Even all these years after release, a Civilization VI strategy guide is always handy as new players are always discovering this seminal 4X game for the first time. Even if you’re a Civilization veteran, it might be time to dust off your internal Civilopedia and reacquaint yourself with the basics of world domination.
To help facilitate this, we’ve put together a beginner’s guide explaining many of the basic concepts of the strategy game, from where to found your first city, to diplomacy, warfare, and the game’s victory conditions. Use this primer as a way to get acquainted with the game, before tackling more complex strategies and elements.
Please note that certain aspects of Civilization VI change dramatically depending on what Civ 6 DLC you own. For example, Gathering Storm introduced environmental hazards and pollution, as well as the Diplomatic victory. Barring a few cases, we’re sticking to universal concepts that can apply no matter what version of the game you’re running, although to be honest vanilla Civ VI pales in comparison to how the game plays with both of the primary expansions. We’ve also not mentioned content from the recent New Frontier Pass either, although you should read our thoughts, as well as this overview of the most recent balance patch, to get an idea as to what state the game is in currently.
FIRST CITY PLACEMENT – WHERE AND WHEN
There are several types of resources in the game – food, production, science, gold, and culture are your basic resources. Food is important for city growth, production determines how quickly you can build things, gold is for upkeep and for rushing projects, and culture is how you earn civics and project your civilisations soft-power on the rest of the world.
In Civilization VI, cities can expand out from the central tile by building districts. Some buildings can be built in the ‘city centre’ tile as in past games, but the more specialised buildings require specific districts to be built on.
Each turn, your civ will be generating science – hopefully quite a lot if you’ve got a campus district and a few buildings in it – which will affect the rate at which you research technologies.
New civics can be researched alongside technology, though they are unlocked through culture, not science. Civics are equally as important, however, and in turn unlock new buildings, wonders and units, just like technology. What sets civics apart are the two other things they unlock: new forms of government and policies.
Once a mere pest, in Civilization VI barbarians have become an intelligent threat. They roam the map, spawning from camps, and explore the world with Scouts just like a regular civ. However, unlike other civs, they’re not looking for resources, new lands or potential allies – they just want to burn and kill and enslave. So when a Scout spots a city or a vulnerable unit – a Builder, say – it will report back to its camp and a more aggressive unit will spawn and attack or, in the case of a Builder, capture.
City states are neutral, single-city nations played exclusively by the AI. Like other civs, they can be traded with and fought, but they aren’t competing or working their way down a victory path. Instead, they exist to provide a source of tension between the larger powers, as well as potential boons if you play your cards right. When you discover a city-state – if you were the first person to discover them you get a free envoy – otherwise you have to earn envoys to send to a city-state.
Interacting with the other major Civs around the world is an important aspect of Civilization VI no matter which victory condition you’re going for. Dealing with human opponents is always a wildcard, so we’re going to predominantly be talking about AI opponents here.
Kicking off a war is not as simple as just attacking a foreign unit or city; you’ve got to declare war first, and even then there are choices to make. The first type of declaration is for a surprise war, i.e. a war that you’ve not got a formal reason to start beyond your own lust for conquest. Surprise wars have a massive warmonger penalty, potentially making other civs more than a little upset with you.
There are several victory conditions each with their own unique objectives. In cases where none of the civs achieve any of the five main conditions, the winner is instead chosen based on their score, itself based on an amalgam of achievements from the number of civics and techs researched to how many wonders have been built and great people recruited.
We hope you found this guide useful – there are more things we could expand on and talk about, but hopefully this will be enough to get you started in the wonderful world of Civilization VI!
