My Greek empire had spent the past five thousand years keeping its nose in front of the other civilizations in the world. We attacked neighbors who encroached too closely and captured their cities. We aggressively developed our technology to become the first on our continent with muskets, then later with aircraft. But there was always balance – always restraint. We destroyed no rival civilizations; they were merely kept in their place. Our overall score stayed comfortably in front, and with only a few turns to go, victory seemed certain.
But the Scythians, who occupied the northwestern portion of our continent, had been quietly building their space program in the hope of attaining a Science victory. They were somehow just two steps from the final goal of sending a colony ship to Mars. Fortunately, we’d been building nuclear weapons and constructing missile silos along our borders as a last resort against just such an eventuality. We didn’t want nuclear war, but we had to win the game. What choice was there?
In his 1985 diplomacy simulation “Balance of Power,” Chris Crawford famously rebuked players who initiated a nuclear war, withholding animated explosions on the ground that “we do not reward failure.” But now, it was the animations that caused me to feel real regret when I obliterated my neighbor in “Sid Meier’s Civilization VI”.” There’s no spectacle quite as terrifying as the slow crawl of an ICBM into the heavens.
In evoking that terror, with the added awareness that I’d initiated it, “Civilization VI” did what this series has always done best: make the player glimpse, however briefly, the enormous complexity and responsibility intrinsic to the business of governance. To reveal such insights through play, without the didacticism of an imposed narrative, has been the beloved strategy franchise’s great achievement for a quarter of a century.
By Yahoo Finance.
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