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Civilization VI: Rise & Fall expansion released

The fifth X stands for eXpansionpacks

The beating of a million drums
The fire of a million guns
The mother of a million sons
Sid Meier's Civilization®

The looping march through history continues today with the launch of Civilization VI: Rise And Fall, the first full expansion for 2016's turn-based 4X strategy sequel. Rise And Fall rolls with the ebb and flow of history, with different Great Ages bringing new challenges and bonuses, alliances that grow stronger over time, era goals, 'emergency' pacts uniting civs against powerful opponents, and more. And obvs it also adds new civilisations, units, wonders, and so on.

Your eight new civs in Rise and Fall are the Cree led by Poundmaker, Georgia led by Tamar, Seondeok's Korea, Mapuche, Lautaro's Mongolia, Wilhelmina and the Netherlands, Scotland with Robert the Bruce, and the Zulu led by Shaka, while India picks up a new leader too, Chandragupta. Here, this video explains the rest of everything with the expansion:

Cover image for YouTube video

A big update has launched alongside the expansion too.

Adding the Cree to Civ has been questioned, with Poundmaker Cree Nation headman Milton Tootoosis saying that it "perpetuates this myth that First Nations had similar values that the colonial culture has, and that is one of conquering other peoples and accessing their land." Civ does have a narrow vision of human civilisation and, as our Adam wrote in response, it might be interesting to expand that.

Rise And Fall is out now on Steam, priced at £25/€30/$30. Obviously it requires the original Civ VI to play. I don't want to volunteer him for work for anything, but I'd be surprised if Adam doesn't have plenty to say about it once he's had time to give it a good play.

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Sid Meier's Civilization VI

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Alice O'Connor

Associate Editor

Alice has been playing video games since SkiFree and writing about them since 2009, with nine years at RPS. She enjoys immersive sims, roguelikelikes, chunky revolvers, weird little spooky indies, mods, walking simulators, and finding joy in details. Alice lives, swims, and cycles in Scotland.

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