So you want to learn how to play Civilization VI? (Part Two)

Welcome back! This is a series of posts I've been making on how to play Civ VI for complete beginners. If you missed part one, you can see it here:

Part One: https://imgur.com/gallery/63QwoeV

In this post, we'll be examining our leader's abilities, deciding on our playstyle and how this affects our first turn. Let's get started!

I booted up a game with the default settings and a random leader and I got Pachacuti, leader of the Incan Empire. Pachacuti is an interesting leader whose bonuses are based on having lots of mountains in his empire (we'll discuss why below). The Incas are also extremely versatile, and are able to adapt to almost any victory conditions as the game progresses. Let's take a closer look at Pachacuti's abilities.

Let's go through these one-by-one:

* LEADER ABILITY: QHAPAQ ÑAN - Pachacuti gets +1 food for every mountain that the origin city has when trading within his own borders. In other words, if I have two cities in my empire and I send a trade route from one to the other, the number of mountain tiles I have in the origin city will directly correlate into +X more food yielded by the trade route. This is especially useful for trading between Incan cities as more food will mean our cities can grow faster and become more productive faster.

* CIV ABILITY: MIT'A - This interesting ability allows citizens to work mountain tiles. Mountains, for most civs, are either barriers or a method of increasing your faith/science. The Incas are able to use the mountains to increase their production (and food, if a terrace farm is adjacent) which no other civ can do.

* UNIQUE UNIT: WARAK'AQ - Incan unique unit. Can attack twice per turn, which is a very rare ability.

* UNIQUE BUILDING: QHAPAQ ÑAN - Both a leader ability AND a building, the Qhapaq Ñan allows Incan land units to move through mountain ranges which usually block other units. Being able to traverse mountains is extremely useful as Incan players will be looking to maximise the amount of mountains in their empire. Even better, trade routes passing through the tunnel will receive additional gold.

* UNIQUE IMPROVEMENT: TERRACE FARM - Available for free without researching any tech, the Terrace Farm must be built on a hill tile. Provides +1 food and +0.5 housing as standard and also provides an additional +1 food for every adjacent mountain tile and +2 production for every adjacent aqueduct. Terrace farms encourage city planning and maximising mountain and aqueducts in your empire.

As you can see, mountain tiles are absolutely critical to Incan success. Let's try to keep this in mind as we begin the game.

This is what we see when we start our game up! I'll explain each of the dials and icons onscreen soon but first, let's talk about our starting units.

* 1x Warrior: Warriors are the most basic melee unit in the game, symbolised by the club icon. This unit will be crucial to dealing with Barbarians and dissuading other civs from attacking our capital in the first few turns.
* 1x Settler: Settlers are used to found new cities, symbolised by the flag icon. Settlers are extremely valuable and losing one to another civ or barbarians is usually a disaster. We'll talk more about settling cities later in this post.

As you can see, there's plenty of mountains near our spawn location - civilizations have a 'start bias' that the map generator takes into account when creating the map. It will try to generate start locations that align with your civ abilities while also making the start locations as fair as possible for other players. In this case, we have a start bias towards mountains, so there's plenty nearby.

Let's talk about these doodads in the top left hand corner. These icons and numbers denote the following:

TOP ROW:
* SCIENCE PER TURN (Blue Flask Icon): A measure of how much Science our civilization is generating per turn
* CULTURE PER TURN (Purple Treble Clef Icon): A measure of how much Culture our civilization is generating per turn
* FAITH (White Winged Sphere Icon): A measure of how much Faith our civilization is generating per turn as well as our total Faith available to spend
* DIPLOMATIC FAVOR (Brown Lectern Icon): A measure of how much Diplomatic Favor our civilization is generating per turn as well as our total D.F. available to influence the World Congresss
* ENVOYS (White Basillica and Pawn Icon): An indication of how much influence points we're generating towards Envoys per turn

^ Note that all of the above is at 0 right now - as the game progresses, we'll see these numbers changing almost every turn

SECOND ROW:
* SCIENCE (Blue Atom Icon): Click here to view Scientific progress at a glance, technologies available to research, Eurekas and the Technology Tree
* CULTURE (Purple Book Icon): Click here to view Cultural progress at a glance, civics available to research, Inspirations and the Civics Tree
* GREAT PEOPLE (Brown Bust Icon): Click here to view Great People, our progress towards them and the abilities the next Great Person will award
* ENVIRONMENT STATUS: Click here to see Natural Disasters that have occured, CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, Global Warming levels and worst polluters
* GOVERNORS: Click here to see available Governors. Governors can be appointed to cities to provide additonal bonuses and keep cities loyal.
* TIMELINE: Click here to view our civilization's timeline - this is a record of all our deeds, good and bad from the start of the game.

THIRD ROW:
* RESEARCH (Currently Empty) - we're not researching anything yet, so no technologies appear in this section. This will change before the end of this turn

FOURTH ROW:
* CIVICS (Currently Code of Laws) - Our in-progress Civics Research. Code of Laws is ready to begin, but it won't start until we found our city so it doesn't have a timer yet.

Still with me? Don't worry if this is a lot to take in - the game will guide you through using all these knobs and dials so you won't be able to finish your turn until you've interacted with everything that needs your attention.

The mini-map appears in the bottom right hand corner (and there's a cow there too!). This allows you to see your empire (and others) at a glance as well as hexes you have explored and not explored. Right now, the mini-map is quite bare, but it will fill up as the game progresses. There are some other icons in here too, but we'll talk about these in another post.

There's a lot of stuff in the top right hand corner too - along the top row, we have the TURN COUNTER and the current year. Beside it, we have the real time clock based on your computer's time settings (it's late here, don't judge me). Beside that, the Question Mark (?) icon allows you to access the 'Civopedia' (an in-game encyclopedia with exhaustive descriptions of everything in-game) and the game menu (where you can save, load, change settings, end the game, etc.).

Below these, we can see Pachacuti's face - this golden rectangle gives us an idea of how we're currently doing. In order, this list shows our SCORE, our MILITARY STRENGTH, our SCIENCE, CULTURE, GOLD, FAITH and DIPLOMATIC FAVOR per turn. As we meet other civilizations, their portraits will also appear in this menu and we'll be able to measure our output to their and make plans depending on what they're up to. To the right of this, we have VICTORY CONDITIONS, ERA SCORE and CITY YIELDS, which we will talk about later.

Finally, in the bottom right hand corner we have (more cows!) our notifications, our 'next step', a circular tracker that shows us how 'complete' our turn is and an X/Y counter right at the bottom that shows our progress towards a Normal/Golden age in the following era.

Notifications trigger every turn, letting us know important things about what's going on. For example, that book icon denotes an 'Inspiration' - a boost towards a Civic. In this case, we earned the Inspiration because we 'discovered' two continents, which helps us research the Foreign Trade Civic faster. More on this later.

The 'next step' tracker is currently showing 'Unit Needs Orders'. This is the current blocker from moving on to the next turn, and this tracker will change throughout your turn as you take actions. Right now, our Warrior needs orders, so he's blocking us from moving on. Let's click this button right now!

Clicking the tracker tells us that our Warrior needs orders. There's nobody to fight right now, so let's move him West to see what we're dealing with. As we move around, we reveal more of the map and can change our plans accordingly. As we move West, we can see some Geothermal Fissures and additional mountains - exactly what we want as the Incas!

Let's move on - our Settler needs orders too. This is the biggest decision of your first turn - where are we going to settle our Capital? As you can see, Civ is highlighting 5 squares for us with the skyline icon right now - these are squares the game thinks would be good for us to settle. Let's dig into this a little deeper with the 'Settler Lens'

Pressing '4' on your keyboard (or clicking Mini-Map > Lenses > Settler) will bring this display onscreen. Dark green squares are tiles with Fresh water, which provide housing and allows us to grow our cities. Coastal water is lighter green and provides slightly less housing - there are no coastal squares in this screenshot. Grey squares do not provide water but can still be settled on. Red squares are either impassable or too close to another city so we can't settle on them. This lens will help you make an educated decision on where to settle your city.

Ideally, we want to settle our city to maximise our abilities, have decent tiles we can work and also have a source of water. Sometimes this isn't possible and we have to make do, but at the start of the game it's usually possible to get an ideal start for your Capital.

This looks like a good spot - we can settle on the cattle (to work it for free), we get fresh water from the river, we'll have stone in our empire already and an additonal stone hex nearby. Most important of call, we're right beside some mountains which we will take advantage of as our borders grow.

To settle the city, move your settler where you want your city centre to be, hit the 'Settle City' button and your city will be created. This will also claim the 6 tiles directly adjacent to your city centre and add them to your Empire. Congratulations! You've settled your capital and you're ready to take on the world

A wider look at the current hexes available to us. Note that Code of Laws in the top left hand corner how has a timer on it, the Mini-Map has updated to show our city and we earned Era score for settling. Next, we'll need to choose our Reseach. Click the tracker in the bottom right, or the science icon in the top left to open the science shelf.

As you can see, we have 5 Technologies ('techs') available to us right now). Let's open the Tech Tree for a better look:

You might need to zoom this one - this is a huge list of techs that we can research, each of which provides new things we can build in our cities. The dark grey techs are available to research - the light grey techs are not available as the prerequisites haven't been met. Techs will become gold/brown as they are researched. In each of the techs, you can see what buildings, abilities or bonuses they provide. The tech tree will need a whole post to itself, so let's pick a tech to research and move on.

In this game, we picked mining to take advantage of the Stone in our Empire ASAP - we can use a builder to create quarries on the stone hex to increase production as soon as the tech is researched. As you can see, it will take 10 turns based on our current science per turn to complete and has not been boosted. Note that the counters at the top of the screen have also increased since we settled our city.

While we're here, let's look at the Civics Tree too:

Similar to the Tech Tree, the Civics Tree is another branching pathway we can use to improve our Empire. Civics are researched with Culture and provide Governments, Government Policies and Wonders that we can use to further our Cultural and Diplomatic Victories. Again, there's a lot to explain here, so let's move on for now - it's enough to know that Code of Laws is always the first civic and will begin research as soon as you found your first city.

Now that we've chosen our tech, we need to start building in our city. In this case, we have a few options available to us. As it's critical that we know who our neighbours are and whether there's any barbarians nearby, let's pick a Scout so we can see what we're dealing with:

Once we choose our production, our city will take X turns to build what we choose. In this case, it will take 10 turns to build our Scout, based on our current city production.

That's it! We've taken care of everything that needs our attention. We've given orders to our warrior, settled a city, chosen our science and started our Production. It's a bit faded, but the tracker in the bottom right is now prompting us to end our turn and move on to the next.

Thank you for reading this far! If you're interested in Civ, I stream over on https://www.twitch.tv/ianb528. I'm going to continue making these guides as I love Civ and I'd like to share it with as many people as possible. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to drop them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.