Civilization VI has a lot of great mods that have emerged over the years, designed for players to be able to expand and change up the game. Perhaps not up to the level seen in Civ IV (there is no Fall From Heaven type total conversion), there is a wide array of mods that can help you make the perfect Civilization VI game for you to play. These are my pick for the best Civilization VI mods out there.
Recommended Civilization VI Mods
We've got 17 Civilization VI Mod recommended Civ VI Mods, read on for what they are, and where to find them!
Let's start with a simple, but sweet mod. This is a simple mod that removes the EULA and logos that show up on start, making the startup process on Civilization VI far quicker. Also, this mod couldn't really be appropriately placed anywhere else, given its name, than at the start.
Another simple mod, this one improves the loading screen so that more details show there. This is a nice, small, quality-of-life thing that shows you additional info about unique aspects of your civilization when you load a game, either at the start or to continue from before.
Environment Skin: Sid Meier’s Civilization V
Civilization VI’s graphics weren’t for everyone, with them being subject to ridicule by some for their increased stylization compared to previous titles. For those who want an aesthetic closer to Civilization V though, the Environment Skin: Sid Meier’s Civilization V mod is a clear choice.
Designed by Civilization VI art director Brian Busatti, this mod is built entirely using the modding tools and off-the-shelf software and aims for more realism in how it looks. Almost all visuals are overhauled with it, and they’ve kept updating it throughout the game's life as it was an example of an extensive environment mod, and a throwback nostalgia-wise for those who like it.
One of the defining mods for Civilization VI, YNAMP is a mod that adds a ton of options for players to customize their game and the map in it. YNAMP allows you to create huge games (up to 63 civilizations), with larger map sizes and a set of maps. There is also more control over how maps are generated if you choose to use those powers.
The only issue is that there has been some issues with the larger map sizes (enormous and above) over the last year with them possibly crashing the game as it goes on, especially in conjunction with Gathering Storm. It is a sad limitation there, and one that can’t be fixed without the developers at Firaxis doing some tweaks on memory management, but don’t let it stop you from playing around with this mod or the other maps it enables.
One of the issues with Civilization that can come sometimes is that its pacing can feel like you’re researching new units as you’ve barely finished producing your last ones, and there’s no real time to play with them sometimes. Playing on slower speeds can impact that sure, but it also makes production take forever, as well as research and civics.
Enter Take Your Time Ultimate, which lets you slow down tech and civics tree progress, including an escalating amount in later eras so that research slows down some as time goes on. This gives more time for individual technologies and units to shine, and it is highly flexible in settings. I’ve found I enjoy 125% on tech and civics with moderate era adjustment, but it lets you customize a whole lot of aspects of it.
I prefer that customization to 8 Ages of Pace, but if you want something that is in the same vein without that, 8 Ages works too with creating more distinct ages throughout the game.
This set of 3-5 mods adds a whole bunch of units to Civilization VI, as well as several new unit lines with upgrade trees (such as the fire support line building off the Slinger, or the naval bombardment line). This provides a lot more variation in units to use, as well as alternate army composition plans that you can use. The two expansions for the mod add extra armored units and more medieval units to provide extra variation to those parts of the game, particularly in longer ones.
If you want city-states to play a larger or more varied role, this is the Civilization VI mod for you. CIVITAS City-States Expanded adds several new types of city-states, over 40 new city-states, and makes them more robust (such as starting with ancient walls). Overall, city-states will be more likely to play a significant role in any given game.
Bonus city-state mod: City State - Cornerbrook. This is a single city-state added that is neat, but I’ll admit that I’m largely showing it off here because it's the small city (roughly 35k people) where my Dad was born, and I was absolutely tickled to see someone had added it to Civilization VI via a mod.
If you feel the nerfing of tribal villages (aka goody huts) went a bit overboard with Civilization VI, Wonderous Goody Huts may be the mod for you. It doesn’t turn goody huts into the reward warping that could happen with Civilization V, but instead makes them more worthwhile by adding 10 new rewards in things like random improvements, random units, a spy, discovering natural wonders, and more.
If you want more tribal village goodness, consider adding Good Goody Huts too, which doubles the number of goody huts, increases experience for scouts, and gives 20 gold in addition to the base reward.
If you’ve been wanting more pantheons or wanted some based on the Gifts of the Nile scenario, this is the mod for you. Ancient Egyptian Pantheons does right what it says on the tin, adding 10 pantheon beliefs themed after ancient Egypt. Combining this with Religion Expanded gives everyone a lot more options on Pantheons.
Religion Expanded isn’t a complete overhaul or the like, but it significantly, well... expands religion choices for the player, with over 40 new beliefs, including 14 pantheons, and seven new religious buildings. This means players will have a lot more choices when founding their religion, and there is more variety in religion play.
Religion Expanded also allows for more religions to be founded in the game — 12 on its own, or 16 with the Gathering Storm expansion and Tomatekh's Historical Religions mod.
Tomatekh's Historical Religions
Speak of the devil, that’s our next mod. Tomatekh's Historical Religions doesn’t directly add new gameplay like Religion Expanded. Instead, it focuses on adding all sorts of new historical religions to the game. These allow players to better pick accurate symbols and representation for themselves or their leaders.
It also ties in with the various civilizations to give them more accurate preferred religions, so that leaders for civilizations now prefer a religion that fits them historically.
If you want to expand this further with modern religions or a variety of fictional religions (like Jediism, Children of the Atom, Pastafarian, scientology, and others), you should check out Zebenji's Additional Religions, which builds on the mod with a whole bunch of these.
UI changes are a common thing in the Civilization VI modding world, but if you are going to dive into the area, none will serve you better than the Enhanced Mod Manager. Firaxis’ default tool for mod and DLC management can be somewhat messy and difficult to parse what is active and what is not.
Enhanced Mod Manager takes part of all that by separating things into two lists: enabled and disabled. It also provides new sorting options and various other options to help make finding and organizing a list of mods a lot easier. It definitely made writing this article a lot easier and was about the one mod I had enabled all the time.
CQUI - Community Quick User Interface
If you want an all-in-one option for UI improvements, the best option is the open-source CQUI mod, which is made by a variety of modders over the years working together. Almost every aspect of the UI is touched in some way, with a focus on ease and speed of use that significantly reduces friction and menu time.
Sukritact's Simple UI Adjustments
While some may favor more complete UI overhauls, I prefer the simple tuning of this mod, along with a few others to the UI. Sukritact’s Simple UI Adjustments makes it easier to see key information often hidden behind several clicks, with one of the most notable being that numerous things show on hovering over city banners.
Overall this mod doesn’t change the core of what you are looking at; instead, it aims to provide more information easily to you.
Better Builder Charges Tracking
Unlike in past games, Builders in Civilization VI have a limited number of uses, and thus it is one of the more important little details to track when building out your cities to know how much building they can do. As the game goes on, you can have a number of builders active in different parts, and knowing how many charges they have by default requires you to click and look at them, taking up some valuable time that you could better spend preparing to nuke Gandhi before he nukes you.
Better Builder Charges Tracking makes it so that you can see how many charges your builders have at a glance. It does this with a rather clever method: by using the level promotion banner for military units on builders to display the charges. It’s easy to see in an area you already are looking at on units, visually unobtrusive, and provides important information — all the stuff you want in a UI mod.
Extended Policy Cards is a great Civilization VI mod that makes it easier to see the impact of a variety of policy cards. While normally you have to either calculate or guesstimate what impact a policy card will have, the Extended Policy Cards mod directly shows what the cards will produce precisely.
This mod requires the Better Report Screen mod, which is a nice mod that makes the report screen far more useful.
If you are tired of having to open up the full diplomacy screen to see more information about the other civilizations you’ve met, the Extended Diplomacy Ribbon is probably the mod you want. By hovering over the leader's face, you can quickly see all sorts of useful information like your relationship (and why), resources they have that you do not, and all sorts of other useful information. All these things you could find in the game yourself but would take several clicks to get to, and it goes even further with several shortcuts to some screens.
How to Install Civilization VI Mods on the Epic Games Store Version
If you have Civilization VI on the Epic Games Store, you'll be happy to know that you can still make use of all the mods on the Steam Workshop — it just takes a bit more work.
- Browse the Steam Workshop to find the mod you are looking for (or follow the links above). Copy the URL of the mod.
- Use the Steam Workshop Downloader, and paste the URL you have from the Workshop.
- Extract the mods to the Civilization VI mod folder — typically "\Documents\my games\Sid Meier's Civilization VI (Epic)\Mods\"
And with that you can download mods from Steam Workshop and use them with your Epic Games Store copy of Civilization VI.
What are some of your favorite Civilization VI mods? Let us know in the comments below.
Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net
A longtime lover of speculative fiction, in almost all its forms, Don joined TechRaptor in 2014 on a whim sending in an application as he was looking for… More about Don
