March's announcement that the NFL had granted a license to 2K to make "non-simulation" NFL football games gave many in the football gaming community hopes that the monopoly that EA and Madden have enjoyed for so long would soon come to an end. Well, sadly, that won't be happening anywhere near as soon as we may have hoped -- if ever. Yesterday, EA and the NFL agreed to extend the "simulation football" exclusivity deal through 2026.

There was hope that the NFL was perhaps becoming unsatisfied with Madden's declining review scores and slumping sales, and that they were opening a door to grant a simulation license to 2k when the EA exclusivity deal expired in 2021. But that won't be happening now, unless EA does something egregious enough to warrant the NFL backing out of the contract or claiming that EA is in breach of contract. I wouldn't hold my breath for that though.

By the time this extended exclusivity contract expires (in 2026), EA will have enjoyed a lack of competition for 22 years, I will be older than 40, and an entire generation of adults (old enough to legally drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and gamble) will have grown up without ever knowing an NFL video game other than Madden, because the last NFL-licensed simulation football video game was released to store shelves before they were born.

Well, Firaxis is apparently not done with Civilization VI. They will be releasing new DLC packs with new game modes, new civilizations, and new leaders through March of 2021. The first such "New Frontiers" pack released in May of 2020 and included two new civilizations: the Maya and Gran Colombia. As usual, I try to give priority for my strategy guides to civilizations and leaders who have never been depicted as playable in the Civilization games before. In this case, we have a civilization that has been in previous games with a leader who has not, and a leader who has been in a previous game attached to a civilization that has not. I'm going to give priority to the leader who seems more straightforward to play, so that I can get this guide out to my loyal fans as quickly as possible. I will thus start by covering Simón Bolívar of Gran Colombia. Simón Bolívar appeared as a leader of New Spain in Civilization IV: Colonization, but has never been included as a leader in a mainstream Civilization game. And Gran Colombia is making its first appearance in the series as a playable faction.

For future releases that may include multiple leaders, I may put up polls on Patreon to let my Patrons decide which civ or leader to cover first. I may also put up polls asking if my Patrons would prefer that I make guides focused on the new game modes. So if you would like to vote on which content you would prefer to see sooner, I hope you'll consider supporting the creation of this content on Patreon.

Following Simón Bolívar's victory at New Granada in the Colombian War of Independence against Spain, political leaders of the colonies in Colombia and Venezuela established the Republic of Colombia (now known as "Gran Colombia") -- even though the War of Independence was still ongoing. The federal republic divided its territory into 12 "departments", each headed by an intendant (some of whom were also commandante generals in the military), with the nation as a whole being governed by an executive branch with a president and vice president. The country only survived 12 years before dissolving over in-fighting between federalists and centralists in its ruling parties.

Gran Colombia's president, Simón Bolívar, had a vision of all the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America being independent republics that cooperated in a league (similar in principle to the modern-day European Union) with a centralized parliamentary assembly and unified policy towards European colonial powers. The treaty was only ratified by Gran Colombia, and Bolívar's dream faded. A few years later, he became ill and died of tuberculosis, and his nation of Gran Colombia died the following year. Before he died, it is said that Bolívar stated that "America is ungovernable", as he became jaded towards the end by all the bickering and political in-fighting that had dominated Gran Colombia's brief existence. Though he failed to unite the entirety of Latin America, his prominent role in liberating Latin American countries from Spanish rule has him regarded as a father figure of many South American countries. The nations of Bolivia and the Bolivian Republic of Venezuela are named in his honor, and their currencies are know (respectively) as "boliviano" and "bolívar".

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 "New Frontiers" Maya and Gran Colombia DLC pack (May 2020) (ver. 1.0.1.501)

Simón Bolívar is built to be an aggressive leader in Civilization VI who should use his units' extra movement, and his free Commandante Generals each era to wage lightning warfare against his enemies.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was one of the lucky ones who was able to keep my job and work from home. At least, so far... It's one of the benefits of working in computer programming: you can often work from anywhere, so long as you have a functioning VPN. One of my tasks over the quarantine period was to try to configure an application to support automatic updates. These applications are UWP apps built for a Windows IoT installation on a Raspberry Pi (RPi). It's an internal application that is still in a Beta stage, so it's not suitable to release over the Microsoft Store (at least, not yet). We had been manually updating the handful of devices in the field for the past two years, and as the number of deployed devices has grown, having to send someone out to manually update them was becoming a pain. Even moreso in this new era of social distancing.

Many Windows apps can be built in Visual Studio to support automatic updates.

Windows IoT has not been the best of environments to work in. It lacks a lot of functionality built-in to other Windows environments, and documentation for it is spotty, at best. Back in 2018 (shortly after we had started deploying the apps in the field), Microsoft released an update for Windows and Visual Studio that allows UWP apps to be built such that they automatically periodically check a specified server location for new updates. Awesome! It sounded like there would be a simple solution!

Be sure to update the version number.

I built the app with auto-updates enabled for every hour, deployed it to my test RPi over the Windows Device Manager, and deployed the update package and .appinstaller file onto our test server.

Then I waited.

Select an appropriate frequency to check for updates. I set it to check every hour while testing.

And nothing happened.

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