Corner Stone: Civilization VI on How Societies Are Made

When you start a new game of Firaxis's strategy epic, it doesn't open on your first city or by asking you where you'd like to screw your capital into the bedrock. It parts its curtains on a mobile unit, the Settler, which you can consume to found your first human village. Why do the designers have us use a unit to raise our Munich or Babylon rather than simply clicking a tile on the map? We could explain it through appeals to examination and autonomy. A mob takes turns to move, and if they wander too far from the spawn point, they may meet an untimely end by Barbarian. So, by founding our capital through an agent rather than plonking it down with the hand of God, there is a risk-reward dynamic. The more we fine-tune our starting location, the less of a head start we get on the other players, and the closer we come to a "game over".

Yet, there is not a single feature that exists in Civ purely for the sake of affectation or friction. Every event, discovery, and conflict has us walking in the footsteps of the societies that came before us. You don't just paint a space to lacquer your lands with +2 appeal; you build the Eiffel Tower. The Replaceable Parts Technology gives bonuses to farms not just because you need a greater profusion of resources for the late game but also because when humans invented Replaceable Parts, the mechanisation of industry made farms more bounteous. We don't have to strain ourselves to find a factual basis for the nomadic Settler unit.

The Origins of Civilisation

Everyone knows that before people lived in settlements, we were hunter-gatherers. Still, with our civilised, locationally-fixed lifestyles, it's scarcely possible to imagine how transient prehistoric life was. If you eat by scouring your surroundings for food, once you've expended all edible material in an area, you must move on to another. That consumption might take less time that you're imagining because only a small percentage of plant and fungus matter is digestible to us. We can't eat bark or most grass, for example, and many of the plants we eat now, we generically engineered after the dawn of civilisation.

It was probably around 12,000 years ago we planted the first crops. Likely triggers include the human brain evolving its cognitive abilities and the end of the ice age.^[1] Agriculture forced tribes to settle because you can't wander the jungles or plains and take the farm with you. The domestication of plants and animals produced more food for less labour than plucking berries and slaughtering wildlife.^[2][3] That meant that: A. You could nourish more people, growing the population, and B. You could acquire enough food to feed the people without everyone being employed in keeping bellies full.^[2][4] Freed from fulfilling the dietary needs of their tribe, homo sapiens could take on other work.^[2][5] They could be artists, teachers, soldiers, or writers.

It's not that there was no education, combat, or art before the village, but these could not be dedicated professions because of the amount of time and energy people had to expend to secure their survival. The combination of static residence and dedicated labour also allowed for the construction of fixed buildings and other permanent structures.^[2] So, pyramids, mass-distributed novels, leaders, the grand stuff that makes Civilization's mouth water, not only arose within civilisations, but could only emerge from them. This is why Civ games start with the Settler and not the city. Everything under Civ's sun is made possible with the end of nomadism, with humanity's lurch from the mobile to the static.

The line between hunter-gatherers and agrarian society is not as clear-cut as Sid Meier would have you believe, however. Humans didn't discover farming and immediately have the skill and capacity to feed their whole settlement. Instead, they slowly tip-toed towards that abundance while supplementing their cultivation with hunter-gathering.^[6] You can live out that behaviour for yourself in Amplitude's 2021 Civ-like, Mankind. While we're debunking, you should know:

• Not all sedentary people became farmers.^[3]
• There are societies that have reduced the share of food they collect through agriculture and tilted back towards hunter-gathering as their food economy demanded.
• Hunter-gathering never entirely ended and there are still hunter-gatherers today.^[6]

But whatever. The nourishing power of the food surplus is still apparent in Civ's early game. Civ matches are split into "eras", and the first, The Ancient Era, is the one in which players are most concerned about setting up farms to produce food. Food lets us establish the population to get art, academia, and standing armies rolling, all of which will be indispensable in the coming millennia. Without art, there is no social progress. Without academia, there is no Technology. Without standing armies, we go woefully undefended and unable to make violent acquisitions.

Geographic Determinism

As an exercise in systemising and gamifying history, Civilization has to opine on why societies take the paths they do. What causes one people to rear great warriors and another to be better known for their sculptors? Why does one kingdom rise while another falls? For Civ, there's no one source of heat or pressure which forms a country or clan, but the geographic surroundings of settlements are up there. Anthropologists call the idea that environments shape peoples "geographic determinism", although some versions of it still allow for free will.

At the simpler end, Civ systemises geographic determinism by having cities founded near silkworm nests able to become rich in fine cloth. The populations of villages with their banks on rivers swell due to the freshwater irrigating their crops, much as it did for many real early states.^[5] The most famous examples of civilisations with liquid diets were the Mesopotamians. They grew at the confluence of the Tigres and Euphrates rivers, their thirsty plantations gulping from the waters of Southwest Asia.

The more time passes in a single Civ game, the more synapses at which leaders' decisions and the planetary layout can fire into each other. Seemingly unconnected geographical and strategic features early in the timeline can exert concerted pushes on the later characteristics of civilisations. For example, finding and taming horses in the ancient world could be the key to dominating rifling in the late Renaissance. Sound unlikely? Well, once a people is keeping horses, they can mount cavalry, which can travel the map faster than unmounted explorers. This could allow them to prospect a wide area for nitre deposits. Nitre (potassium nitrate) was a key component of the earliest gunpowders. So, the civlisation becomes a machine that turns horses into rifles.

Here's another initially inexplicable reaction: Founding one early city next to a mountain and another by the sea, as well as being trade-minded, could promote Hinduism in your country. Placing a campus by a mountain gives a bonus to the science that school produces. Presumably, this is because the elevation of mountains lends astronomers an opportune view of the night sky. You can ride the wave of that research boost to attain the Astronomy Technology and then its child node, Celestial Navigation. If you have one or more cities on the coast, you're then in a prime position to launch a fleet of ships with that navigation knowledge: feelers probing for undiscovered civilisations.

Discovering neighbours brings more opportunities for trade, and one of Civ's sharpest historical insights is that trade hasn't only been an exchange of possessions. It's also been a point of insertion for new inventions and ideologies. International trade routes can give us science and culture bonuses, but they can also be the intake for a religion. Therefore, having a city by a mountain and another by the sea could be the start of converting your citizens to Hinduism.

Technologies and Civics

There is a stark difference between how Civ imagines religions spread and how it sees technologies and ideas doing so. If there is more support for Protestantism in Atzcapotzalco than there is for Taoism in Melbourne and Melbourne begins trading with Atzcapotzalco, Melbourne doesn't just import "religion" as a broad concept; it feels pressure to convert to Protestantism specifically. But let's say that the Aztecs invented masonry and sent traders to Melbourne. In Civ, this relationship would not ship masonry to the Australians, only an undifferentiated "Science" resource.

This means that France could not have yet invented the wheel, trade with China, and somehow, China could create the wheel on the back of trading with them. Civ thinks with board game logic; it has some tokens and figurines to represent the cargo of history, but not enough that you're meant to take it literally. However, even with a little skeuomorphic license, some phenomena in Civ are inexplicable, like our China spontaneously manifesting the wheel.

If we're discussing Tech trees, we should also discuss the other abilities unlocked through trees: Civics. Most historical strategy games have a bias towards understanding history as a set of objects and events and ignorantly discount the influence of ideas and ideology. In its Civics system, Civilization VI dodges that bullet, and I can only give the game a big sloppy kiss for its acknowledgement of art and media as motivating sociopolitical changes.

We tap theatres, studios, museums, and the works exhibited in them for Culture points, and Culture points buy Civics. Where Civilization V had us select a form of Government through stubby upgrade plants, in the sequel, we instantiate a model of Government with certain slots and then place "Policy Cards" into those slots. These Governments and Policy Cards are unlocked when we research Civics. For example, we might discover the Political Philosophy Civic, which unlocks the Autocracy, Oligarchy, and Classical Republic Governments. If we become a Classical Republic, we will be able to set two Economic Policies, one Diplomatic Policy, and one other Policy of any type. If, instead, we become an Autocracy, we get one Military Policy slot, one Economic, one Diplomatic, and one Wildcard.

A sample Economic Policy Card would read like Serfdom. Builders can usually only construct three different "improvements" on tiles (e.g. Farms or Mines) before they are expended. With Serfdom, they can construct up to five. Diplomatic Policies include Machiavellianism, which reduces the levels of Spies operating in your lands by two, and means your Spies act as if they were one level higher during offensive operations. The base game has 103 Policy Cards.

With its Civics and Policy systems, Civilization VI theorises how societies come to be governed according to set conventions. Cultural maturation sprouts ideologies and governmental policies are applied ideologies. But again, Civ's thrashing between the abstracted and specific leads to not just a simplification of history but a misrepresentation of it. Because of this chain of influence: Artifact/Great Work → Culture Points → Civic, you can procure the Shroud of Turin to institute Oligarchy or have Miguel Cervantes contribute to the concept of Diplomatic Service. I hope I speak for us all when I say, "Buh?"

For the sake of keeping its economics manageable, Civ also doesn't have most material constructs require tangible resources, just a few special picks. You need Aluminium to manufacture Fighter Jets, but you don't have to collect oils or pigments for your Artists to paint Portraits. Coal Power Plants require, well, Coal, but you don't need to chop wood or mix concrete to open a harbour. If you did need oils for paintings or concrete for harbours, you could see with even more pronouncement how the natural resources around a peoples' point of origin, and their relation to them, would affect the output and trajectory of their society.

The Dark Side of Geographic Determinism

I'm being careful to mention the agency of societies in cultivating, extracting, and applying the resources in their vicinity. I'm taking those precautions because I don't want to end up wearing the dunce cap of pure determinism. While geographic determinism might sound incontrovertible and harmless, the narrative found purchase during the late 19th century as an exculpation of the European colonial expansion that started in the 16th century. Although the concept festered as far back as far as the Ancient Greeks.^[7][8] Popular formulations of the theory stated that Europeans had assiduity beaten into them by the harsh cold of the north, while non-white people who lived in balmy climates had been rendered bone lazy by heat or that the ease of procuring food in hot climates led to indolent lifestyles. By its believers' reckoning, it explained why white Europe was a more developed and culturally esteemed region than, for example, the Americas or Africa.^[7][9][10]

This salve for conqueror egos doesn't survive logical analysis, let alone make it to the empirical stage. If we conclude that climates in which you must endure hardship motivate hard work, then wouldn't non-white people in tropical locations people be spurred to brilliance through the battle against the heat? What about people who flourish even in the barrenness of the desert? As the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture points out, (content warning: racist imagery) white people made black people work from sunrise to sunset in the sweltering heat and yet stereotyped their race as shiftless.

If we conclude that the absence of suppressive geographic factors is a plus, then shouldn't the best of humanity be found among the rapid growth of jungles and the well-irrigated islands? Geographic determinism also doesn't stop to consider that, as Europeans adapted to their environment, Africans, Americans, Aboriginals, or Arabs could have done the same. Here, the Europeans project their own experiences of climate onto all people: "It would be hard for me to get anything done near the equator, so it must be hard for everyone".

What you end up with is a conception of anthropology that says the civilisations that pioneered writing, construction, calendars, and mathematics can't get off their asses and get any work done. It looks for the washouts of history and absurdly lands on the Ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Indians. There's a tendency for white people like me to see racist speech as an advanced kind of rudeness, but this climate determinism, like all racist speech, was also an ancilla for violence against the marginalised.^[8][11][12] It said that the destitution of the colonised was environmental destiny rather than blood on the hands of the colonisers.

Today, non-white people continue to be stereotyped as lazy, and ignorance of the accomplishments of non-Europeans persists. There are even historians currently writing who have been accused of preaching strict environmental determinism. They are the men who write that the planet itself is an immense or even absolute determinant on the prosperity of people. They include Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel; Ian Morris of Why the West Rules - For Now fame; Tim Marshall, who wrote Prisoners of Geography.^[11][13]

There are debates to be had about the extent to which the criticism of any of these men hits its target, and the conversation about geographic factors in history does not end on this page. However, you should understand why environmental determinism has baggage. A complete rejection of land features as factors in shaping nations and tribes is impossible. You can't have, for example, a landlocked seafaring people or a bronze age in a society without access to copper mines. Nonetheless, to ignore culture and will is only to tell half the human story and forget that we have the option to reject colonial conquest.

Autonomy

Civilization VI does simmer with colonial biases, but for what it's worth, it walks the line tremendously between discarding geographic explanations for societal developments and completely surrendering to them. Deterministically, you have the indelible layout and geographic features of your map, but these are butressed by the autonomy inherent in our command of our servants, the forks we take in the Civics and Tech trees, and by the complex game of policycraft. If Civilization were a film, play, or novel, it would be a creature of determinism, only able to print the same story on each read. Instead, this grand strategy harnesses the unique interactivity of games to both give the colonised free will and show that colonisers made a choice in their politics. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Neolithic Revolution by History.com Editors (October 4, 2023), HISTORY.
2. Civilization by Joshua J. Mark (August 16, 2022), World History Encyclopedia.
3. Owen, B. (2009). Agriculture and sedentism in theory. Sonoma State University.
4. How agriculture and domestication began by Encyclopedia Britannica Editors (September 15, 2024), Britannica.
5. OIS 13. Irrigation in Early States: New Directions by Rost, S. et al. (2022), Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures.
6. Hunter-Gatherer Culture by National Geographic Society (February 9, 2024), National Geographic.
7. What is Environmental Determinism? by Amanda Briney (September 13, 2024), ThoughtCo.
8. Western Colonialism by Encyclopedia Britannica Editors (September 6, 2024), Britannica.
9. Chowdhury, R.R. (2021). Climatic Determinism and the Conceptualization of the Tropics in British India. Climate Science.
10. Harris, M. (2005). Nature Makes them Lazy: Contested Perceptions of Place and Knowledge in the Lower Amazon Floodplain of Brazil. Conservation & Society vol. 3, no. 2 (p. 468).
11. Environmental determinism: Does climate control our destiny? by David Correia (January 24, 2013), Climate & Capitalism.
12. Peet, R. (1985). The Social Origins of Environmental Determinism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers vol. 75, no. 3 (p. 309-333).
13. Correia, D. (2013). F**k Jared Diamond. Capitalism Nautre Socialism vol. 24, issue 4 (p. 1-6).

All others sources linked at relevant points in article.