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- "To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
– Paul R. Ehrlich
- "The good thing about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do."
– Ted Nelson
Computers is an Atomic Era technology in Civilization VI. It can be hurried by adopting a government with 8 policy slots.
Strategy[]
The next paradigm-shifting invention which will define post-modern times (sigh) is a machine which makes calculations...or rather, the infinite ways clever people find to use such a machine.
It is indeed difficult to imagine the modern world without computers. They gradually find their way into every facet of human activity: industry, communications, home appliances, and arms, to name a few. They even help your espionage, and the spread of your 
Tourism!
In Rise and Fall, discovering Computers unlocks the Drone, a support unit that upgrades from the Observation Balloon. In Gathering Storm, it increases Tourism by only 25% instead of 100% and also unlocks the Flood Barrier, a City Center building which protects coastal lowland tiles from flooding as sea levels rise.
Notably, the 
Eureka for Computers can be triggered without a Tier 3 government. Playing as Greece, Frederick Barbarossa, or Kublai Khan and building Alhambra, Big Ben, the Forbidden City, or the Potala Palace will add additional policy slots to one's government, potentially allowing players with a Tier 2 government to trigger the Eureka. Joining the Owls of Minerva and playing as Georgia (with the Secret Societies and Dramatic Ages game modes enabled, respectively) allow even more possibilities for earning additional policy card slots.
Civilopedia entry[]
If one thinks of a computer as a device simply to aid computation, then these have been around for millennia. An abacus, used as early as 2400 BC, is just such as device. (For that matter, so is counting using fingers, but that’s far too simple for modern civilization.) A mechanical astrolabe with a calendar calculator was devised by Abi Bakr in Persia in 1235 AD. The slide rule was invented around 1620. The “differential analyzer,” a mechanical analog calculator, was first proposed by Lord Kelvin in 1876, and by the 1920s Vannevar Bush and others had built such contraptions.
But most people think of a computer as a device that is programmable to perform and display a wide variety of tasks, something more than a souped-up calculator. The primogenitor of such was built in 1833 – about a century ahead of its time – by the “father of the computer,” the Englishman Charles Babbage. His programmable “mechanical computer” incorporated punched cards, a printer, an arithmetic logic unit, conditional branching and even an integrated memory (of sorts) … all recognizable to any present-day computer geek.
It was the arrival of electricity that spawned the “Computer Age.” The principles of pioneer “computer scientist” (actually, he was a mathematician) Alan Turing were first set out in his 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers.” During the Second World War, various battling nations set about turning his insights into reality, for everything from breaking enemy codes to shooting down enemy aircraft. Most of the engineers used electricity and vacuum tubes rather than mechanical switches, and gave their monstrous machines names such as “ABC,” “Colossus” (the first digital programmable computer), and ENIAC (capable of 5000 additions or subtractions a second) in 1946, the first “Turning-complete” machine.
Since then, thanks to the invention of bipolar transistors and integrated circuits and semiconductors, and the efforts of a lot of tinkerers, computers have become ever faster, more compact and oozed into all sorts of human pursuits from research to manufacturing to warfare to entertainment. Thus, HAL 9000 and Skynet.
Trivia[]
- The
Eureka for Computers can be obtained in no fewer than six ways: adopting a government with eight policy slots, obtaining it with espionage, or activating Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Alfred Nobel, or Erwin Schrödinger. This is the most ways to obtain any tech or civic boost in the game.
See also[]
- Computers in other games
