So, the sixth installment to Sid Meier’s Civilization series has just been announced, and unusually for a game that’s just been announced we know quite a bit about how the game’s going to work. That’s mainly because the announcement also contained the release date which is actually not that far away: October 21st 2016. It’s even already up on Steam for pre-purchase, along with a few bundles.

It’s going to be the same civilization builder type game, but with some key differences. Firstly the way cities work in Civ 6 will follow the same ‘unstacking’ rule that happened to units in Civ 5; instead of having all buildings in a city ‘stacked’ atop each other they’ll be spread out across the city’s territory via districts – the bigger the city, the more districts it’ll be able to support up to 12. This means that cities will now be made more specialised from the beginning. Districts will have specialisations that are affected by certain terrains, such as mountains giving religious and scientific bonuses to those particular districts. Map pins are also being introduced so that you’re able to plan out what you want your next district to be once your city has grown that much.

Because of this, sieges in cities have changed too, allowing for enemies to sack and loot districts outside of the city without taking the heavily defended city centre, weakening the empire it belongs to. Of course, if the centre is taken it once again flips ownership to the conquering army.

Combat is also getting an overhaul, with previously consider ‘military units’ such as catapults now being assigned as ‘support units’ that can stack onto the same tile as ‘military units’ to stop battlefields being so congested. Military units will also have an added layer of customisation now and units of the same type can be combined into a unit, further reducing the numbers on the board.

Research now also gains some bonuses depending on where cities are located, with a city on the coast having a boost to their researching of Sailing for example over land-locked cities. This means that your actions and playstyle compliment just how fast your chosen civilization will be researching and developing some technologies, to better tie it into the game and not have it feel as divorced from proceedings as it previously did.

Other civ leaders will now have their own agendas, tied to how their historical counterparts acted in real life. For example some actions will make some other leaders like you, while it might anger others. In this way it will be possible to potentially set them against each other as opposed to just against you in the game. For once the AI will attack the AI! This adherence to the historical counterparts doesn’t mean that they won’t act counter to that though; after all, Civilization’s greatest in-joke is Nuclear Gandhi and Firaxis have confirmed that they’ve not forgotten about that amusing little bug-come-feature of the series (although they didn’t go into details obviously).

Finally, one of the biggest complaints about Civ 5 was that multiplayer sessions could take a while. You’d often have games running over several sessions and Let’s Players could literally make a series out of a single 5/6-player session. Now Firaxis have said they’re going to introduce some pre-made multiplayer sessions that will let you “cooperate and compete with your friends in a wide variety of situations all designed to be easily completed in a single session.” They’ll also be available as single-player games too. I see an opportunity here ripe for the Steam Workshop developers.

Of course, there’s more to find out yet but given that it’s just been announced, this is quite the treasure trove of info. I’ll leave you now with the game’s trailer as we await more news.