When I first fired up the game, I sat and watched the whole introductory video. The Firaxis folks know how to make a fun little intro, that's for sure. On subsequent game starts, I skipped it...but got weird graphical glitches in the intro screen and menu when I did. Fortunately those went away after loading a game, but still, minor issues like that are kind of silly in a big budget game with more than a year of patches under its belt. Plus it's not possible to skip the (very loud) logo intro screens without messing around with the game files in the install folder. Really, folks, you have to throw your logo in my face and blow out my ears every time I start the game? This is the sort of thing that makes me really happy I didn't pay the full $60 launch retail price.
Anyway, enough of the minor annoyances, on to the world-conquering. I've only played one full game as I write this, on the default settings. (A Culture victory with the Australians, for the record.) I'm sure I haven't seen everything the game has to offer, but I've seen enough of the most significant parts. Players of Civ V will feel mostly at home with Civ VI initially: similar graphical style, same one-unit-per-tile gameplay mechanic, tech tree looks vary familiar. But it doesn't take too long to run into some significant differences, most notably the concept of districts and the Civics tree (like technology, but for cultural/societal advances). And of course there's plenty of new leaders and civilizations to try out.
The district concept is really interesting. In earlier Civ games, when you built a building in your city, you didn't have to think about where to put it on the world map - everything was just packed into your city's space. Civ VI makes you pick out a tile within the city's influence zone for a specialized district, then the buildings related to that specialty end up there. Want research? Build a campus district, and populate it with a library, university, observatory, etc. Building ships? Locate a harbor district and drop in a lighthouse, shipyard, etc. The bigger your city, the more districts you can zone, and some even affect other nearby cities. The terrain around your city really impacts which districts you decide to build, and cities tend to naturally fall into specializations based on the districts they have.
World Wonders use a similar placement method as districts, requiring the player to pick a tile near the city to use for the wonder. Most wonders have restrictions on which tiles are eligible - must be hills, must be near a particular district, and so on. The result is that wonders tend to be spread out around the civilization, not concentrated in one or two giant cities. Bad for those trying a One City Challenge, I suppose, but I think I like the way it gives me more reason to pay more attention to cities beyond the first few.
The other major gameplay change that I really like is the active research model, with Eureka moments (for technology) and Inspirations (for civics). Completing an objective gives you half the research/culture necessary to unlock the technology/civic. Most are things you'd be doing anyway - building farms, founding cities, beating back barbarian hordes - so generally you're not going greatly out of your way to get the boosts. But the fact that those boosts are there is a great incentive to be actively pursing specific goals.
Civ VI seems like a solid entry in the Civilization series. The designers took some risks with new concepts like districts and active research, and on the whole I've been impressed. 4X game fans will definitely want to give Civ VI a try.
