Fortune and misfortune have always been the weavers of destiny, shaping the rise and fall of empires with a timely rain or a sudden plague. The Civilization series brilliantly captures this, masterfully intertwining our skill with the fickle hand of fate. I’ve learned that if you want to win consistently, taming the element of luck is the cornerstone of victory. While you can’t control every roll of the dice, you can learn to load them in your favor.
Here, I’m going to break down the many forms of randomness you’ll face, from your first crucial steps to the final clashes of armies. I’ll share the strategies that help turn unpredictable variables into calculated risks, making sure your skill—not chance—decides the game. It’s time to stop just playing the hand you’re dealt and start building the whole deck.
The Primordial Lottery: Mastering Your Starting Location
Your starting location is the most significant dice roll in any Civilization game. It’s the foundation of your entire empire, influencing everything from early-game production to your strategic options. A great start can catapult you ahead, while a barren one can feel like an insurmountable handicap. True mastery, however, is about seeing the potential in any start and adapting.
Reading the Land: The First Ten Turns
Those first ten turns are a frantic dance of discovery. Your warrior and settler aren’t just units; they’re your eyes and hands, shaping your empire before a city is even founded.
- Scan Immediately: Before moving anyone, analyze the tiles around your settler. Look for fresh water (rivers, lakes, coast) for that crucial housing. Find high-yield tiles—you need food for growth and production for building. A 2-food, 2-production tile is a solid start. Hills are fantastic for early production, which is often a bottleneck.
- The “Don’t Settle on Turn One” Gambit: It’s tempting to settle right away, but it’s not always the best move. Taking a turn or two to find a better spot can pay off for the entire game. A better location might have a luxury resource, a natural wonder, or just much better yields. You have to weigh the delay against the long-term prize.
- Scout Intelligently: Your warrior needs a methodical path. Don’t just wander. A spiral pattern out from your start is a reliable way to reveal the map. Get on hills for better line of sight. Your goal is to find choke points for defense, spots for future cities, and where your rivals are.
Decoding Starting Bias
Many civilizations have a “starting bias,” a hidden mechanic that makes them more likely to start near certain terrain. Russia is biased towards tundra, Egypt towards floodplains. You have to understand these biases to play as or against specific leaders.
- Leverage Your Bias: If you’re playing a civ with a known bias, lean into it. As Russia, you should beeline for a religion to leverage the Lavra’s synergy with tundra. As Indonesia, you should be looking to settle coastal cities to take advantage of your unique abilities.
- Anticipate Opponent Biases: Knowing your opponents’ biases is a huge strategic advantage. If you’re up against Montezuma, who is biased towards luxuries, you can expect him to be an early-game economic powerhouse and a potential threat. This lets you adjust your strategy preemptively, maybe by building up your military or seeking defensive alliances.
The Art of the Reroll
Sometimes, the game just deals you a terrible hand. A start with no fresh water, surrounded by flat desert or jungle, can be a death sentence. When that happens, don’t be afraid to reroll. Your time is valuable. Spending hours trying to salvage an unwinnable start is just frustrating. A quick reroll can get you into a much more engaging game. Just decide what an “unwinnable” start looks like to you and stick to it.
Tribal Villages: From Goody Huts to Strategic Assets
Tribal villages, or “goody huts,” are another big piece of early-game luck. The rewards can be anything from a game-changing free settler to a useless map fragment. You can’t control what’s inside, but you can maximize your chances of finding them and strategically use their rewards.
The Science of Goody Hut Rewards
Goody hut rewards aren’t completely random. They’re influenced by the game era and sometimes by how many huts you’ve already popped. Knowing the odds helps you make better decisions.
- Common Rewards: You’ll most often get a bit of gold or faith, a scout, or a technology boost. These might seem small, but they can give you a crucial early edge. A timely bit of gold can let you buy a builder, while a free scout doubles your exploration.
- Game-Changing Jackpots: The rarer, high-impact rewards include a free population in your capital, a relic, or even a settler. Getting a free settler in the first 20 turns is one of the most powerful boosts possible, effectively doubling your city-founding speed.
- Strategic Popping: The timing of when you pop a hut can be strategic. For instance, if you’re about to finish researching a technology, you might wait to pop a nearby hut, hoping for a boost for a more advanced tech.
The Race for the Huts
Given the potential rewards, you should make a real effort to claim as many tribal villages as you can early on.
- Prioritize Exploration: Your first scout (and any others you get) has one main job: explore the map and pop goody huts. Don’t get sidetracked by minor barbarian fights unless you have to.
- Use Your Warrior Wisely: Your warrior is key for defense, but it can also pop huts that are in safe locations near your capital.
- Deny Your Opponents: Popping a goody hut isn’t just about what you gain; it’s about what your opponents lose. If you see an enemy scout heading for a hut and you can safely intercept it, do it.
Natural Wonders: From Pretty Pictures to Power Plays
Natural wonders are unique map features with huge bonuses. Finding a powerful one early in the game can completely change your strategy.
The Tiers of Wonder
Not all natural wonders are created equal. Some give modest yields, while others have game-breaking bonuses. You need to know the difference to assess their value.
- Top-Tier Wonders: Wonders like Pamukkale, Torres del Paine, and Paititi offer amazing, versatile yields of food, production, gold, and culture or science. Settling near one of these should be your top priority.
- Mid-Tier Wonders: Wonders like the Matterhorn or Yosemite give strong, but more situational, bonuses. The Matterhorn’s combat bonus is great for aggressive play, while Yosemite’s science and gold are a solid boost for any victory type.
- Niche Wonders: Some wonders, like the Eye of the Sahara, are more specialized. The science and production bonus is nice, but it really needs a desert start to be effective.
Capitalizing on Your Discovery
Just finding a natural wonder isn’t enough; you have to actively use its bonuses to get a lasting advantage.
- Settle, Settle, Settle: If you find a top-tier wonder, your first priority is to settle a city that can work its tiles. This might mean changing your original settlement plan, but the long-term benefits will almost always be worth it.
- Synergize with Your Strategy: The bonuses from a wonder should shape your overall strategy. If you spawn near the Great Barrier Reef with its high science yields, you should lean into a scientific victory. If you find the Cliffs of Dover, with its culture and gold, a cultural or diplomatic victory becomes more appealing.
- Denial as a Strategy: In a multiplayer game, finding a wonder near an opponent creates a tough choice. Do you try to settle it yourself and risk an early war, or just accept that your opponent gets the advantage? Sometimes, the best move is to forward-settle your opponent to deny them the wonder, even if your new city isn’t in a perfect spot. It’s an aggressive, but sometimes necessary, tactic.
The Barbarian Menace: Taming the Unruly Hordes
Barbarians are a constant source of early-game pressure. A poorly timed barbarian rush can cripple your expansion and leave you vulnerable. With the right approach, however, you can manage and even exploit them.
Understanding Barbarian Mechanics
To beat the barbarians, you have to know how they work. In Civilization VI, they’re smarter than in past games.
- The Scout and the Camp: It all starts with a barbarian scout. If that scout sees one of your cities and gets back to its camp (you’ll see a red exclamation mark over its head), the camp will start pumping out units to attack you.
- The Key to Prevention: The best way to deal with barbarians is to stop their scouts from getting home. That means actively hunting them down with your own units. Kill the scout before it reaches its camp, and you’ll prevent a full-scale invasion.
- Camp Spawning: Barbarian camps will appear on any tile that isn’t in the line of sight of a civilized unit. This means that as you explore the map, you’re also preventing camps from spawning in those areas.
From Menace to Opportunity
While barbarians are a threat, they also offer a few opportunities for a smart player.
- Early Promotions: Fighting barbarians is the main way to get early promotions for your military units. A well-promoted warrior or archer is a huge asset in an early war with a rival.
- Era Score: Clearing barbarian camps and killing their units can give you valuable Era Score, helping you get a Golden Age and avoid a Dark Age.
- Farming Barbarians (An Advanced Tactic): Sometimes, it can be better to “farm” barbarians instead of destroying their camp right away. By positioning your units to kill the barbarians as they spawn, you can get a steady flow of experience and Era Score. This is a high-risk, high-reward strategy that requires careful military control.
The RNG of War: Mitigating Combat Randomness
Even the best-laid military plans can be ruined by a few unlucky combat rolls. While there will always be some randomness in combat, you can do a lot to stack the odds in your favor and minimize the impact of bad luck.
The Math of Murder
Understanding the combat mechanics is the first step to mastering them. The outcome is determined by the combat strength of the units, plus various modifiers for terrain, promotions, and unit types.
- Combat Strength Differentials: The bigger the difference in combat strength between two units, the more predictable the battle. You should always try to start fights where you have a big combat strength advantage.
- Key Modifiers: Pay close attention to combat modifiers. Attacking across a river, into hills, or against a fortified unit gives your opponent big defensive bonuses. You should always try to use these modifiers for your own units.
- The Power of Flanking and Support: Surrounding an enemy with multiple units gives you a flanking bonus, increasing your damage. Some units also give support bonuses to adjacent friendly units. Positioning your units to maximize these bonuses is the mark of a skilled commander.
Strategies for Predictable Warfare
- Overwhelming Force: The easiest way to reduce combat randomness is to attack with overwhelming force. Don’t send one warrior to do a job that needs two or three. By concentrating your forces, you can ensure that even with a few unlucky rolls, you’ll still win.
- Focus Fire: When fighting multiple enemy units, it’s almost always better to focus your fire on one target until it’s destroyed. A badly damaged enemy unit still deals full damage, so taking them out one by one is more effective than spreading your damage around.
- The Art of the Retreat: Knowing when to retreat is just as important as knowing when to attack. If a unit is badly damaged, pull it back from the front lines to heal. A living unit, even at low health, is always better than a dead one.
In the grand strategy of Civilization, luck is a current in the river of time. The unskilled player is tossed about by its unpredictable whims, while the master strategist builds a dam of preparation and channels the flow to their advantage. By mastering your starting location, strategically pursuing tribal villages, capitalizing on natural wonders, taming the barbarian hordes, and mitigating the randomness of combat, you elevate your play from a game of chance to a contest of skill. The dice will always roll, but with foresight and adaptability, you can ensure they almost always roll in your favor. True victory in Civilization is not about being lucky; it’s about making your own luck.