Civilization VI: Tips For Beginners

I have been playing the game Civilization on and off since Civ I. This is a list of beginner’s tips for Civ VI. With a specific combination of the tips herein, I can win regularly at Diety level. 😇

Platforms

You can find Civ VI in the Apple Store. I’ve played it on Mac, iPad, Samsung, and MS Windows. You can find the MS Windows version at https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/p/sid-meiers-civilization-vi . They are all nearly identical. iPads can be slow unless you have an A14 chip or better, such as in an iPad Air. For this article, I am not including the Civ VI upgrades: Rise & Fall or Gathering Storm, nor with any other down-loadable content (DLCs). This guide about just the standard, vanilla edition.

It’s Complicated

Civ VI’s rating of about 3 is fair. Civ VI is way too complicated, the interface is bewildering, the maps way too big, and 500 turns are way too many.

My first recommendation if you haven’t played Civilization before is to start with Civilization Revolution 2 👀 on a tablet or gaming device. It’s fun, simpler, and you will learn important concepts. Once you get good at it, then dive in to Civ VI.

The big plus with Civ VI is that the AI opponents are not idiots. They know how to siege a city 🔥 and win a space race 👽, among other things. The flaw in Civ Revolution 2 is that the AI is rather stupid 🤡. But it’s good for learning, and fun.

Colors

Civ VI uses colors to indicate specialties:

• Light blue: science
• Lavender: culture
• White: religion
• Gold: economy
• Red: military
• Orange: industry/production

The panel of numbers in the upper-left corner shows your totals for Science, Culture, Faith, Economy, and, if any: Tourism, Trade Routes, Envoys to city-states, and Strategic Resources, in that order.

In the 2nd row are round buttons to get you access to pages for the Technology Tree (advanced with science points), Civics Tree (advanced with culture points), Government & Policies (made possible by progress thru the Civics Tree), Religion, and Great Leaders.

Tutorials

The tutorials are good, and limited to 330 turns. 👉 Start there 👈.

Advanced Setup

The Advanced Setup panel makes a big difference. Click on the Advanced Setup button at the bottom of the Single Player / Create Game page.

(Note: Some of these settings are listed in more detail here: https://www.pcgamesn.com/civilization-vi/civ-6-difficulties-speeds-map-types-options)

Set Game Difficulty to Settler. As you progress, you can make the game more difficult. But in the beginning, there’s too much to learn.

For the Start Era, you will want to start with Ancient, but I also like Medieval or Renaissance, as they give you 2 settlers and therefore 2 cities from the beginning. They also jump you thru much of the civics and technology trees and shorten the game a few turns.

Find and set the Game Speed to “Online”, which will make it go twice as fast, generally 250 turns instead of 500. That’s 4 to 10 hours of game time.

You may want to set the number of City-States to zero until you get hang of the basics.

Pick Your Map

You will want to experiment with different maps. Fractal is perhaps the most fun, as it’s the most unpredictable. Seagoing/coastal civs (England, Norway, Spain & Japan) will like islands or small continents. Continental civs (France, US) will prefer a big continent.

You can pick Earth as your map. Since you already know where the continents and oceans are, this helps. True Start Location Earth will place the civs in their historical locations. As a beginner, the first time I played with True Start Location Earth, I picked Russia, and as opponents, I picked every other European civ and boxed them off from Asia. This meant they were crammed together on the European subcontinent, competing with each other for territory. It helped. Another time I played as the Aztecs (Mexico City). There were no US or Brazilian opponents. This opened up the all of the Americas to rapid expansion. This is all within the rules, so use it, especially as a beginner.

The maps 4-Leaf Clover and 6-Armed Snowflake offer predictable continent shapes, and fairly even distribution of start positions.

Set Resources to Abundant. It can be very frustrating to play 500 turns, and find out you can get no oil, which means no tanks, or no aluminum, which means no modern planes. You’re pretty much toast as far as modern combat is concerned. Plus you will probably need to build oil wells on 2 hexes to build tanks. This is one of many hidden secrets in the game.

If you like mountains, set World Age to New. Mountains help to build better Holy Sites and Campuses.

Set the Start Position to Legendary or Balanced. Otherwise you could be placed in a bad location, and you’ve lost from the start, without knowing it. I prefer Legendary.

I prefer Sea Level at Low as I don’t find ships very useful.

Pick Your Civ

Over the course of time, you will want to try all of the civs. The best single indication of their strength is the special districts they can build : Greek Acropolis for culture, Russian Lavra for religion, German Hansa district for industry, etc.

Pick Your Opponents

You can pick your opponents. Pick those who are weak in whatever strategy you want to go with. For example, Kongo cannot found a religion. Arabia will (almost) always get one.

Some versions of Civ VI allow you to pick all 19 enemies. It’s a very different game. Expect to be at war a lot. 😡

The enemy I least want to face is Frederick Barbarossa (Germany) because he’s aggressive and powerful 😩. He’s also very productive at building things.

Advanced Options

Turn on No Barbarians [x]. They are a nuisance and do not add anything to an already complicated game. You can include them later, but you will learn quickly that you will be fighting them as much as building a civilization. 😡

Strategies

In general, games like this are about building civilizations — which mean territory, population, and production. Learn to align your cities to deny your opponents access to the territory behind them. Then fill out that territory.

It’s important for city growth to place them near a river, lake, or oasis. Fresh water 💦.

Get to know the victory icon, on left side of the panel that is in the upper right corner. There are 6 kinds of victory conditions.

It’s really easy to get blindsided by a civ sneaking up on you and winning if you do not pay attention, especially towards the last quarter of the game. So check them often, especially Science, as that can happen quickly.

If you are playing with 10 or so opponents, it’s very hard for anyone to win with Domination or Religion, as they have to take the time beat each opponent individually. With Culture/Tourism, you are trying to beat the next best tourist score. Doable, but complicated; see below. With Total Score and Science, you are just trying to beat the best of the rest. You can see the status totals in the upper right corner. They are: total score, military, science, culture, economy, and faith. Note again, the use of specialty colors.

If you click on a picture of a leader, you will jump to a page with information about that leader, and links to negotiate with them.

You have to dig for the science status. Below, Trajan is about to win. Gilgamesh needs to take defensive measures, such as create and send spies to disrupt Trajan’s rocketry, or outright bomb/attack Trajan’s space ports. Again, this can sneak up on you quickly. 👀

Religious victory is another way to get blindsided, and lose, or win easily. The defense against this is to set up your own religion, have an Apostle start an Inquisition, and create some Inquisitors to keep your own cities in line. They are very effective, but only with your own cities, but you can prevent an opponent from converting your cities. The flip side is that your AI opponents know this trick too, making a religious win nearly impossible — unless you convert all of their cities that have holy sites. BUT, if after about 25 turns (10% of the game), nobody else has established a religion, evangelize away 😇. This is the easiest way to win. 👀

Faith/Religion

The faith points that you accumulate are visible in the upper left and right-hand corners. To spend them, you need to click on a city, and then on the faith icon that pops up in the lower right-hand corner.

If you have enough faith, you will be able to buy evangelists, and sometimes buildings, or naturalists for national parks (tourism). This depends on your pantheon, civics, government, and its policies. It’s complicated.

Evangelizing means moving a Missionary or Apostle next to a city and pressing the Spread Religion button (red circle) for that unit.

Here, Saladin’s missionary (yellow unit on the left) is in position to spread Islam to Mycenae. But the green circle shows that the city has already been converted to Islam. So time to move on to another city.

Winning with religion means converting over half of the cities 👀 of each of your opponents. That’s the number of cities in each civ, not population; and not city-states. Go after smaller cities with fewer people to convert, it’s easier. Be aware that over time, cities can exert religious influence on their neighbors, so if the game shows you that a city is within a few turns of converting to your religion, find another city to convert. Above, the dark box below the city name of Mycenae shows you that the crescent moon of Islam is the most popular religion in that city, followed by the green cross of Greek Orthodoxy

In the situation below, to win Saladin needs to convert 2 more civs (which have no religion of their own). Saladin has already converted a majority of Tomyris’ cities to Islam.

Governments & Policies

The 👉 tutorial 👈 does a decent job of introducing you to governments and policies. Which governments are available depend on where you are in the Civics Tree. Each choice of government has its own advantages, and offers a certain number of policy slots: for defense (red), economy (gold), diplomacy (green), and “wildcard” (purple). You slide your desired policy cards from the right side into the slots on the left. Wildcard slots can take any 👀 kind of card, not just purple ones. If you are going to want to start a religion, you will want to select the “Revelation” (Great Prophet) card first from among the purple ones. I then usually go with the “Inspiration” (Great Scientist) card for most of the rest of the game.

The 2 Greek civs get an extra wildcard slot. Germany gets an extra defense slot.

I am not going to take the time to explain all the governments and policies. Study them one by one. It’s complicated.

Units

When you select a unit in the map you will see a panel of options pop up in the lower right corner. The 👉 tutorials 👈 do a good job of familiarizing us with these options and the game does not let you ignore them.

However, sneak tips:

• You must have built access to certain strategic resources before you build some military units. Horsemen need horses (duh!), knights need iron, musketmen and bombards need niter (for gunpowder), tanks need oil, modern armor needs uranium, modern aircraft need aluminum, battleships and ironclads need coal, & I need some wine 😬. This is in addition to needing certain technologies.
• Aircraft need aerodromes.
• Roosevelt’s P51-Mustangs do not require any strategic resource, just aerodromes.
• Helicopters are not aircraft 😳. They count as, and behave as light cavalry (of course!)
• Modern armor supersedes tanks. Once you’ve acquired that technology, you can’t build tanks any more, even if you don’t have the Uranium resource yet for modern armor, but do have oil for tanks. You’re SoL. 😡 Don’t ask me why.
• The same thing occurs with Knights. They need iron, and if you have the Knights tech, but no iron, you can’t build heavy cavalry from earlier eras.

Combat

It’s really complicated. A few quick comments:

• You can boost the strength of 2 similar units by putting them next to each other — “flanking”
• As I’ve reached higher levels of difficulty, especially with barbarians, I’ve learned that one of the earlier things to do is build walls around a city, and station an archer inside. This creates a pretty good defense. 💪 The archer must be active (ie: not fortified) in order to shoot.
• If your capital is not surrounded by friendly cities, nearby opponents like to attack that first. It helps them towards a Domination win. Defend it well. 👀
• Stay friendly with nearby city-states. Otherwise they may attack you. 😱
• If you allow barbarians, do not build cities directly on ocean coasts. Otherwise barbarians will come along and bombard them. 😱
• What I really, really don’t like about Civ VI is the inability to stack units on the same tile. This makes it very hard to set up a city defense using a combination of units. The Nationalism and Mobilization civics let you stack 2 or 3 units of the same kind, but it takes 100+ turns to get there.

Economics

You can follow your economic status in the upper left corner. Watch this closely 👀.

Early in the game, it’s usually not a problem. But as you build up your cities and units, your expenses might start pushing your account balance down. If the balance dips below negative -10, units can disappear. 😩 To boost your economy, build Traders, Commercial Districts, etc. If you are at war, you can pillage enemy tiles and collect gold. Your government policies and city-states can also influence the economy. BTW, extended war is expensive. 😳

City-States

City-States matter, but not as much as other topics. For beginners, note that they show the color of their specialty — white for religion, lavender for culture, orange for industry, etc.

A Suzerain is the civ that controls the city-state; the boss.

The round buttons with numbers in them (green boxes) show you how many envoys you have at a city state. The numbers off to the right (yellow boxes) show you how many envoys you need at that city-state to become its suzerain. 👀 EG: 8 for Kandy. You’re in competition with other civs for suzerain status.

If you hover your pointer over that same small number, a message pops up showing what benefits that city-state offers. Each city-state has a unique top offering for its suzerain. 👀

As you get to higher difficulty levels, city-states may attack you if you are at war with their own suzerain. So it’s a good idea to become suzerain of city-states that are close by. A city-state cannot seize a civ’s city 👀, but it can attack nevertheless, making life annoying. 😡

Again, beginners can set the number of City-States to zero in the Advanced Setup.

Closing

That’s it for now. I have both been frustrated, and enjoyed playing Civ VI for many months. I know I have skipped thru some topics - Placing Districts for maximum benefit, actual Combat; and Wonders and Great People give your civs specific boosts. But this is a beginning. Keep playing, and keep studying. You will learn. As I’ve said, it’s complicated. But that means variety, which, in the long run, is a very good thing. 😎

— — — — — — — — —

PS: Culture Victory

Culture is not the same as tourism, and a “culture” victory is really a tourism victory. Culture advances you thru the Civics tree, already important. But Tourism can win games.

If you look at the World Ranking (upper right corner) for Culture, the most important, rightmost column is Visiting Tourists. It’s a fraction, with the first number (numerator) being the number of Visiting Tourists that civ is attracting from the other civs. The 2nd number is the highest number of Domestic Tourists from one of the other civs. Looking at these numbers:

Freddy’s 72 Visiting Tourists come from total of the 2nd column, “Our Visitors From”, of the other civs : 19 + 19 + 17 + 17 = 72

Freddy, with 72 Visiting Tourists, is trying to surpass the next highest Domestic Tourism score, the 116 + 1 of Saladin. Everybody else is trying to surpass the 232 + 1 Domestic Tourists of Freddy. Whoever gets a numerator that matches the denominator wins. So you have to attract more Visiting Tourists than the next best civ has it’s own Domestic Tourists. Got that?

Trade Routes, Great Works of Art, Relics, Artifacts, Seaside Resorts, Holy Cities, and Wonders attract tourists. City Walls add tourism points after advancing to the Conservation Civic. The economic policies: Heritage Tourism, Online Communities, Satellite Broadcasts help. France’s Chateau, Sumeria’s Ziggurat, China’s Great Wall, Egypt’s Sphinx help too, but they require the Flight technology to bring the tourists in. A Naturalist, which you buy with Faith points, can build a National Park. America’s Film Studio building also attracts tourists.

The best 2 civs for Culture are the Greeks: Pericles, and Gorgo. The Acropolis replaces and is better than a Theater Square district, and the Greeks get an extra Wildcard slot for government policies, which lets you get more cultural Great People.

Wikipedia is not entirely clear about this, but I believe that late in the game, having a government compatible with that of another civ can help to attract tourists from your civ.

Then there is the issue of Open Borders. If you open up your borders to another civ, you can attract their tourists ❤️, but also maybe their troops ☠️. It’s not something I do until late-ish in the game.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but you get the idea. It’s complicated.