Civ VI: Rise and Fall's new features explained
After dark, become a hero
I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down. That's what I'll be singing when I play Civilization VI's upcoming Rise and Fall expansion. There are loads of new features but the unifying theme is, as the title suggests, success, failure and recovery. That means dark ages that come with hardships but also bring about the possibility of a renaissance into a heroic age. All of that, and much more, is explained in the brand new video below.
Rise and Fall should introduce more fluctuations in the flow of the game. Eras will be more distinct, so that the mightiest empire of the classical period might not be quite so dangerous by the time feudalism rolls around. The video explains it all quite clearly, but for those who have not or cannot watch, the sequence looks a little like this. At the start of each era, you choose a dedication, setting goals for your civ, and then your discoveries, decisions and achievements receive a score. As an era ends, your progress is judged and you might end up in a Golden Age if you're particularly successful, and kept to your Dedication, or fall into a Dark Age if you're at the other extreme.
Dark Ages are troublesome but they're also the gateways to Heroic Ages, which I'm guessing are like that moment when you survive a really bad hangover and peel back the curtains for the first time in hours and then strut to the local shop determined to buy nothing but health and goodness in your quest to never be that person ever again.
The other major addition, as far as I'm concerned, is Loyalty. Again, there are more details in the video, but essentially it raises the possibility of people defecting from your civ and becoming free cities.
There's loads of other stuff, including a nifty historical timeline that gives you a neat summary of the good times and the bad, and Emergencies. These sound great. They're triggered when one civ does a bad thing, like annexing a city state or dropping a nuke, and they allow other civs to form a temporary alliance to deal with the problem.
While you chew over all of that, you can see the new civs and leaders that'll be introduced in Rise and Fall below. I haven't included the Cree Nation because I've written about them here.
