Good news if you're living under a rock and playing strategy games, which is not unlikely these days: Civilization VI is available for free on the Epic Games platform. You can download it until May 28, 11 AM Eastern Time or 17:00 CEST. Although the game is from 2016, new content is still being developed.
I prefer Steam, but I did install Epic for this reason. I can be bribed.
First impression: Civ6 doesn't just look cartoonish, it also feels like playing a console game on your PC. I think they're aiming for the human sentiment called "fun".
Since I haven't played more than a few steps with my first unit, let me show you some of my adventures from Civilization V. It's my second-favorite game after Alpha Centauri (from the same series), and I'm not done with it yet. I'm not autistic enough to be a good player, but I want to show you a few examples of how I fooled the AI, which is rather silly and relies on numerical advantages in the higher difficulty levels.
Let's start with some cool tech from an endgame I haven't finished yet. I'm playing as Denmark in brown, almost the same color as my arch-enemy England in maroon red. It's a huge map with islands scattered across the ocean, an advantage for the Royal Navy, which is England's strong point. England is still stronger than me at this point, but I have more territory. And the Danes have a good track record as invaders IRL.
After I dropped an atomic bomb on York, England's most productive city, I made peace and exchanged a larger city of mine (Beijing I think) for Canterbury. Now I'll have direct access to London during the next war. And I'll move my aircraft carriers back a bit in order to fly bombs and planes across the open ocean to Canterbury.
The goal for a domination victory is to capture the enemy's original capital cities. Exchanging cities is a trick to get there quickly. You need a base to heal and produce units. But you can't just spam the map with cities; having more than a handful of cities will lower your science, happiness and culture levels.
Big games like this one do become less exciting towards the end, when it turns into a logistics simulator. I have two Giant Death Robots, which will have to attack America first, because that's where they are.
Civ5 seems to require more from my old graphics card than Civ6, so I usually play in the strategic view, which also gives a better overview of the information on the map.
This was my first game in the Brave New World extension, playing as the Zulus on a map of Africa with randomized terrain and climate. Here, Portugal in blue/white is trying to attack some poor native American tribe in the Sahara from Congo. We're not at war and we don't have an open borders agreement, so the Portuguese are not allowed in my territory, and I can cut off half of the continent by placing four units between my possessions. Just for fun - there's no strategic gain in this for me. And it reminds me of how the British Empire IRL blocked Portugal from linking up its African colonies.
Eventually, I'm going to lose this game to Poland in red, which will have better technology and diplomacy. Aggression doesn't always pay.
Here's an example of cool stuff you can do with mods: I'm playing as the United Federation of Planets on a map of the Mediterranean in Australia.
I haven't really scratched the surface of what you can do with mods. And Civ6 will have endless possibilities too. Now is your chance to try it for free if you haven't played it before.
