It filled up in under a minute, making me wonder whether at any one time there were actually thousands of dejected Civvers out there - broken after being kicked from countless pre-game lobbies, but holding out hope that one day a benevolent somebody (like me) would create a game that didnt turn them away. I created my own game, giving it the unequivocal label, ALL WELCOME. There wouldnt usually be more than ten pre-match lobbies to join at any one time, and of these at least half mustve been private games where they forgot to tick the Private Game box, because I got kicked from them the second I joined. I headed out to see if the old online bugbears of Civ V had been fixed, how the new multiplayer scenarios - made to be completed in a couple of hours - played out, and whether its possible to functionally play Civ in the company of strangers. The high-interest loans, the proxy wars where you secretly provided troops to your weaker pals to take on bigger threats, the negotiations to trade back the Great Prophet you took hostage. It was notoriously buggy, broken, and with AI that couldnt even approach you for a deal, let alone beat you in a war, but these flaws were drowned out by the joy of playing and dealing with real people, and the new gameplay elements that organically arose out of it. I also wanted them to be just as sneaky and tactical as me, and equally capable of exploiting Civs systems, rather than just waiting to be exploited themselves. Not content with the difficulty level being based on how much of a head-start the eternally asinine AI had on me, I wanted my opponents starting on equal footing to me.

The workings of the game, its routes to victory and weird idiosyncrasies became too transparent in single-player. These are some of the traits of the Civ multiplayer experience, and its wonderful. In the original Civ, Id while away the minutes admiring my ramshackle palace with its medieval castle wings ostentatiously flanking an Arabic dome in Civs 1 through 3, I loved looking at my cities from above using the dedicated aerial views in Civ 4, Id zoom all the way out of the world view until I was in space, appreciating the smallness of the planet relative to the cosmos, before plummeting back in through the swirling clouds all the way in on my civilization, panning across it at full zoom while listening to the ambient sounds that changed depending on whether I was hovering over cities, jungles, deserts, what have you. The fantasy of empire-building was one that I enjoyed doing in my own time and on my own terms, getting swept up in whatever alternative world history the games systems - combined with my hunger for global domination - would generate. We sent our cultural ambassador Robert Zak onto the internet to test out Civ 6 multiplayer in all its forms.

Civ 5 crack multiplayer