About Rise & Fall AND Gathering Storm, need explanation.

[Sirlight]

Hello everyone.
So as far as I understand they are 2 separate DLC so you have to choose one of them or vanilla game to play. That's good. Now the point is, what is better for you? Also I thought Rise and Fall mechanic was included into GS with governors, so i am a bit confused....
I have read the description of both DLC but still why can't i play all of them in one game?

[Synavix]

They are inclusive. If you select the Rise and Fall rules you are technically playing both Rise and Fall and vanilla. If you select Gathering Storm you are playing vanilla, Rise and Fall, and Gathering Storm.

The only reason you would want to select vanilla or Rise and Fall is if you want to disable Gathering Storm (or if the game needs to disable it for Scenarios).

[Sirlight]

Originally posted by Synavix:

They are inclusive. If you select the Rise and Fall rules you are technically playing both Rise and Fall and vanilla. If you select Gathering Storm you are playing vanilla, Rise and Fall, and Gathering Storm.

The only reason you would want to select vanilla or Rise and Fall is if you want to disable Gathering Storm (or if the game needs to disable it for Scenarios).

Thank you, I understand now! Also I'd like a suggestion about the small modifications you can make to the game (like to barbarians clans, etc). Are they worth to acitvate or they unbalance the game too much? Any of these that you recommend to activate? I have them all since I bought Civilization VI Anthology.

[Oaks]

Originally posted by Sirlight:

Originally posted by Synavix:

They are inclusive. If you select the Rise and Fall rules you are technically playing both Rise and Fall and vanilla. If you select Gathering Storm you are playing vanilla, Rise and Fall, and Gathering Storm.

The only reason you would want to select vanilla or Rise and Fall is if you want to disable Gathering Storm (or if the game needs to disable it for Scenarios).

Thank you, I understand now! Also I'd like a suggestion about the small modifications you can make to the game (like to barbarians clans, etc). Are they worth to acitvate or they unbalance the game too much? Any of these that you recommend to activate? I have them all since I bought Civilization VI Anthology.

Some of the modes are interesting. They do unbalance the game. The one I like the most is secret societies, I'd recommend just trying that one first.

[Synavix]

I also really like Secret Societies. I also like Heroes and Legends, and the AI uses them a bit (but usually gets them killed). Each hero only gets a few charges for their special ability and can only be recalled once per Era, so it's not too unbalanced. The other one I turn on all the time is Corporations, but that one is REALLY unbalanced for tourism and gold.

The rest are fun, although they're all a bit unbalanced. I'd recommend only using one per game until you know how they work, then you can start adding all the ones you like together.

[Maya-Neko]

Gathering Storm only includes the rules and features of Rise & Fall, but the civs from R&F are still locked behind buying R&F. And obviously, playing with a lower rulesets deactivates any civ, which needs a specific ruleset to be active. So usually, if you want more variety and features, then it's usually better to use the highest ruleset.

As for the modifications the game is mostly balanced around the rulesets without changing too many other options. Thus anything else will add some imbalance to it, but heavily depends:

1- heroes and legends: Human players can definitely utilize the heroes way better, but the impact is not as big usually, depending on which heroes your get. Though you still might be able to win a war or get ahead with these. But since heroes are strong units as well, the AI can still utilize them at least in wars.
2- apocalypse mode: It's pretty much just tons RNG, thus i would rather consider it a fun mode. But since you can cause disasters manually with the newly introduced unit for this mode, there's obviously tons of options to exploit the yield bonusses (like having a great bath on a city lets you pretty much infinitely add faith yield onto flood tiles at the cost of CO2-concentrations)
3- barbarian clans: It's a nice new addition. It plays quite normal most of the time, but you'Ve the additional option to turn barbarians into city states, so again, something which you can utilize more to your advantage than the AI most of the times. I would say, that this mode doesn't really affect the gameplay, as long as you don't interact with the barbarians most of the time.
4- dramatic ages: this is just pure chaos. i personally don't use it, because it just causes cities to flip like crazy, so you definitely need to fully understand and exploit the loyalty system and use it to your advantage. Also loyalty bases civs, which normally are not that strong, will pretty much dominate this mode (especially Dido, who can be immune to loyalty loss to some degree on her main continent)
5- secret societies: many buffs from the societies are just crazy, especially the ones from the owls of minerva. It's hard to tell, how good the AI is at utilizing it, but i wouldn't be surprised, if humans outpace the AI due to this mode harder than they would without it.
6- corporations: It's fun to play with and can easily get you some strong bonusses, when you're lucky enough to have the right luxury goods around. Again, something which is stronger in the hands of humans.
7- tech-mix: If you get bored by always researching the same stuff over and over again, this will definitely be fun to play with. The AI seems to struggle with it though, since it can't beeline stuff in here as good as it can do in the normal trees. Thus it can make it easier to build specific things like wonders early on. Stone Henge and especially founding a religion gets easier here due to the AI taking longer to research it and the AI tends to be less fast in getting to crossbows and knights, which can make wars in these eras a littlebit easier. However it can obviously also cause you to be slower, when you've guessed wrong and some unique units might also be weaker, if their upgrade follows directly after them being upgraded.
8- zombies: pretty much just a fun mode. You'll constantly fight with the zombies without any pause, so best training for your units, but obviously quite exhausting as well, especially if you're not good in managing your units health. The AI obviously can struggle heavily with it in some situations.

Overall i can recommend to plac with 1, 3, 5 6 and 7 for most games and the rest if you want a challenge. However it's always best to just test it yourself to see, what you like and what not.

[Sirlight]

Originally posted by Maya-Neko:

Gathering Storm only includes the rules and features of Rise & Fall, but the civs from R&F are still locked behind buying R&F. And obviously, playing with a lower rulesets deactivates any civ, which needs a specific ruleset to be active. So usually, if you want more variety and features, then it's usually better to use the highest ruleset.

As for the modifications the game is mostly balanced around the rulesets without changing too many other options. Thus anything else will add some imbalance to it, but heavily depends:

1- heroes and legends: Human players can definitely utilize the heroes way better, but the impact is not as big usually, depending on which heroes your get. Though you still might be able to win a war or get ahead with these. But since heroes are strong units as well, the AI can still utilize them at least in wars.
2- apocalypse mode: It's pretty much just tons RNG, thus i would rather consider it a fun mode. But since you can cause disasters manually with the newly introduced unit for this mode, there's obviously tons of options to exploit the yield bonusses (like having a great bath on a city lets you pretty much infinitely add faith yield onto flood tiles at the cost of CO2-concentrations)
3- barbarian clans: It's a nice new addition. It plays quite normal most of the time, but you'Ve the additional option to turn barbarians into city states, so again, something which you can utilize more to your advantage than the AI most of the times. I would say, that this mode doesn't really affect the gameplay, as long as you don't interact with the barbarians most of the time.
4- dramatic ages: this is just pure chaos. i personally don't use it, because it just causes cities to flip like crazy, so you definitely need to fully understand and exploit the loyalty system and use it to your advantage. Also loyalty bases civs, which normally are not that strong, will pretty much dominate this mode (especially Dido, who can be immune to loyalty loss to some degree on her main continent)
5- secret societies: many buffs from the societies are just crazy, especially the ones from the owls of minerva. It's hard to tell, how good the AI is at utilizing it, but i wouldn't be surprised, if humans outpace the AI due to this mode harder than they would without it.
6- corporations: It's fun to play with and can easily get you some strong bonusses, when you're lucky enough to have the right luxury goods around. Again, something which is stronger in the hands of humans.
7- tech-mix: If you get bored by always researching the same stuff over and over again, this will definitely be fun to play with. The AI seems to struggle with it though, since it can't beeline stuff in here as good as it can do in the normal trees. Thus it can make it easier to build specific things like wonders early on. Stone Henge and especially founding a religion gets easier here due to the AI taking longer to research it and the AI tends to be less fast in getting to crossbows and knights, which can make wars in these eras a littlebit easier. However it can obviously also cause you to be slower, when you've guessed wrong and some unique units might also be weaker, if their upgrade follows directly after them being upgraded.
8- zombies: pretty much just a fun mode. You'll constantly fight with the zombies without any pause, so best training for your units, but obviously quite exhausting as well, especially if you're not good in managing your units health. The AI obviously can struggle heavily with it in some situations.

Overall i can recommend to plac with 1, 3, 5 6 and 7 for most games and the rest if you want a challenge. However it's always best to just test it yourself to see, what you like and what not.

Oh great description! Thanks <3