Here are two of the best things about PC gaming: the Civilization series, and the ability to change your games by adding in user-created content. Modding Civ 6, then, is an expression of the very apex of PC gaming. It’s peak PC.
Since the Civ 6 modding toolkit came out in February 2017, the number of mods on offer has been steadily expanding. Civ 6’s modding community isn’t yet at the level of its timeless predecessors, but modders have now created enough new leaders, gameplay tweaks and AI improvements for you to swing your caveman club at. There are over 1,400 Steam Workshop,in fact, so plenty of options for every budding ruthless/benevolent leader.
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So we’ve congregated the best efforts of Civ 6 modders from both Steam Workshop and Civfanatics.com, into a long unravelling papyrus of a list. All of the mods here are compatible with the Rise & Fall expansion pack, so no matter how invested you are in Civ, all of these mods will work just right.
Steel & Thunder Unique Units/Units Expansion
Deliverator’s comprehensive mod (formerly known as MOAR units) diversifies and brightens up the game with plenty of new units. The mod adds one unique unit to every civilisation in the game (including DLC and Rise & Fall civs), as well as 11 new global units that slot into existing upgrade paths.
New global units include, among others, Gatling Gun, Longswordsman, RIfleman, Naval Cog and Galleass. Listed below, meanwhile, are some of our favourite unique Civ units:
– America – AH-64 Apache
– Germany – Landsknecht – England – Ironside – Poland – Uhlan – Kongo – Medicine Man – Khmer – War Canoe
Steel and Thunder comes in two separate packs: Unit Expansion adds the global units, and Unique Units adds the civ-specific ones.
Civ 6 leader modsJFD’s collection
The biggest collection of Civ 6 leaders belongs to long-time modder JFD, who’s created and crafted over 30 of the great leaders from history such as Philip II of Macedon, Elizabeth I and Louis XIV. For those wanting some villains to rally against (or play as), there are a few bad eggs in there too, including Hitler, Mussolini, Ivan the Terrible, and Mr. Omelettes-and-Eggs himself, Stalin.
Each new leader has a portrait that blends seamlessly with the bold, vibrant Civ 6 art style, and comes with their own unique units, traits and agendas. As you can guess, old Adolf’s ‘Liebensraum’ agenda makes things pretty feisty.
Head over to JFD’s Steam Workshop page to see his full leader collection.
Civ 6 conversion modsQuo’s Combined Tweaks
Anyone who has spent some time on Civ 4 and Civ 5 forums will have heard of the great conversion projects like Rise of Mankind and Realism Invictus for Civ 6, or Vox Populi for Civ 5. These community-created mods spend years revamping the game rules, eventually creating a much deeper experience that borrows the best bits from across the series. Quo’s Combined Tweaks takes inspiration from those, revamping hundreds of rules to make for an interesting alternative to Firaxis’ vision.
There are way too many changes to list, but they include faster unit movement, more impactful governments and policies so you can really feel the difference between, say, Fascism and Democracy, and more powerful Wonders (which now steal tiles around them when built, and can be woo City States). Each civ now has several new unique traits too, making games a little more interesting and asymmetrical.
In a nutshell, it’s the most sweeping set of rule changes to Civ 6 available. Mod creator isau recommends using it with AI+, and says that it should be compatible with most unit, UI and map mods. You’ll need the Rise & Fall expansion for Quo’s Combined Tweaks to work.
Anno Domini
If you’ve always found Civ to be at its most compelling in the earlier eras, when mankind worshipped trees and thought the Earth was just a spinning plate on a giant celestial stick, then you’ll quickly settle into Anno Domini. Building on his experience of creating a similar mod for Civ 5, creator rob8xft mod sweeps us back to an old world of Germanic tribes, druidism, even way back to Minoan civilisations, and keeps us there with a bespoke tech tree that never goes beyond the classical era.
Anno Domini currently has 24 unique civilisations (though you can use some from the main game and JFD’s collection), as well as its own roster of policies and eras that zoom in on the ancient-classical period. It’s the most polished Civ 6 conversion mod to date.
R8XFT himself plays Anno Domini with Religion Expanded, which you’ll find further down this list.
Civ 6 map modsYet (not) Another Maps Pack
Gedemon’s YnAMP is the most feature-rich map pack for Civ 6. It contains a couple of variations on maps of Europe and Earth, as well as a script that generates Terra, a map split up into the historical Old and New Worlds.
Like in Civs of yore, you can create a game on Terra where all civs start in the Old World, then race to colonise the New World once they can build ships. This setup provides a welcome shift of pace just as a game can start to lull towards the middle stages, and really thrives in multiplayer when you know that all your rivals have their avaricious eyes on the land and plunder of the New World.
This modpack adds a wealth of options for tweaking maps before a new game, as well as Giant, Enormous and Ludicrous map sizes (the latter of which doubles as a stern benchmark tool for your PC’s RAM and CPU).
YnAMP also allocates civs with starting positions based on the kind of environments they were associated with in real life (coastal areas for naval civs, more arid climes for middle-eastern civs, and so on). This feature not only adds a touch of realism, but means that each civ’s starting location is likely to be better suited to their unique traits and buildings.
Civ 6 Religion modsReligion Expanded
There have been quite a few attempts to improve upon the flawed religion system in Civ 6, not least of all when Firaxis figured that adding Warrior Monks into the game would spice things up a bit – which it didn’t. Instead, the best changes to religion in Civ 6 come from the community.
A good place to start is pokiehl’s Religion Expanded, which adds 43 new religious beliefs, seven new fully-modelled religious buildings, and raises the cap for number of religions in a game from 7 to 16 (on a Huge map). The increased cap means that there will not just be a few faiths battling it out for supremacy, but also smaller ones doing their own thing in far corners of the world.
Tomatekh’s Historical Religions
You can combine Religion Expanded with Tomatekh’s Historical Religions, which adds tens of new religions and icons to the game – from strange sub-sects of Protestantism to Aboriginal Dreamtime beliefs. Every Civ in the game now has their preferred religions too, so AI will be drawn to the religions their civs are historically associated with.
Rule with Faith
Rule with Faith (RwF) is the work of JFD, who sees it as a continuation of his Rise to Power mod for Civ 5. That mod aimed to bring greater political and religious depth to the game, and RwF does the same, adding a new religious policy slot, 16 new policies and three new governments. It’s compatible with both Religion Expanded and Tomatekh’s Historical Religions.
Civ 6 tweaksSmoother Difficulty
Making a challenging AI is tricky in strategy games, perhaps more so than in any other genre. Designers usually have to resort to giving the AI artificial bumps to resource production, and even free units, to give a savvy player a run for their money. Unfortunately, the way Civ 6 does this can mean certain death for the player before there’s anything they can physically do to stop it, as the AI swamps you with its five free Warriors (we’re not kidding – to see how much cheese drips from the AI on Deity difficulty, see our article on Civ 6 difficulties).
Windows xp sp3 2019. Fortunately, here’s RushSecond smoother difficulty with a solution. This mod removes most of the AI’s extra starting units, and instead dials up its resource generation bonuses. The result should be a smoother challenge on higher difficulties, with the AI keeping pace with you throughout the game despite its technical ineptitude, yet unable to stuff you in the first two dozen turns through an unfair unit advantage.
Civilization V ModsAI+
The biggest criticism players have of Civilization 6 is the AI, which has unfortunately taken a few steps back towards the stone age since Civ V (which wasn’t exactly space-age itself).
With Firaxis doing little to fix things on this front, modders have taken the AI burden on themselves. AI+ is the best of the lot, making the AI better at balancing their empire’s development with military size, as well as an improving their ability in wartime, as they’ll now send troops to the front lines more aggressively and be bolder in invading your cities in the late game.
Along with the more sweeping changes, there are small bits of fine-tuning like improved settler behaviour, increased reluctance to agree unfavourable peace terms, and tougher city-states that won’t so readily fall into the hands of expansionist civs.
PhotoKinetik Westeros
For those of you who didn’t take to Civ 6’s vibrant aesthetic, here’s [email protected]!n with a reshade mod. Inspired by the Game of Thrones opening sequence, it mutes Civ 6’s colours to give a cooler, more mature washed-out look, as you see above.
You can download PhotoKinetik Westeros here. Note that it has some more complicated installation instructions than most other mods on this list as it relies on ReShade, a separate post-processing application, to achieve its effects.
Quick Start
And so, like intrepid explorers circumnavigating the globe, we’re going to end our journey at the start. The start of the game, that is. If you’re tired of Civ 6’s multiple boot screens perennially reminding you who made the game and which GPU manufacturer it’s in bed with, you can skip it all with Quick Start. How to access documents and settings. Now, if we could just find a way replicate this mod for every game in existence…
These are just a few of the thousands of Civ 6 mods available, which you can peruse yourself at Civ Fanatics, Steam Workshop and Nexus Mods. There are more outlandish ones out there – Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings spring to mind – but they missed the cut because they felt feature-thin and unfinished at the time of writing. The fact is that for now, the modding community is limited by not having access to the DLL source code. When that came out for Civ 4 and 5 (some two years after each game’s launch), the modding scenes really took off, as did big overhaul projects like A New Dawn and Vox Populi.
If that’s anything to go by, we should expect to see the DLL code for Civ 6 released soon-ish, and only then will we see the game’s modding potential unleashed. The best, we hope, is yet to come.
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Sometimes the work that goes into a mod is breathtaking. Civilisation V NiGHTS is such a thing, born perhaps equally out of admiration and frustration. The team, led by Markus Beutel, have looked at Civilisation V, stripped it down and rebuilt it from the ground up. They describe the mod as a total conversion but that doesn’t mean it gives you fantasy units, adds magic or allows the use of Achron-style time travel (which I now want, mod community). Instead, this is a remake of the game Firaxis released. A game that is conveniently 75% on Steam this very weekend. The mod has been available and actively updating for almost a year now by my reckoning and it is currently the only way I play Civ V. And I play Civ V a lot.
A brief and personal history of Civilisation. I’ve been a fan of the series since I first saw a screenshot of a newspaper saying “The Zulus have invented gunpowder.” It feels like that was around 1842 (the screenshot, not the invention) but careful research tells me it was 1991. I’m not sure if I remember the details of that screenshot exactly but I do know it was the first time I became aware of the game and all the mad possibilities locked inside it. Rather than being a simple strategy game, it seemed to be an alternate history creating device. I’ve since discovered better ways to indulge those particular urges but I’ve never stopped playing Civ.
I still remember my first game. I played on the Earth map, because I wanted to warp our reality not a random one, and I was the Romans. I tried to be just like the real Romans but with a twist. In my world, we were pacifists. More than that. We were cowards. It’s a template that I took with me through the series. I build a few glorious cities and I watch those lovely beakers full of science stretch across bars until I discover yet more glorious things to put in my glorious cities. When culture came along in Civ III, it was one more bar I was happy to fill up. It soon became my favourite. Even better than science.
Civilisation V was the first game in the series to really make the military appealing to me. I’d always thought I was just a benign ruler who didn’t want to be responsible for bloodshed. I imagined my citizens were paragons of virtue, living in a utopia built upon respect for all nations and people. They were artists, not warriors. Judging by how fast my cities were growing, they were lovers as well. They built cathedrals but they were not dedicated to a vengeful God but to beauty and the power of the human spirit. I had raised my people to be the benevolent and meek inheritors of the Earth. Then Civ V happened and I realised none of that was true. I just didn’t like unit stacking very much.
That’s not to say I’m always the leader of a bloodthirsty gang of militant murderers in Civ V, but I do enjoy building and deploying armies now. If that leads to the occasional destruction of an entire way of life, so be it. For a game in such a long-running series to alter my playstyle so dramatically is quite impressive and I do love Civ V but I also accept its faults. It giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other. And then there’s another hand stuffed full of DLC. I’ve mostly ignored that one because of its uncanny nature.
Here’s three of the things I loved: hexes, the removal of unit stacking and policies. Hexes because they feel more natural and contribute to the beauty of the maps, the unit stacking for the reasons mentioned above, and policies because they lent an RPG-like personality to my civ. Yes, they may just be toggles to adjust numbers but, stripped down, everything is.
Here’s three things I didn’t like. The AI, the computer opponents and the AI. The perceptive among you will notice what I’ve done there. I’ve effectively repeated the same thing three times. It’s very clever. Twice I actually used the exact same term. Read it again if you don’t believe me.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say, as many have, that the AI is broken. I’ve played many games to completion and even though dominance is often far easier than I’d like my main problem is that games tend to play out the same way over and over again. There’s not enough unpredictability and sometimes the AI doesn’t seem to understand all the rules it’s playing with. Other times there’s a distinct impression that it doesn’t actually want to win, or perhaps no one told it how.
Thankfully, the modding scene for Civ V has become something rather special. It’s at the point where I can keep all the things I love and see massive improvements in the things I didn’t like. That doesn’t just mean turning Civ V into Civ IV. It was already possible to do that by uninstalling Civ V and reinstalling Civ IV. I’d even argue that the games played so differently, it was worth having them both installed. My favourite Civ V mods are the ones that expand on what was unique and worthwhile in the game. The things that make it different to its predecessors.
It would be bold and incorrect to say that Civilisation NiGHTS eliminates all the problems with the AI but it does a damn good job. While there are still issues, over an entire game I find opponents to be more unpredictable, more difficult to box in and more believable. That’s a very good thing and tackles my three major complaints but it’s the parts that I didn’t want to change that impress me the most.
I said earlier that I loved policies. Now I adore them. There are seven branches now and over a 100 policies to choose from. Although you have to start from the bottom of each branch, they’re all open and picking one will never lock off another. This means a civilisation can change more dramatically over time, adapting to its new place as the political situation evolves. Crucially, players don’t need to decide which victory type they’re aiming for quite so early on in proceedings. There’s more.
“Each tree unlocks 2-3 Governments at various points, and as you get further down each tree, they unlock special synergy abilities that boost a variety of buildings from the Renaissance Era onwards. This is to ensure that as you progress through the game, buildings in later eras feel powerful compared to their early era counterparts. These bonuses are also listed in the tool-tips for the buildings themselves.”
Not only is that a lot of new stuff but it’s been added with a high degree of polish. The tool-tips are accurate, and the policy screen looks professional while fitting the graphical style of the game. What’s more, whenever DLC or patches are added to the game, Civilisation NiGHTS is made to fit them, not just so that it doesn’t crash but so that anything new that requires tuning is integrated.
I haven’t even touched on the biggest difference, which overhauls the way that Civ V plays completely. That’s the way the mod deals with happiness. In Civ V, citizens generate unhappiness. It’s a view I find myself in agreement with. The more of us there are, the more miserable we become. It’s why I escape the concrete confines of the city whenever the chance presents itself. NiGHTS doesn’t agree with me though. In the mod, citizens actually generate happiness. Expansion and militarisation take it away again. It changes the balance of the game to the extent that you’ll have to relearn a lot of things but it’s all implemented so well, with much much more than I’ve described going on both above and beneath the hood, that the learning process feels natural. At first it’s not quite clear how much has changed but almost everything has.
You can read all the details over at Civ Fanatics, including the installation instructions. If you’ve been frustrated by Civ V, this may be your way back in. And if you’re enjoying the base game already, give this a try and you may well find you never want to go back to vanilla.
It’s not the only big mod for Civ V out there but it’s the one that I’ve stuck with. There was another update a short while ago and, alongside the constant balancing and responses to feedback, there are plans for the implementation of more detail in areas such as the handling of religion.
I shall take this opportunity to remind you once last time that Civ V is 75% off on Steam this weekend.
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