Great expansion for the main game.

Civilization is one of my all-time favorite games, and the leap from the fifth to the sixth game is epic. It offers new mechanics, tons of stuff to do and build and a fresh new look over the older games. There is some new and relaxing music, more factions and overall, it is a huge improvement over the previous game.

Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Rise & Fall adds a lot more leaders and factions to the game, each with their own unique skills and stories.They are all well balanced and fun to play. It also adds the new era score system.

The new era score system is a little confusing at first. As you go through the different eras of time, you can either get a dark age (pretty bad), normal age or a golden age. With a normal age, nothing changes, with a dark age, you get some penalties and with a golden age, you get some fat bonuses to give you an advantage. At first, I did not understand at all how this system worked, but after a while, it became clear that you needed to achieve eureka moments and build different building that you did not construct before. Things like discovering villages also helps.

This DLC is packed with content and worth the extra money.

Together with Gathering Storm, these are very solid expansions that change more of the whole game than I expected. They’re of a piece with other Firaxis DLC, in the X-Com tradition of “more is more.” As such, they’re more additive than anything else, which can be a bit of a drawback as it can extend long games to be even lengthier, adding several other menus to periodically navigate.

Even so, the new systems are well integrated with the existing ones. In particular, I think there’s something very interesting in navigating electrical power as infrastructure, linked with fuel resources, linked with global warming, flooding, and climate change.

As usual with Civ, this doesn’t come as straightforward commentary – it strikes me that the best position for the system is to burn through resources in the earlier eras, reaping the benefits of production, and then decommission polluting plants to secure diplomatic points for the climate accords. In that regard, this is a continuation of Civ’s usual status quo politics, in which exploitative modes of colonial history are presented as bonuses for the purposes of the game. At least this time, that comes with downsides in terms of flooding and more sudden natural disasters that players and computers alike must address.

Though the features added in Rise and Fall are hit and miss, I would not go back to playing without it. The positives outweigh my grumbles: the loyalty mechanic brings welcome depth to city placement and livens up your borders; achieving historic moments feels great and so does being able to review your civ's history; and overall there's a lot more of what was already in the base game (new playable civilizations, new wonders, etc.) which together bring variety and longevity to the experience.
But while we're here, I have two grumbles and they're both to do with the Great Ages mechanic:
1) It was much more fun in base game when the big "you have entered the renaissance era" (or whatever) moment was triggered by you researching a renaissance era technology. The new system—wherein you are pre-warned that "the world will enter the renaissance era" (or whatever) in X amount of turns, and then it just happens—feels passive and thus dissatisfying.
2) Because the points that you earn towards achieving a Golden Age do not carry over into the next era, players who have already met the threshold for a Golden Age are encouraged to make odd decisions and avoid triggering Heroic Moments in order to score the points later. It's a level of micromanagement that feels narratively incongruous.