I want to blog about Civilization VI again, and this time about yet another swing and a miss: the secret societies game mode.

Civ VI usually plays exactly how every other Civ game plays out, 6-12 randomly chosen civilizations are plopped down on a randomly generated map, and the player must “build a civilization that stands the test of time,” ie win the game with science/culture/diplomacy before the game ends in 2050. Why 2050? Well the game must end at some point, and when these games were coming out in the early 2000s, 2050 seemed to be so unimaginably far in the future as to be a good “end date.”

But Civ VI has a secret societies mode which shuffles this system around. This mode is built on the popular fiction trope of there being one or several secret societies which have guided human history from the very beggining. There are 4 societies here, and they’re each in perpetual conflict with each other all the way back to the Neolithic era:
The “Order of Blood” aka a secret society of Vampires (think of White Wolf’s Old World of Darkness)
The Hermetic Order aka a science-y magic secret society
The Voidsingers aka a Cthulhu Mythos secret society
The Owls of Minerva who seem ever so slightly Harry Potter themed, although maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, the Civ VI secret societies game mode adds these guys as players to the game. They don’t actually have any cities or units of their own, mind you. But in the early neolithic while the player is exploring the map, these societies will occassionally approach the player and invite the player’s civilization to join them. In exchange, they’ll give the player’s civ powerful abilities that will only increase as the game continues.

But this game mode is very unbalanced, and worse yet it isn’t very well thought out in places.

The order of Blood gives you a vampire unit and later lets you build Vampire castles. The vampire is as strong as the strongest melee unit you have, and if killed it shows back up in your capital needing to be healed rather than actually dying like a normal human unit. That’s neat.

The Owls of Minerva give you bonuses when you send a trade route to a city-state. This would be neato, except these bonuses also inadvertantly cause the city-state to acquire more and more territory, such that if the player picks the Owls as their patron, the city-states on the map will gobble up all the tiles that the actual Civs are supposed to use to build their empires. It’s a shame city-states can’t build empires of their own.

The Voidsingers give you a statue of the Old Gods, which seems to give minor bonuses to faith generation, but then later in the game they make 20% of your faith generation get added to your gold, science and culture generation also. The cult therefore ends up being the most powerful society by far just because of how much it powers up your entire empire, even though their bonuses seem by far the most mundane, almost lame.

The Hermetic Order though is… weird. To discuss them, I first have to tell you about yields and ajacencies.

So the map in Civ VI is divided into tiles, and each tile has a “yield” on it describing how much “stuff” that tile produces. A simple grassland tile produces 2 food. A plains tile produces 1 food/1 production. Yields can be altered by resources, improvements, and technology also. If we have a wheat resource on that plains tile, it jumps to 2 food/1 production. If we farm that wheat, it becomes 3 food/1 production. If that wheat farm has 2 other farms “adjacent” to it, it becomes 4 food/1 production. That last one is more than twice as good as a simple plains tile.

Cities work these tiles and use their yields. A city needs production to produce things and food to feed its citizens. Thus the main gameplay loop is acquiring high-yield tiles and improving them further with builders, technology, and so on. This lets your cities grow large, produce stuff, and have culture, science, and gold to boot.

Next adjacencies, we saw them briefly in the wheat-farm discussion. Civ VI has a system where certain things get bonuses if they are “adjacent” to other things. Nice and vague, but here’s some examples:
A campus gets a bonus to its science generation if it’s next to a mountain.
A commercial district gets a bonus to its money generation if it’s next to a river.
A theatre square gets a bonus to its culture if it’s next to a “wonder of the world,” whether that’s a natural wonder like Mount Everest or a man-made wonder like the Hanging Gardens.

So the other gameplay loop is planning where you’ll place your buildings, farms, and other things to maximize their adjacency bonuses as well.

So here’s where the Hermetic order comes in: the very first thing they give you is the ability to see “ley lines” on the map, which power up your adjacencies is you build buldings near to them. This is also where the problems begin: these ley lines might not be anywhere near where you want to build a city.

The other societies just give you a “thing” immediately, whether it’s a vampire or a statue to the Old Gods, but the Hermetic order demands you go out and not only find these ley lines, but also build your cities near them, because the ley lines are useless to you unless you actually build stuff near them for the adjacency bonus. But what if there’s no ley lines near your territory? What if on this map they’re all in the desert or tundra, far from fresh water, good land, or any kind of resources? Sucks to be you then, because now you’ve basically joined a secret society that gave you nothing in exchange.

People call it save-scumming, but whatever: when I want to join the Hermetic Order, I’ll first save the game, and then join them to reveal the ley lines. If I find out there’s no ley lines in reasonable locations from me, I’ll just reload the earlier save and join a different society instead. No other secret society is this dependent on random luck to make them useful. This is added to the fact that how you join the order is also a pain: you can’t join the Hermetic Order until you find a nature wonder, which are quite rare on the map, and again you may have absolutely none near you.

The other societies give you fairly simply joining requirements: find a tribal village, find a city-state, kill some barbarians. Villages, city-states, and barbarians virtually litter the map, but natural wonders are very very rare. So not only are the bonuses this society give you very hit or miss, but even joining them is a pain.

Later on in the game, the Hermetic Order will power up your ley lines by giving them yields based on how many Great People you’ve earned, but this is unfortunately a “win more” scenario, not an actual benefit.

What do I mean by “win more?” That’s a thing where the bonuses you receive don’t help you win, because you only get them if you’re already winning. Essentially they’re bonuses that don’t actually help make the difference between your winning and your losing, they just make you look stylish if you’re already winning.

See, getting Great People requires your nation to build a lot of buildings of the right type, and use faith and gold to entice the great people as well. This obviously means you already need lots of production, faith, and gold generation to get great people. So if you’re getting lots of great people, the Hermetic Order will rewards you by upgrading your ley lines with more… production, faith and gold.

This isn’t like Civ IV where you could focus on getting great people or focus on a non-great people economy instead. Every useful thing in Civ VI generates great people, so if you’re playing well and winning the game, you’ll get a lot of them. If you’re not playing well and struggling, you’ll get almost none. So if you’re winning, the Hermetic Order will help you win more, if you’re not winning, they won’t help you at all. Not a great system to be honest.

I think this is why this is the worst of the secret societies, even if mechanically they are by far the most interesting. The other societies all give you a very direct way to turn their bonuses into win conditions. The Voidsingers tell you to maximize your faith generation, and in return they’ll give you all the other stuff you need. The vampires tell you to maximize your military power, and that in turn powers up your vampires. The Owls of Minerva tell you to maximize your relations with city-states, and in return they’ll ensure those citystates remain utterly loyal and VERY powerful for you.

But the Order of Hermes demands that you get lucky enough to find a bunch of ley lines, and then also be winning enough to get a bunch of great people.

I’d prefer it vastly if instead of the ley lines being randomly generated, if the Order gave you a special unit that could *build* a couple of ley lines wherever you want them. Maybe give you a few more ley lines as the game progresses, like how the vampires give you extra vampires as the game progresses. Then they could actually feel like a pure benefit instead of a diceroll.

And instead of powering up ley lines based on how many great people you’ve recruited, maybe they could power up your great person recruitment for every building you build near them. Then instead of a “win more” condition, they’d actually help you come from behind and recruit great people if you haven’t already gotten some.

Anyway that’s my 2 cents. The devs have long moved on to Civ VII, but I think it’s unsurprising that game was so poorly received, when so much of Civ VI showed but flashes of brilliance with not enough thought put into them to make them truly stand the test of time.