“In the past, pretty much all the Civilization games worked the same way with research,” says Beach. “You can see all the things you’ve built in your city, but you can also see all the things your opponents have built in their cities,” adds Brian Feldges, noting that this makes where you position scouts and traders (who can spot this city-building activity) around the map that much more crucial. We want how you place each of these items on the map to be an important decision that’s going to shape how well you’re doing in the game.” So we decided to take all that interesting content that was stacked in cities and spread it across the map. “And you’d lose track of what you’d built in which cities because you couldn’t see it. “We’ve gone away from what was true in all the other Civilization games, where creative buildings or wonders of the world wound up buried deep within cities, all within one tile of the map,” says Beach. Or to put that another way, to make players play to the map they’re given.” The new ‘unstacked cities’ are the first part of this approach We wanted players to have to come up with brand new untried strategies, to have to react to situations they might be faced with in Civilization VI. We wanted players to have to think on their feet more. But we didn’t like that there were clearly identifiable patterns that you didn’t have to break out of, and that you could follow those through every single game. “We liked that our fans had done so much work analyzing these strategies. There were tech tree assumptions that you always wanted to approach its beginning in the same way, and that you’d want to rush toward the National College or to the Great Library, get those built, get your science up, and once you’d done that there’d be other paths through the tech tree you’d always want to take in the same way.”

“There were things you’d find on forums about how building your empire to four or five cities was the optimal strategy, and there was never any reason to go beyond that.

But players would always approach how they went about winning similarly. “They would play the game over and over again, which was great, because we had 43 leaders in the game and so many different civilizations to try. “The number one thing we found was that players of Civilization V tended to come up with a specific pattern for how they would play the game, and then they would follow that pattern,” says Beach. So we had some areas where the game wasn’t being played exactly as we’d hoped, or it was a little weaker than anticipated in those areas.” Firaxis wants players ‘to have to think on their feet’ “In order to do that, the first thing we wanted to do was look at where we were with Civilization V.

Civilization 5 or 6