Hi readers,

It has been brought to my attention that the "Contact page is not working properly, and I am not receiving emails sent through that page. I migrated the blog over to a new hosting server a couple years ago, so the problem may have begun then -- even though I tested it, and it worked at the time. I'm not sure. If you've tried using the "Contact" page to send me an email in the past year or two, I did not receive the message. I was not ignoring you, and I hope you do not take it personally.

I'm going to investigate this issue when I have the time and hopefully fix it soon. I apologize for the inconvenience.

In the meantime, if you need to get a hold of me, I recommend that you do one of the following:

• If the message is OK to be seen publicly, post it in the comments of this page.
• Otherwise, send me a PM at twitter.com/MegaBearsFan, or at youtube.com/user/MegaBearsFan/, or through my Patreon page. I will most likely see any messages sent to those accounts.

Civilization VI's second expansion, Gathering Storm recently released and has added a handful of new civilizations and leaders. I am hoping to write a strategy for each of them, but I want to start with the civilizations and leaders who are completely new to the franchise.

One of these new civs represents a sort-of "farewell" present to the founder and former lead-host of the PolyCast podcast, Dan Q, who stepped down from the podcast at the end of 2018 in order to spend more time with his new family. However, he'll still be playing Civ, and for the first time in the franchise's history, Dan gets to play as his home and native land of Canada. It's too bad he's not on PolyCast anymore to tell us about how great Wilfrid Laurier of Canada is, eh?

On a more serious note: thank you, Dan for over a decade of faithful service and dedication to the Civilization community. And on a more personal note, thank you for inviting me to join the regular panel on PolyCast. You gave me a voice within this community that I did not think I would ever be able to reach. We'll miss you, Dan, and we hope to talk to you again as a guest host many times in the future. Best wishes to you and your new wife in your new life together. May your lives together be forever in a Golden Age!

This guide is dedicated to you, Dan. Now let's talk about Canada in Civilization VI!

The first European colony in North America is widely accepted to be a Norse encampment in Newfoundland, which was abandoned within a few years of settlement. It wasn't until the 16th century that large-scale colonization began -- mostly by French and British colonists. In 1763, France ceded most of its North American colonies to the British following years of on-again-off-again warfare. The Confederation of Canada was formed over a hundred years later, but remained loyal to the British crown until the Canada Act of 1982. Despite being a formally independent nation, Canada still maintains the British monarch (currently Queen Elizabeth II) as its official head of state. Because many of the founding cities were French colonies, Canada is an officially bilingual country, with both English and French being its official languages, and it is now one of the most multi-cultural nations in the world due to frequent large-scale immigration from other parts of the world. Canadian interactions with indigenous peoples were generally less violent than with neighboring United States' interactions with natives. However, the expansion of Canadian territory still required the forced relocation or assimilation of somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million indigenous peoples, including the Inuit, Métis, the Cree, and several dozen other tribes.

Canada's first French-speaking prime minister was Sir Henri Charles Wilfrid Laurier. Laurier was part of Canada's Liberal party, advocating for decentralized federalism and staunchly defending individual personal liberty. Despite wishing for Canada to remain an autonomous nation loyal to the British Empire, he would go on to oppose British conscription of Canadian citizens in World War I, which would become a polarizing issue in the early 20th century. He gained a reputation as a bright and cheerful leader who always followed the "sunny ways", and has become one of the most beloved prime minsters in Canadian history.

DISCLAIMER:
Civilization VI is still a "living game". Strategies for the game (and for specific leaders and civs) may change as Firaxis applies balance patches, introduces new features, or expands the game through further DLC or expansion packs, or as the Civ community discovers new strategies or exploits. As such, the following strategy guide may change from time to time. I will try to keep it up-to-date, and will make notations whenever changes are made. I'll also post links in the official 2K forums and CivFanatics, where I'll also report any changes made. If possible and practical, I will try to retain the original content of the strategy for posterity.

I welcome any feedback or suggestions that readers wish to offer. Feel free to post on the linked forums, or by posting a comment at the bottom of the page.

This guide is up to date as of the release of the Gathering Storm expansion (ver. 1.0.0.290)

Canda is a prime contender for a turtle strategy, as it cannot surprise declare on other civs, or be surprise declared on. They also specialize in settling in otherwise-inhospitable tundra.

...

Some number of PC players may have booted up Namco/Bandai's recently-released Ace Combat 7 on PC, only to be disappointed to find that their preferred flight stick doesn't work with the game. Un-supported controllers apparently includes the very popular (and very expensive) Thrustmaster Warthog. This isn't a technical issue; it's a hardware-exclusivity deal that Namco/Bandai apparently signed with Thrustmaster and Hori. Only two flight sticks are supported by the game: the Thrustmaster T. Flight and HORI AC7 flight stick. Apparently, the same restrictions apply to the PS4 and XBox One versions of the game

If you're like me, and don't play a lot of flight sims, any flight stick that you have is likely old and obsolete. But you probably still hoped it would work with the game. It's PC, after all, and controllers are mostly plug-and-play. Worst case scenario, you'd have to custom configure the control mapping. Right?

Not so. If the game detects a flight stick that isn't on its approved list, it apparently refuses to recognize it.

I'm not exactly a huge Ace Combat fan, but Ace Combat 4 (which I played on PS2 back in the day) is on my short list for "favorite games ever". Perhaps I'll put up a retro-review of it at some point. Needless to say, AC4 was a near perfect hybrid of acrade dogfighting and realistic flight sim, and it's nuanced depiction of war might make it my single favorite video game about war -- except for maybe This War of Mine.

So I was excited that a new game was coming out. I had bought a Logitech Attack 3 flight stick some years ago for another game, and I was also excited to see how Ace Combat would feel with a flight stick instead of a game controller. So I bought the game on PC expecting the flight stick would work. It didn't, and I was pretty bummed. I bought the game on the weekend of its PC release, and when I found that my flight stick didn't work, I shelved the game and went back to Resident Evil 2 and Civilization VI: Gathering Storm. I figured I'd come back to AC7 in a few weeks, at which point, the flight stick situation would hopefully be resolved, or modders would maybe add unofficial support for un-supported flight sticks.

You can configure an un-supported flight stick via Steam's built-in Controller Settings.

After a little bit of research, I discovered Steam's built-in "General Controller Settings" gamepad mapping, and that it can be used to "trick" Ace Combat 7 into thinking you're playing with a third-party gamepad. I tested it last night, and was pleased to discover that it works!

To see if your flight stick will work (and it's no guarantee), perform the following steps:

1. Open Steam and select "Steam -> Settings" in the top menu.
2. In the Settings panel, click "Controller".
3. In the Controller Config panel, click the button that says "GENERAL CONTROLLER SETTINGS". A big, blue menu with several check boxes should appear in a new window.
4. In the Controller Settings window, check the "Generic Gamepad Configuration Support" box.
5. If your flight stick is plugged in, and the PC is registering it, you should see it in a list of "Detected Controllers". Click it.
6. This should take you to a key binding screen. Set up your key bindings as you see fit. You do not necessarily have to map every single button, as most flight sticks may not have enough buttons.
7. Click "Save" and a dialogue should appear asking you if you want to "Share this controller definition?". You can name the controller anything you like. The important part here is that there is a drop down labeled: "Select the type of controller:". You must select "Generic Gamepad" from the drop down! You can then click "No, Thank You" if you do not wish to share the settings.

You should now be able to boot up Ace Combat 7, and the game should now believe your flight stick is a third-party gamepad (rather than a forbidden flight stick), and it should function based on the bindings that you specified.

You can configure your flight stick as a "Generic Gamepad" in Steam's Controller Settings.

...

This past weekend, I put up my review of Gathering Storm, the new expansion for Civilization VI. The overall summary is that I felt very "meh" about the game's headline features, but was actually impressed by how the smaller, more subtle changes really improve the underlying game. That review focused on a lot of the high-level concepts of the game, and was already starting to get rather long (my readers all know how verbose I can be). I decided to cut a lot of my smaller criticisms of individual mechanics or functionality out of that review, and save them for their own separate post.

So now that you all know how I feel about the expansion overall, here's some of my smaller nags and nitpicks (and suggestions for resolving them) that I hope can be resolved by some post-release patches.

Table of contents

• Un-Intelligent Queuing
  • No wishful-thinking in the queue?
• Ugh, now there's even more U.I. issues!
  • "Resume Game" should tell me which game I'm resuming
• Units should require different resources
  • More domestic uses for strategic resources
• World Congress should have a leader who sets the agenda
• We should be able to demand promises before the offending action
• Joint wars should still count as "Surprise Wars"
  Joint wars and joining an ongoing war should cost Diplomatic Favor
• Civs who don't pollute should gain Diplomatic Favor

It's refreshing to see a video game (of all things) take seriously the second greatest existential threat to civilization (after nuclear weapon stockpiles), while governments (particularly here in the United States) fail to even acknowledge that it's real. I was honestly a little bit surprised to see anthropogenic climate change be the focus of an entire expansion to Firaxis' Sid Meier's Civilization VI. Firaxis has been playing very "politically correct" with the game in its past two iterations. Civ IV, if you remember, included slavery as a mechanic that allowed players to kill population in exchange for a production boost, and it included leaders like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zadong. Civilization III allowed collateral damage from city sieges that would kill population, destroy infrastructure, and potentially reduce wonders of the world to mere ruins. Civilization II allowed democratic congresses to overrule the choices of the player. And Civilization: Colonization actually required you to draft citizens from your cities into soldiers to fight wars.

Politically sensitive concepts like slavery, and characters like Joseph Stalin, have been in Civ games before,
but Civ V and VI have played things very safe and controversy-free with most of their content.

Civilization V and VI have dialed back from such concepts and leaders, as well as other "politically sensitive" topics in favor of diversity, inclusiveness, and a more rose-tinted vision of human history that tries to pretend that things like slavery, colonialism, opium wars, and the Holocaust didn't happen. I get it. They're going for a more optimistic vision of humanity that celebrates our achievements while overlooking the incalculable amount of [often unnecessary] suffering that came at the expense of many of those achievements.

So to see Anthropogenic Global Warming not only be included -- but to be the headline feature -- is surprising. I mean, I don't think it's a politically or culturally sensitive topic, nor should it be to anyone else if we lived in a rational world. It's the reality that we live in -- plain and simple. Nevertheless, it's a brave and important gesture from 2k and Firaxis. Anthropogenic climate change is certainly the second greatest threat to human civilization after our frightful stockpile of nuclear weapons -- or maybe an asteroid impact, but that is exceedingly unlikely to happen. It's an issue that needs to be a part of the cultural conversation, and it is perhaps the biggest price that we (as a civilization) are going to pay for the hubris of our unsustainable growth. It's a problem that every nation in the world needs to face, and solving that problem should be part of any game that attempts to simulate or systematize modern politics.

Anthropogenic climate change is one of the most serious problems threatening real-life civilization.

That is why I'm rather disappointed that the actual implementation of global warming in Civilization VI: Gathering Storm is a bit lackluster and un-apocalyptic.

The greatest existential threat to civilization is civilization

Climate change in Civilization VI: Gathering Storm just doesn't seem to be quite as devastating [globally] as it is in real life. Basically, raising the global temperature will have three effects.

• Increases the frequency of weather-related disasters,
• Melts polar ice caps,
• Floods certain coastal tiles.

Many disasters are trivially managed by leaving a builder or two (with 1 charge) to repair pillaged tiles.

The melting of the polar ice is actually a benefit, as it provides easier routes for naval units if canals aren't available or useable. The other two will cause problems for every player, but I've found them fairly easy to manage (at least on the Emperor difficulty that I usually play on). Disasters will typically pillage tile improvements and districts, but a severe disaster may also outright remove improvements, and may even kill points of population.

...