Trade and Roads

The next major system to be upgraded is the Trade system. And this is an important system to master since it is the major way of obtaining gold in the game. If you neglect Trade, you will be in continual financial difficulty, but use it wisely and you can have all gold you need, and then some. I’ve had games where I am bringing in as much as 900 gold per turn! And with a healthy treasury you can buy buildings and military units as needed, plus have all the gold needed for maintenance and upkeep. The other reason to master this system is that in Civ VI workers (now called Builders) do not build roads. Instead, roads are created by your Trade units when they travel between cities. This is a major change in the game dynamic.

Sometimes you need to send a trade unit to a city purely for the road it creates. Within your Empire you might send a Trade unit between two of your cities just to get the road. And you can send one to the city of another Civ to build the road, and then use the road for your military to invade! One thing to watch out for is that when you are looking at setting up a Trade Route, the game interface shows you the path your trader will take, and if you watch closely you might be able to send a trader to a foreign city but have it go through one of your own cities. So you can get a road connecting two of your own cities as part of a Trade Route that goes to a foreign city and brings in Gold. The one exception to the rule on roads from Trade is that later in the game when you discover Steam Power you can use Military Engineers to build Railroads. This does not use a charge from the Military Engineer, but does use one Iron and one Coal, which adds to your CO2 emissions. You would not want to overbuild Railroads, but if you are aiming for a Domination victory you will want to get the new units you build to front quickly, and there is no better way to do that than a good Railroad system.

But the primary reason to build Trade units to set up Trade Routes to bring in Gold (primarily), and perhaps other resources as well. You begin when you discover the Civic ForeignTrade, which gives you the capability of having exactly 1 Trade Route. You can gain the capacity for additional routes in several ways. You can build a Harbor and Lighthouse, and that will give you 1 more. Or you can build a Commercial Hub and Market, which also gives you 1 more. However, you cannot build both in any one city and get 2 extra trade routes. But since you can get one more route in each city where you do this, one way to get more trade routes is to get more cities, an approach known as “building wide”. There are also Wonders and Great Merchants that can give you additional capacity.

Once you have the capacity you have to build the Trader and send it. Unlike in previous games where your Trade routes were totally virtualized, in Civ VI the Trader is a unit that travels between the cities, and it can be attacked by enemies or by Barbarians. If this happens your route is pillaged and you have to start over by building another unit. But if nothing goes wrong you will eventually get a Trading Post in each city when the route is complete. This matters because Trade Routes are limited by distance. They can go up to 15 tiles for a Land route, or 30 tiles for a Sea route. But a Trading Post increases the range by another 15 or 30 tiles, and if you can go from Trading Post to Trading Post you can go clear across the map. However, this is not usually the most important consideration. Trade Routes are also important for gaining a Culture victory since they add to the tourism you get from your trading partner. Trade Routes also last for a fixed time according to a complex formula I won’t try to replicate, but suffice it to say you will get a chance to use your Trader again as long it has not been killed. So you can use it to build a road, then some turns later use it to get Gold from a City-state, for instance.

Civics

I mentioned Civics in the previous section. In Civ VI this is a whole new system that is parallel to the Science/Technology tree. It is a tree of Civic advancements, and you really need to advance along this tree to keep up. And just like the Technology tree requires you to earn Science to make progress, the Civics tree requires you to earn Culture. You can do this in a variety of ways. First is through buildings, beginning with the Monument, which is available to you immediately without any Research. Many players like to build a couple of units first, then a Monument so they can start building up the Culture. Then Theater Squares give you a place to put your Amphitheaters,, Museums, and so on. Anyone who wants to get a Culture victory will be building a lot of Theater Squares and the buildings for them. You can also get Culture from Trade Routes, from Wonders, from some tiles, and so on.

You need to advance along the Civics tree just as you do on the Science tree. So you have two quasi-research tracks going on, and you can use the same selection methods. You can simply pick individual Techs and Civics from the options the game gives you, or you can open the tree, find a goal you want to achieve and click it. The game will then select that and all of the prerequisites, and take them in order. And a number of things that used to be on the Research tree in earlier versions have moved to the Civics tree in this version. For example, Trade has always been a technology you would research, but in this game Foreign Trade is now a Civic. So I just think of it as researching Techs and researching Civics.

At the bottom of the Civics Tree is a progress bar that shows where you and other players you know have progressed in terms of Eras. If several players are in the same Era, you will see a number for the number of players in this Era, but if only one is in this Era you will see the portrait of the player. Since it is only based on Eras it is not very detailed, but it is information. To access the Civics Tree use the button on the Top Left.

Policy Cards

The new Civics system in Civ 6 gives you a lot more flexibility than the Civics system in Civ 5, and this is accomplished through the system of Policy Cards. As you progress through the Civics tree you will be given slots into which you can insert Policy Cards that affect your Empire in different ways, and some Civics will give you additional Policy Cards. In addition, the slots you have available are subject to your Government choice. There are 5 categories and they are color-coded in the Policy screen. They are

• Military – Red color
• Economic – Yellow color
• Diplomatic – Green color
• Wildcard – Purple color
• Dark Age – Black color

The flexibility comes from the fact that you can remove and replace cards as your circumstances change. And as you move through the Civics tree you will gain more cards. You should expect that as the game goes on you will have more cards available to you than you can use at any time because of limited slots. Cards have to go in the appropriate slots, so if you have a slot for a Military policy you have to put a Military Policy Card in that slot. The exception is with Wildcard slots. Wildcard Policy Cards have to go into Wildcard slots, but the slots can also accept other cards as well.

When you start the game you will be in the default Government type of Chiefdom, and that will give you one Military slot and one Economic slot. A good example of a Military Policy Card you might to use at this point is Discipline, which gives you +5 combat strength when fighting Barbarians. In the early game you will be fighting a lot of Barbarians so this will come in handy. But as the game goes on and you progress into further Eras you don’t encounter so many Barbarians so you would want to switch this card out for something more useful in your given circumstance. A good Economic card in the early game makes producing Settlers easier. Since producing Settlers and founding cities is something you mostly do in the early game, this is useful. But once you have set the cities down you will need to develop them, and that requires Builder units. So this could be good time to switch out the Settlers card for one that makes it easier to produce Builders. You can make a free swap whenever you research a new Civic, or whenever you change Eras, otherwise you would have to pay for the privilege. So again a healthy Treasury is a big help.

As you progress through the Civics tree you will get access to more Government types, and this also affects the slots you get. Tier 1 governments get 4 slots, tier 2 get 6, tier 3 get 8, and tier 4 get 10. But the kinds of slots can vary when you change governments. As we saw before, Chiefdom has 1 Military and 1 Economic slot. But if you move up to Classical Republic, a tier 1 government, you get 2 Economic slot, 1 Diplomatic, and 1 Wild Card. But you don’t have a Military slot available. So when you change to this government (if you choose to, there are two other tier 1 government types available), whatever Military card you had previously selected goes away until such time as you get another Military slot.

You can also gain slots from certain Wonders. And certain Empires come with an extra slot, so you can pick one of them and get one more slot from the start.