Civilization VI will be getting a free update this month. And it adds some extra options for your next game of world domination.
One new feature is a pick/ban list for natural wonders. Natural wonders are special tiles that yields extra bonus that can either be cool or extremely advantageous should you have them within your borders.
Now you can specifically pick the ones you want in a game, while banning the rest. Or ban them all, if you want a more balanced multiplayer game that’s less about forward settling.
The other new feature is a randomised tech and civics tree. Or tech and civic shuffle mode, as it’s called.
The idea is that you won’t really know what’s the next tech or civic you research, which means you’ll be playing off the seat of your pants a bit more.
This does not change what tech/civic unlocks what units or abilities, however. You still need archery to start building archers. Now it’s the case of not know where will archery be sitting in the tech tree. This is similar to the Gathering Storm expansion’s future tech tree, but expanded to the whole tree, as well as for civic tree.
All these features are free for all players, even if you just own vanilla Civ VI without the expansions, or the New Frontier Pass.
You can watch the folks at Firaxis play through the new update, as well as discuss more about the changes in this update on an upcoming dev livestream on August 27, 2AM Malaysian Time (+8GMT) on the Sid Meier’s Civilization YouTube channel.
Based on the roadmap, two new civs are expected to drop for the New Frontier Pass in September. So these new modes free to all will be something for Civ players to keep hitting that one more turn button for a while. The update, which comes with a bunch of other game adjustments based on player feedback, will arrive on August 27.
Civilization VI is out now on the PS4, PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.