The appearance of a Great Person
A Great Person is a special kind of non-combat unit in Civilization Revolution. Great People can significantly upgrade your cities' production of Culture, Gold, or Science; increase their rate of population growth; reduce the cost of constructing buildings; or upgrade military units.
Great People will be born in your cities as culture grows throughout them. It is also possible to acquire Great People by reaching milestones of Gold reserves, discovering technologies first, capturing them with a city, or by kidnapping them with a Spy.
Using Great People
The actual avatar of the Great Person is essentially a unit with a movement of 2 spaces per turn. It can be moved like all other units, but as a civilian unit, it cannot attack or defend itself. Each Great Person can either be used to provide an immediate one-time bonus (which consumes the Great Person) or settled in a city to provide a permanent bonus, which is dependent on its type. The permanent bonuses they can provide are as follows:
- Artist/Thinker: Increase culture production of a city by 50% or convert a nearby city to your civilization.
- Builder: Finish construction of a current building project or reduce future building costs by 50%.
- Explorer/Industrialist: Increase gold production in a city by 50% or add a lump sum to your treasury instead (usually between 100 and 500 gold, depending on how late in the game they are utilized).
- Humanitarian: Increase the population growth of a city by 50% or add 1 population to each city you own.
- Leader: Automatically upgrade all of your military units in play to veteran or upgrade all future units produced in that city to veteran; if a Barracks is already in place, they will acquire an additional upgrade beyond veteran.
- Scientist: Finish research of a current technology or add 50% science production to a city.
While the permanent bonuses provided by settling Great People are highly beneficial, using them for their immediate one-time bonuses makes it impossible for another civilization to acquire them (either by kidnapping them with Spies or conquering the city in which they have settled). You can have multiple Great People living in any one city; however, only one type of Great Person can live in a single city.
Other civilizations may offer peace for a set number of turns in exchange for a Great Person. If this request is met, you lose that particular Great Person, but may still settle another Great Person of the same type in your city.
List of Great People in Civilization Revolution
Great People all fall under one of six different categories:
- Great Artist/Thinker
- Great Leader
- Great Scientist
- Great Humanitarian
- Great Builder
- Great Explorer/Industrialist
Here are all of the Great People in Civilization Revolution:
Notes
- If a civilization has gotten one of each individual no more can be obtained, even if a Spy successfully kidnaps one. The game tells you you have kidnapped a named Great Person, but that person disappears. (The enemy civilization loses the benefit of that person, though.)
- If you are playing the game on the PlayStation 3, you can see your cultural progress by pressing and holding the R2 button. The purple bar at the bottom indicates how much culture you have accumulated so far. The area of the bar that is not purple indicates how close you are to achieving a cultural milestone and thus receiving a Great Person. The grey area of the bar indicates how much culture you will have accumulated by the next turn.