Here are two of the best things about PC gaming: the Civilization series, and the ability to change your games by adding in user-created content. Modding Civ 6, then, is an expression of the very apex of PC gaming. It’s peak PC.
Since the Civ 6 modding toolkit came out in February 2017, the number of mods on offer has been steadily expanding. Civ 6’s modding community isn’t yet at the level of its timeless predecessors, but modders have now created enough new leaders, gameplay tweaks and AI improvements for you to swing your caveman club at. There are over 1,400 Steam Workshop,in fact, so plenty of options for every budding ruthless/benevolent leader.
Need even more tactical joy? Try out one of the best strategy games on PC.
So we’ve congregated the best efforts of Civ 6 modders from both Steam Workshop and Civfanatics.com, into a long unravelling papyrus of a list. All of the mods here are compatible with the Rise & Fall expansion pack, so no matter how invested you are in Civ, all of these mods will work just right.
Steel & Thunder Unique Units/Units Expansion
Deliverator’s comprehensive mod (formerly known as MOAR units) diversifies and brightens up the game with plenty of new units. The mod adds one unique unit to every civilisation in the game (including DLC and Rise & Fall civs), as well as 11 new global units that slot into existing upgrade paths.
New global units include, among others, Gatling Gun, Longswordsman, RIfleman, Naval Cog and Galleass. Listed below, meanwhile, are some of our favourite unique Civ units:
– America – AH-64 Apache – Germany – Landsknecht – England – Ironside – Poland – Uhlan – Kongo – Medicine Man – Khmer – War Canoe
Steel and Thunder comes in two separate packs: Unit Expansion adds the global units, and Unique Units adds the civ-specific ones.
Civ 6 leader mods
JFD’s collection
The biggest collection of Civ 6 leaders belongs to long-time modder JFD, who’s created and crafted over 30 of the great leaders from history such as Philip II of Macedon, Elizabeth I and Louis XIV. For those wanting some villains to rally against (or play as), there are a few bad eggs in there too, including Hitler, Mussolini, Ivan the Terrible, and Mr. Omelettes-and-Eggs himself, Stalin.
Each new leader has a portrait that blends seamlessly with the bold, vibrant Civ 6 art style, and comes with their own unique units, traits and agendas. As you can guess, old Adolf’s ‘Liebensraum’ agenda makes things pretty feisty.
Head over to JFD’s Steam Workshop page to see his full leader collection.
Civ 6 conversion mods
Quo’s Combined Tweaks
Anyone who has spent some time on Civ 4 and Civ 5 forums will have heard of the great conversion projects like Rise of Mankind and Realism Invictus for Civ 6, or Vox Populi for Civ 5. These community-created mods spend years revamping the game rules, eventually creating a much deeper experience that borrows the best bits from across the series. Quo’s Combined Tweaks takes inspiration from those, revamping hundreds of rules to make for an interesting alternative to Firaxis’ vision.
There are way too many changes to list, but they include faster unit movement, more impactful governments and policies so you can really feel the difference between, say, Fascism and Democracy, and more powerful Wonders (which now steal tiles around them when built, and can be woo City States). Each civ now has several new unique traits too, making games a little more interesting and asymmetrical.
In a nutshell, it’s the most sweeping set of rule changes to Civ 6 available. Mod creator isau recommends using it with AI+, and says that it should be compatible with most unit, UI and map mods. You’ll need the Rise & Fall expansion for Quo’s Combined Tweaks to work.
Anno Domini
If you’ve always found Civ to be at its most compelling in the earlier eras, when mankind worshipped trees and thought the Earth was just a spinning plate on a giant celestial stick, then you’ll quickly settle into Anno Domini. Building on his experience of creating a similar mod for Civ 5, creator rob8xft mod sweeps us back to an old world of Germanic tribes, druidism, even way back to Minoan civilisations, and keeps us there with a bespoke tech tree that never goes beyond the classical era.
Anno Domini currently has 24 unique civilisations (though you can use some from the main game and JFD’s collection), as well as its own roster of policies and eras that zoom in on the ancient-classical period. It’s the most polished Civ 6 conversion mod to date.
R8XFT himself plays Anno Domini with Religion Expanded, which you’ll find further down this list.
Civ 6 map mods
Yet (not) Another Maps Pack
Gedemon’s YnAMP is the most feature-rich map pack for Civ 6. It contains a couple of variations on maps of Europe and Earth, as well as a script that generates Terra, a map split up into the historical Old and New Worlds.
Like in Civs of yore, you can create a game on Terra where all civs start in the Old World, then race to colonise the New World once they can build ships. This setup provides a welcome shift of pace just as a game can start to lull towards the middle stages, and really thrives in multiplayer when you know that all your rivals have their avaricious eyes on the land and plunder of the New World.
This modpack adds a wealth of options for tweaking maps before a new game, as well as Giant, Enormous and Ludicrous map sizes (the latter of which doubles as a stern benchmark tool for your PC’s RAM and CPU).
YnAMP also allocates civs with starting positions based on the kind of environments they were associated with in real life (coastal areas for naval civs, more arid climes for middle-eastern civs, and so on). This feature not only adds a touch of realism, but means that each civ’s starting location is likely to be better suited to their unique traits and buildings.
Civ 6 Religion mods
Religion Expanded
There have been quite a few attempts to improve upon the flawed religion system in Civ 6, not least of all when Firaxis figured that adding Warrior Monks into the game would spice things up a bit – which it didn’t. Instead, the best changes to religion in Civ 6 come from the community.
A good place to start is pokiehl’s Religion Expanded, which adds 43 new religious beliefs, seven new fully-modelled religious buildings, and raises the cap for number of religions in a game from 7 to 16 (on a Huge map). The increased cap means that there will not just be a few faiths battling it out for supremacy, but also smaller ones doing their own thing in far corners of the world.
Nq Mod Civ 6 Update
Tomatekh’s Historical Religions
You can combine Religion Expanded with Tomatekh’s Historical Religions, which adds tens of new religions and icons to the game – from strange sub-sects of Protestantism to Aboriginal Dreamtime beliefs. Every Civ in the game now has their preferred religions too, so AI will be drawn to the religions their civs are historically associated with.
Rule with Faith
Rule with Faith (RwF) is the work of JFD, who sees it as a continuation of his Rise to Power mod for Civ 5. That mod aimed to bring greater political and religious depth to the game, and RwF does the same, adding a new religious policy slot, 16 new policies and three new governments. It’s compatible with both Religion Expanded and Tomatekh’s Historical Religions.
Civ 6 tweaks
Smoother Difficulty
Making a challenging AI is tricky in strategy games, perhaps more so than in any other genre. Designers usually have to resort to giving the AI artificial bumps to resource production, and even free units, to give a savvy player a run for their money. Unfortunately, the way Civ 6 does this can mean certain death for the player before there’s anything they can physically do to stop it, as the AI swamps you with its five free Warriors (we’re not kidding – to see how much cheese drips from the AI on Deity difficulty, see our article on Civ 6 difficulties).
Fortunately, here’s RushSecond smoother difficulty with a solution. This mod removes most of the AI’s extra starting units, and instead dials up its resource generation bonuses. The result should be a smoother challenge on higher difficulties, with the AI keeping pace with you throughout the game despite its technical ineptitude, yet unable to stuff you in the first two dozen turns through an unfair unit advantage.
AI+
The biggest criticism players have of Civilization 6 is the AI, which has unfortunately taken a few steps back towards the stone age since Civ V (which wasn’t exactly space-age itself).
With Firaxis doing little to fix things on this front, modders have taken the AI burden on themselves. AI+ is the best of the lot, making the AI better at balancing their empire’s development with military size, as well as an improving their ability in wartime, as they’ll now send troops to the front lines more aggressively and be bolder in invading your cities in the late game.
Along with the more sweeping changes, there are small bits of fine-tuning like improved settler behaviour, increased reluctance to agree unfavourable peace terms, and tougher city-states that won’t so readily fall into the hands of expansionist civs.
PhotoKinetik Westeros
For those of you who didn’t take to Civ 6’s vibrant aesthetic, here’s [email protected]!n with a reshade mod. Inspired by the Game of Thrones opening sequence, it mutes Civ 6’s colours to give a cooler, more mature washed-out look, as you see above.
You can download PhotoKinetik Westeros here. Note that it has some more complicated installation instructions than most other mods on this list as it relies on ReShade, a separate post-processing application, to achieve its effects.
Quick Start
And so, like intrepid explorers circumnavigating the globe, we’re going to end our journey at the start. The start of the game, that is. If you’re tired of Civ 6’s multiple boot screens perennially reminding you who made the game and which GPU manufacturer it’s in bed with, you can skip it all with Quick Start. Now, if we could just find a way replicate this mod for every game in existence…
These are just a few of the thousands of Civ 6 mods available, which you can peruse yourself at Civ Fanatics, Steam Workshop and Nexus Mods. There are more outlandish ones out there – Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings spring to mind – but they missed the cut because they felt feature-thin and unfinished at the time of writing. The fact is that for now, the modding community is limited by not having access to the DLL source code. When that came out for Civ 4 and 5 (some two years after each game’s launch), the modding scenes really took off, as did big overhaul projects like A New Dawn and Vox Populi.
If that’s anything to go by, we should expect to see the DLL code for Civ 6 released soon-ish, and only then will we see the game’s modding potential unleashed. The best, we hope, is yet to come.
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Hello mate!
This is my first ever upload to DTube or to Steemit and hopefully it won't be my last! ;)
I really want to make this work.
In the past I have tried and failed on YouTube to make a channel work..
..It always bothered me that I couldn't do it because making people laugh and feel better is what I think I'm best at!
So.
As soon as I saw DTube I knew it was the place for me!
I LOVE the way people are not only rewarded for creating content but also for being a part of the wider community.
I recorded the video above, and the rest of the 7 part series, about 2 years ago and I'm still really proud of them. They took me bloody ages to make and sometimes I'll even watch them back myself for a little chuckle..
..maybe I shouldn't admit that to anyone.
I used to get annoyed when I was watching Civ 5 videos, and most other strategy games, because I would always get bored before the end of the game and I'd give up.
So I decided to make some of my own where I only showed the best bits.
And the above video is what I ended up with.
I know Civilization 5 isn't exactly a new game but the video is worth a watch, I promise.
I hope you like it and I hope it brightens up your day.
If you do like it let me know and I'll put the other 6 videos in the series up as soon as I can.
If you've read this far down the post then you're a legend and I love ya.
Much love.
Will
▶️ DTube ▶️ IPFS
Civilization 6 has had two expansions since 2016, and unsurprisingly that means it's a bigger and better game than it was at launch. Even if there are no more expansions in store for the future, that doesn't mean there's nothing new to check out. The modding community has pulled out all the stops tweaking graphics and gameplay, adding new civs and new units, and even improving the UI.
Here's our definitive list of the best mods for Civilization 6, updated to take 2019's Gathering Storm expansion into account.
Installing Civilization 6 mods
With the addition of Steam Workshop support, installing many mods is easy: simply subscribe to the mod on Steam. Steam will automatically download the mod, which can be enabled or disabled from the 'Additional Content' menu.
Mods that aren't on Workshop can be installed by creating a folder called ‘Mods’ in your Civilization 6 user directory: DocumentsMy GamesSid Meier's Civilization VI.
Extract mods to your new Mods folder (with each mod in its own subfolder) and then enable them from the ‘Additional Content’ menu in-game. Some mods may have extra steps, which I’ll describe in their individual entries.
If you want to make changes to Civ 6’s files yourself, the simplest way is to make direct changes to the files in Civilization 6’s install directory (after backing up the originals, of course). First, find Civ 6’s install folder. If you don't know where it is, you can right-click on the game in your Steam library and select Properties > Local Files > Browse Local Files. The default install location is Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonSid Meier’s Civilization 6. Identify the file you want to mess with, save a copy, and go for it—just don’t forget what you’ve changed.
For help with the more elegant and shareable approach—a mod which can be installed in the Mods folder and toggled in the menu—check out and Gedemon’s .
GRAPHICAL MODS
Environment Skin: Sid Meier's Civilization V
One common criticism of Civ 6 is that it’s a bit too bright and cartoonish, as compared to the more realistic look of previous games in the series. This mod, released by a Firaxis dev, strikes a really nice balance between this Civ’s visual style and that of its immediate predecessor. The saturation has been turned down and almost every basic tile type and decal has been altered in some way. It even adds new, more naturalistic models for ground clutter like trees. Pair this with something like the R.E.D. Modpack (above) to get rid of the Clash of Clans-looking armies and you’re in for a much more immersive, less board game-y feel.
Mappa Mundi
Gathering Storm added labels for major geographic features on the map, which was a really cool touch. But if you play a lot, you’ve probably seen the same ones over and over. Mappa Mundi can basically eliminate that problem forever, adding over 15,000 new names of real world rivers, deserts, mountains, and more. It’s also seamlessly compatible with a lot of the most popular mods that add new civs to the game, so your Taino or Icelandic empire can put their own linguistic stamp on the map.
R.E.D. Modpack
Gedemon brings us a Civ 6 version of one of our favorite Civ 5 mods. The R.E.D. Modpack rescales units to make them a little more like miniatures, a little less like cartoon giants stomping over the hills. Check out the mod's collection for versions that are compatible with all of Civ 6's expansions.
MAPS
Detailed Worlds
Graphics mods can make certain things look more realistic, but if you want the world layout itself to feel a bit less game-y, this is the mod for you. In addition to adding more coastal detail to replicate all those little coves, bays, and fjords we expect to see on a globe, it also makes the placement and size of deserts, rainforests, and marshes much more true-to-life. And if you’re all about that Nile Valley life, it improves food placement along rivers running through desert tiles as well. It comes with seven different map scripts, including Continents, Pangea, and Islands.
Yet Not Another Map Pack
Yet Not Another Map Pack is another map pack from well-known modder and bundler Gedemon. YNAMP for Civilization 6 includes Earth-shaped maps with the correct start locations for each culture. If you’re tired of playing a landlocked Norway, this is your chance to create a proper Viking empire. The pack also adds new, bigger map sizes (one of which is so big it might take five or so minutes to load).
When starting a game, you’ll have new map types and size options available. Head to the post on Civfanatics for more information on how to use YNAMP, as well as known bugs and issues.
GAMEPLAY MODS
Catastrophic Disaster Intensity
The highest disaster intensity in vanilla Civ 6 is called 'Hyperreal.' If that’s just not enough for you though, this mod let’s you crank it up to basically Just Plain Ridiculous. The description states that some kind of disaster will happen somewhere on the map just about every turn, and the severe versions are made more common. There is no longer any such thing as a dormant volcano. And in the late game, the number of coastal lowland tiles that can flood from climate change has been increased from the vanilla 33% all the way up to 75%. Mother Nature is coming for you and this time she’s not gonna play nice.
To Hell With The Devil: Religious units fight Rock Bands
This mod is so great we wrote an entire article about it. The premise is pretty simple: Rock Bands, Civ 6’s new, late game 'culture nukes,' can now engage in theological combat with religious units. For the pious, you can send apostles to keep these long-haired hooligans from corrupting the hearts and minds of your people. For the sacreligious, you can cast down the sanctimonious clerics of the Demiurge and make sure all the world gets to hear your tasty riffs and the good word of our Lord, Satan. This mod is so much fun that I have a hard time playing late game Civ 6 without it.
Zee's Fewer Trade Offers
The struggle of having to tell Victoria you’re not interested in her weird trade proposals constantly is real. This mod forces the AI to give it a rest once in a while, whether it’s pestering you for your gems or begging for their lives in a war. The AI cooldown for trade offers is increased from 10 turns to 50, peace offers in war from 3 turns to 10, and offers of friendship from 5 turns to 30. Maybe now you can finally enjoy some peace and quiet while you plot their ultimate demise.
Adjust starting units, techs, and more
While I was messing with Civ 6 to try to play a game , I found that all the player and AI starting conditions are stored in a file called Eras.xml. You’ll find it in the Civ 6 install directory, under BaseAssetsGameplayData.
Using what’s there as an example, it’s not hard to copy and paste to add starting units, or limit the AI’s unit bonuses on harder difficulties. Just make sure you backup Eras.xml before you start tinkering in case you want to revert to the defaults.
INTERFACE MODS
Better Trade Screen
The 'Repeat Route' checkbox alone makes Better Trade Screen worth it, but it brings lots of improvements, such as new sorting options to the Trade Overview screen. It's one of those quality of life improvement UI mods we'll keep checked forever.
Radial Measuring Tool
One of the most poorly-explained mechanics in Civ 6 is the fact that certain districts, like Industrial Zones, grant their benefits to all city-centers within six tiles. (I’ll pause for the gasps of everyone who has played hundreds of hours and still didn’t know that.) What makes it even more annoying is that there isn’t an easy way to figure out which cities are close enough—you have to count out tiles individually while bouncing your cursor along. At least, there wasn’t an easy way until now. Disable chrome's most visited pages thumbnails. This mod adds a tool that makes it very easy to quickly display the range of these effects so you never waste land on a redundant district again.
CIVIGraphs 2
If you love data visualization and miss the demographic graphs from previous Civs, you’re in luck. CIVIGraphs 2 adds a Civ 5-style demographics panel that lets you see info on things like army size and population for you and all of your rivals over time. Simple, lightweight, but very useful. TPS Report cover sheet not included.
Real Era Tracker
Rise and Fall brought us the concepts of Era Score, Golden Ages, and Dark Ages. But there was one glaring problem: You’re never really told what actions will give you Era Score. So until you memorize all of the mini-achievements that do so, it’s a lot of guesswork and hoping. It can be even harder to keep track of which world firsts are still available. But no more! This mod adds an objective list of ways to earn Era Score, and even lets you know which moments are no longer available once they’ve been claimed by another civ. This makes it much easier to stack up those Golden Ages and let the good times roll.
NEW CIVS
Durkle’s Anangu
Australia finally got some representation in Civ 6 after long being the only populated continent to never appear in the series, but they’re represented by the British colonizers that came along pretty recently. This mod adds an Aboriginal Australian civilization, the Anangu, under Tjilpi with two unique units, a unique tile improvement, and bonuses to setting up specialty districts in arid regions akin to their Outback home. They also benefit greatly from finding and building near natural wonders. If you own the Australia DLC, which the mod creator recommends, they will use Australia’s music tracks for added thematics.
CIVITAS Vlad III
Vlad the Impaler leads Romania in this appropriately bloody addition, and he’s all about causing chaos for his enemies. His unique unit is basically a crossbowman with the movement speed of a cavalry unit, which is already pretty crazy. But even more interesting is his unique ability that damages enemy units adjacent to a tile that’s being pillaged and sends out a wave of disloyalty to nearby cities when he captures a city, which can result in a chain revolt if you use it in the right place at the right time. You’ll need to download the Romania civ separately, which gives even more unique bonuses like a free technology for being on the winning side of an Emergency.
'A Song of Ice and Fire:' Rise and Fall of Usurper
This mod adds NINE(!) new civs based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, the basis of the television show Game of Thrones. These include Rhaegar Targaryen of the Crownlands, Eddard Stark of the North, Tywin Lannister of the Westerlands, Robert Baratheon of the Stormlands, Mace Tyrell of the Reach, Jon Arryn of the Vale, Hoster Tully of the Riverlands, Doran Martell of Dorne and Balon Greyjoy of the Iron Islands. Each have unique units and bonuses appropriate to the lore. And yes, of course, you can train dragons.
TOTAL CONVERSION MODS
Anno Domini
This is one of the most involved mods I’ve ever seen. It basically takes Civ 6’s gameplay and zooms way in on the Ancient and Classical eras 'from the Dawn of Time to the fall of Rome,' keeping the same game pace and roughly the same number of civics and technologies to unlock. This sharper focus allows Anno Domini to model things that would normally be outside the scope of a Civ game, including new Historical Moments and new government types.
Sounds cool already, but who can you play as, you might ask? Well, these beautiful, crazy bastards have gone way above and beyond to bring us THIRTY distinct leaders (some being alternates for the same civ), including Ashurbanipal of Assyria, Sargon of Akkad, Hannibal of Carthage, Hatshepsut of Egypt, Arminius of Germania, Boudica of the Iceni, Zenobia of Palmyra, Leonidas of Sparta, Helen and Hector of Troy, four new Roman emperors, and reworked versions of some vanilla favorites like Pericles, Qin Shi Huang, and Chandragupta.
Posted by10 months ago
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Hello again,
I’ve spent some time working on the religion changes for my mod and ended up making a bunch of other changes too. There is now a new version available, and the changelist is here too (I cannot be bothered to format the Docs document into Reddit post so I’ll just share a link for the changelist):
Install it by extracting the folder to your Civilization 5 DLC folder, and remember to REMOVE previous versions of the mods (usually named NQmod/MP_MODSPACK). Follow Fruity’s instructions for installing v12.4 if you have any issues, it follows the same procedure.
I was in contact with Fruitstrike again and we talked about the name of the mod, and while he recommended I keep it as NQmod (I feel like he would be happy to “pass on the torch” for someone new), I have decided against it. I want to try out new things and have fun with changes, and while I’ll try my best to not create anything too crazy, my first priority is not doing changes for game balance - it’s because they’ll make the game more fun to play for me. So if you only want minor balance changes, I’m sorry to say that this probably not the mod for you. Everyone's welcome to play it and give feedback, but this mod started out as my own pet project, and I want to keep it that way.
I also don’t want to hijack the Reddit page, as it should really stay as a place where people can discuss the currently mostly played mod or meta or whatever, not as a place for me to promote my own stuff. So my next priority is gonna be writing some Google Docs pages, such as a cumulative changelist and so forth. I’ll make a short post here when those are ready, and after that I’ll be keeping my stuff on those Google Docs. And while HellBlazer made a stickied post about my v13.0 being the latest version of NQmod (thanks for that), I think in the future the stickied post should maybe contain links to the newest versions of all the mods that are based on NQmod (so mine, lek’s, and last Fruity’s one v12.4)? The documentation and download link to Lek’s stuff should be stickied somewhere at least, since those are a bit difficult to find if you don’t know where to look.
I’m fairly happy with this version myself so far, I’ve included pretty much all changes and tweaks that I can do by “surface level” modding (XML, LUA, and minor .dll tweaking), without having to create new columns and/or tables to the .dll. Which is something I’m not sure actually ever even want to be doing, because Firaxis’ code is sometimes complete spaghetti, it’s quite a lot of work, and I don’t want to turn into a person who only mods the game but never plays it - last month or so I’ve only booted up Civ5 for the purpose of testing something. So don’t expect any bigger changes like this anymore. That said there are couple of smaller things I still want to change and I do have some bigger ideas on what I might want to do with the mod in the future, but that would be in a long long time from now.