City management ain't what it used to be. Not in Civilization VI anyway. What Civ V did for combat, Civ VI does for city building.
Namely, Civ VI unstacks your cities. You used to have a home tile for a city, and the surrounding tiles would be devoted to resource managment, more or less. You'll still have a home tile in Civ VI, but, for example, science structures will spread out to another tile. And as you go through the ages, you'll add more science structures to that extraneous tile. In the first-look video below, they use the example of starting with a library in your science tile, then adding a university in a later age, and then upgrading that science tile further with a research lab in the modern era.
Where you place that tile also makes a difference. There are adjacency bonuses if you build those tiles next to relevant resources.
This also changes how a city can be sieged. Instead of—to continue with the example—having your science buildings tucked away behind your home tile's walls, a savvy attacker could cherrypick targets around your city's extended tiles. This option obviously existed in previous Civilization games, but that was typically for pure resources like from mining, etc.
Also, you can't be like me and just have some super-massive, super-produdctive city that pumps out all the Wonders on the home tile. Wonders now require their own tiles, and may have specific requirements of where they can be placed. The Pyramids, for example, must be built on a floodplain or in a desert. At first, I didn't like the sound of that. I'm like, Civilization exists so that you can break away from those ideas. What if I want to build my Pyramids in a tundra or on an offshore island? Being able to do that is what's kinda cool about Civilization, right?
But, yeah, it was always kinda cheap (on my part) to jam the Seven Wonders of the World into one town. This also gives a Wonder the space it needs to be huge and awesome on the map. And you'll have to spread your Wonders around your nation a lot more, instead of creating that single insane City of Wonders that I always ended up building, usually just out of convenience, not because it ever made sense beyond that.
So far, unstacking cities sounds great, since full-blown military campaigns don't often interest me, this emboldens strategies where it hasn't before. Too much of Civilization goes on autopilot, so anything that beefs up my more domestic stratagems is welcome.
We're only four months away from Civilization VI. It launches October 21 on Windows PC.
CIVILIZATION VI: UNSTACKING CITIES
Unstacking Cities has implications that permeate the entirety of the Civilization VI experience and this change presents new emergent strategies to players. Choosing where to settle your city is now more crucial than it has ever been, as available tiles affect the potency of Districts and limit what Wonders can be erected in that particular city. This means players must adapt to their environment, consider greater city specialization and create more diverse empires throughout play.
In Civilization V, you simply queue up a build order, construct your buildings and they all live as one enormous stack within the city screen. With Civilization VI, we've unstacked the cities, removing all of that clutter within the city screen. So not only do you need to weigh build order in Civilization VI, but you also have to consider district adjacency bonuses and what terrains around your city center are compatible with certain Wonders. There isn't one template for success in Civilization VI, and players need to react to the environment around them. No two games will play the same.
Combat is also affected by the Unstacking Cities mechanic in Civilization VI. As cities spread across more territory and become more exposed, adept warmongers may target specific tiles to cripple a city's infrastructure before going after the city center. Additionally, passive players who would choose to fortify cities in the past must now consider their city's full perimeter when deciding to pursue this same tactic in Civilization VI. A city is so much more than just its city center now.
Finally, from a visual standpoint, Unstacking Cities presents great aesthetical changes to the Civilization experience. Cities now look more diverse and reflect their growth in more distinct ways. We've found this change goes a long way, not only in making players feel more connected to their choices and progress, but also in keeping players immersed in the beautiful world of Civilization VI.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT LEADS THE AMERICANS IN CIVILIZATION VI
Roosevelt took office following the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 and, at the age of 42, became the youngest United States President in history—a record he still holds today. Roosevelt championed his "Square Deal" domestic policy, comprised of three basic ideals: the conservation of natural resources, greater control over corporate plutocracy, and consumer protection.
His efforts to regulate corporate "trust" monopolies earned him the nickname "trust buster." He established the United States Forestry Service in 1905 and fought for the conservation of millions of acres of federal land, which are still protected to this day. Roosevelt also coined the iconic phrase "speak softly, and carry a big stick," describing his form of foreign policy of negotiating peacefully while simultaneously threatening with the "big stick." Roosevelt described this policy as "the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis."
Unique unit: P-51 Mustang The P-51 "Mustang," an aircraft created by America during World War II, was designed as a long-range, high-altitude fighter to serve in dogfights, escort bombers and even enact bombing missions on its own. The P-51 Mustang was able to outmaneuver the best German Luftwaffe fighters above 15,000 feet and even outlast the efficient Japanese fighters, and by 1943 the P-51 Mustang was in service on every American front.
Unique unit: Rough Rider The 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry, better known by its colloquial moniker the "Rough Riders," was a regiment recruited and raised by Theodore Roosevelt in 1898 AD to fight in the Spanish-American War. This volunteer regiment included 1,060 ranchers, cowboys, college athletes, miners and other rugged outdoorsmen hailing from New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Arizona.
Unique Building: Film Studio Thomas Edison, the much vaunted American inventor and businessman, created the first film studio in West Orange, New Jersey back in 1893. His film studio was used to capture the amusing larks of vaudeville and theater actors, to display within penny arcades, fairground tents and unused theaters. By 1920, there were a dozen film studios in operation around Hollywood, California, each feeding what would become an American and global obsession with film.
