Video Game / Civilization VI

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Civilization VI is the sixth game in the Sid Meier's Civilization series, developed by Firaxis Games and initially being released on Microsoft Windows on October 21, 2016 before being ported for Mac, Linux, iOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Android. New features include the creation of a full-fledged Civics Tree separate from and parallel to the science-based Tech Tree, which focuses on unlocking Social Policies and culturally related advances; unstacked cities, where World Wonders and city districts are placed on tiles separate from the city center, allowing for a greater degree of city planning; and replacing Workers with Builders, who have limited charges but instantaneously complete tile improvements. This time around, Sean Bean handled narration and voice-over for the game.

Two expansions have been released for the game:

• Civilization VI: Rise and Fall (2018), including the Eras mechanic, where a civilization's fate can be dictated by how many objectives the player achieves before the era changes; Governors, each of whom provide a specialized bonus to a single city at any given time; and Emergencies, which are emergent scenarios that a player may choose to respond to as the need arises.
• Civilization VI: Gathering Storm (2019), including a major rework of the Strategic Resource mechanic; climate change as a late-game mechanic, whose effects the player can either choose to mitigate or exacerbate; the reintroduction of the Diplomatic Victory; and map features such as rivers and mountain ranges being named by the civilization that discovers them.

Followed by Civilization VII.

Civilization VI contains examples of:

• Alternate Techline: The optional "Tech Shuffle" game mode leads to this. It scrambles the arrangement of technologies within each era, which can lead to things like Computers being researched before Electricity. ^note  This isn't totally impossible, depending on how broad your definition of a computer is.
• Ambiguously Brown: The man and girl (who is also the advisor) in the opening cinematic have generic features that do not indicate any specific ethnicity, allowing them to appear as members of various civs throughout the video.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • The opening cutscene tries to avert Hollywood Tactics by having a WW2 infantry charge of well-spread troops covering each other on the run... performed by bayonetless musket-toting Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth soldiers.
  • Using a Roman Legion unit to clear out nuclear contamination grants you the Achievement "Missed That Day in History Class".
• Anti-Air: Units with the Interception ability automatically attack aircraft which enter their radius of effect. That's Anti-Air Guns and Mobile SAMs on land; at sea that's Destroyers, Missile Cruisers, and Battleships; in the air that's Biplanes (VI), Fighters, and Jet Fighters.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Gathering Storm introduces a grievances/favors system, which quantifies dickish behavior and helpful behavior. Prior to the expansion, the A.I. would tend to label all your wars as aggression, even if you were simply trying to stop a rival Civ from attacking a city-state or converting all your cities to their religion. With the expansion, you get a type of currency that justifies striking out at an antagonistic Civ after you've put up with their abuses for a while. Favors, similarly, is a currency that rewards you for being nice to other civs so you don't run into Ungrateful Bastard behavior for helping, or at least get something solid to show for it.
• Artistic License – History:
  • Many of the leaders' religious preferences are different than their real-life beliefs:
    • Gandhi's explicit preference for Hinduism makes sense given that Jainism, the other major religion that informed his philosophy, is not one of the twelve available religions in-game.
    • Dido's preference for Judaism is obviously derived from her Punic origins (and to allow one civ leader to prefer Judaism, since the Israelites are not a featured civ), but Dido was certainly not Jewish and neither was Carthage, which practiced Punic polytheism.
    • Harald Hardrada's preference for Protestantism reflects the Reformation which swept Scandinavia... nearly half a millennium after he lived. Hardrada was Catholic, although he feuded with the Church during his reign (as did many other Catholic monarchs, then and ever since).
    • The real Kristina of Sweden would no doubt consider her preference for Protestantism a grave insult, since she abdicated her throne and converted to Roman Catholicism.
  • The game claims that spices were popular historically because they could cover the taste of spoiled food. This makes no sense as spices tended to be extremely expensive, to the point that anyone who could buy spices could easily afford fresh food, and even though hygiene standards were less sophisticated in the past, people didn't eat rotting food unless they were desperate or it being fermented being part of the dish.
• Ascended Extra:
  • In the DLC, the city-states of Amsterdam, Babylon, Antioch, Seoul, Jakarta, Stockholm, Carthage, Lisbon, Toronto, and Palenque get replaced with new city-states with the introduction of Netherlands, Babylon, Byzantium, Korea, Indonesia, Phoenicia, Portugal, Canada, and Maya as playable civilizations.
  • Also in DLC, Genghis Khan, Aza Nzinga, and Simon Bolivar get replaced as Great Generals with Timur, Amina, and Jose de San Martin with their introductions as leaders.
• Ascended Meme:
  • In the period leading up to release, promotional material teased new civilizations with blurred photos of the leaders. One was suspected by some to be Tamar, leader of the kingdom of Georgia. It ended up being Gorgo of Sparta, but the fervency and unexpectedness of the guess was so amusing it led to the nation becoming a popular guess for any upcoming civilization... until Tamar and Georgia were officially announced as part of the Rise and Fall expansion released two years later.
  • The Achievement for getting a culture victory is named "Buying Your Blue Jeans and Listening to Your Pop Music", after a complaint made by leaders in IV when players were strong in Culture. In V, AI leaders make the same complaint when the player becomes culturally influential over them.
  • "Seahenge" is an achievement in Gathering Storm. It's a reference to how in V, Stonehenge would often appear on the ocean if built in a coastal city. In Gathering Storm, it's for losing Stonehenge to coastal flooding due to global warming.
  • Elizabeth I's leader agenda is titled "Trade Agreement" and causes her to dislike leaders that don't trade with her, and her leader ability revolves around strengthening her own trade routes, referencing an infamously repetitive voiceline of hers from Civ V.
  • The August 2023 update added achievements for winning the game as leaders from the Leader Pass. The name of Yongle's achievement is, of course, Live Yongle Reaction.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Due to their almost pedantic requirements, most of the Wonders are like this. While they provide often valuable bonuses, it takes a very specific spot on the map to even build them. Also, it can easily reach the point where not having the wonder provides more than sacrificing everything just to get it in place.
• Barbarous Barbary Bandits: The Barbary Corsair is the Ottoman's unique unit, replacing the generic Privateer available to other civilizations. Compared to the Privateer, they are cheaper and cost no movement points to perform coastal raids.
• Bilingual Bonus: Catherine de' Medici speaks French with a slight Italian accent, unless she's agitated. If so, she switches to her native Italian, complete with Florentine cadence. Similarly, Gandhi switches to English whenever he's angry.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: Theological combat, a representation of religious conflict within a region, is manifested by one religious unit summoning a thundercloud which blasts the opposition.
• Bread and Circuses: In the Rise and Fall expansion, cities with an entertainment district can enact a "bread and circuses" project to instill extra loyalty in the region and prevent cities from rebelling.
• Cap Raiser: In Gathering Storm, constructing buildings from the Encampment district like Barracks and Armories increases the maximum capacity of your strategic resources like Iron and Oil.
• Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth: The second tier of Government Plaza buildings offer the player a choice between the Grand Master's Chapel, which allows land military units to be purchased with Faith and causes pillaging improvements and districts to grant extra Faith (Combat); the Foreign Ministry, which halves the cost of levying City-States armies and increase the Combat Strength of allied City-States (Diplomacy); and the Intelligence Agency, which grants a Spy when built and increases the chance of success for Spy operations (Stealth).
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: The game eventually allows you to combine two of the same type of unit into a Corps, and later three into an Army. One of these is stronger than an individual composing unit, but weaker than using the two or three separately.
• Demoted to Extra: After becoming a full-fledged civilization in V, Venice is demoted to a regular city-state. A number of other cities belonging to previously playable civilizations show up as city-states (Babylon, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Jakarta, Seoul, Stockholm) though these were all replaced when their respective civs were slowly phased back into the game.
• Early-Bird Cameo: A winged hussar leads the charge during the opening cinematic before Poland was introduced in the game.
• Evil Laugh: Both Gilgamesh and Harald Hardrada do this if you declare war on them—Gilgamesh, especially, gets such a kick out of your foolish aggression that he gets a full bellowing three-stage laugh that brings a tear to his eyes.
• Evolving Music: Each Civilization's theme music changes over the Era. For example the Russian theme goes from traditional, to Grimdark (Industrial) to Soviet-theme chanting (Atomic Era), reflecting Russia's history itself. And yet the simple melody you start with is at the core of every evolution of the music.
• Famous for Being First: In the Rise and Fall expansion, civilizations earn points towards Golden Ages with "Historic Moments". Many of them only go to the first civilization to make the achievement: the first to discover a new continent, form a government, meet all the other civilizations, circumnavigate the globe, and so on.
• Finishing Move: Units perform one when they killing an enemy unit. For example, polearm-wielding units like spearmen will stab the final enemy, and swing it over their head as one.
• Flooded Future World: In Gathering Storm, polar ice caps begin to melt and some coastal land tiles become flooded when enough carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere from industrial buildings and units.
• Fusion Dance: This is basically how "formations" work, as a sort of compromise for players who miss the old stacks of doom or who have to deal with cramped battle situations with only one unit able to get at an enemy. Merging two units of the same type together (and later, adding a third) creates a "Corps" or "Army" unit, respectively (naval units become "fleets" and "armadas") that is stronger than a unit of that base level. Shaka Zulu was reworked for his reappearance in VI to specialize in this. An Army can even pull a Rock Beats Laser on a unit of a higher technological tier this way (again, fitting for the Zulus.)
• God-Emperor: One of the policies that can be adopted is declaring oneself a "God King". As one might expect from history, this is very useful in the early game but not so much later on.
• Hegemonic Empire: Rise and Fall has the loyalty mechanic which embodies this trope in a way. If a city receives enough pressure from neighboring rival cities (either from population, governors, or other factors) it will immediately break away from their home empire, initially as a free city, and after additional pressure, becomes part of the civ that gained this city's favor the most. Eleanor of Aquitaine's ability amps this up; if she manages to be the most responsible for making a city break away, she immediately gets to keep it for herself.
• Here There Be Dragons: Unexplored areas of the map feature sporadically-placed dragons, serpents and compass roses.
• Hero Unit: The November 2020 update adds the "Heroes and Legends" game mode, which allows for the recruitment of famous mythical heroes as a unique form of Great People, such as King Arthur, Maui, and Sun Wukong.
• Humongous Mecha: The Gathering Storm adds the Giant Death Robot (according to its Civilopedia entry, its official name is the Gun Deployment Rig, but no one calls it that), which requires 1 unit of uranium to build and 3 to maintain. Given a possible inspiration for its appearance, all it needs is a Kaiju to fight. It can gain new abilities and upgrades with Future Era techs, such as Drone Air Defense (increases anti-air defenses), Particle Beam Siege Cannon (to quickly tear down a city's defenses), Enhanced Mobility (faster movement and the ability to cross mountains In a Single Bound) and Reinforced Armor Plating (better defense against land and naval units). Word of God is several Future Era units were scrapped in favor of focusing the developers' efforts on the Giant Death Robot.
• Interface Spoiler: In Gathering Storm, the map overview for Settlers shows which plots of land will be flooded when climate change inevitably makes the seas rise. This is an anti-frustration feature, this is available from the Ancient era, even though ancient peoples should have no way of anticipating that climate change will be a problem for their distant descendants.
• Iram of Many Pillars: When an AI-controlled Suleman I has their last city captured, they will say that Istanbul has gone the way of Iram, "Only remembered by melancholy poets".
• Jerkass: Leaders have a Leader Agenda which relates to their history (such as "likes long time allies" for Sumeria or "hates small civs" for Rome), and a randomized hidden agenda such as wanting a lot of salt or needing more oil. Gandhi is a "Peacekeeper" (doesn't go into wars that label him a warmonger), but is also very likely to be "Nuke Happy" (likes himself and others building/using nukes). This leads to him being a passive-aggressive shithead who will hate you for not having nukes well before you can have them, attack you in wars that won't label him a "warmonger" (especially in the Ancient Era where there is little chance of him being a warmonger), congratulate you for using nukes one turn and the very next turn denounce you for warmongering and attack you after starting things so he won't look bad in front of everyone else.
• Magikarp Power: Scout units are individual Magikarps. They start out weaker than the base combat unit of the game, but they have a unique promotion tree that starts with them becoming able to move through rough terrain and ends with them getting a whopping 20-point combat bonus (that's an entire technological age!) and being able to retreat after attacking. The medieval, industrial and modern versions of the unit trade their melee attack for a ranged one which lets them pick off enemies from a distance without endangering themselves. There's a reason why the modern version of them are Spec Ops soldiers. The trick is keeping them alive long enough to get promoted that high.
• Multiple Life Bars: Cities with walls gain two health bars, one for the city and one for the fortification. By contrast, earlier games have fortification buildings simply add to the health of the city. Certain units can bypass the walls to attack the city directly and the replenishment of each has different qualifications: life regenerates automatically at a rate determined by population, whereas walls can only be repaired as a construction project which depends on the city's production rate and prevents the city building anything else, like new units.
• Multi-Slot Character: Leaders who lead multiple civilizations like Eleanor of Aquitaine or Kublai Khan, and leaders who have different personas available like Theodore Roosevelt or Catherine de Medici, are treated as separate leaders for selection purposes.
• Mundane Made Awesome: The Flavor Text for each acquired research item includes quotes from a very diverse pool of sources. From ancient philosophical treatises to popular movies or songs. Sean Bean's narration often gives them way more gravitas than expected.
• Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups:
  • Each Military Encampment can have either a barracks (increased XP for infantry) or a stable (increased XP for cavalry) but not both.
  • There are two types of museum — Archeological or Art Museum — and each Theatre Square can only have one.
• Natural Disaster Cascade: Gathering Storm plays with this, as you can customise "Disaster Intensity", which affects the general frequency of volcanic eruptions, forest fires, river floods etc. Disasters in general get worse due to climate change, with rivers constantly flooding and the coastlines eventually being submerged entirely as the sea level rises. The Apocalypse gamemode takes this up to eleven; once the climate intensity reaches its final stage, asteroids begin to pelt the planet, destroying everything they rain down upon, including capital cities.
• New Resource Midgame: In Gathering Storm, once you reach the Industrial Era, two new resources come into play: Power, which is generated by certain buildings or terrain improvements, and consumed by other buildings to increase their yields; and CO2, which is generated by buildings and units that consume certain resources, and contributes to climate change. If the city-state Cardiff is in the game, whose suzerain bonus allows Harbor buildings to generate Power, you can potentially start generating Power as early as the Classical Era even if you can't do anything with it at that point.
• No Animals Were Harmed: Any cavalry unit who gets killed will have their horse survive and flee the battlefield, compared to older versions where both horse and rider die. The same applies to scouts and their dogs.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Diplomatic Victory is an economic victory in disguise since nearly everything needed for a diplomatic victory can be, and is most easily, bought with gold. Actual diplomacy is not only optional but can be actively detrimental.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • Did you know that Great People are useful scouts and explorers? They have high movement points, can embark and even enter ocean tiles without research! Even if an enemy goes over them, they are taken to the nearest city instead of being captured. So if you have plenty of unused Great People (like, say, idling Admirals, or Great Musicians that can't be activated because your Great Works gallery is full), make them run towards unexplored territory!
  • The Gathering Storm expansion brings in climate change mechanics, which can be manipulated by a continental in-land civ to screw over any civilization built primarily on the coast.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: The one thing you cannot ignore when going for any victory type is science. Science victory is obvious, but military units are locked behind more advanced technologies and fielding subpar units generally won't let you blaze your way across the world. Unique units for many civilizations aiming for a religious victory are also locked behind tech, such as the conquistador, and if you are aiming for cultural or religious victories you need to be able to at least fend off rivals or make things easier by knocking out a few important enemy cities.
• Order Versus Chaos: Communism, Democracy, and Fascism are the penultimate government forms, respectively focusing on increasing production and achieving a Science Victory, promoting Great People and achieving a Cultural or Religious victory, and increasing military strength and achieving a Domination victory. The increasingly severe relationship penalties for differing government types mean that any genuine peace between any combination of communists, democrats and fascists is basically impossible unless you've been very close friends with someone from the start. The best you can hope for is a cold war.
• The Power of Rock: Gathering Storm adds the Rock Band as a late-game cultural unit. Purchased using Faith, rock bands are sent overseas to tour, generating tourism for their home country and helping them win a cultural victory. Upon creating a rock band, you name it and give it one of several promotions that inform what type of music it plays, giving it various bonuses; for instance, Glam Rock, reggae and festival bands gain bonuses for playing at theater squares, water parks and national parks respectively, religious bands can convert foreign cities and indie rock bands reduce loyalty in foreign cities (great for when you want to flip a neighboring city with shaky loyalty).
• Public Domain Artifact: The helmet worn by Harald Hardrada in VI is modeled after a real one found in Sutton Hoo in England.
• Random Event: The New Frontier Pass include the Apocalypse mode, which adds random disasters such as forest fires, solar flares, and meteor strikes, but also subverts it by allowing you to purchase Soothsayers, special religious units who can actually trigger natural disasters in enemy territory.
  • Gathering Storm adds random natural disasters, from floods and droughts to hurricanes and volcanic eruptions. Their initial frequency and severity can be changed during game set-up, and as climate change occurs, they gradually grow more frequent. While they can cause significant localised damage, especially if they hit a city directly, they can also fertilise the tiles they hit and permanently increase their yields.
• Regional Riff: The soundtrack consists of your civ's "main" Evolving Music and secondary pieces, combined with those of your neighbors. So depending on who you're playing as and who you ended up next to, the music could be "Scotland the Brave" on bagpipes, "Waltzing Matilda" with didgeridoos, Mongolian throat-singing, "Kalinka" on the balalaika, and "Bayisa" with an isiZulu chorus.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: Builders create all terrain improvements instantly, though they can only make a few before they disappear (the exact number can be increased in several ways).
• Shout-Out:
  • Gilgamesh's design makes him look like Marvel's The Incredible Hercules.
  • The quote for the Robots technology is a short "I'll be back", without even stating the source.
  • One of the multiplayer options is called "Global Thermonuclear War".
  • One of the achievements is given when your Roman city loses 6 population from a Vesuvius eruption. The achievement is called "And the Walls Kept Tumbling Down".
• Subsystem Damage: Unlike in previous games where you either take an enemy city wholesale or don't at all, you can target and destroy individual districts outside the city centre to cripple parts of their industry.
• Through His Stomach: When sending a delegation to you to establish diplomatic relations, most leaders will include a prepared dish originating from their lands. These can include apple pie from Teddy Roosevelt, maize and chocolate from Montezuma, cheeses and baguettes from Catherine de Medici, caviar from Peter the Great, airag from Genghis Khan, haggis from Robert the Bruce and a-ping from Jayavarman VII.
• Thunderbolt Iron: Meteors become a thing in the Apocalypse Mode and, while they will destroy anything they hit, they leave behind a meteor full of valuable metals that, if collected, instantly create a free Heavy Cavalry unit for your use. In later stages, this can mean a tank.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: It's possible to soft-lock the game by getting two units of the same type stuck on the same tile when neither can move, such as having two Great People in a city center that's surrounded by enemies, as the game won't let you end your turn until they're not stacked on the same tile but every action you can take to get rid of one (activating them, moving them to another city, even deleting them in some cases) is blocked because they're stacked. The only way out of this is to reload an earlier autosave.
• Unreliable Narrator: The Civilopedia claims under "Police State" credits it with helping Stalin not lose World War 2, while Stalin's entry says only Russia's sheer size and winter prevented a quick loss.
• Urban Segregation: VI invokes this with the districts concept for city-building. Whereas previous editions just basically piled all the buildings and wonders of a city into one tile, VI requires specific districts be built to house the appropriate building, such as a campus district for science production like libraries and universities. Placement of said district also becomes important for various reasons: for example, industrial zones get bonuses to production for adjacent infrastructure improvements like mines, but both also lower nearby tiles' appeal which affect things like a neighborhoods' usefulness in providing housing.
• Used Future: In a departure from previous Civilization games, where the Modern Era's aesthetics tended to emulate the time the game was originally released, VI eschews this by basing the Information Age on the late Cold War, with the majority of its late-game units being represented by decades-old vehicles whose roles have been superceded by more advanced machines in their countries of origin (i.e. "Jet Bomber" versus "Stealth Bomber"), while in contrast IV and V went as far as fielding (then, in the case of the former) hypothetical units such as the railgun-wielding Stealth Destroyer and the infamous Giant Death Robot. ^note This was intentionally done to make their matchups with their direct predecessors less of an egregious case of Rock Beats Laser: it's easier to imagine an M4 Sherman taking out a T-80 or a P-51 Mustang shooting down a MIG-29 then it is a T-34 taking out a Leopard 2 or a Zero shooting down an F-22. Then the Gathering Storm expansion goes ahead and adds the Giant Death Robot to VI anyway, with the option of giving it a giant particle beam cannon.
• Useless Useful Non-Combat Abilities: Neighborhoods are widely considered to be never worth building. They unlock so late in the civic tree that they're no longer useful by the time you get them, they compete for high Appeal tiles with National Parks and Seaside Resorts, and their purpose, growing population, is generally seen as a detriment past a certain point due to how amenities work. Spies can also target them for the Recruit Partisans action, one of the few legitimately dangerous actions a spy can perform.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • Gathering Storm adds climate change, which will slowly melt sea ice and flood low-lying regions as you pump more carbon into the atmosphere. The devs have stated you can either try to slow down the effects, or you can be a jerk and weaponise it by purposely raising sea levels and watch as all your enemies' coastal regions get flooded.
  • Apocalypse Mode adds the soothsayer, a unit that can cause natural disasters to happen. As SpiffingBrit demonstrated, because the AI does not take into account whether a natural disaster is actually natural or caused by you, it's perfectly possible to go around crippling rival Civs' cities by causing them to be buried under sandstorms, snowstorms, floodwater, or volcanic ash.
• Video Game Randomizer: The Tech and Civic Shuffle" game mode released in August 2020 randomizes the Tech Tree and Civic Tree when enabled. Techs and civics within each game Era are shuffled, the tree layouts are changed, and unknown techs and civics are hidden.
• Violation of Common Sense: The way Diplomatic Victory is implemented leads to a few of these:
  • By racking up grievances with other civilizations then declaring a surprise war against them you can prompt them to request military aid from the World Congress. You can then vote to approve this aid request and give aid to the person you just declared war on, getting diplomatic victory points for it. You can even pay for this aid with the gold you got by pillaging your victim's territory! Winning by doing this repeatedly makes the victory cutscene wonderfully ironic as it praises your commitment to peace and cooperation despite your spending the whole game being a bully.
  • A good way to win the Climate Accords and their associated diplomatic victory points if you don't have access to carbon recapture is to build or buy coal power plants for the sole purpose of decommissioning them, since the Accords only care about how many you decommissioned, not how many you decommissioned relative to the number you had before. This also makes it possible to win the Climate Accords while increasing your CO2 output.
  • In late-game World Congress votes there is a proposal to give or remove 2 Diplomatic Victory points to or from a civilization. If you're on the verge of a Diplomatic Victory then the ideal option is to vote to take points away from yourself, since every other civilization, even your allies, will band together to vote to take your points away. Voting against yourself means you'll lose two points then immediately get one back for siding with the majority, halving the impact while saving your favor to gain points by winning other votes.
• War Elephants: Three elephant unique units appear; the Varu replaces the Horseman for India, the Domrey replaces the Trebuchet for the Khmer, and the Voi Chiến replaces the Crossbowman for Vietnam.
• War for Fun and Profit: The AI actually factors this into its (rather complex) war planning. If an AI is under economic stress, undoubtedly due to their tendency to overproduce units, it will check for a valid land target (at least 8 border tiles abutting each other) among other things like power and disposition and possibly attack. The goal would be to launch either a limited war to pillage improvements for gold and get compensation for a peace treaty, or a total war to capture more profitable territory and acquire city capture bounty. Coveting thy neighbor's land indeed!
• You Require More Vespene Gas: In Gathering Storm, strategic resources work this way. The same expansion also adds Power, although unlike other games it simply gives you bonus yields rather than penalizing you if you don't have enough.
• Zerg Rush:
  • Seen in religious combat. Because a converted city isn't actually a blow to an opponent (they still get all the yields of the city) it's trivially easy for them to just buy a missionary and convert it back. Instead of doing it one city at a time, the most effective way of shutting down a competing religion is to build up a force of missionaries then send them all to convert every city at once making it so it's physically impossible for your opponent to undo the damage since they don't have any cities left to buy missionaries that aren't your religion.
  • Enforced in the "Cleopatra, Lich Queen of the Nile" Monthly Challenge. As Ptolemaic Cleopatra, you have to earn a Domination Victory in Zombie Defence Mode. While Cleopatra can only train Warriors, her units are also able to recruit adjacent Barbarian Zombies, and while those Zombies start out equally weak, there's an endless supply of them. Pretty soon you'll amass such a massive Zombie army that even the most militaristic civ can be worn down through sheer attrition.