Civilization 6: Rise and Fall (DLC)

Rise and Fall is the first major expansion for Civilization VI, released in February 2018, and it targets a specific problem that vanilla Civ 6 had in spades: the late game feeling like a foregone march to a finish line you picked in turn 40. The answer Firaxis gives is a cycle of Great Ages driven by Era Score. Every significant action - founding a religion, clearing a barbarian camp, being first to research a technology, building a wonder - feeds into a running tally. Hit the threshold and you enter a Golden Age; fall short and the map desaturates into a Dark Age with sombre audio to match. The wrinkle that makes this interesting is the Heroic Age: survive a Dark Age and your next Golden Age hits with amplified bonuses. Strategically, that creates a genuine risk-reward calculation. Do you sandbag some early milestones to nurse a Dark Age entry, banking on the Heroic payoff? It is exactly the kind of multi-era planning that will appeal to anyone who colour-codes their build queues. The Loyalty system is where the expansion earns most of its reputation. Individual cities now exert and receive loyalty pressure based on proximity to your capital, nearby foreign population, religious influence, and whether a Governor is stationed there. A border city next to a thriving neighbour in a Golden Age will bleed loyalty fast, eventually declaring itself a Free City open for anyone to absorb. That mechanic alone reshapes city placement calculus significantly: sprawling wide without Governor coverage is a recipe for losing cities without a single unit being fired. Seven distinct Governors are available - each unlocked via the Civics tree and each carrying a promotion tree of their own - and you will never have enough Governor Titles to fully promote all of them in a single game. That forced specialisation is a genuine strategic constraint, not just flavour text. The expansion also adds nine new leaders across eight new civilisations (including the Cree, Korea, the Netherlands, Mongolia, and Georgia among others), eight new world wonders, two new districts including the Government Plaza, and a reworked alliance system where partnerships level up over time and branch into Research, Military, Religious, and Cultural types with escalating bonuses. The Emergency system - triggered by actions like dropping a nuke or conquering a city-state - is designed to rally the world against an over-performing civ, which is a nice idea on paper. In practice, the military AI remains the expansion's most visible weak point. Coalition members often fail to show up or act incoherently, which means Emergencies frequently resolve as single-player heroics rather than tense diplomatic standoffs. For newcomers to Civ 6 who feel intimidated by an expansion, this one is actually a reasonable entry point once you have a dozen base-game hours under your belt. The Loyalty map is visually clear, the Era Score tracker is readable at a glance, and the Governor system introduces micro-management gradually through the Civics tree rather than front-loading complexity at game start. The bigger concern is whether Rise and Fall feels complete by itself. Community consensus settled roughly where critics did at launch: the ideas are solid, the execution is uneven, and the full vision only really crystallises when Gathering Storm (the second expansion) is added on top. If you are building a full Civ 6 stack, Rise and Fall is a necessary layer in that stack. If you are buying it in isolation, expect good bones with some rough edges, especially around AI diplomacy and the feeling that Golden Ages can occasionally make the Loyalty system nearly irrelevant by flooding your border cities with pressure. Diego, Scout Team