Colonizing a separate continent requires more of a cost-benefit analysis than ever, as the danger of low Loyalty can outweigh the advantages of settling new regions. You can affect Loyalty through proximity-a city on the edge of your borders will be vulnerable to the charms of a nearby foreign city and vice versa-city projects, espionage, and more. Loyalty suffers in Dark Ages and flourishes in Golden ones if it falls too low, your city will be less productive and eventually revolt, becoming a 'free city' open to the sway of other civs. Loyalty is a metric of each city's dedication to your leadership and is added on top of happiness to the list of city stats you need to care about. Rise and Fall adds two big features that affect cities specifically: Loyalty and Governors, which work in tandem to add depth to city management without overcomplicating it. In vanilla Civ VI, cities have individual happiness meters instead of civilization-wide ones, and greater depth to city development forces you pay close attention to each city and its unique contributions to your empire. As a result, a strong start isn't enough to carry you through Rise and Fall, even on lower difficulties-you need to work proactively and adapt your strategies at every step if you want to rule the world.īuilding off the base game, monitoring each city's individual growth is paramount.

So even if you're two eras ahead of everyone else in your own tech tree, you're still susceptible to falling into a Dark Age if you fail to do anything else of note. If you lean too heavily into one specialization, like science, you'll have trouble earning enough points in any given era to escape a Dark Age and its pitfalls. A wide variety of accomplishments contribute to your score, from clearing Barbarian outposts and building Wonders to being the first civilization with a complex form of government. The Ages system works brilliantly with Civ VI's emphasis on careful planning and building a well-rounded civilization regardless of the victory condition you're working towards. These so-called Heroic Ages are a powerful weapon later in the game if you've fallen behind and are struggling to catch up. While Golden Ages obviously carry the most benefits, Dark Ages have unique bonuses of their own, and if you pull yourself out of a Dark Age and into a Golden one, it'll be even stronger.

As the world collectively transitions from one era to the next, each civilization accumulates a score toward the next era's 'Age.' Depending on your progress during the previous era, you can enter a Normal Age, fall into a Dark Age, or rise into a Golden Age. The big-picture addition and namesake of Rise and Fall is the Ages system, which coincides with each of the existing technological eras-Ancient, Classical, etc.-but is based on a global average rather than individual progress through the tech tree. Civ VI's first expansion, Rise and Fall, strikes a remarkable balance between the two, with several key features that both complement and change up the base game. With that, however, comes the challenge of adding new content to improve upon what's already there without bloating it. Civilization VI stands out as the deepest and richest base game in the series, with smart additions and changes that refine its already great strategy gameplay.

Civilization vi rise and fall