It’s basically a Civ toy box: you can spill out features like assassinations, bribe missions, breakaway states, barbarians turning into fully-fledged civilisations, you name it, then smash them all together and throw yourself into the chaos that ensues. Really though, those modders were just being modest, because there’s so much more on offer here.Ī New Dawn is brimming with new and overhauled leaders, techs, rules, AI and buildings, but what’s really fascinating is the mindblowing number of tweaks you can toggle for each game you play.

Work on A New Dawn began in 2009, when it was billed as “a new expansion” to Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword. Note that you’ll need the full versions of the given Civ game to run these. So instead of grafting away at a Civ game that feels too comfortable and sanitised, I sought out three of the biggest community mod projects for previous Civ titles that, in their own ways, make the stone-space-age journey compelling again, layering the game with systems and mechanics that really try to capture some of the drama of humankind’s evolution.

I want all these things colliding, systemically creating those mad moments that tilt the axis of history (like that bloke who shot Franz Ferdinand while buying a sandwich). I want revolutions and uprisings, fraught diplomacy and assassinations, corporations and insidious neo-colonialism. I don’t want passive point systems posing as Dark/Golden Ages, or a cast of doe-eyed governors being all bloody nice and functioning like a sort of diplomatic A-Team. The Civilization VI expansion, Rise & Fall, just didn’t speak to me it felt more like a pacing patch-up than an attempt to 4Xify the most fascinating aspects humankind’s evolution. But after 20-something years and untold in-game millennia, I’ve finally begun to feel its insatiable fantasy of empire-building subside. I’ve been playing Civilization long enough to remember building gaudy palaces that combined Arabic minarets with Ionic columns, and the sight of pixel-drawn Stalin grimacing at me with his retinue of Asiatic advisers.

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