Update: Firaxis has confirmed that the spelling errors are a mistake. In a brief statement sent to PC Gamer, the developer wrote:
“We’re aware of a community-reported bug that has a minor impact on AI behavior. We’ve also made sure that everyone knows that I goes before E except after C… or other weird exceptions. Thanks to all who helped bring this to our attention and there will be a fix included in our next update.”
Original story: There's a story going around that sounds too improbable to be true: that Civilization 6's AI leaders have been acting strangely all this time because of five misspellings in a data file. The likelihood that Firaxis wouldn't have noticed such an obvious error for so long seems minuscule. And yet, inside one of Civ 6's loose data files, Leaders.xml, are the following five lines:
<Row Item="YEILD_PRODUCTION" ListType="DefaultYieldBias" Value="25"/>
<Row Item="YEILD_SCIENCE" ListType="DefaultYieldBias" Value="10"/>
<Row Item="YEILD_CULTURE" ListType="DefaultYieldBias" Value="10"/>
<Row Item="YEILD_GOLD" ListType="DefaultYieldBias" Value="20"/>
<Row Item="YEILD_FAITH" ListType="DefaultYieldBias" Value="-25"/>
In each line, 'YEILD' is a misspelling of 'YIELD.' That wouldn't matter if it were misspelled everywhere, but 'yield' is written with the correct spelling in every other instance across all of Civ 6's data files.