It’s a hard truth, but not all Civilization 6 civs and leaders are created equal. You have your obvious top-tier choices in Korea for science victories, or Shaka – leader of the Zulu – for domination victories. If you’re playing multiplayer, then civs such as Japan, Maya, and Rome are considered some of the best the 4X game has to offer.
There are plenty of different criteria you could use to create a ranking list – and that’s even before we acknowledge the impact of personal bias – but Civ 6 fan GimikkuPappeto from the Civ subreddit has decided to rank them based on how friendly they are during games. Only two are ranked top tier in the ‘eternal friends’ category: Gilgamesh, who leads the Sumerians, and Poundmaker, leader of the Cree civilisation in Civ 6.
Brazil's Pedro II and Australia’s John Curtin are the two bottom-tier civ 6 leaders, in the ‘eternal archnemesis’ category. The remaining 50 leaders are split between five other tier ranks, with a small majority placed in positive tiers versus negative ones. While this tier list does include alternative leader options, it doesn’t include the alternate personas for Teddy Roosevelt and Catherine de Medici.
Here’s the original tier list on Reddit, if you want to have a look:
I ranked the civ leaders based on how friendly they usually are with me from civ
One commenter theorised that Gimikku must like going down the religious route a lot, which thy confirm: “Yeah I almost always try to generate good faith and a religion even as a non-religious civ.”
The choices a player makes – especially the consistent game-to-game ones – can quite often dictate how other leaders are going to react to you as you come across them. It’s also worth mentioning that even though this tier list is based on one person’s experience, there is logic at work too.
Gilgamesh and Poundmaker’s leader agendas – the core trait that governs how the AI plays that nation – are geared towards alliances and being friendly. Gilgamesh’s friendliness is even a bit of a meme at this point.
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There are currently no known plans for Civilization VI at the time of writing. There are plenty of rumours Firaxis is working on something – possibly Civilization 7 – but there’s also been no confirmation whether the studio is done with Civ VI either. In the meantime, a new challenger has surfaced in the form of Humankind.