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Civ-VI-Feature

The Civilization franchise has evolved to encompass new features, units, and scenarios over its 20-five year life. Now, AMD and Firaxis have jointly announced that the upcoming Civilization VI volition be congenital around DirectX 12, with features similar asynchronous compute and explicit multi-adapter GPU support. This is the second major collaboration between the two companies; AMD and Firaxis also worked together to add Mantle support and carve up-frame rendering to Civilization: Beyond Earth when that game debuted a few years agone.

We haven't written much about Civilization Half dozen since the game'southward announcement and some of the information that's come out looks quite encouraging. The game volition utilize a brand-new engine rather than relying on a tweaked version of Civilization V'due south. It'll also transport with deep modding support and with a richer set of features at launch than previous Civilization games, which accept often been fleshed out with expansion packs that not every player ever sees.

Urban center management and customization are also getting a major overhaul. In the past, each Civilization city, no thing how big, occupied a single map tile and could utilise resources found on surrounding tiles. Now, larger cities will take up more space on the map, which each square representing a different district or specialized area of the metropolis. Each city tin accept upward to 12 districts in total and will receive benefits from nearby terrain — religious and science districts, for example, both do good from being near mountains. Civilisation VI will go along the one war machine unit per tile rule, but will let not-combat units to necktie themselves to a specific gainsay unit, making it easier to escort settlers and workers.

Civ6Cities

Some other major change rolling out is the way scientific research has been modified. In the past, researching technology was by and large divorced from real-world requirements — you could build the Manhattan Project before fifty-fifty discovering uranium, for example, even though in real life the Manhattan Project required uranium to even begin. In Civilization 6, you lot'll demand a quarry if you want to learn about stoneworking quickly, while having cities built forth a coast will better sailing research. Desire to build the Pyramids? You'll demand a desert hex to do information technology.

These changes are interesting considering they should permit for intrinsic types of specialization that previous Civilization games take lacked. In the real world, Britain's status as an island nation fabricated a powerful navy disquisitional to its long-term success equally a world power. Culture has never modeled this blazon of specialization all that robustly — tying inquiry to urban center location and specialization is a new way to arroyo the mechanic.

Overall, the new game looks excellent, and robust DX12 and async compute back up from AMD should improve it further. Feedback on the new visual fashion has been mixed — we're waiting to run into how information technology works in-game before rendering an opinion. It'll be interesting to see if a game like Culture benefits significantly from a low-overhead API. Culture: Beyond Earth didn't see higher frame rates from using Curtain, but its frame timing was much improved compared with single-GPU D3D or AFR (alternate frame rendering). In theory, using a depression-overhead API should help resolve graphics bottlenecks, but games like Civilization usually don't require cut-edge GPU firepower in the first place.

Now read: What is DirectX 12?