So as I posted a few days ago, the teaser trailer came out announcing Civ VII's debut sometime next year. Got me thinking, maybe I should give Civ VI A Little More Love. Why is that capitalized? Beats me. Ask the usual culprit; you know how I can't be bothered to actually type these posts by hand.
I subscribed to a popular mod that provides a TSL Earth map it calls Enormous. And, well, it sure is. Above is a mini-map capture. Reminds me of the ginormous maps one could use in Civ III.
Here's a fabulous MS Paint rendition of a Civ III game on one of those huge maps I played back in the day:
Or maybe more to the style of this map generated from an epic game of Europa Universalis III:
The author of this Civ 6 map mod gives ample warning that your game may crash but he seemed to indicate that it was mainly due to some of the changes resulting from Gathering Storm so I dialed my game back to Rise and Fall to avoid the instability. Frankly, I prefer omitting Gathering Storm anyway since I absolutely hate natural disasters and global warming.
As you can probably figure out, I'm playing America. The only other Civ in the entirety of the Western Hemisphere are the Cree and I recently finished a war with them where I took half their empire which now makes up roughly the area of IRL the Pacific Northwest, Montana, Wyoming, and The Dakotas.
This mod is not only true start location but the dude who wrote this actually coded it so that wherever you plop a city the game picks the city name corresponding to that location in real life, but, named appropriate to the power that holds it. For instance, after I conquered one of the Indian named cities from the cree, something like Ochoboonee-wakana or whatever, it turned into Casper, as in Casper, Wyoming. Very cool! Likewise, for instance again, as you can see on the map, Greece, in light blue, has cities like Athens spelled out in ancient Greek like Athenos, and those cities it holds in North Africa are the Greek names for those cities which in real life are now, I guess, Arabic named cities in Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.
The other nice thing about Civ VI is the fact it works better with modern computers. Even a vanilla large or huge map in Civ V can really bog down and retard the graphics since the game can only use like one core of the CPU and I don't think it's optimized at all to take advantage of the multiple gigs of GPU ram on modern graphics cards like mine.
This mod states that it can accommodate up to 63 Civs! I chose only 16 for this run through since I wasn't sure if it would stay stable, but I mean the late game now just entered the atomic age and frankly there's no lag or hesitation at all, I think I'll shoot for something like that maximum number next game. And another thing I should have tweaked is the play speed. For this game I set it on the usual Online speed which is the fastest. For a big map like this, I think it works better to play in either Epic or Marathon since, as you can see, there are huge gaps all over the map. The way this game is progressing, I'll win it in a science victory way before all the land becomes occupied. Pretty unrealistic.
In any event, I'll likely be playing many more hours of VI for a while. Who knows, I may rival the near 7K of Civ V before VII comes out? Oh man, I hope not. My ass can't take sitting in this chair that many hours!