TL;DR – Today we chart out Civilization VI in Map form the base game all the way up to the South East Asia DLC

Map-It –

So today we continue with our Map-It series by looking at one of my favourite video games Civilization VI. Given the amount of content that Civilization VI has that you can map, and since I do love maps I decided to create two maps, the first map has all the civilizations currently released, and the second shows the locations of all the World Wonders, Natural Wonders, and the City States. So for today’s maps, we are including everything in the base game of Civilization VI, as well as what was include in the Poland, Viking, Australia, Persia/Macedonia & Nubia DLC packs

Civilization Map

Click Here For Full Sized Map

Now when putting this map together there were a number of considerations I had to make when determining what to add and what to leave off, and how to present it because it was not as easy as I thought it would be. The first issue I came across was given some of these empires have had wildly different shapes and territories throughout their lives, what point should I use to represent the empires? To rectify this I decided to use the in-game leaders as my guide, so I used the death of the Civilization’s leader for Monarchies, or when they left office for Democracies as the baseline. Now while this was helpful it does lead to some peculiarities like having say a smaller China that you would normally expect, and why France does not have a colonial empire, as they were just starting to set up trading posts during this time.

Now even with this guide, there were a number of issues to rectify, for example, do I include all the territorial positions or just the core territories? Here I decided when something was clearly labelled a territory or a colony I used a lighter shade of colour to differentiate it. The colours themselves were taken from their in-game counterparts where possible, but some have been changed to avoid a clash. There were some other judgement calls I had to make, I decided not to add Canada and Australia to England’s territory as they were Dominions at the time, nor did I add Portugal’s territory to Spain as it was only a short-lived union, and I expect Portugal to be its own civ at some point, also I chose to use the wider interpretation of the Scythians people, as Firaxis had picked an eastern capital rather than the more traditional more western core. As well as this, the reference maps for some of the civilizations were wildly different for example, the territories for Spain in North America, the shape of the Poland, the extent of the Kongo Kingdom, so I took the middle ground option where available, Ollie Bye’s History of the World, was a handy guide here when there were conflicting data points.

The one thing we do see is the massive overlap in and around Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. There are so many overlapping empires in this area that poor Macedonia is mostly lines, but that was the only way to get them all on it. Also, it shows there are still a lot of gaps on the map waiting to be filled in.

South East Asia Update: with the update we have added Indonesia and Khmer to the map, as well as, added Angkor Wat, Ha Long Bay and changed Jakarta to Bandar Brunei. With the update, we also to a bit of time to make some changes to the original map thanks to feedback from R/Civ and Civfanatics. As well as just some general tidying up of some of the borders, I have updated Norway, Spain, and Brazil’s boundaries. Also, when making the original map I added a distinction between core territories and tributaries/colonies. However, as the map grew it became clear that this was just added confusion, so they have been removed.

Also if you want to see all the individual cities for each Civilization you can see that HERE.

You might be just lines, but we still love you Macedon, well until you arrive on our boarders with a Calvary charge.

Wonder/City State Map

Click Here For Full Sized Map

One of the things Civilization excels at is making you feel like you are playing in the world even when most people are not playing on the world map or even TSL (True Starting Locations), and how they do that is yes the civilizations, but also the City States, Natural Wonders, and World Wonders that we see throughout the game. Now while there is still the same issue with the concentration of wonders in and around Europe and the Middle East, especially England, but we actually get to see a much larger spread across the world with this map. However, there does seem to be some large gaps in an around the world especially in Africa and South East Asia that I hope will get filled with upcoming DLCs or the inevitable expansion pack *Editor’s Note: They were*. Now, this map was in some respects much easier to put together because there was very little overlap issues to deal with, bar England which took some creative positioning to fit everything in.

One thing that is interesting is that right from the start alongside such staples as the Pyramids, Colossus, and Hanging Gardens that have been in the game since Civilization I* we have ten Wonders that have never featured in a Civilization game before, like the Apadana, and the Potala Palace. However, there are a couple of mainstays still missing like The Statue of Liberty, and The Globe Theatre, but like the rest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient world, I expect we will be seeing them soon. However, I do hope they continue this drive to show use new wonders from the world that we haven’t seen before, like *shameless plug* The Dish *shameless plug*.

With the Natural Wonders, it was great to see a much wider spread of wonders from around the world, it’s also good to see more varied types of Natural Wonders that the mountain heavy Civilization V. Also the detail in these wonders are breathtaking, from the smoke coming out of Eyjafjallajökull, to Nemo and Dory being in the Great Barrier Reef, there are so many beautiful little features. Though it does feel like there is a bit of an imbalance between the Wonders that give out bonuses to the tiles they are on and the Wonders that give bonuses to tiles surrounding them, also to be nit-picky, because I can be nit-picky, it made sense for the Great Barrier Reef to be two tiles in Civilization V because everything else was only one tile, but now most of the Natural Wonders are above one tile, it just feels that the two tile GBR is a bit too small.

So there we have it, Civilization VI mapped out, now as Civilization is an ongoing entity that keeps getting bigger and bigger we will be periodically coming back and updating our map so look forward to it expanding over time.

* There have been only six wonders that have been in every game of Civilization: The Colossus, The Great Library, The Great Lighthouse, The Hanging Gardens, The Oracle, and The Pyramids. As well as this, the Colosseum has appeared in every game, but only appears as a Wonder for the first time in Civilization VI, on the flip side both the Sistine Chapel and The Great Wall which have been wonders since the start, and both do appear in Civilization VI but not as World Wonders but instead as a Great Work and a Civilization Improvement respectively.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you seen any odd maps in Movies, TV or Video Games?, let us know in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day.

Credits – The World Map that we used was created by ‘San Jose’ which is shared with a Creative Commons Licence, The World Wonder and Natural Wonders images were created by Firaxis Games

Lead Designer – Ed Beach
Lead Engineer – Ken Grey
Producers – Dennis Shirk & Sarah Darney
Art Director – Brian Busatti
Music – Geoff Knorr,  Phill Boucher, Roland Rizzo & Christopher Tin
Developer – Firaxis Games
Publisher – 2K

Disclosure – I am a moderator on the site Civfanatics of which several staff and players are members of the ‘Frankenstein Testing Group’, Firaxis Games internal playtesting team. I am not part of this team nor do I have any links with Firaxis Games or 2K.