For instance, Beijing's reactor explosion temporarily disabling some of its amenities gave me a tiny extra edge in my long-term attempt to chip away at its loyalty and ultimately convert it over to my Civ. Where I think the disasters are most effective is in shifting the needle for another strategy. Even the new scenarios are shy about running the natural disaster ball - we get Black Death and World War II mini-campaigns. Competing for control of or survival upon an increasingly ravaged and inhospitable planet would be a bold shift away from ancient Civ convention, even if just an option rather than a mandate. It also makes the game wind up mechanically conservative in its dying hours, after all the drama and oddity of the mid-to-late stages. Is its ultimate message, then, "go ahead, screw up the planet, it'll sting a bit but we'll get by"? But it's odd that Gathering Storm then treats it as essentially an inconvenience rather than Armageddon. Civ in general is fairly careful not to be political, with even the likes of fascism depicted as a strategy much more than an ideology, so I hope that climate change's starring role here says a lot about how it is has ceased to be a controversial topic for most of us (at least those who aren't involved with the fossil fuels industry or current US government). The sea had done all its rising, almost no-one had been meaningfully effected by it, and now we were all back to business as point-chasing usual. So, my expectation was that more and more world would be lost as the various Civs upon it proved too slow to turn the environmental ship around, but past a certain point, our road to oblivion simply stopped.
Thinking globally rather than nationally is a lovely twist upon Civ convention. You can be an isolationist shmuck if you want, but no amount of protecting your own borders is going to stop the icebergs from melting.
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If you've risked settling or building on them, you might lose something, while getting to build floating domiciles is a fun twist on managing growing population once free land becomes scarce.Ī smart turn is that global warming is not a per-Civ problem, but rather something that's going to affect everyone, unless you manage to diplomatically browbeat everyone into ditching the fossils and going big on wind farms and solar panels early on. The most catastrophic it gets is that some coastal tiles can be permanently swallowed when the sea level rises. Presuming you're not already in a particularly tight spot, which is unusual though a long way from impossible by the very late point in the game that the world really starts throwing its toys out of the pram, you'll have enough resources to cope with these picosecond apocalypses, and even to have planned for them long in advance. Rising sea levels? Build a wall, to coin a phrase. Hurricane season? That's a couple of farms out of action for a heartbeat, which makes zero difference because you've so many trade routes by then that food remains abundant. Lava and ash everywhere? Send out a man with a spanner and it's business as usual within a handful of turns. 16 turns later, the 'corruption' was all cleaned up and a cheap Builder unit had all four affected constructions tickety-boo all over again. When Beijing's nuclear power plant exploded, it was with all the lethal finality of Mr Burns' uranium seeping into Springfield's water supply. That said, disasters aren't hugely disastrous. That's the elevator pitch, but in practical terms what Gathering Storm's really about is injecting some pep into a late-stage campaign, to keep players on their toes rather than grimly click through decreasingly vital build orders while waiting for one or another victory condition score to finally max out.Ĭoasts flooding, droughts droughting, volcanoes volcanoing and nuclear power plants Chernobyling certainly adds some new spice, and on top of everything else in Civ 6 and first expansion Rise and Fall, this is world history as a mad carnival.
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The second major, and jarringly expensive, expansion for Civ VI sells itself with the promise of welcoming natural disasters and catastrophic climate change into the mix, a fairly dramatic turn from the series convention of the Earth itself being an unprotesting battleground for assorted self-serving human oiks. With the Gathering Storm expansion, for better or worse, it's unforgettable.
I used to fret that Civilization VI wasn't memorable. The World Congress is trying to stop climate change by running a gameshow. A volcano just erupted over Dutch Disneyland. The Aztecs are increasingly angrily demanding that I give them an Edgar Allen Poe novel. Ghengis Khan keeps sending me charity donations.
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