Civilization 6 will soon let you cooperate with your friendly neighbourhood barbarians
Civilise the uncivilised
Civilization 6's barbarians have always been depicted as the brutish sort. Kill them before they kill you, and all that. This won't be the case for much longer, though. The strategy game's next update adds a Barbarian Clans mode, which will let players interact with the barbarians with more than just their swords - like raiding or hiring them. I mean, the new interactions are still mostly sword-related, but they don't all involve stabbing each other.
The free update goes live on February 25th, adding the optional Barbarian Clans game mode. This introduces six clans into the world, each specialising in a different type of unit, and they can all eventually evolve into a city-state with a little help from the player.
Here's a dev update from Firaxis going into a bit more detail:
You can just demolish a Barbarian Clan as usual, and that will make them gone forever. However, the new mode gives you the option to raid them instead, nicking some gold and knocking them down a peg on their city-state progress. You'll be able to bribe clans to stop them attacking you, or hire a clan to nab their strongest units as well.
Barbarians can also be given gold to incite them into attacking another civilisation. Or, if a clan kidnaps one of your units, you can pay a ransom to get them back. A press release says that exchanging gold in these "civilised" encounters will boost the clan's city-state progress. I don't know that I'd personally call inciting war and abducting people "civilised", though in comparison to just fighting them all the time, yeah, I guess.
The February update also adds a Leader Selection Pool. As the name implies, it lets you customise the pool of leaders for your game - helpful if you're looking to play against a leader you haven't before. On top of that, there'll be AI adjustments and balance changes aplenty.
We reckon Civ 6 is one of the best strategy games and one of the best ultrawide games on PC. Adam Smith (RPS in peace) liked it very much when it came out in 2016, calling it "a thing of wonder" in his Civilization 6 review.