Civilization VI's screenshot of the Fall 2017 Update preview

After a rather lengthy period of silence Firaxis has now announced some of the features planned for Civilization VI's Fall Update. First and foremost, religion will be getting fleshed out with new beliefs and religious units. More importantly, religious units will soon be able to exert a Zone of Control and receive Flank and Support bonuses during religious combat, while the Guru support unit will be able to heal nearby religious units. So if you're a fan of starting your own holy crusades, the next update should be a pretty damn interesting one.

Religions aside, the Fall Update will also be bringing some massive improvements to the AI, most notably to its naval presence. Once the patch goes live you can expect to see a greater number of naval units, as well as entire fleets and armadas from the AI. Additionally, the AI will be much better when it comes to healing and protecting their naval units, so they won't be as easy to snipe as they are now. 

As far as the UI is concerned, all of the changes are aimed at making it easier to see what exactly is happening. A whole bunch of useless Gossip messages are being removed in order to bring attention to the truly relevant ones, while the Diplomacy screen is being reworked to ensure that all information is clearly presented and easy to find. On a similar note, the Great People and Espionage Mission menus will be getting a bit of a cleanup in order to make them easier to use.

That's pretty much the long and short of things, but if you're interested in all of the details you should head over to the official blog post. That said, there will also be a lot of other changes coming in with the Fall Update, but for now I'm afraid they are shrouded in mystery. On the positive side, with the Fall Update set to arrive in the near future we should be getting more information any day now.