Playing A Game Sid Meier's Civilization VI, Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Rise and Fall, Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm PC

My first Civ 6 campaign turned sour when my friend Montezuma suddenly declared war on me, flooding my blissfully undefended cities with medieval-era pikemen; and when I finally built up an army large enough to stop him, its upkeep costs broke my whole economy.

Why did Montezuma turn on me without warning? Because one of his AI-controlled quirks is murderous, warmongering jealousy of a civ who possesses a luxury resource that he doesn't. (I think it was silk.)

Like Sid Meier's Civilization V before it - and like the newer Ara: History Untold - Civ 6 is hopelessly complicated, even before its expansions Rise and Fall and Gathering Storm have added yet more governing and environmental mechanics. The in-game user interface, to its credit, does about as good as it can making those mechanics manageable -- but "the problem" isn't the interface, it's the complexity underneath.

In my second campaign attempt, I played as Canadian PM Wilfrid Laurier (after finding internet advice that Canada can't be surprise-attacked); deactivated barbarians; and completely ignored entire features like military combat, religious expansion, cultural exports, and spycraft. My focus was science research, and racing to victory in space.

And I still had to work through a ton of meticulous city improvement and district management, civic development of government policies, city-state sponsorship competition, access to electricity-generating resources... on my way to science victory. All while my AI opponents were executing their own globe-spanning religious and cultural and military offensives. Good thing I couldn't be surprise-attacked, or any one of them could've crushed me immediately.

I feel like there's got to be some "ideal" amount of complexity that's more diverse and spicy than just science, or just war, but still less intimidatingly unapproachable than this mess of parallel systems. The amount of civilization progress that I can mess up - the opportunity space for setting myself up for failure - is just too great.

(Which, I think, kinda explains Civ 7's controversial reset-for-new-age mechanism: it can prevent mistakes from piling up too high, without actually removing complexity. Though I'd probably still prefer ... less complexity.)

Then again, Civ 6's over-complicated circus of simulation mechanics nevertheless kept me clicking Next - tapping into that classic "just one more turn" addictive behavior - through the wee hours of the night, until I'd finally launched Canada into the cosmos. So what do I know? In Civilization terms, it still works.