Hi, Civilization fans!
The first major update for Civilization VI: Gathering Storm is now live. Here's a full breakdown of what's included:
FEATURES
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] New and improved version of Map Pins (now called Map Tacks) that includes pin icons for many new specific markers (Districts, etc.), in addition to a new grouped scrollable list of pins that were placed. Thanks to Bradd Szonye for his Mod inclusion!
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] Map text search: Located on the mini-map tool bar. Players can now search for map items via text search and have them highlight on the map. For example, type "Iron," or "Knight." Includes search history, search suggestions, and "go to" buttons.
BALANCE/POLISH
Civs
- Canada: Receives +1 Production from Snow and Tundra (Including hills).
- China: Great Wall can only be pillaged (never removed) by natural disasters. +2 Gold for improvement itself. Add +1 Gold and +1 Culture to that received for each adjacent Great Wall.
- Egypt: Update the Egyptian Chariot Archer to not replace the Heavy Chariot.
- Egypt: Sphinx now provides +1 Culture if built on Flood Plains. Cannot be built on Snow, Snow Hills, Tundra, or Tundra Hills. +2 Appeal (since they are encouraged to build on Flood Plains). Cannot be built next to another Sphinx.
- France: Château now provides 1 Culture for each adjacent wonder. 1 Gold for each adjacent Luxury Resource.
- Hungary: Mathias ability now only 75% resource and Gold discount to upgrading levied units (instead of 100%).
- India: Cities gain an Amenity for every Religion with at least 1 Follower. Missionaries have +2 spreads. +100% Religious pressure from your Trade Routes.
- India: Varu ability no longer stacks but maintenance reduced to 2.
- Mali: Nerf the Mali + City-State + Democracy Combo/Exploit. Democracy is now a 15% discount on purchases with Gold.
- Mali: Increase Mali desert weighting.
- Maori: Toa ability no longer stacks, and Strength is reduced to 36.
- Maori: Reduce the Marae ability to +1 of each bonus yield, instead of +2.
- Netherlands: Add a Production bonus towards Flood Barriers and Dams.
- Norway: Allow Norway (only) to receive Science and Culture from pillaging improvements in addition to Gold or Faith.
- Spain: Mission: +2 Faith; +1 Food, and +1 Production if on different continent than your capital. +1 Science for every adjacent Campus and Holy Site.
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] Improve leader victory preference weighting.
Environment Systems and Climate Change
- Reduce Dust storm yields by 33%. Add some Food yields from Blizzards. Reduce damage to population and structures from Blizzards by about a third.
- Detach climate change progress from Natural Disaster Intensity slider.
- Move percentage of coastal tiles that can flood from 35% to 45%.
- Halve carbon emissions from units to slow down climate change to just over half the previous rate.
- Reduce unit CO2 emissions for a player by 50% if they research Advanced Power Cells.
- Increased chance of Storms and Droughts per degree of temperature rise is no longer 20% for all events. Now it does not increase chance of weaker type of each storm/drought at all but instead boosts stronger type by 50%.
- From Phase IV on Floods and Storms will not add fertility.
- At Phases V and above yields previously added to the map can be stripped off as Storms and Droughts pass over (chances increase as you move to later phases).
- Allow a single player's CO2 footprint to go negative (if they have run the Carbon Recapture project but never generated much carbon). Hence one player can clean up the other players' mess.
World Congress
- Provide a one-time cap on each player receiving Favor for reviving each other major player.
- Adding tooltip to tiebreaker scenarios so players can understand why a player won a tiebreaker.
- Adding Favor Per Turn and Request for Aid score penalties for excessive Grievances and CO2 emissions.
- Climate Accords competition now enables projects for decommissioning Power Plants.
- Reducing the lockout timer on hostile emergencies so that they can show up slightly more often.
- Reduce time between deals during Request for Aid emergencies so AI can give multiple gifts if desired.
Districts/District Buildings
- Reducing power of Royal Society Government District Building (reducing percentage-per-builder-charge from 3 to 2).
- Nuclear Accidents of any severity will now always pillage the Nuclear Power Plant.
Pillaging
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] Convert Science and Culture from pillaging improvements to Gold or Faith.
- Reduce effectiveness of Raid and Total War policies so they are only +50% instead of +100% to pillaging
- Dam districts now provides healing if plundered.
- Pillaged Reactors cannot trigger a nuclear accident. Completing the 'Recommission Nuclear Reactor' project will also 'un-pillage' it.
Improvements
- Seastead: Cannot be placed adjacent to another Seastead.
Wonders
- Panama Canal wonder now gives +10 Gold to its city.
- Mahabodi Temple and Statue of Liberty now award Diplomatic victory points.
Units
- Increase the cost of upgrading units (about 33%).
- Reduce base cost of Naturalists from 800 to 600 to make them compete better with Rock Bands.
- Update certain Great Generals and Admirals to provide strategic resources.
- Make sure Barbarians can't spawn GDRs.
- Unsuccessful WMD attacks now consume the WMD.
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] Increase the Destroyer’s sight range to 3.
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] Air unit and Anti-Air unit combat strength balance changes propagated to base game.
City States
- Add Walls to City States on Diety and Immortal games.
- Add additional melee units to City States at higher difficulties.
Misc
- Grievances/Warmongering: Changing Grievance calculation (and Warmonger in base and XP1) to treat cities taken offensively during a Defensive Pact/Suzerain War/Emergency War as if taken during a Formal War (now generates Grievances)
- Setup: For advanced starts, add extra Faith and scale it.
- [XP1, XP2] Track barbarian camp placement throughout the game (much like we do storms & droughts) and shy away from camp locations that are close to previously used spots. Should distribute camps across the continents better.
MULTIPLAYER
Play By Cloud
- Hide full games on Lobby list.
- Adding Remember My Choice option for what happens after a client readies up.
- Adding automatic ready up countdown.
- Activating an in-game notification for a Your Turn event to display a popup that will allow the user to go straight into that match.
- The Upper case " i ", lower case " L", and number 1 all look identical when observing the Join Code in the Game Summary of the Play By Cloud Staging Room. - Increased size of the font so unique aspects of glyphs can be determined.
Misc
- Relationship pip icons would fail to display when progress with other Human Players during a Multiplayer game (Allied, etc.).
- Staging Room countdowns should reset when a new session is joined. Countdowns should persist even if the screen is simply hidden, which happens if the Game Settings tab is pressed.
- In-game chat panel should not display dead players.
- Additional general bug fixes and polish.
SCENARIOS
- You can now play the Black Death scenario in hotseat/PlayByCloud.
SYSTEMS
- Add secondary color to jersey selection color collision detection. Now jerseys are only considered to have collided if BOTH primary color and secondary color collide. Jerseys with similar or identical primary colors are now allowed if the secondary colors are very different
UI
- Great Works UI: Converted system to Drag and Drop.
- Climate Overview: Add icon, tooltip for fertilized tiles lost due to weather events.
- Civilopedia: Pillaging Yields are now database driven in the Civilopedia.
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] World Resource Report: Add sorting on resources and on the leaders in a row.
- Additional general bug fixes and polish.
AI
Trade
- Increase value of Diplomatic Favor. Limit number of items desired in a trade. Set minimum value for traded items.
- Don't try to trade more of a Luxury resource than the human is already importing.
- Correctly value maintenance resources when calculating trades. Reduces possible exploits with resource for gold trades with the AI.
- Fixes to trades for strategic resources - Stop paying full value for them when you've got a decent stockpile, not just at the stockpile cap. Reduces possible exploits with resource for gold trades with the AI.
- AI will not pay for banned resources
- Reduce the chance that the AI offers only a single strategic resource in a trade deal unless they are padding out a larger deal.
- Improvements to AI Deal management with Gold.
- [XP1, XP2] Fix an issue where AI was overvaluing Great Works on the turn they are created (causing lots of trade requests).
Victory Strategies and Agendas
- Boost Wonder Obsessed AI's desire for Wonders in later eras.
- Improve victory strategies, including Diplomatic victory.
Combat
- Improve AI ability to successfully complete the capture of a city during a Military Emergency they are taking part in.
- Embarked units know they are under threat from naval units - Improve protection of units while on city assault.
- [XP1] Improve ability for AI to use Warrior Monks militarily - Add additional war footing condition.
- [XP1, XP2] Fix an issue where an AI unit
- garrisoning a city would occasionally leave the protection of the city when they didn’t need to, exposing them to attack.
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] AI more strongly prefers attacking with aircraft to deploying to districts.
Misc
- Fixed an issue that was making the AI less likely to improve strategic resources.
- Avoid advancing your Power Plant if you don't have resources for it.
- Increase odds of aggressive civs making encampments.
- [XP1, XP2] Reduce value of supply convoys, they were heavily overvalued by AI.
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] Minor Civs will no longer make aircraft carriers (since they can't make aircraft)
PERFORMANCE
- Additional AI and rendering performance improvements.
BUG FIXES
Civs
- Phoenicia: Fix non-capital continent bonuses moving properly for Phoenicia (additional checks).
- Cree: Poundmaker's Trade Route UA (which is based on tile improvements at the destination city) now works like it used to back in XP1.
- Maori: Mana ability was incorrectly being applied to all units.
- Ottomans: Ibrahim in some situations was not able to be moved to another capital.
- Kongo: Now correctly is awarded benefits from Founder beliefs. Mvemba now cannot get the Intolerant Agenda.
Policies
- Check for obsolete policies after awarding free civics (Bolshoi).
Many fixes to code that controls what is expelled during city flips, capture, trade, etc.
- On city transfer, all air-units that do not belong to the new owner that are based in a district or improvement, are immediately re-based, prior to any other expelling of other units.
- If the city is flipped to a new culture, default placement rules apply, no units are booted out, except stationed air-units, unless they can't be in the new owner's territory.
- If the city is transferred in a deal, only friendly units (non-air), traders and spies can stay.
Units, Movement, and Combat
- Fixed a bug caused when trying to form an Army with a unit that has no movement remaining.
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] Don't factor in embarked and amphibious combat penalties for air units.
- Don't let the player select other player's air units.
- Fix an issue that was causing the unit cycling to pull camera away from user when they were doing things like changing citizen assignments in the city.
- Don't add Mountain Tunnel entrances/exits on water tiles.
- Don't let an embarked builder/engineer create an adjacent improvement on a land tile.
- Remove mountain tunnel entrance/exit if the tile submerges.
- Don't let naval units use Tunnels.
Carriers/Air Units/Rebasing
- Added additional checks to rebasing aircraft to make sure they are properly paired in cases where a carrier unit exists in a city center.
- Correct some visualization issues with air-unit rebasing.
- When a tile is annexed by a player and it is trying to kick out any other players that shouldn't be there, don't assume that all the air units can't be there, they might be able to stay.
- Also do the kick out in two stages so that if the units do have to leave, any parent objects are moved first, then child objects, so the child objects can just go to where the parent is (aircraft carrier) if appropriate.
Civilopedia
- Removing a page from the Civilopedia's Trade Route game concepts, which referred to a base benefit that was removed in XP1 and XP2 and made into a governor bonus instead.
- Update Sweden's capitals in the Civilopedia to be Swedish instead of Norwegian.
UI
- Golden Age UI will fail to display on the Status bar when transitioning into the Future Era during a Gathering Storm gameplay.
- Fix an extremely large amount of space being added for tooltips from point.
- UI now properly updates upon completion of the Recommission Nuclear Reactor project.
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] Several color systems fixes and corrections. Improved default colors for several civs that were difficult to read.
- Multiple misc UI fixes and updates.
- Front End: 'Teams Share Visibility' is now disabled/0 when 'No Teams' is checked and reset when unchecked.
Trade
- Treat incoming gifts as incoming demands; don't allow the user to modify them.
Resources
- Player Resources are now updated before Player Units in the turn order. This is to fix the issue where the insufficient resource combat debuff was not being removed until the following turn, even though the player had sufficient resources at the beginning of the turn.
World Congress
- Fixing multiple World Congress issues that could cause mis-matched or blank proposal choices to show up on the review and results screens.
- Adding in filtering for the Migration Treaty, so that players cannot target unmet players.
- Fixing an issue that would allow a Special Session to be called before the World Congress properly unlocked.
Wonders
- Fixed an overflow that some players noticed when they had large amounts of gold and completed Big Ben, which gives a 50% gold bonus.
- Fixed an issues with Apadana where the user was not granted 2 Envoys when completed.
- Fixed Panama sometimes not lining up with its neighbor canals.
Grievances
- Grievances now decay between dead civilizations. Prevents negative Loyalty modifier from hanging around after defeating the city's original owner.
- Fixing Grievance notifications doing nothing when clicked.
Districts
- Fixed a bug preventing nuclear reactors from being removed from the game when a city is razed. Changed the identification of nuclear reactor buildings to use a database parameter instead of a game tag. Added fail checks when searching for a reactor type building.
- District modifiers should now properly reattach when the district was pillaged but has been successfully repaired (was staying inactive; ex. a pillaged Suguba district that was then repaired).
- Districts that are over strategic resources are now correctly represented in the Reports screen. Resources are shown as from that city as opposed to 'Gameplay Bonuses'.
Misc
- Hall of Fame: Improved performance of aggregate updates. Also fixed a crash that would occur if one of the Hall of Fame aggregate queries was bad (typically from a mod).
- Map Gen: Make is so that there is a chance that Zhangye Danxia and Mount Roraima can appear. Before there was 0% chance of them showing up.
- Map Gen: Make sure coastal lowlands don't appear inland near lakes
- Scenarios: Plantations should not show up as a potential build in the Black Death Scenario.
- Achievements: Fix "Peacekeeper" achievement to require that the end-user be Laurier winning an emergency.
- Achievements: Ensure that the player has actually won the Nobel Prizes for achievement
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] Multiplayer: Fixing progress blocker that was occurring if a player was defeated during their turn in hotseat.
- Road Vis: Fixing issues with Road and Railroad "spaghetti".
- Tile improvement modifiers should now properly detach from an old city when the tile is swapped to another city (was staying active; ex. Power from green energy improvements)
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] Espionage: Fix espionage funds being siphoned not showing for negative amounts
- City-States: When sending your first real Envoy to a city-state, but you already have Amani in that city-state giving you "virtual" Envoys there, correctly award a second bonus Envoy from the Diplomatic League policy
CRASH
- Multiple crash fixes as reported by the public crash reporting system
EXPLOITS
- [ALL GAME VERSIONS] Re-enable SHIFT+ENTER to force end turn. Make sure that production overflow is lost if this is used.
- Coastal Raids can no longer target Impassable plots. In Gathering Storm, this loophole allowed naval units to raid a mountain improvement (ex. Mountain Tunnel) without actually pillaging it, allowing continuous gold.
- Great Generals that transform a military unit into a Corps or Army can no longer do so for the GDR, which is not allowed to be a Corps or Army.
- Correct exploit where player could receive duplicate Luxuries by trading it away, removing the improvement, then rebuilding it for a duplicate copy.
MODDING
ModBuddy (unsupported)
- ModBuddy now supports XP1, XP2, and shared pantries in art tools.
- Misc polish and debugging.
WorldBuilder Editor (unsupported)
- Allow Forge tuner panel to work in WorldBuilder.
- Add "Basic mode" for creating simple hand-crafted location maps with random start positions. Separate out scenario tools to "Advanced Mode", which is very much still in development.
- Add ability to "paint" with different brush sizes.
- Assign a default continent value when "painting" any terrain (Africa).
- Scatter Resources button added.
Settings
- Disable Generate New ID button in Basic mode.
- Make Generate ID button do something in Advanced mode.
- When updating text strings, the text in the left column did not update to reflect the changes.
- Now, text options are locked for name, descript, and map name, map descript (they are required). These were able to be deleted before.
Misc
- Don't allow selection of resource amounts for non-strategic resources in the Plot and Placement editors.
- Fix an issue where an already saved WorldBuilder map, when loaded back into WorldBuilder, would lose continent data.
- Erase any improvements on a plot when changing the owner to NONE.
- Erase improvements and features on a tile if you change the terrain type to something incompatible in the Placement mode.
- Allow changing the Pillaged state of improvements on tiles.
- First pass at status message system to give feedback like "Library requires a Campus district" or "Placed Shrine successfully" instead of silently doing nothing.
- Show correct civ icons in World Builder Player Editor.
World Builder Front-End
- Additional Content
- New maps created in WorldBuilder are now automatically found and enabled when returning to the main menu. No more required restart.
- Updated mods UI to show a different icon if the mod came from a map.
- If a mod has a 'Created' property, show the date the mod was created. * Expansion 2 and Expansion 1 are now always shown at the top of the mods listing.
- Map-loaded mods are always considered compatible.
- Additional fixes for compatibility, etc.
- Game Setup
- Maps now display properly in the in-game map-lists if you are in the correct rule-set, and the map mod is enabled.
- Maps created in the "Standard" ruleset now will show as playable in both Rise and Fall and Gathering Storm.
- World Builder Menus
- Change front-end menus to reflect only items necessary for WorldBuilder. Update text strings. Update in-game pause menu to reflect only items necessary for WorldBuilder.
- Add World Wrap toggle to Advanced Setup.
ART
- Fixing hotseat Rock Band colors.
- Fixing the unit colors for the Fez city state.
- Tweaking the unit colors for Japan and Mapuche to match their civ jersey's a bit better
- Pass on the "Player Colors" which are the jerseys that are picked when we run out of other reasonable jersey selections. We have enough to cover over the max number of players picking the same civ.
- Add beards to all remaining leaders that did not previously have beards.
- Tweak to the civ Icon backing texture that is used in the Character selection screen. Show more representative color scheme so that players will be able to make more informed readability decisions in the main menu.
- Editing Gorgo/Greece civ symbol placement and size so it matches all the other civs.