 said:

I'm just glad they didn't name the band Nickelback

Also, for anyone reading this, @heatdrive88 was just kidding about the robots. It is not a real thing and we don't talk about it in Canada.

It would be a pretty rare Civ game to not have any conflict since your opponents will likely declare on you for something or another. Especially if you aren't taking the time to build up your armies.

Still there is only one victory condition that requires you to be actively aggressive. Hell you can even technically win a Domination victory without ever killing a unit thanks to the new French/England leaders Court of Love passive.

As a native Madagascan I am frankly insulted by the pronunciation of our great capital city's name.

I just cannot get into modern Civ. I loved Civ 1 & 2, but the modern games are TOO BUSY. They wnat you to see everything from just hovering over the city, so everything is mashed up in a super deformed fashion. It just looks like ass.

That why I switched to the Anno games, they give you that "seeing it in miniature" look and feel where the scale of the city of town is close to N-Scale hobby grade.

@corvak: yeah and it was sinking -_-