Civilization VI’s Newest Free Update Arrives Soon

February is one of the “off-season” months, as I like to call them, as far as Sid Meier’s Civilization VI‘s New Frontier Pass is concerned. Even so, that doesn’t mean that the game’s developer Firaxis has just been sitting around twiddling its thumbs in preparation for the final piece of the New Frontier Pass sometime in March. They’ve got a new Civ VI update coming soon that will be free for all players, even those who own only the base game with no expansions or DLC.

This update will bring a new game mode known as “Barbarian Clans Mode.” This mode overhauls how players will interact with barbarians. As Eurogamer put it, barbarians will no longer be simple “empty-headed gold piñatas” once this new update is live. Barbarian Clans Mode adds six clans of barbarians which can be found near specific terrain types and specialize in their own unique type of unit. For example, there’s one clan of barbarians which can most often be found near tiles of horses; they specialize in cavalry units, as you might expect.

The aspect of this update that I find most interesting is the fact that with this mode enabled, Barbarians can lay claim to and construct unique units belonging to any Civilizations which are not present in any given game. So, for instance, you could wind up fighting Bablyon’s cavalry-obliterating Sabum Kibittum as part of a nearby barbarian encampment if old Hammurabi isn’t present in your current game. I find this both interesting and potentially terrifying, depending on whether the barbarian clans develop other Civs’ unique units that counter my normal strategies.

That’s not the only intriguing thing that will be brought to Civilization VI with this update, however. You see, Barbarian Clans Mode will, at long last, allow you to engage in rudimentary forms of diplomacy with any of the six nearby clans. I say “rudimentary” because things don’t get much more advanced than going to a barbarian clan and essentially saying, “Hey, I’ll pay you a set amount of gold to leave me alone for a number of turns,” or “Hey, I’ll pay you to go attack this nearby enemy city or city-state while leaving me with plausible deniability.”

Of all the new barbarian “diplomacy” aspects added in this update, the one I’m most pleased to see is that you’ll be able to negotiate a ransom to regain any of your civilian units that are captured by any barbarians with whom you don’t have any agreements in place. I don’t know why, but it certainly seems to me that my Builders move faster than they should be able to when they’ve been captured by barbarians. Even if that’s not the case, I can almost never recapture my own units once they’re gone. As a result, this ransom mechanic will likely come in quite handy for me.

Interestingly, if any barbarian clans are left alone for long enough, they can make progress toward becoming city-states. You can hinder this progress by clearing out camps belonging to any given clan, or even help the process along so that you may become a clan’s Suzerain once they’ve formed a city-state. Of course, if you don’t want that to happen for whatever reason, you can still make it your mission to wipe every last barbarian clan off the map. You particularly bloodthirsty players out there have nothing to worry about on that front. On a final note, this update is currently scheduled to go live on Thursday, February 25th, 2021.