Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 finally had its gameplay reveal at Gamescom earlier this week, and it has predictably gone over exceptionally well. The popular strategy games have become a household name, especially among PC players, and even the most casual game fans have had a significant amount of exposure to this series. However, if the tease for Civ 7 has only whet your appetite, there’s currently a sale going on for most of the modern installments in the series.
Most notably, Civ 6 is on an especially steep sale at the moment. You can grab the base edition of Civ 6 for (quite appropriately) $6. Anecdotally, I’m always hearing from folks about how these games are such easy time sinks, and no one I know who plays Civ has anything remotely close to a “normal” hour count in ‘em. That means that for just six bucks, you’re probably getting hundreds of hours of entertainment as you try and develop your own civilization with any number of CIv 6’s available leaders.
In case you’re new here, the Civilization series are strategy games that allow you to develop your own nations, and, eventually, empires. You can customize the minutiae of these societies, including their values, religions, and technologies, and you can pursue a number of different paths to progress your society, hence the moniker for Civ’s subgenre 4X, which stands for explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. You can come into conflict with other civilizations and famous world leaders (including a hilariously nuke-happy Gandhi) and can win these encounters, and the game, through various different means, including warfare or diplomacy.
Civ 6 is the most recent entry, despite being released nearly ten years ago now, but it’s been thoroughly supported since then. In the intervening years, it has received at least two major expansions, and a number of smaller expansions adding new leaders, civilizations, and mechanics (like freakin’ climate change) to the game until as recently as early 2023. If you’re at all interested in getting more out of the game, you can pick up the expansions at about $5 apiece, or you could buy one of two bundles packaging the DLC.
The first bundle, called Sid Meier’s Civilization 6 Platinum Edition, packs the two major expansions and about half of the smaller DLCs for about $12 right now on Steam. Alternatively, if you feel like you’re ready to go all in on Civ 6 ahead of the upcoming sequel next year, you can grab the anthology bundle that includes everything for just $25. In total, you’d be getting the base game and 18 DLCs spanning about a decade of content. I don’t think you could possibly get more out of the CIv series outside of playing every previous game.
Though you should be set with just that game, some of the other modern games in the series are also on sale. Civ 5 is pretty cheap right now, only running you about $5, and if you want to go even further back, Civ 4 is going for $3. Don’t worry though, you don’t need to play Civ 1-6 in order to understand Civ 7. Common misunderstanding around these parts.
As someone curious about the best PC strategy games, and who’s been dipping their toes into PC gaming in general of late, it feels blasphemous to not have a single Civ game on my hard drive. Maybe today’s the day I fix that and get myself amped for the next game, which I’m sure I’ll be hearing about for the next decade following its release. We may as well all jump on board now, and who wouldn’t for these insanely low prices.
