Civ fans, I have brought you good tidings and a new trailer, and for that, you are welcome. Civilization VI: Gathering Storm is a new expansion for Civilization VI, set for release for PC on February 14, 2019. Firaxis announced this bad boy via a livestream on November 20, 2018, and Ed Beach, Franchise Lead Designer for Civilization VI made a long post afterwards about what you can expect from the upcoming title.
Civilization VI: Gathering Storm adds a bunch of new goodness to the series, like new advanced technologies, engineering projects, the fan-favorite World Congress, and introduces a living world ecosystem that showcases natural events that could enrich or challenge your growing empire. Civilization VI: Gathering Storm also adds eight new civilizations and nine new leaders, seven new World Wonders, and a variety of new units, districts, buildings, improvements and more.
Here's the complete word from Beach, and don't forget to check out the trailer at bottom.
A WORD FROM THE DEVELOPER
I’m Ed Beach, and I’m going to take you through some of the exciting changes that you can expect with the upcoming expansion for Civilization VI.
History is full of rich stories of great empires, exploration, survival, and the human spirit. While we have always managed to capture a lot of this in the Civilization series, our story of human history was missing something without the impact that a changing planet has had on our settlements, and the imprints that we have left behind on Earth. This was the primary theme that we wanted to explore with Civilization VI: Gathering Storm.
VOLCANOES, STORMS, AND FLOODS – OH MY!
With this expansion we’re unleashing the forces of nature to bring the world to life in a way that you’ve never seen before. We’ve always had Floodplains in the game, but I always found it disappointing that they were completely static. No longer! We’ve enlarged the floodable areas to include flat Grasslands and Plains tiles next to Rivers so these valleys can offer the potential of incredibly high yields. So you’ll still want to settle there -- but now doing so comes with real risk. Periodically each of these rivers will flood, damaging structures throughout the floodable tiles. But don’t worry, there’s an upside! First, you can mitigate the effects with our new Dam district. And once you’ve rebuilt, the flood will have enhanced a number of those tiles with rich, fertile soil. I love the way this works out: throughout history civilizations have risen and flourished in dangerous places, like near volcanoes and in river valleys. Now you’ll experience those same high risk/high reward decisions as you plot out where to settle in your next Civilization campaign.
Another exciting new environmental effect is the addition of volcanoes. They offer some of the same risk/reward decisions as floods, with eruptions occurring periodically. When you see the magma spilling down the side of one of these you know there’s going to be damage to adjacent tiles. However, the long term benefits are there with the yields provided by the volcanic soil left behind. We have also been able to use volcanoes to add a level of realism to our map generation. We’ve always had continents in Civilization VI, but the geology didn’t necessarily correspond to continental boundaries as you might expect. We’ve updated all that so you’ll find the Mountain ranges you expect along these continental divides, as well as Volcanoes and Geothermal Fissures. We’ve also taken the Volcanoes we already had in our Natural Wonder system and made them really powerful.
As we added more significance to these geographic features, we thought there should be a way to identify them. This inspired the addition of named features. So every time a new feature – river, volcano, mountain range, or desert – is discovered, it is named after the discovering civ. Now if Egypt starts on a River, that waterway will officially be designated as the Nile River. Of course, this gets tricky when a civ like the Netherlands discovers a Volcano – in that case, it will be named for a civ that isn’t in the current game. It ends up becoming an interesting geographic trivia game while you play. And the better you are with river and mountain names the more clues you get about which other civs may be present in this particular Civilization world.
