As long as you haven’t been living under a rock the past quarter of a century, you have heard –even if only faintly–of the Civilization series of games. The popular turn-based, historical strategy games have long been a source of fun for the grossly nerdy, because the games play a lot like a chess match (the series even follow a game board format), but with a ton of history, culture, and diplomacy thrown in.

Featuring civilizations, empires, nations of all orientations, languages, and time periods, the games offers a formidable line-up of famous world leaders for players to choose from–player then serve as a champion for that leader’s country. Players are in charge of the nation’s economy, agriculture, arts, military, and more. Players advance either by land or sea, seeking to expand their borders and enrich the civilization they are in charge of–however, neighboring nations have the same goal, and in later games players can go head to head in player vs. player in which two players choose their favorite nations and have at it.

After five installments in the series, the string of games have all been helmed by the same developers and director, Sid Meier and his team. Having seen the release of their fifth game back in 2010–and in 2014 a spin-off game titled Beyond Earth–the series has recently announced Civilization 6 slated for an October of 2016 launch!

With the next turn-based adventure on the horizon, it appears developers have gone to lengths to bring us a game unlike any other Civilization game before it. It looks like the cities are going to becomes “unstacked” meaning players civilizations (houses, palaces, etc) will be spread out into different districts instead of compiled in one area.

There’s all sort of tactical complexity that was unlocked by putting the units out on the map…Every city is a handcrafted, hex-by-hex layout puzzle.

Developers are also promising more “finished” AI on release, stating that they are looking to fix many of the problems presented at the Civilization 5 release. Lead Designer Ed Beach states, while speaking on building on Civilization 5′s foundations:

We wanted to make people think on their feet…We want them to have to adjust to the map and play the map that is presented to them, which is going to make them have to rethink their strategies.

Another major update is the addition of what developers are calling Active Research. While in past games, players could discover advancements through economy and geographical exploration, now technological advances will be according to their terrain and geology in the environment:

In previous Civs research was up on the side, and it didn’t matter what was going on in the game world. You could kind of move through that tech tree however you felt like in a very independent manner. It was a very passive activity; you could click on the technology you wanted to work toward, and it might be two or three layers deep in that tree, so you wouldn’t have to make another decision for 25 or 30 turns. We wanted to break people out of that…

We can look forward to Civilization VI out for October 21st, 2016!