War Is Hell: attempting a Conquest victory, while the specifics vary between games, can be very difficult and frustrating. You'll have to pool your civilization's production resources into an army, you'll suffer civil unrest from loyal citizens that disapprove of the war, enemy cities you conquer are going to resist you and may rebel and overthrow you, and you'll have your work cut out for you rebuilding them since the terrain around them is probably damaged and the city itself has lost its infrastructure. It's liable to become a Pendulum War as dozens of units for either side take turns lasting several minutes of real time fighting and killing each other, and with an enemy of strength comparable to yours this will almost certainly happen. Additionally, you can expect other civilizations to look upon you with suspicion, especially if you were the aggressor, and if you manage to negotiate peace with your enemy they'll still never trust you again, regardless of who the aggressor was. Plus, all of your production spent attacking another civilization is production not spent on infrastructure, Wonders, etc., so even if you successfully conquer your enemy, you may be left at a disadvantage against everyone else. Ultimately, unless you specifically play as a fascist Evil Overlord dedicated to world conquest who ignores all these problems in the name of trying to Take Over the World, long-term warfare is fairly unsustainable, counter-productive, and even self-destructive if you manage it badly.
In Civ 5, UN Resolutions can be passed banning any luxury resource for any reason if it gets enough votes. This can lead to strange alternate universes like one where whaling and ivory hunting are still legal, but chocolate is banned because of a measure spearheaded by Montezuma (the fiend!) The potential Aesop? Resource bans and regulations may have more to do with punishing the producers or users of that resource by proxy than any real ethical concerns with the resource itself, which is an argument that can be applied to the War on Drugs and elsewhere.
The other civilizations love to butt in while you're deep in thought, planning, or an all-out war. There is no isolationist option for the game to play uninterrupted. In IV you could set up a game with no AI to play against, but this was again dropped in V.
If you accept an offer of friendship from Civilization A just to make them go away, you often find yourself immediately contacted by civs B, C, and D one after the other, each saying "I see you've become friends with A, I have done the same. Perhaps great things can come from this alliance in the future!", or conversely "I hate A, don't get too friendly with them or we'll have problems getting along" (not helped by the fact that you can't check diplomatic status when asked to declare friendship, and rejecting prevents you from proposing friendship with them for quite a few turns).
The logic routines used by UI in V to decide which units you should give orders to first is... Well, suffice it to say that you should get used to giving the wrong orders to wrong units, and to watching your screen go whizzing halfway around the globe. Sometimes twice, if you managed to give a command to the unit you actually care about while the game tries to foist some Worker Unit on you instead. It's actually very annoying how often the game will announce you have a new unit ready and then activate a different unit instead of the one it just told you about, making you send warriors to resources and workers into warzones. An option to disable this has since been added.
The advisers in Civilization I come with a bug wherein if they can't come up with a suggestion on what you should build, the game freezes. Hope you saved recently. Fortunately however they can be turned off.
Both V and VI want to draw your attention to everything. While fine in theory, what this means in practice is that a busy turn can see a special full-screen event appear followed by a short video or two followed by 4-5 consecutive pop-ups as the camera gets yanked halfway around the world to highlight a unit then selects a different one than the one it just zoomed to while the event panel displays a third thing altogether all while an advisor is talking. This leads to a lot of confusion about what is actually going on. Only some of these can be turned off in the options.
Base-Breaking Character: Gandhi's become this to a degree; he's one of the most famous characters in the series and one of the most memetic, to the point that many players say it's not a Civ game without Nuclear Gandhi. At the same time, though, veterans of the series dislike him for his relatively passive strategies of peacemaking and religion focus without much variance between games, and ask for a different leader from India's very long history (especially since Gandhi, though important, technically never ruled India). IV and VI alleviated this a bit by including the concept of alternate leaders, with Ashoka in IV and Chandragupta in VI available as alternatives to Gandhi for India.
The Civilopedia entry on slavery in IV describes all its woes and moral repurgence... while the game makes the Slavery civic almost a Game-Breaker, and most definitely a very useful and lucrative option that completely outweighs any of the alternatives.
The Gathering Storm expansion aims for a Green Aesop by reintroducing climate change and focusing the expansion around its importance but the moral gets undermined by the game mechanics. First, consequences for climate change are mild and abstract compared to the real world and can be easily mitigated by the point in the game they begin to appear in earnest. Second, only Diplomatic victory (itself a Scrappy Mechanic) is advanced by being green while all others, especially Science and Domination, are hindered by it. Third, climate change is a global Prisoner's Dilemma and the AI will always choose to ignore it, rendering the player's own choice almost meaningless. When all taken together, the intended Green Aesop comes off as a Self-Imposed Challenge by way of Honor Before Reason.
In II, each and every game will be about bee-lining towards Trade, spamming Caravans and using the massive wealth they will generate to advance a handful of other important technologies or wonders. On top of that, Currency tech that precedes it works as a multiplier for both tax and luxury ratings, allowing to rake even more money and spend less on luxury for the same results.
Good luck not using Slavery in IV. Whipping is the basis of pretty much any more advanced strategy and the basis of survival in higher difficulties. Not helping matters is that it arrives earlier than any of the alternatives and never really loses its potency, while said alternatives are situational at best, useless on average.
In V, the Rationalism Social Policy track, since it improves Science output that is so vital, is taken by almost everyone regardless of intended victory type.
V: In the early game, almost every single player, even those who played Wide picks Tradition over Liberty. This is due to the fact that they provide substantial boosts to their starting Capital and in BNW, Wide play overall has been severely nerfed due to the increase in Science threshold with each city. Even after it was nerfed by making Oligarchy (The policy that gives their City a defensive boost and it's placed in a separate tree where it's almost always picked as the last) required before the rest of the policies, it still didn't sway their preference one bit.
In VI, 'rerolling' the map in to get an ideal starting location was so common a strategy that an option to do so with one click was eventually added to the single-player game menu.
The Religious Settlements pantheon in VI will always be chosen first as it gives you 15% faster border growth and a free Settler. The benefits of getting a free settler long before you could ever hope to build one are hard to understate and whoever winds up with this pantheon is well-situated for a strong early snowball. The only thing that stops it from being a Game-Breaker is that it's also the top priority for every single AI player, which makes it so hard to get that many players report playing the game for months without realizing it's even an option.
A rare case where this happened to the developers is with the Zombies game mode in VI. Zombie strength scales infinitely based on the number of zombies killed, but the scalar is only balanced around the default game settings. Increasing the map size, player count, or era length can cause zombies to become unstoppable as more of them spawn faster and die quicker relative to the scaling of combat units.
In VI Magnus and Pingala are almost always going to be the first two governors picked, Magnus for boosting the efficiency of chops, allowing stronger growth from internal trade, and letting a city crank out settlers without losing population, and Pingala for generating more Science and Culture and Great Person Points. Which one is taken first or second is somewhat situational, but these two provide such large and consistent early-game bonuses that it's always going to be one of them barring highly unusual circumstances.
Every game in the series has its fans and detractors, but by far the most controversial is V. So many staple mechanics of the series as a whole were either significantly retooled or dropped entirely that some fans of the older games refuse to buy it on principle, and an extremely bug-ridden first release didn't help matters for the rest.
Within V, the second expansion, Brave New World, made the game feel a little more like its predecessors by offering trade routes, a UN-style World Congress, a culture victory based on influencing other civs instead of merely building up your own (the latter now a means of preventing other civs from influencing you), and trade caravans that enable trade between cities, even ones outside of your civ. While celebrated by much of the fanbase, all of these features add a great deal of micromanagement and, depending on who you ask, don't do enough to make the game more interesting, and may even water it down. Certain elements that were slowly balanced in patches over the vanilla game and the first expansion were thrown out of balance (e.g. the Tradition policy is indirectly much more powerful than before because of trade routes and AI behaviour), and patching activity was minor after the release of BNW, presumably because the dev team was busy with Civilization: Beyond Earth.
Civilization II was so beloved that it became a Tough Act to Follow for III. While III was rarely considered to be bad, it wasn't until IV that enough time since II had passed for the fandom to unite on a game again and the franchise to start picking back up (and a memorable menu theme and narrator certainly helped).
Critical Dissonance: V has been and still is lauded by the vast majority of critics, while fan opinion is much more mixed, at least with fans that played IV extensively, as V plays differently and generally has less features than IV with expansion packs and mods does. The dissonance was especially obvious when V had just launched; before patches, it had far more bugs and weird mechanics which have since been removed and changed, but most critics loved the game right out of the box.
Demonic Spiders: Barbarian tribes can get this way pretty easily, especially in V and VI. Because they come from all directions, you need a competent garrison around... and because unit-stacking was discontinued starting with V, having one becomes that more complicated. You have to keep an eye out at all times for incoming barbs who have designs on your settlers and workers. And finally, because units of similar strength are weighted to typically not lose more than half their health in any given battle, it requires two units to take out a single encampment quickly—during the early-game phase, where sparing even one unit for scouting is an imposition. Taking the Honor social policy track in V gradually leans barbarians to the Piñata Enemy side of things, as it gives you 33% more strength against them and gives a culture bonus for defeating them.
In VI, though, they Took a Level in Badass and became even nastier. They send a scout first, and if it finds your city and gets back to an encampment, they will spawn a war party of multiple units. The Discipline civic, VI's rough analogue to the Honor policy tree's combat bonus against barbarians, provides a fixed bonus of 5 combat strength, but this bonus is basicaly irrelevant when it's your one starting warrior against 4 or 5 barbs. America and Japan's combat bonuses (an additional 5 strength for fighting on the home continent and on shorelines, respectively) become lifesavers when paired with Discipline. Finally, your cities can't attack on their own until you research masonry and build walls, meaning that, for much of the ancient era (i.e. the time when the barbarian threat is greatest), your cities are at their most defenseless. In short, keeping barbarians from pillaging your improvements and carrying away your builders now requires a near-constant garrison.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Even though Xerxes and Darius have taken turns as Persia's leader throughout the series, Cyrus the Great's appearance in IV has left quite the impression, to the point where Persia's intro in V talks mostly about Cyrus' accomplishments, even though Darius is Persia's leader in that game. Cyrus being brought back in VI was thus very well-received.
Philip II of Spain has proven to be the by-far best received Civ VI leader announced so far, with many players anticipating playing him or playing against him. Unlike the more divisive leaders, he's clearly had a large impact on Spain and is viewed as a very good representation of a leader for the country (having ruled the Spanish Empire at its absolute peak). While he's replacing Civ long-time-returnee Isabella, rumors that she will return in DLC have limited backlash to that. His leader ability and civ bonuses are geared towards the new religious victory and appear exceptionally powerfully. Finally, Philip's character design has proven to be among the best received of the game.
If the comments on his theme are anything to go by, Genghis Khan seems to be one of the most well-liked leaders in V, for his charming personality, straightforward dealings, and being surprisingly easy to befriend (even, hell, especially if he's already fought you) and rare to turn his back. The fact that it doesn't take much effort at all to convince him to declare war on your rivals just makes him even more useful. The announcement he would be returning in the first expansion to VI, after being absent from both the base game and its first round of DLC for the first time in the series (and now with abilities that make him a historically-accurate Genius Bruiser instead of merely a warmonger) was greeted with delight.
Despite being just one of many leaders in the original, Gandhi's memetically quirky AI has made him by far the most recognized leader in the series. The majority of jokes about the series involve him in some way, and as a result, he's appeared in every game since.
Gilgamesh in VI is well-loved among the playerbase because he's always willing to be your friend. He will always accept a Declaration of Friendship the first turn you meet him, the only leader this is true for. He might wind up disliking you later, but he's one of the few leaders you have nothing to fear from when you run into him early.
Epileptic Trees: In V, from the starting narration it seems all of history's great leaders were put on an Earth-like planet to be given a second chance to rule.
While most sequels in the series are contested, II is the true Trope Codifier for the 4X genre, taking everything that had been a hit in the original and refining it into a classic that's still widely-played today.
Broken Base of V aside, everyone seems to agree that the expansions massively improved the experience in general. The first one, Gods & Kings, made naval combat not suck, added a much-needed layer of complexity with the religion system, tightened up city-states, and just made the whole thing better overall. The second one, Brave New World, added plenty of new features to increase players' enjoyment of the game, most notably overhauling the culture system to make a cultural victory into an actual competition.
As might be expected, fans like to shorten the names of the world's legendary leaders when typing them out, so Alexander the Great becomes "Alex", Catherine the Great becomes "Cathy", Montezuma becomes "Monty", etc.
Gilgamesh from VI in particular gets called "Gilgabro", given his Boisterous Bruiser personality and the fact that it's really easy to get on his good side.
Pacifist games where the focus is on building up cities over building a military is often called 'playing SimCity.'
May the LORD bless you and keep you May He make His face shed light upon you and be gracious unto you May He lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.
As it turns out, this blessing is delivered while making the sign of the letter Shin in a specific way... a way upon which the devoutly Jewish Leonard Nimoy (who did the voice work for the tech quotes in IV) based the Vulcan salute and Catchphrase ("Live long and prosper!").
The leader defeat screens? Some of them, like William of Orange's and Pedro II of Brazil's, were actual last words!
In Civ II to Civ IV The Pyramids are the only ancient-era wonder that never becomes obsolete, reflecting the fact that the Pyramids are, in the real world, the only canonical wonder of the ancient world to survive into the present day.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Poles Love Civilization, to the point that Word of God says that they were the chief reason why Poland was added to V with the Brave New World expansion. When the game was in development, there was a fan petition to add Poland as one of the Civs. While it only reached 7351 signatures of the targeted ten thousand, the developers took notice.
Barbarians are usually this if they're not Demonic Spiders, forcing you to always send garrison with settlers and having to construct and send out military units to destroy their camps if they get too close to your borders and start killing your workers and destroying your terrain improvements. Even on the first rounds of the game, they are never going to be able to fight their way past any city defender unless they outnumber you some 10-to-1 (and even then depending on levels), but again, killing workers and destroying terrain improvements, they're still going to annoy you. Barbarians are kicked up a level in the Brave New World expansion for V. There are more of them, and if they are anywhere in the path of a trade route and no civilized unit is watching them, they will plunder the trade route, take the unit that took ~8 turns to build, and convert it into another barbarian!
If there's ever a square of terrain in your general territory that is not technically in your civ's borders, every AI opponent will attempt to send a Settler and garrison to it through your borders. They will do this even if the area isn't worth building a city on, and if you tell them to get out of your territory they'll comply only to try again next turn. This can go on for turns on end.
In VI, Apostles under CPU control. They waltz in, convert your cities, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it, because the AI will promise to stop converting your cities — then keep doing it anyway. Casus Belli doesn't help because you still get hit with the Warmonger penalty even though you've done nothing wrong. Downplayed in Gathering Storm with the new Grievances system — if you ask a civ to stop converting your cities, and they keep doing it, they'll rack up Grievances regardless of whether they actually agreed to stop, allowing you to declare a Holy War on them without being seen as the bad guy.
There have been reports of Achivements in V unlocking when other players trigger the needed conditions.
In VI, you could set the turn limit to 1, play as Russia (who gets more land, and therefore more points, when they settle a city), and win a victory on points after completing the first turn, even on the highest difficulty.
Actually not the case with "Nuclear Gandhi", where said leader became very aggressive and threatening with nukes in the late game. This was widely believed to be a result of an underflow error bug for many years but was refuted by Sid Meier himself many times, who pointed out that this specific error was not possible in the game's coding, and that this "bug" was a normal, albeit unintentionally humorous, part of the gameplay.
Due to a peculiar interaction with the civilization's abilities, the best Giant Death Robots in Civilization VI belong to the Zulus. A GDR cannot normally be made into a Corps or Army, limiting their ability to grow more powerful, but the Zulu's ability automatically promotes any unit that conquers a city into a Corps (or an Army if already a Corps), letting his GDRs become even more devastating. (Sadly, this has since been patched out.)
In the original game, it's possible to build roads and railways on ocean squares - just load a settler into a sea transport and set them to work. You can't use the result for transport, but you get the associated bonuses from those squares.
Growing the Beard: While the franchise itself has always been well-received, opinions about the individual titles themselves generally improve with each expansion pack. II in particular managed to be this and also Even Better Sequel, setting the bar for future installments.
Hammurabi is nearly always banned in multiplayer VI due to how quickly a player can blast through the tech tree and outpace everyone else then turn around and win a Domination victory by attacking with units multiple eras ahead of their opponents. While they won't have many units due to how expensive they are, there's not much stopping line infantry, cavalry, and cannons with swordsmen, horsemen, and archers.
Shortly behind Hammurabi is Basil II of Byzantium. Basil has a laser-focused toolkit that pushes him into a religious domination game and lets him do it with extreme speed and efficiency if he gets the few things he needs. If he gets a quick religion and a good first holy site all the tools in his kit combine to let him run around the map with a flood of unique heavy cavalry he neither built nor pays for while converting cities to his faith then conquering them without any need for siege equipment or artillery all while getting massive combat bonuses from his religion and abilities that only increase the more holy cities he conquers.
Giant Death Robots. While their inclusion in V was widely seen as hilarious, in VI they’re generally seen as a boring, overpowered "do everything" unit that invalidates every other military unit in the late game, causing most late-game wars to consist of little more than throwing Giant Death Robots and nothing else at cities unless you don’t have any Uranium to build/maintain them, in which case you’re basically screwed late-game.
In an eerily literal example, one of the expansion packs to III includes a fascist government type; immediately after a civilization adopts fascism, it suffers a slight population loss for a few turns, presumably as 'undesirables' are, ahem, dealt with by the Secret Police.
Forced labor (present in several forms of government in the same game, and under the Slavery civic in IV) has pretty much the same connotation. More liberal forms of government replace this method with the standard option to rush-build things by throwing enough money at it.
Razing towns kills its entire population. Although capitals can never be razed, so it's not possible to kill off entire races... in V. Before that, the games allowed, even encouraged genocide. Of course, you could always just assume that the displaced citizens are merely cast out into the countryside as their homes are burnt to the ground, which is still not all that great either.
It's Easy, So It Sucks!: V got some of this attitude because it streamlined a fair amount of gameplay nuances. A big part of why the expansion packs were well-received was the re-insertion of many mechanics.
The Iroquois is often regarded as the worst civilization in all versions of V. Their unique building, the Longhouse, loses the 10% production bonus of the Workshop in exchange for a highly situational production bonus for each forest tile. Its unique ability, the Great Warpath (units move through forest and jungle in friendly territory as if it were road), is also very situational (and buggy on top of it), as is their unique unit, the Mohawk Warrior, a replacement for the Swordsman that gets a combat bonus when fighting in the forest and doesn't require iron (but upgrades to the Longswordman, which does need iron). About the only time people will play the Iroquois is if they're playing an Arboreal map, which is a map covered in trees. Ironically, Iroquois were in the top 3, if not the best possible pick in III, where their combination of traits and special units, along with decent default terrain attached to them allowed them to easily dominate the whole game.
Plantation-based resources in V are consistently rated as the worst starting luxuries to have in the game. Much of this is due to the fact that the gold they give from working them is completely inferior compared to the production and gold that mining-based luxuries give in the early game and not to mention that in contrast to the latter requiring only 1-2 technologies to improve them, plantation requires at least 2 or even 3-4 in covered tiles, which wastes away science points compared to more valuable technologies such as Writing or Archery. A player that starts with plantation-based tiles will almost always fall behind to ones with mining, or even camp-based ones.
Even among the plantation luxury resources, Sugar is notable for being one of the absolute worst luxury in the whole game, due to the fact that most of the time, they're covered in marshes which meant that they only provide 1 food in contrast to the 2 food that a grassland gives unless one research 4 techs before being finally improve them for a tile that isn't any better than any other plantations in the game and by that time, the opponent would likely already outpaced the player just before the latter finally began to rise from the mud.
The Hermetic Order from Civilization VI's Secret Societies game mode is widely considered the weakest of the bunch, to the point that picking it has become something of a Memetic Mutation. The Ley Lines they unlock spawn at random locations and there is no way of telling beforehand where they will be, making it difficult to plan your empire around them—if any are present at all! They also can't be improved and they block districts from being built on them much like Strategic Resources. Eventually Ley Lines are given bonus yields depending on how many Great People you've recruited, but at that point in the game these bonuses are too little, too late to make a difference. A later patch buffed Ley Lines to increase their adjacency bonus to a hefty +2, but all the other problems remained. Meanwhile the three other secret societies all offer substantial, fully controllable bonuses right of the bat, only get better as you unlock new tiers and fit a variety of play styles.
Gilgamesh in single-player VI is popular because of how friendly he is as an AI player, but he's usually near the bottom of most tier lists. It's generally agreed that Gilgamesh's problem is that he peaks too early - Most of his leader and civilization abilities are designed to make sure he doesn't get too far behind while going for an Ancient Era War Cart rush, but the Ancient Era ends quickly and if he's not successful enough those bonuses fall off hard in the Classical Era and are almost meaningless by the Medieval Era, making him play like a Civ with no bonuses at all. This is compounded at higher difficulties by the jumpstart the AI get, where they might have Spearmen, Archers, or even Horsemen by the time a player Gilgamesh can get an army together.
The post-Rise and Fall version of Mimar Sinan is generally regarded as the worst Great Person in VI by a wide margin. His special ability is to allow Industrial Zones to culture-bomb nearby tiles when constructed, which is so situational as to be nearly useless; it's also the only Great Engineer ability that doesn't scale with Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Worse, he comes early enough that you either have to pass on him and wait for someone else to claim him or deal with him resetting your Great Engineer points. It doesn't even work for unique industrial zone replacements, making him completely useless to Germany and Gaul.
The Highlander is widely regarded as the worst unique unit in VI, replacing an already seldom-used unit (the Ranger, an expensive recon unit that comes online at a time where you'll rarely have to do any recon) in exchange for being slightly stronger and gaining a bonus in Hills. Needless to say, you really shouldn't be trying to actually invade with these even with the bonus, making Highlanders nigh useless except for the 4 era score.
Memetic Badass: Real Life Gandhi is the defining image of a pacifistic leader. Civilization Gandhi is a bloodthirsty warlord who will churn out nukes like no tomorrow and will not hesitate to nuke your civilization into the stone age if you ever so slightly covet his lands.
"Spearman beats Tank."Explanation A very annoying phenomenon in all the games, but most noticed in III, is for supposedly obsolete units to get very lucky with the Random Number Generator and survive wave after wave of technologically superior units. Even the website lampshades this: "A common way of resolving this phenomenon is to consider the global nature of the Real World. In a world of advanced warfare technology a unit like the "spearmen" represents a poorly organized garrison armed with non-natively produced assault rifles and anti-tank grenade launchers. Likewise, a battleship attacking an ancient tribe could run aground during the manoeuvre, or an artillery unit could misfire, or be subject to a surprise counterattack within the encounter."
Nuclear Gandhi.Explanation An Urban Legend of Zelda claimed that, due to an integer overflow glitch, Gandhi would accidentally become a nuke-happy warmonger once the player progresses far enough into the game. While false, the rumor quickly gained popularity due to the dissonance of famed pacifist Mahatma Gandhi being a nuclear warlord, and Civilization fans started jokingly characterizing him as a Memetic Badass based around the fake glitch. The meme eventually became so popular that it got its own article on Wikipedia.
Even funnier (or scarier) when you realize that India is one of the few countries that have an active nuclear weapons program.
As of the Gods & Kings expansion for V, hostile leaders with nukes will occasionally exclaim this in diplomacy.
"BUILD CITY WALLS!"Explanation The Military Advisor in II was very passionate about this.
"Never trust an Aztec with nukes!" As discussed here, this one probably dates back all the way to the BBS days. Explanation The Aztecs have, in every game, been a very aggressive civilization who will seemingly use nuclear weapons at the first provocation, or even without any warning whatsoever.
V: "Montezuma's peace theme doesn't actually play in-game."Explanation A tongue-in-cheek "bug report" based on the same phenomenon as the above. This tends to also be applied to any infamously warmonger-focused civs, such as the Zulu, Huns, or Mongols.
TV Tropes is a hypercube wiki. Explanation Venice in the Brave New World expansion was first hinted at as a civ that was not just "outside the box" but outside the entire hypercube. It turned out to be fairly unique but still subject to pretty much all of the rules. Now any civilization/tactic/thing that's even remotely non-standard is given the hypercube label by fans.
"WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN A TRADE AGREEMENT WITH ENGLAND?" As trade quotes are often reused whenever a player asks what the AI is offering, Queen Elizabeth's quote has become one of the more recognizable and memetic quotes from Civ V. Doesn't help that she's (obviously) one of the few leaders to speak English.
Pledge to protect Explanation A screenshot of the city-state menu from Civilization V, with this option highlighted, and often with additional distortion effects, is used as a reaction image to seeing a cute, sympathetic character such as The Woobie.
Blue jeans and rock music.Explanation When you defeat another civ culturally in V, their leader contacts you with a message that starts, "Our people are now wearing your blue jeans and listening to your rock music". This is infamous enough that it became an Ascended Meme in VI when you trespass on another civ's Tourism secondary agenda.
I am fond of pigs.Explanation One of the first techs you could research in Civilization VI is Animal Husbandry, and one of the two quotes it uses is from the Churchill quote. Due to how frequent it is researched as first and how people often skip the text, as well as how Sean Bean reads it, people are indeed fond of this meme.
FUCKMOUNTAIN DEATHMONSTER. Explanation A Tumblr post regarding the change in mechanics to barbarians in VI decided to describe the new barbarians in remarkable Purple Prose mixed with profanity, something that took off.
Boat Mormons/Denouncing Venice/YOLOismExplanation These three religions appear to be the most popular religions in the world of their session
"Ban crabs!" "They are a menace!"Explanation Suleiman and the World Council vote to ban crabs for no discernable reason.
"We demand whales!"Explanation In the midst of "We love the King" Day, one citizen demands whales despite not knowing what they are.
CheeselandExplanation Sweden, renamed.
SeahengeExplanation A civilization constructed Stonehenge in the ocean, with one worker calling it "sea"-henge due to it being at sea.
"I'm just standing here."Explanation An enemy unit standing right at the edge of the Ottoman border justifies his behavior (despite him moving all around) by simply standing still
Cliffs of Dover is easily the worst Natural Wonder in VIExplanation It provides 3 Culture and 2 Gold, and 4 Appeal to adjacent tiles. The thing is that it occupies two spaces and those tiles cannot be improved. The bonuses are also measly compared to say, mountain Natural Wonders which tend to have bigger bonuses., that any Natural Wonder-related talk within the fandom will eventually bring that thing up for mockery.
Live Yongle Reaction Explanation The fact that Yongle is frequently mispronounced by English-speakers as rhyming with "dongle", combined with his extremely powerful abilities when first introduced in VI, has made Yongle an extremely popular and memetic leader. Expect this image to be spammed in the comments of any social media post about Yongle.
Memetic Psychopath: "Nuclear Gandhi". In particular, his threat that "Our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!" Aggressive civ leaders, especially Montezuma, Attila, and Shaka, get this treatment as well.
The technology quotes in VI have gotten flak for either lacking gravitas, being lame attempts at humor, or having bizarre sources (including Scott Adams and random bloggers), made even worse by Sean Bean's somewhat bored-sounding delivery.
In VI every time a leader denounces you, they throw a hissy fit at you, without any words to be spoken despite having subtitles for them. This end up making it awkward and loses much of the impact that you would have gotten from a leader that just denounce you as a warmonger.
Nightmare Fuel: IV had a mod for Beyond the Sword called Next War. It's pretty much Nineteen Eighty-Four in video game form, with superpowers at constant war with each other and mind control centers (Ministry of Love and Room 101, anyone?), for instance.
Obvious Beta: When V first came out, it had a lot of bugs and balance issues, routinely crashed to desktop for many machines, and had obtuse, sociopathic AIs in an over-reaching effort to make them more like human players. Patches fixed many of the crashes, fan-made mods such as VEM took care of the balance issues and bugs (and much of VEM was later implemented into official patches), and the AI has found a balance between the above and the manipulable point-based relations of IV.
The "controversy" of "cartoony" artstyle of VI wasn't the first time this accusation have been thrown around. IV was hit by it just as much, along with mockery of what was considered to be a sub-par 3D rendering, to the point the elaborate, well-animated and voiced in their native (or closest thing Firaxis was capable of getting) languages leaders in V are the direct result of the outcry toward "deformed" leaders from IV.
Some players were surprised to hear one of the game's more memorable background music themes in, say, a documentary film. That theme actually far predates the game: it's "Our Town" by Aaron Copland, composed for the 1940 movie of the same name.
Power Creep: A risk that every expansion runs. As new units and mechanics are added, older civilizations may find their abilities outclassed by these additions.
Possibly the most infamous example in the entire series was Medieval Infantry from III's expansion, Play the World. Every single Antique unit and lion share of Medieval ones instantly became obsolete at the face of cheap, disposable and still quite powerful Medieval Infantry. It required Iron and upgraded to Guerillas in Industial era (and TOW Infantry in Modern one). With stats of 4/2, Medieval Infantry could beat every single unit of its era short from final tech Cavalry, to the point it had higher attack rating than the defense unit of Pikemen introduced with the same tech as Med Infantry. The fact it could be upgraded to next era, while most other units couldn't only made it more powerful, since it was beneficial to crank out as many as possible of those cheap and then upgrade them further.
In the Conquests expansion of III the technology granting Medieval Infantry also provided new government, Feudalism, a variation of Monarchy, which was particularly beneficial for civilizations consisting of numerous low-population cities. It provides insane military support rating in such configuration, being the reverse of Monarchy, which struggles with small towns, but at this point of the game you are going to have nothing but small towns. Consider this: Monarchy is a non-mandatory tech to advance to Medieval but Feudalism is one of the opening technologies of Medieval era. If you are playing as Scientific civ, you might get this technology for free on era advancement. Monarchy suddenly got redundant.
From V, there's America's unique ability, "Manifest Destiny", which cuts the cost of buying tiles in half (and gives all land units +1 sight, a comparatively minor buff). Come the Brave New World expansion, you have the Shoshone's unique ability, "Great Expanse", which gives every newly-founded city eight free tiles and gives military units a combat bonus when fighting on friendly territory (i.e. on the home front). This thoroughly outclassed America's unique ability, which many fans felt should have been beefed up in Brave New World to make up for it. America's unique unit, the Minuteman, did get a minor buff (it now generates Golden Age points from victories), but not enough to compensate.
The way VI handled leaders and civilizations made the game especially vulnerable to leader power creep as a leader only brings one or two bonuses to the table; all a leader needed to be stronger than another is to have a bonus that was either less situational or more closely aligned with their civ's bonuses. This began to happen quite a bit towards the end of VI's content pipeline as more leaders got released for existing civs, most notably with Germany's Ludwig II, Egypt's Ptolemaic Cleopatra, and China's Yongle, all of whom are widely agreed to be superior to other leader(s) of their civ in nearly all circumstances.
The April 2021 update of VI added the Man-at-Arms unit as an intermediary between Swordsmen and Musketmen. This negated a large chunk of the strength of the many civilizations that had unique units replacing the Swordsman as their unique units could now be obsoleted surprisingly quickly by researching the same technology that unlocks Industrial Districts, which most civs want to beeline anyway.
The Scrappy: Queen Elizabeth of England is often regarded as a miserable enemy, just for her personality. Her Catchphrase, "Would you be interested in a trade agreement with England?", has become a Memetic Mutation for just how annoying it is (in addition to the fact that Elizabeth's AI is notorious for making exceptionally absurd trade agreements). She herself suffers from Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and is extremely hostile and difficult to befriend, and will often denounce the player for no discernible reason. And to top it all off, unlike other leaders of similar, aggressive, dominant personalities (such as Catherine the Great or Shaka), she is woefully incompetent and will almost always end up utterly decimated by the other AI in any game she's in despite her civ being exceptionally powerful in the hands of a competent player.
No matter how well you are doing in III, you can't research a technology in less than 4 turns. As irrevelant as it might sound, when this obstacle is modded over, your research level can simply explode by late Middle Ages.
The eras, also from III. In every other Civ game you can research whichever next tech is possible to unlock in the tree. In III, techs are further divided into eras. Unless you research all the obligatory techs from the current era, you can't advance to the next one. Add to that the fact research will always take 4 turns per tech and you might be researching utterly useless things just to meet the quota and move to the next era. What made era mechanics particularly annoying was the fact that the Hospital building, which allowed cities to grow beyond a population of 12, was unlocked early in the Industrial Era. In II, the similar Sewer System building wasn't locked away and could be potentially researched before Wheel, Iron Working, or even the prerequisite building of Aqueduct, while IV replaced hard-coded population limits with health mechanics. And while the eras stayed in the series, from IV onward they are purely cosmetic.
Yet another issue III had was with its resources. This was the game that introduced resources as part of the game, rather than just bonuses to tile productivity (like in II). Each resource is given in finite amounts on the map, depending on difficulty and map size. However, luxury resources were also scripted to occur in clusters on random maps. So if you found Wine, you had all of it. If someone else found Spice, they had all of it. And so on and forth. While ostensibly designed to enforce trading of resources between civs, this only worked when all of them were controlled by human players in multiplayer. In any other case, due to AI being AI, this meant you had to conquer land to gain access to new luxury resources.
The Statue of Zeus, which is considered a Game-Breaker by itself, has a very simple catch. You need Ivory to build it. Good luck if the Ivory cluster didn't spawn near your starting location.
Diplomacy in IV. Whereas in V you would mainly take reputation hits from actions (and breaking promises), IV loved to throw out reputation penalties from inactions, as in you not agreeing to do something another civ wanted. Expect to see a ton of demands for gold, technologies, to cancel trading agreements with other civs, or worst of all, to join in a war against another civ, despite you possibly being friends with that third civ. The equivalent would be like Iran getting upset with England for not joining a war against the USA. To add insult to injury, the diplomacy screen doesn't allow you to analyze any information before making a decision, such as the extent of the trading agreements that you have, where the enemy civilization is in relation to your own, and/or where everyone's units are located. Part of this is due to a coding error that prevented AI opponents from making unreasonable demands from each other to avoid unnecessary reputation loss, but didn't account for such demands with the player. V removed a lot of these "Give us X or we'll hate you" diplomacy options, but does have some oddities of its own. For example, civilizations can get upset that you voted against their proposal in the UN, despite the fact that the proposal was clearly targeting you, such as banning a resource that only you possess. And yes, they can get angry at you if you vote against being embargoed: How dare you be against having your own economy boycotted!
Related to the above is any menu where you're forced to make decisions on the spot without being able to view what would be relevant information. This is a problem in all of the games, sometimes for technical reasons, but the worst offender would probably be IV, where you receive constant demands from world leaders that require an answer right now without being able to review essential information (hope you have it all memorized!). You'll often receive demands to stop trading with a particular civilization or face a reputation hit, without being able to consult what items (if any) you're trading with said target civilization to begin with. Does that mean that a computer civilization can use these demands to really target you as opposed to the third civilization in question? Hope that the civilization is not providing you with critical strategic military resources in case the demanding civilization was thinking of invading...
The removal of unit stacking in V has had a... let's say 'mixed reception'. One resultant headache is that it kills unit pathfinding. If you tell Unit A and Unit B to both make for the same hex tile, and Unit A gets there first, Unit B will ask for new orders. Imagine if you did that to your entire 15-unit army. The micromanaging is a nightmare, especially when combined with an interface bug that makes Fortified units unselectable once auto-move orders have been executed.
Unit stacking is problematic for military units, but it completely kills management of your civilians, most importantly workers. From I to IV, it was possible to stack your workers so they could finish tile improvements faster, meaning that laying rails or expanding in later stages of game could be done very fast, if not instantly with sufficient numbers of workers. By V, you can only use one worker per tile, meaning that no matter how advanced you are and how big your empire is, tile improvements take (sometimes literally) ages. It's even more glaring when you consider that some backward Iron Age civ is building its improvements almost at the same rate as the Next Sunday A.D. empire spanning two continents. There are ways to alleviate this, such as building the Pyramids (Workers build improvements +25% faster, and spawns 2 new Workers for free) and unlocking the Citizenship policy in the Liberty tree (Also +25% faster improvement speed, and 1 free Worker at your capital), but still - it's fair to say one should not be forced to have to rush for the same thing every game.
This is especially aggravated when you want to purchase a unit instead of producing it. If you produce a unit in a city that already has one of the Civilian/Military types, you will simply get a "Stacked Unit, need to move" message. However, you are completely unable to purchase a unit in the same situation, which requires you to move the unit out (sometimes a great defender), purchase a unit, and then on the next turn move the new unit out and the old unit back in. This is presumably for game balance reasons so cities can't get two defending units, but it's still annoying as hell.
The rework around no-stacking rules and hex grid was done ostensibly to add the tactical depth of Panzer General, but this spread into every aspect in the game, without achieving its main goal due to the insufficient scale of the map. But since everything was geared around non-stackable units and their tactical combat, this in turn made units far more expensive to build and maintain, leading to the point where everything is scaled down and thus oversimplified, rather than gaining depth. Despite it being a well-known fact within the dev team since half-way through V, they still kept hex grid and no stacking in VI, further simplifying game mechanics to balance around size of invading force.
The warmongering penalty in V can be ridiculous. Even after hundreds of years of being a peaceful and generous nation, you can still be seen as a warmonger and treated poorly because of it, thus making it even harder to atone or play. Once you become a warmonger, you're pretty much forced to keep conquering if you want to go anywhere. Coupled with....
Is there anyone that really likes the Denouncement mechanic? If you ever get denounced for being a Warmonger by one civ, expect to be denounced by virtually ever other civ within a turn or two. Why are they denouncing you? Because other civs are denouncing you. You'll then receive a notification in a few dozen turns that the denouncement is no longer affecting anyone's opinions, followed by that original opponent denouncing you again, starting the chain all over again.
Trade routes being plundered in Brave New World. The unit for a trade route moves by itself. If a barbarian or enemy unit reaches the trade unit with any moves remaining, they can plunder it. If a trade unit runs into a barbarian or enemy unit, it can be plundered automatically. Upon being plundered, you lose the trade unit, which takes 10 turns or more to build in the early game. On paper, this makes sense; can't have a caravan or cargo ship moving around undefended. The scrappy part is that it's not enough to have a unit nearby that can see your trade unit; it must be right on the same space to keep it protected. Just escorting a normal civilian unit with a military unit is more work than it needs to be (both units have to be manually moved turn-by-turn to make sure they don't split up), but with an automated trade unit, the problem becomes worse. Oh, and if barbarians take your trade route, it turns into a barbarian military unit! Thankfully, VI finally fixes this (and as a bonus, the hassle of keeping your settlers and workers safe by the same merit) by allowing units to "escort" non-combatant units, which makes them move in a stack.
One issue with IV is that civilizations often asked for your help in starting a war, but you weren't necessarily ready for war immediately, even if you were interested in attacking the target civilization. Civ V introduced a much needed diplomatic option to say "Give me 10 turns to prepare", and the civilization will then ask you again in 10 turns if you're ready (you'll take a huge diplomatic hit if you back out). All good, except the declaration of war occurs on the requesting civilization's turn. If the target civilization's turn occurs between that one and yours, they effectively get to attack your units before you've advanced them into position, turning what should be a surprise strike on them into a surprise strike on you. It seems like a much better solution would be for you to automatically declare war at the start of your next turn.
In V, there is a mechanic that rival civilizations get irritated with you if you start settling cities near their borders (hemming them in and preventing them from their own expansions). On paper, this makes perfect sense, but there are a few bugs with the implementation. For one, settling too near to them gives you a choice of agreeing to not settle any further cities near to them, which allows an obvious exploit of forward settling a single city right next to them to prevent them from expanding and then just holding off on future expansions until the agreement is fulfilled. However, there are also some major problems with agreeing to not settle further cities nearby. Unlike most other mechanics in the game, the duration and distance for which you agree to avoid settling nearby them is kept vague. There are also a few bugs that can unfairly penalize the player for "breaking their promise not to settle nearby" due to how the computer calculates whether you transgressed: Rather than making a check on your turn when you settle a city to see if it was too close, the computer checks on the target civilization's turn to see whether you have any new cities close to their borders since you made the agreement. This can result in the promise being broken in a few unexpected ways. For example, if you end up going to war with that civilization and a peace agreement involves them giving you one of their cities, they will likely view the new city under your control as proof you violated your promise to not settle near them even if they were the ones to offer that city in the first place! Even more egregiously, if they had gone to war with some other civilization and lost their capital (which means one of their remaining cities becomes the new capital), they will recalculate what they perceive to be "close to their borders" and can get angry that one of your existing cities is now too close to their capital.
In V Great Engineers, Merchants, and Scientists all share the same threshold of Great Person points to acquire, which means getting any one of them makes all three of them more expensive. This causes Great Merchants to become a Scrappy since they have the weakest tile improvement of the three and their special ability to gain gold from and improve relations with a city-state is considered far less useful than an Engineer's ability to rush Wonder production or a Scientist's ability to instantly finish one or more technologies. Many serious players will try to avoid generating Great Merchant points as much as possible to maximize their gain of the other two.
The Agendas introduced in VI were meant to give each Civ their own personality and motivations. In practice, this usually ends with the AI being unhappy with the player most of the time, as failure to meet or adhere to their beliefs results in declining relations. Unless you want to risk being dragged into a war you've done nothing to actually warrant, you're forced to play in a way that satisfies your neighbours and potential allies, rather then how you actually want to play. In addition to their main agenda, every Civ also has at least one secondary secret agenda which cannot initially be seen, making it possible to anger someone and ruin your relations with them without even knowing what you've done to anger them.
Many players in VI dislike the World Congress added in Gathering Storm. Complaints about it vary widely, ranging from it starting too early in the Medieval Era to its generally inconsequential decisions and competitions to the fact leaders you haven't met yet aren't identified to wondering why their civilization is bound by something they never agreed to join. The most common criticism is how much of an interruption it is, pulling you out of the game every few turns to pop up in its own window that demands resolution before anything else. Further, you must vote on every issue with no choice to abstain, so there's no quick way to skip through it and get back to what you were doing.
Connected to the above, a lot of VI players also disable Diplomatic Victory, again from Gathering Storm, because it's considered far too easy to achieve due to its low requirements and lack of scaling for difficulty or map size. It's also seen as lazily-implemented or outright mislabeled since it doesn't require any actual diplomacy, instead requiring the player to reach 20 Diplomatic Victory points which can be gained by being in the majority in a World Congress vote, completing competitions at high tiers, or building certain things. This also means it's possible to achieve Diplomatic Victory by accident by voting with the crowd enough times then building the Statue of Liberty (which gives 20% of the points needed immediately) or, in defiance of all logic, while at war with everyone.
Catapults and Trebuchets in V can sometimes fall into this along with Too Awesome to Use due to their general inferiority to regular ranged units at the same point in the game. Their damage is similar to those ranged units, but require a point of movement to set up for fire. This means that, by definition, they cannot shoot at a city in the same round that they enter the city's defense radius, which makes them easy targets. After gaining a few levels, they do get sizeable damage bonuses to attacking cities, but getting there requires attacking enemy units (again, hard to do when they have to set up before firing) or successfully pulling off a few sieges without being destroyed first. It's usually preferable to just use regular ranged units instead, as they can move and shoot, making it easier to build up their levels and attack cities. This becomes averted later in the game, as Cannons start to do significantly more damage than the equivalent ranged unit of the same era (Crossbowmen), and Artillery really start ramping up in usefulness due to having range that exceeds that of the city defenses.
Anti-Cavalry units from VI are generally looked down upon. Their large bonus against cavalry units is partially offset by cavalry units having higher baseline strength, making it less impressive than it looks. It only takes one or two small bonuses to let heavy cavalry trade evenly with anti-cavalry and light cavalry can just about do the same with a single promotion. Both can then use their speed and ability to ignore zone of control to easily withdraw to heal while the anti-cavalry unit cannot. Their other match-ups aren't great either, as basic melee troops get an attack bonus against anti-cavalry and cost less to produce while ranged units can just shoot them. Their only real advantage is that they don't cost any strategic resources, which lets them serve as cannon fodder for resource-strapped militaries.
The menu theme for the BTS version of Rhye's and Fall of Civilization (which shipped with the vanilla game) was one to Pink Floyd's "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond", which was the menu theme for previous, non-commercial versions of the mod.
The Hoover Dam Wonder video in Civilization II has music eerily similar to Race Against Time/Arkham Bridge from MechWarrior 2.
The very first game's main theme borrows heavily from Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man."
"Conquest of the World" in V, which requires you to defeat everyone you know as Greece by 350 BC. Even if you play on a Duel size map (which is highly recommended for this achievement), there is still a lot of luck involved in what resources your city spawns near, what enemy you get and their playstyle, and how fast you can build up your military so you can both destroy your enemy and meet the deadline, all while ensuring your own civilization's economy doesn't collapse.
There are two caveats that bring the difficulty down to "really difficult" and not "you'd have an easier time trying to do this in Real Life", which is that while fairly luck-based, a Domination Victory is NOT actually required for the achievement: the criteria to complete it reads "As Alexander, defeat every known player by 350BC". 'Every known player' refers only to the players whom you have met at any point in the game. So if you were playing on a Continents map and found yourself sharing it with a single other civ, then provided you're lucky enough to not meet anyone else before you can conquer them, it counts. Failing that, you could play one of the five tutorial maps, which satisfies the criteria upon completion. You still have to keep restarting until you're randomly assigned Greece, though.
"Kamikaze Attack", also from V, requires you to defeat an enemy unit with your attacking unit having only 1 HP left. It's somewhat doable if already a Luck-Based Mission in vanilla, where health maxes at 10, but Random Number God give you the good luck you'll need to get it in G&K or BNW where health maxes at 100.
This might be more doable than it initially appears. The game is coded that when a unit attacks a city that has its hit points reduced to 0 (presumably through ranged attacks), the unit will automatically succeed at taking that city even if it has to be kept up at one hit point to do so. This mechanic has the greater advantage in that it allows mounted units, which have a penalty to attacking cities, actually be the best units to take cities because they can stay out of range until the last second when the city's defenses have been destroyed.
In BNW, "Pyramid Scheme," which requires you to have 1) the Louvre 2) in Paris 3) with a Full Set Bonus, which involves 4) two Artifacts and two works of Art, all from different ages and civilizations. The Art is easy to swap, but the only way to get an artifact that isn't from the Ancient age is to engage in a war of conquest or run into barbarians that haven't been killed off yet, fight a bunch of battles, and then cross your fingers. (At least your ruler is renowned for his warfighting abilities.)
Also in BNW, "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which requires you to play as America and have one of your Archaeologists extract an artifact in Egyptian lands while a German Archaeologist is within two tiles. While it is a nice homage to Indiana Jones, its ridiculously specific requirements usually means that you'll probably never achieve this through normal gameplay without the help of other people online through multiplayer playing along with you to help you gain the achievement.
In BNW again is the achievement "Here's Looking At You Kid", referencing Casablanca. It requires you to play as Morocco with an enemy Portugal. You have to capture Portugal's starting city/capital Lisbon. You then need an Airport there to airlift a worker from there to Casablanca (Morocco's starting city/capital). You can already see the annoyance in getting this.
Thankfully, plenty of the achievements that could be seen as this can be alleviated with Hot Seat mode (a multiplayer mode where different players share the same computer — or one player can coordinate more than one Civ to meet the requirements). With that said it can still feel a bit grind-y.
A not-insignificant number of the achievements in VI require extremely specific circumstances that you have to know a great deal about the game to engineer. Some are so opaque in their requirements that achieving them without setting up a game for the specific purpose of achieving them is a miracle and others are so unlikely to occur naturally that you have to engage in some serious manipulation and often a Violation of Common Sense or two to arrange them, like building a large city next to an active volcano or nuking yourself on purpose.
That One Side Quest: Any City-State request can be this depending on how one is playing at the time; for example, being asked to generate a Great Writer while focusing on science, or being asked to train a Galley when you have no coastal cities.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: IV replaced production icon from shield to hammer, while food was now represented with slices of bread instead of sheafs of wheat. This created an outcry. Yes, purely cosmetic switch of icons representing tile production caused an outcry.
Unconventional Learning Experience: With introduction of strategic resources, Civ III infuriated a whole lot of players by being "unfair". Resources are mostly spawned at random and following rather odd-looking grouping. Thus, no matter how good your own play was, if you didn't have access to vitals for your given tier, like Iron, Coal or Rubber or even something as basic as Horses, you were screwed, because no resources = no units and later on no advanced infrastructure. Especially if while lacking some early game important resource, your civilisation was sitting on bunch of late-game resources that were useless before reaching certain level of technology. This could be further compounded by having "unproductive" tiles that either only provided one resource (floodplains and or grassland) or, far worse, being surrounded by unproductive ones (deserts, jungles and marshes, that requires a massive effort to squeeze anything out of them) Unfair? Just like in real life, making Civ III a learning tool on "soft" geographical determinism theory.
Making a Defensive Pact between two civilizations in V allows them to form an alliance where if an enemy civilization has declared war, then the other side will join alongside the war as well. However the AI never used this function and to make things worse, it's possible for said declaration of war to screw you over if said opponent is someone that you have a Declaration of Friendship with at which point you'll get a permanent diplomatic penalty of "breaking a promise" which will turn even the one you made a Defensive Pact against you. Even in multiplayer, this function isn't really seen that often as players can simply chat with one another and form their own teams not to mention that it is very unlikely that one will even want to accept your deal in the first place.
Espionage in VI isn't as good of a Comeback Mechanic as it was in V while still having little use to whoever is already ahead. While there are many more available actions, most of these actions aren't as impactful as stealing technologies in V and, more importantly, aren't guaranteed to succeed. Low-level spies especially have a poor chance of succeeding and their promotions are randomized, so you might not get the promotion you need without a specific policy card buried deep in the Civics tree. Finally, the actions you can perform are district-dependent and thus useless in a city that doesn't have that district, so unless you know what type of victory the opponent is pursuing there's not much you can do except guess. The end result is most players just use their Spies to counterspy in Commercial Hubs to catch enemies trying to siphon funds.
Natural Wonders in VI can be remarkably hard to utilize due to a quirk of how the game generates maps. Succinctly, the game will try to place all players first, then natural wonders, then city-states. While it will try to make sure natural wonders are not placed near players it does not make the same exception for city-states, and because both natural wonders and city-states want to spawn away from players the end result is many natural wonders being claimed by city-states and not available for players to use without attacking the city-state and its suzerain.
Unintentional Period Piece: Through the entire series, the games compare the player's final score to real historical leaders, with the lowest score being Dan Quayle, the American Vice President from 1989 to 1993 who became unfortunately known for his poorly formulated and ridiculous remarks. The Take That! was apparent to American players when the first game was released in 1991, but as the time passed and the former Vice President faded in obscurity, him being the benchmark of the poorest player's performance only remained as a tribute to tradition.
Vindicated by History: While V had mixed fan response on launch and still draws ire from long-time old guard fans, its reputation has improved massively over the years and currently sits at an "Overwhelmingly Positive" user rating on Steam, and is one of the most-played Steam games ever. Some of it is due to the updates and expansions improving the game's issues, and some of it is due to the game being the first installment to be deeply integrated with Steam (frequent discounts, a centralized platform, and access to Steam Workshop allowing for seamless modding), leading to a Newbie Boom. While VI has slowly overtaken it in active players, V has become a Tough Act to Follow and is still one of the most beloved games in the series while opinions are still divided on VI.
(Numbers 6:24-26):
