The Civilization series of games have progressed from an electronic version of Risk into a deep and complex strategy game. You’re free to pick what ideology you want to use for your civilization, with each roughly corresponding with an actual ideology from your current historical era. Late game options usually offer a communism ideology label that you can give your Civ. However, can you actually build communism in Civ VI through your city management and play style?
Civ VI made quite a few changes to the way you interact with your own territory and people. The biggest was the introduction of districts. Previously your entire city had been squashed into one square, with buildings pilled on top of each other. The population would occasionally become unhappy or starve, but you were largely kept away from actually building a liveable civilization through these simple mechanics.
Districts make you build a city across the area on the map which the city actually occupies. Actually building for the people within the city and managing space. This has brought with it many more concerns about keeping people in decent conditions. If we are attempting to build communism in Civ VI, we have to start with the cities. These have to be cities that keep people fed, housed, working and happy.
Building Communism in Civ 6 In The Districts
Districts have brought the ability to specialise cities, rather than just spamming each one with the same buildings you need. This has forced players to be economical with how they build their cities up. Its also brought with it, the constant nagging of your people for more amenities and housing. These are the only two measures for judging if the population is living in a productive and progressive society.
For the first time in a Civ game, you can kind of role-play Nixon. (Outside of Mods) You can obsess over landing a man on the moon to spite your enemies! Occasionally your angry constituents will cry for you to spend some money on housing rather than troops. In these late game scenarios, you’re often left perusing your chosen type of victory over keeping your population perfectly contended. Building communism in Civ VI means abandoning these petty disputes and concentrating more on building amenities in the form of entertainment districts, and housing in the form of neighbourhoods.
Civ VI doesn’t give you the sort of control over cities and their problems as an extensive city builder. So as long as you don’t mind having to wait a while for victory, building communism in Civ VI in the districts can be achieved relatively easily. Isn’t there more to this than entertainment and houses though?
Every Government is A Communist One
In Civ VI, every form of government is essentially a communist one. You don’t have to fight elections or worry about public approval. Your cities are built automatically in an equalitarian way. By virtue of the game functioning on the basis of a single leader, everyone else in your civilization is so much of a non-person that they count as a large mass. Each equal. It’s more of a dictatorship with communism below you. For the purposes of trying to build communism within the confines of the game, were going to ignore that bit. If we remove the player character and their fourth war breaking role from the scenario then we’re left with a state that, by assumption, splits up all of its resources fairly evenly. So long as you’re not directing them to your passion projects.
So where is the fun in building Communism? The revamped Diplomacy section of the game comes into play here. While its fun attempting to recreate the cold war (until it goes too far), what we should be doing to build communism in Civ VIis influencing the rest of the globe.
Some war-mongering Civs may fall so far behind that their people are still using bows and arrows while you’re getting a Nuclear bomb ready to shut Roosevelt up. Can we call it a victory if our people are doing well but the rest of the world is living in squalor at our expense?
Workers of The World Unite
The easiest option would be to murder half of the world in order to take it over and show them how to live properly. Most Civs are too set in their agendas for persuasion to work. You can try gifts but all you’ll do is given the capitalists an advantage for when they inevitably tire of you. The only solution is to take over the rest of the world, or at least a lot of it. Most of the time this won’t result in a domination victory. Once you’ve gotten rid of all leaders who are standing in the way of progress you can stop your war. The remaining Civs will despise you, but that’s okay. You’ve murdered half the world but the other half can now live in freedom.
With half the world conquered, you can now leave the agreeable Civs to their devices. All that’s left to do is to keep everything ticking over with your cities. If you actually managed to win your world war while keeping your population perfectly happy, then you’ve done all you can. That’s about all we can do work to work towards an equitable society in Civ outside of pursuing the right government types and policies.
Civ VI gives the population of your cities a comfortable existence, as long as you do some minor things to keep it that way. The other players in the game complicate things. Unless you’re willing to be an island of calm surrounded by capitalists, you’re probably going to have to have a quite a lasting period of war. Building communism in Civ Vi is difficult in this way, but it’s not impossible. It is interesting how often you end up massively compromising your morals.
Jordan Ashley
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