Modding offers users an excellent opportunity to slowly customize and polish their favorite game.
When it comes to games as large as Civilization VI, everyone has their own idea of what needs to change to make it just right – but there’s something we can all agree on:
Quality of Life improvements are paramount.
These are not flashy add-ons with new civilizations or game mechanics but smaller enhancements that can polish the game to a mirror sheen and make every turn a pleasure.
Here are the best QoL mods I refuse to play Civ VI without.
I’ll be the first to say that Civilization VI’s cinematics are a pleasure to watch.
But after the first few times, it gets annoying having to skip that and the company logos before getting to the main menu.
Setting up a game of Civ takes long enough. There’s no need to make it any longer!
Modders have been removing company logos and opening cinematics in PC games since before modding communities were a thing, and Civ VI didn’t fly under the radar.
The Quick Start mod by Odin Vex takes you straight to the main menu after launching the game so you can scrape a couple seconds off restarting when your online game crashes – which happens a lot.
The first thing you need to do when you start a game of Civ VI is scout the terrain around you to find resources and threats that might need your attention.
Usually, that would take anywhere from 10 to 15 turns as you produce your first scout and get moving.
But what if you could skip that process?
Expanded Initial Vision by TC is a slightly unbalanced mod that gives you visibility up to seven tiles away from your starting position, allowing you to choose the ideal settling spot and making scouts less of an immediate necessity.
Depending on the processing speed on your rig, you’ll spend more or less time staring at your loading screen – but most of us have to look at it for at least a couple minutes before the game starts.
What better way to spend this time than learning about your chosen civilization and its leader?
The vanilla loading screen already offers some helpful information, but it’s nowhere near detailed enough to answer important questions you may have about your leader trait, unique unit, etc.
Better Loading Screen by Infixo offers a deeper look into your civilization’s unique abilities. You’ll find anything you might be wondering about on the loading screen.
I’ll be honest with you and admit I’m that guy who completely foregoes espionage so he doesn’t have to bother with moving spies around.
The whole system feels complicated and tedious.
Mod creator Astog offers an improved user experience with Better Espionage Screen, offering impressive new features that’ll speed up choosing your next target and keeping track of your agents.
These include filtering cities by district or civilization and adding a side panel describing all possible missions in the chosen city.
Another must-have mod by Astog is the Better Trade Screen, which makes overseeing your civilization’s mercantile activities a lot easier.
Some of the main additions are detailed sorting options and an overhauled trade screen that makes information much easier to process.
For example, routes are colored based on their starting city and show both origin and destination yields on the same screen, so you don’t unknowingly make your enemies rich.
You can also set traders to automatically repeat their previous route or choose the most profitable one and head there without taking up your precious turn time.
The average builder in Civ VI can extract resources or build improvements two times before their time is up. But there are many ways to increase that number, and it can be pretty hard to keep track of every builder’s individual charges.
This mod by Witk solves this problem by adding a small ribbon showing a builder’s remaining charges next to their unit flag, so it’s always visible to the player.
With it, you’ll know when to produce more builders and easily choose a suitable unit for each task.
Those of you who’ve been playing Civ VI since release will remember a time when map tacks weren’t even in the game, and we had to download a mod to be able to plan our cities.
Firaxis has long since merged that mod with the vanilla game, but the mod community still has a lot to offer to make your city planning experience easier.
Detailed Map Tacks by Witk helps you get a better idea of a city’s potential by calculating your adjacency bonuses.
Start setting down tacks, and it’ll show you the potential adjacency bonuses of each tile and update them as you add more planned districts.
Next up, we’re looking at a collection of nifty UI adjustments by prolific Civ VI modder Sukritact.
This mod focuses on improving the player’s interaction with the city and making important information like currently worked tiles and next border growth more accessible.
It also moves the city panel so it’s not overshadowed by the production panel and adds a district count.
In addition, this mod adds a much-needed Screenshot Mode – though it’s a bit unstable. Use at your own risk!
As you make your way up the civics tree and unlock new policy cards, it can be tempting to just use the latest ones assuming they’ll give you more yields – but that’s rarely, if ever, the case.
But how would you know?
After all, you can’t pull out a calculator and crunch the numbers to see if double Campus adjacency bonuses are better than extra science from Campus buildings across the empire in the middle of a game.
That’s why Extended Policy Cards by Astog is an absolute must-have to play Civ VI.
It does the math for you and shows you the result of adopting each policy in simple numbers.
Negotiating business agreements with other world powers can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of playing Civ VI – especially on single-player matches against the AI.
Quick Deals aims to give you access to your full economic power with a simple interface that lets you “auction” your resources to the highest bidder.
You choose what you want to trade and see everyone’s offers pop up right beside your “selling cart.”
Moreover, you’ll get a reminder whenever new beneficial agreements become available.
A similar interface is provided for trying to get specific items from the AI, such as Great Works, relics, and various resources. It’s so easy, it almost feels like cheating. Almost.
Nelson Chitty is a Venezuelan expat living in Argentina. He’s a writer and translator passionate about history and foreign cultures. His ideal weekend is spent between leisurely playing games of Civilization VI and looking for the next seinen anime to marathon.
