The American studio Firaxis promised a revolution and kept its word – Civilization 7 is a revolutionary installment. Without hesitation, he takes on the greatest sanctities of the series, destroys the old order and introduces a new order. The problem is that this revolution is still going on – barricades are still being erected in the streets, and smoke is rising over the city. And we will wait a little longer before the old goes away for good, and the new one solidifies, learns from its first mistakes and – most importantly – repairs the distortions. Because there are simply a lot of them in this revolutionary mess.
Currently, Civilization 7 is a chaotic mix of interesting ideas, classic solutions for the series, a lot of minor and major bugs, wonderful audiovisual setting, misguided simplifications and unclear mechanics. As a result, apart from the moments when the game drew me in so much that it was difficult for me to tear myself away, there were also a lot of moments when I couldn’t find basic information, key mechanics didn’t work or the gameplay was simply tiring. And above all this, there is a red flag in the form of a cut out fourth epoch (the one with computers or the conquest of space), the absence of which is simply felt. Which, by the way, is a clear reminder that the revolution in the series is not only about gameplay changes, but also about a stronger focus on monetization.
Adam Zechenter
It feels odd to link to a review in a language I don’t speak, and to comment on a game I haven’t played yet, but based on the translation this article best represents my own impressions on Civilization VII, at least from the early previews and gameplay videos from Firaxis and content creators. In short: huge changes to game mechanics that are paired with poor and even baffling implementation, bad UI, and lots of unfinished work that cannot, for me at least, justify the initial high price.
The introduction of military commanders, an upgraded incarnation of Great Generals that can gather all the troops, move them across your empire, and provide various combat bonuses, is probably the best addition to Civ VII. It’s also a genuine improvement over Civ VI, where unit promotions always felt unsatisfactory compared to the variety in previous versions – and barely changed after release as far as I remember. In Civ VII, the commander levels up based on combats in its area of effect, but they can also be used passively to provide bonuses to the cities they’re stationed in.
Another good addition is the separations of settlements into cities and towns. Towns are a bit like Civ V’s puppets, except you can settle them yourself and as they grow past a certain size you can decide to specialize or convert to full-fledged cities, where you can control the production queue as in previous iterations of the game. This allows cities to grow much taller and use specialists because they are fed by towns, reducing micromanagement while allowing the player to expand and control land and resources.
From here on out the questionable to bad stuff start to creep in. The new mechanic to keep players from expanding uncontrollably is a global happiness cap akin to Civ V, which doesn’t feel great considering that this massively rewarded ‘tall’ and defensive play, with very few cities as opposed to Civ IV and VI’s more expansive mindset.
The removal of workers/builders feels like a downgrade, to me at least. While many rejoiced at the reduction of micromanagement – and to be fair, in VI it became a nuisance to constantly produce builders because of their limited number of charges – to me this points to a disquieting trend of taking choices away from players for the sake of ‘simplification’. The prime example: the removal of manual road building in VI; VII goes even further by removing user-constructed roads and railroads entirely – in VI you could at least lay them down later into the game with a Military Engineer.
I’m more mixed towards that fact that chopping forests and resources has been removed as well. It always felt like a cheat to rush production by whipping or chopping; on the other hand having urban districts on top of forests of jungle feels odd and ahistoric; cities expand by clearing and transforming the land around them, so removing that option from the game is silly.
Coming back to workers, in VII improvements are built instantly as the population expands, which plays into the same theme of oversimplification: you can no longer control which tiles the city is working, nor expand its borders without pop growth! This removes a lot of strategic choices, like settling in a contested area and buying territory for defense, access to resources, or to block passage for other players. Now, if your opponent grows faster and claims the tiles, you’re out of luck! This has the added consequence that cities cannot expand borders beyond the third ring, a limitation I frankly would not have expected to see surviving this long. In the later stages of the game you can no longer rely on culture to claim distant resources; you have to settle the map, otherwise it will remain uninhabited land – which feels unnatural, considering that in the real world countries have established borders in remote regions without a large settlement to control these areas.
The ages and crisis mechanic is the sort of idea that looked good in concept, but the execution leaves to be desired. My current impression is that the ages are too constraining, they end abruptly, in many cases too soon to enjoy later-age units and mechanics – a particularly embarrassing situation happened in an official livestream when the game ended anticlimactically in a score victory because the age accumulated enough points to end… The transitions look so abrupt that you might as well have started a new game: your select a new civilization, your cities and towns reset, you lose old troops (but at least get to keep the commanders and their promotions), age-specific buildings lose adjacencies, specialists go unassigned, most social policies become obsolete, even the relations with your neighbors and the city states on the map reset! Speaking of city states (rebranded as independent powers), in Civ VII once you befriend one you are locked in as its suzerain, which to me is an absurd design decision; once again overcorrecting for a mechanic that can be frustrating (randomly losing city state bonuses when opponents gain more influence), but also provided strategic depth.
Ages introduce good concepts as well, such as the distinction between ageless and age-specific buildings, and the overbuilding mechanic used to replace/upgrade obsolete buildings with their age-appropriate version. Nevertheless, overbuilding could have been designed without involving ages – as a matter of fact, Civ VI already does something similar by allowing up to 3 buildings (of different eras) per district, without automatically obsoleting their previous versions. It would have felt more seamless to leave old buildings in place and obsolete them as players unlock certain civics or technologies (a mechanic that worked pretty well in Civ IV) instead of scrapping everything you built at the start of a new age. The same criticism can be applied to wonders, as wonders unlocked in the age that ended become unavailable after an age transition. The game could allow people to keep them by spending cultural attribute points – then again, as discussed elsewhere, wonders are largely irrelevant after Antiquity, so not much point in that.
Civ VII tried to refine Humankind’s controversial addition to strategy games, evolving into another culture at each age transition, but the result is unfortunately not much better. While Civ restricts what new civ you can pick based on historical affinities and in-game decisions, the modest number of civilizations each age makes for awkward transitions, and the unlock criteria for non-historical paths feel trivial and stereotypical (horses for Mongolia, wine for France, silk for China). Maybe a different system would feel more natural, like unlocking civilizations based on which legacy paths you performed best on during the current age; anyone can improve three horses, doesn’t mean they potentially desire to become a Mongolian horde. I think this might work slightly better if you could keep the starting civilization and change leaders each age. As things stand, it’s jarring to face the same opponent now in charge of a new civ; on top of that, many leaders currently in the game do not even have their original nation represented.
Speaking of comparisons to Humankind, another controversial idea in that game was that you could ‘reserve’ wonders that other players could not construct after you picked them. I never liked that concept because the whole point of world wonders is to give significant bonuses, but at the risk that someone else may get there first. Fortunately, Civ VII didn’t go this route, instead giving each civ a bonus to their associated wonder, with increased production and the option to unlock it sooner. Still, Civ VII wonders feel pretty bland; many only give bonuses to the city they are built in, which kind of negates the ‘world’ aspect – and the ‘wonderous’ aspect. Unlike Civ VI, where only theater squares benefitted from being next to wonders, now all buildings get bonuses, hence my impression of sameness; it feels like in VII you’re supposed to build wonders primarily to boost other yields (and in the first age to gain culture legacy points) rather than for their individual bonuses.
The new governments feel bland and uninspired, an unmistakable step down from Civ VI. Another instance of oversimplification gone wrong: instead of having interesting choices, balancing the various types of policy cards in each government against the bonuses of the government itself and current needs, Civ VII switched to just a set of policies and some bonuses during celebrations (happiness-triggered golden ages basically). As far as I can tell you get one government per age, meaning the choice to switch into something else as the game situation evolves was taken away as well. I have already seen players sticking to the same government one game after another because it offers the ‘best’ bonuses (growth mainly); how can this claim to be an interesting strategic game, if it drives players into the same choices constantly? One innovation in Civ VII are the civilization-specific culture tree and policy cards, but that is something that could have easily been implemented on Civ VI’s systems.
I’m not a fan of the new trade and resources system either. Having to assign (some) resources to cities and towns while trying to maximize the bonuses you receive introduces a whole new layer of micromanagement. This is possibly an overcorrection to Civ VI’s amenities, where the happiness from luxuries would get randomly allocated across the empire, which players had basically no control over. The Civ VII version looks tedious in comparison. I’m not very clear on what strategic resources are supposed to do; apparently, they no longer unlock more powerful units, but just give small combat bonuses to certain unit types? Very uninspired if you ask me.
What perplexes me most about trading is that it looks like you automatically receive the resources of the city where you establish a trade route, and the owner of the city cannot do anything to prevent you from acquiring those resources! (short of all-out war I presume) This is very different from previous iterations of the game and strange from a real-world perspective; trading implies that you, well, trade goods for other goods or money, and the other party can negotiate the terms or reject the deal – and that’s how it worked for all the Civ versions I remember – not getting stuff for free because your merchant traveled there!
But what about winning the game? Alas, the victory conditions are one of the weak points of Civ VII for me. There are four different paths to victory (cultural, economic, militaristic, scientific), where you ultimately have to complete quests and gather points towards a set goal. My issue is that, whereas previous games gave players a victory objective and they had a certain amount of flexibility and leeway how to arrive there (the most diverse maybe being Civ VI’s cultural victory, where by the last expansion there were multiple sources of tourism and you as the player could lean more into one or the other based on the in-game situation or personal preferences), in VII the paths to ‘victory’ are rigid and predefined, and I suspect this will become stale and repetitive rather quickly. Want to conquer the world? Go ahead, but that won’t actually win you the game unless you build a nuke in the Modern era. Want to build wonders? Sure, but they only advance your victory progress in Antiquity – and there’s no other path to cultural legacy points in that age, so you’re forced into wonder building at a point when you civilization is the least prepared for it.
The worst thing gameplaywise about these new legacy paths is that… it doesn’t provide workable methods to prevent a runaway opponent from winning! In Civ VI alone you could use spies to steal great works, sabotage industrial zones and space projects, to could condemn religious units, prevent rock bands from entering your lands, vote to deny others diplomacy points, and as a last resort you could go to war to hamper the progress of other players. In VII I’m not even sure war is a viable option because of the hard cap on settlements; your society might crash well before you can reach your opponent’s core cities. The economic victory in Civ VII might be the worst offender: you go around capitals spending gold and influence to make others join the World Bank and… they cannot refuse or fight back! There’s no diplomacy or persuasion involved, and worse almost no skill at the game; you can simply turtle in a corner amassing resources and gold until you hit the mark and win.
Another minor side-effect of the ages system is that… you cannot win before the Modern age! For all the talk about introducing ages to keep the game engaging for players, previous versions at least allowed fast victories by conquering/vassaling the world, by religious conversion or cultural influence under certain circumstances; space was usually the victory condition that took the longest. In VII on the other hand you only play the first ages to gather some rather inconsequential bonuses for the final showdown.
The mechanic I’m most disappointed by has to be religion, which feels like an afterthought strapped onto the game in the late stages of development. Antiquity restricts you to pantheons, you can found proper religions only in the Exploration age, but it’s completely removed in the Modern age. This is another area where the age system proves overly rigid, forcing all civilizations into a development path that doesn’t feel organic. The mechanic itself is incredibly dumbed down: you only need a civic and a temple to found a religion, and its sole purpose seems to be generating relics for culture legacy points. Converting others seems trivial, but you can’t covert holy cities, and there’s no downside to not spreading your own religion to your own cities or get converted by competing religions; after generating enough relics for the legacy path you can simply ignore religious spread altogether.
Speaking of the Exploration age, treasure fleets are another one of these ideas that sounds cool in theory but arrived in a poor and possibly unfinished state. It’s tied into the economic legacy path, all about collecting resources, this time from overseas, which Civ VII labels as ‘distant lands’. The big issue here is that these distant lands are defined in relation to the starting position of the human player, meaning that civs that spawned overseas do not have distant lands of their own, therefore cannot take part in this legacy path at all! A rather large oversight from the development team, and one of the indications that the game was rushed to release.
Another issue that ties into this mechanic is the abysmal state of maps. Civ VII doesn’t offer a Pangea map type – likely because developers either didn’t know how to integrate the distant lands mechanic onto a Pangea supercontinent or didn’t have the time to work on it – and the largest map size is standard! This second one is a negative outcome of restricting civilizations to certain ages, which reduces the number of available players per age – a large map would simply not have enough civs available for all players! The few maps scripts available are of an staggeringly poor quality, producing weird blocky continents and tiny oceans that many have complained about.
There have been numerous criticisms of the game UI, yet another aspect that comes off unpolished and rushed. My number one complaint though is that the map, although beautifully detailed (or perhaps because of this), looks awfully cluttered and illegible. Whenever I watched YouTube videos of Civ VII gameplay, I struggled to distinguish between terrain and units, and between the various types of terrains and units. I remember vocal criticisms at the launch of Civ VI that the art style made it difficult to tell apart hills from flat terrain; let me tell you, Civ VII is much, much worse in this regard!
Of course, much of the dissatisfaction this time around revolves around the pricing and numerous planned DLCs, and personally I tend to agree that the game is overpriced for the poor state it launched in. There’s obviously another age planned, as the current gameplay covers history up to around the end of World War II, way too few civilizations to play with, and the list of things to balance and fix is clearly lengthy, if you made it this far into my post. Worst of all, this staggered release cycle makes it seem as if the game was designed for content creators, who are naturally thrilled to have something new to show every other month, instead of the actual people playing – and paying! – for it.
Despite being a fan and regular player of the series since Civ II, I don’t plan on buying Civ VII anytime soon, at least not until I see meaningful improvements in some areas. To be completely frank, I sort of lost interest in Civilization over the past year and switched to mostly playing Endless Space 2, and unfortunately the direction Civ VII is heading does not appeal to me in the least. My final remark is that the developers went out of their way to turn this into a low effort game for new players – despite opaque mechanics, it seems trivial to gather legacy points, and streamers are already beating Deity difficulty with ease – but a low challenge with repetitive victory paths is not something I want from a good strategy game.
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