If there’s one thing Civilization VI lead designer Ed Beach has hammered home over and over, it’s his desire for players to respond to the unique challenges of each map with different strategic decisions every time. One way the next installment in the Civ series plans to do so is by introducing the Builder, a unit that instantly builds improvements, but has a limited number of uses before the unit expires.
Check out the in-depth video from 2k Games explaining Civ 6’s Builder below:
Workers in Civilization V could trundle along from the ancient era straight into the information age and beyond without much player intervention. Tools like “auto-improve” and “route-to-mode” took some of the more time-consuming and tedious turn-by-turn management away from the player, but Beach saw this as a huge strategic loss.
“Because the world is unique each time you play the game, we want to really emphasize the players’ interactions with it,” said Beach in a feature on Civilization’s site. “This means having players make very deliberate choices, rather than setting important parts of their game on autopilot.”
By contrast, builders in Civ 6 require more active participation. “Now there’s a whole series of critical decisions to make about when you construct a Builder and when you put an improvement down, and all of those decisions play out quickly and directly. It’s a simple change, but a dynamic one in terms of how players are interacting with improvements and planning. And it’s critical to control all these placements with our new unstacked cities,” said Beach.
Automation is still available for some units -- namely, for auto-exploring with land and sea units. But automation will break if the unit encounters a “goody hut” or an enemy.
“The changes we’ve made for Civilization VI have been done based on how we’ve seen people play previous Civilization games,”said Beach. “When there are optimal choices or rote strategies within the game, we have looked carefully at those and tried to see if there are things we can do to shake up people’s habits. We want players to understand the consequences of their choices and how that’s affecting their game, and sometimes automation takes critical decisions out of a player’s hands.”
Are you excited by the new strategic possibilities of the Builder? Will you miss Civ V’s immortal workers, or is the instant gratification of the Builder right up your alley? Feel free to let us know in the comments section below.
