Civilization 6 mod adds giant Earth map

For more, see our list of the best Civilization 6 mods.

Those of you familiar with Civilization 5's modding scene will likely know of Gedemon's Yet (not) Another Earth Maps Pack which added planet Earth to the 4X 'em up in varying sizes. Those of you who aren't, know that its Giant Earth 180x96 map was blooming huge. And know that it's now coming to Civilization 6—alongside a new Ludicrous 230x115 map option.

Released last week, the latest of Sid Meier's strategy games is for now without Steam Workshop support but that obviously hasn't stopped modders getting to work. Across both sizes, over 50 civs can be set in YnAEM, and, while the mod is currently in 'alpha 3' state, its creator has put the Ludicrous map through 500 turns in autoplay with 32 civs without issue (Gedemon's build is pretty powerful, mind: i7 4770K CPU, 16GB RAM, GTX 980 ti GPU).

Gedemon does however lead with a warning:

"The giant map is already way above the size of the huge map, it may or may not load on your PC (and will take some time to do so), the Ludicrous map is the max map size before the game refuse to load, and will take more than 4-5 minutes to load (or crash). I'd suggest to lower the textures size in the video option, the game use almost all the 6GB of VRAM of my GPU."

Hitting turn 240, the average turn time was two minutes, while at 470 turn times averaged four minutes. As it stands, true starting locations aren't implemented.

Strategy aficionado T.J. Hafer described Civilization 6 as the "most engrossing, most rewarding, most challenging 4X in any corner of the earth" in his review last week, and I do wonder—with so much going on in this mod, could Tyler really play Civ 6 without ever founding a city?

Details on how to install can be found here.