Making sure you place your city in an ideal location to get these items is vital for sustaining happiness. Each city’s happiness is governed by a system called “amenities.” These amenities come in the form of specific districts, luxury resources, and bonuses from trade routes. The global happiness meter from Civ V is gone, in favor of a system that resembles IV. If you found a city near luxury resources, you can give yourself an early amenity boost that will keep your city happy. Instead of building a few settlers and plopping those down as fast as possible, you need to be aware of the resources around you. This makes the early game a lot more important than it ever used to be. If you settle in the middle of nowhere, expect your city to suffer for it. This means that you can’t focus on wonders or only military with certain cities.
Now, districts occupy space on the map adjacent to your main city. The largest change to the standard Civ formula in VI is that you can no longer build literally everything for each city. If you can accept that scenarios are absent, Steam Workshop isn’t currently available, and that multiplayer doesn’t work much better than in Civ V, then I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you Civilization VI is worth owning. That is the mark of a game that is truly great, but not every aspect of the package is flawless. I envision how my next playthrough is going to turn out well before I even sit down.
I’ve gone through the motion of placing districts, training an army, distributing “great” people, and building world wonders so many times that I dream about it at night.
Over the course of many playthroughs and almost three full days of game time, Civilization VI is still on my mind.