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[Civ VII]Learning from Napoleon - A Civ VII Exploration/Tutorial
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(February 15th, 2025, 12:02)civac2 Wrote:(February 13th, 2025, 09:17)Chevalier Mal Fet Wrote: I really can't recommend a purchase right now. This is the last straw. Yep. I'm totally with CMF. If we're not going to defend accuracy, precision and downright pedantry (particularly around big gun warships), who will?
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
Part VIII: Modern Times
The final age of our Civ VII playthrough is upon us - the Modern Age. Naturally, as Napoleon of Normandy, we have only one real choice to evolve into for our last civ selection: the French Empire.  France's bonuses: France gets, first of all, to choose any celebration effect in every Golden Age. That means your government choice doesn't matter (since governments only exist to let you choose between celebrations), probably because this wretched nation overthrows its own government every few decades anyway.* This gives the French unparalleled flexibility as long as they prioritize happiness, as you can rotate between bonuses to food, culture, production, whatever you like depending on the situation. So we're definitely going to build happiness buildings! *Seriously, there are so many that I wager a majority of normies don't even realize that the French revolution portrayed in Les Miserables isn't theFrench Revolution, but just a minor student uprising in the early 1830's. The happiness push is helped by our two unique buildings, the Jardin & the Salon. The Salon grants +5 happiness automatically, plus extra culture for adjacent happiness buildings (I've got city-building worked out by this point, though I didn't at the time I played this game). The Jardin in turn grants Culture, with extra happiness for adjacent culture buildings. Build them together and you get an Avenue quarter, which gives all urban quarters on this city +2 happiness. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but future games have shown me how key happiness is to high yields in the late game, and the French have happiness on easy mode. Our final two uniques are a unique unit, the Imperial Guard - just a modern Immortal, basically, an infantry unit with a ranged attack and a small strength boost, and the more interesting Jacobin. The Jacobin represents the new Great Person system in Civ VII. Instead of a common pool, Great People are unique to certain civilizations, and are trained or purchased like a normal unit - IF you have the appropriate district (typically, but not always, that Civ's unique district). So, if the Greeks have an Acropolis, they can train a logoios (what we'd call a philosopher), and earn Plato, Thales, Socrates, Hypatia, etc. Egyptians with their Necropolis can train engineers like Imhotep, the Spanish with a wharf can train Conquistadors, and we French get Jacobins if we have an Avenue built. Each Great Person is random and has a random boon - wonder production, increased culture on this building or that improvement, a free army spawn, etc, etc. You can't plan your strategy too much around them since you can't control which you'll receive, but they ARE definitely worth building no matter what. I am usually able to exhaust the list in my test games. That done, time to decide our victory conditions:  There are 4 victory types - Economic, Militaristic, Scientific, and Cultural. Science is familiar - reach end of tech tree, build fancy projects, win with space (in this case, manned spaceflight, so the Soviet Union won Civ VII in our timeline). Militaristic is NOT domination - instead, you conquer enough cities of an opposing ideology (the familiar Democracy/Fascism/Communism triad), THEN build the Manhattan Project, and THEN build Operation Ivy - which technically happened before Gagarin's flight so I guess the USA won the Militaristic victory after all. Culture is stupid and I haven't done it yet. Um, build Explorers, dig up artifacts, display enough and you win! Finally, Economic is creative - you earn points for factory resources hooked up to your rail net, then you eventually spawn a great banker. He has to do a grand world tour and spend oodles of gold to set up a bank in every opposing capital. So you actually need a strong economy to win! The Modern Age resets our building adjacencies as the Exploration buildings obsolete, but it's a foregone conclusion anyway:  On turn 1 we already earn 2-3x as much science as most civs, anywhere from 3-6x as much culture (before we've done anything French!), are twice as happy...Xerxes does have us beat in gold, though, so that's something. Anyway, there's no shot the AI can beat me at this point, so this is purely a learning and exploration experience. Final Civics tree:  3 precursor techs and then Political Theory lets you choose your Ideology for a Military Victory. Natural History unlocks the Explorer for culture victory, but in 5 complete games of VII I've still never bothered. Instead we'll prioritize getting France fully up and running with our 7 unique traditions:  Belle Epoque unlocks the Salon, as well as a tradition to refund 20% of a building's production cost as Culture - excellent. Mastering it gives culture to Happiness buildings. Voie Triumphale unlocks the Jardin naturally enough, as well as a tradition granting Culture for defeating enemies (stacks with Napoleon for even more culture from war). Mastering it grants happiness on Military buildings, as well as increasing the settlement limit. Then, moving up the tree Grande Armee upgrades your commanders with an extra promotion, mastering it increases our army's combat strength and enables our infantry to ignore Zones of Control, and finally the Code Civil unlocks the Eifel Tower early and grants culture for every policy we ahve in our government. Overall, you get huge synergistic bonuses to culture, happiness, and military conquest. The culture & happiness feed off each other to spawn celebrations, which let you slot more policies for even more culture... ...pity that high culture generation has nothing to do with the Culture victory, so we'll just go for a Military victory instead. Tech tree is standard and boring:  Military Science unlocks Industrialization, key for railroads, then you need Mass Production to unlock Factories for economic wins. Flight is also relatively easy to grab and there's rumors the AI uses planes in this game, but I've personally never seen it. On turn 2 I choose a government. Since we're French and can do anything this is purely aesthetic. Since we're Revolutionary Napoleon, we'll go with an elective republic:  If I were Lafayette I'd roleplay as a Bureaucratic Monarchy (the restored Bourbons & the house of Orleans), if I were Imperial Napoleon I could only be Authoritarian, of course.  And on turn 4 we already have our first Celebration. This is stupid:  Here's my city building in Aksum:  Trying to get my first Avenue built. I didn't build this city, but the AI fucked it up. YOu see all those districts with a blue dot next to them? That means there's only one building in that district. Building two buildings in the same district upgrades it to a Quarter. Quarters have boosted adjacency bonuses and in turn stronger specialists. Spreading out like this builds over your potentially good rural yields and weakens your specialists. Better to concentrate your buildings. That said...Aksum is still one of the better cities in my empire. I didn't understand how to build a city in this, my first game. Here in Rome you can see me fucking up:  I'm placing my Salon over my old Observatory. The Observatory no longer gets the high adjacencies it did in the last age, only a trickle fo science, and I thought I'd place the Salon on the high adjacency 4/5 tile. Clearly better adjacencies than anywhere else, right? EXCEPT if you look closely, you can also see that the other building is a Brickyard. A Brickyard is one of a few Ageless buildings in Civ VII - things like the Granary, your Sawmills & Gristmills (production/food, respectively), a Saw pit. These buildings boost the rural yields of a city like +1 to farms or +1 production to lumberyards or mines. They can be built in any age, BUT they can't be built over once placed - they're there forever. So you see the problem? By placing my Salon on the Observatory, I will NEVER be able to place a Jardin in the same hex, since I can't build over the Brickyard. So Rome will never get an Avenue.  Oops! Live and learn. It was asked if there are disasters, and the Rubicon floods all the time in this game:  It only pillages districts actually ON the water, though. In this case you see it pillaging a Bridge I built for fun (there are new Bridge districts in every age, to be built only on navigable rivers. They generate a trickle of gold and let units move over the tile without embarking, replacing the old ferry. Fun but not that useful, actually). Turn 14 and we have another Celebration. This is stupid:  I keep boosting culture to race through the civics tree, then I'll pivot to whatever I need instead. France is nice. Aksum is first to finish its Avenue, and so the only place I can build Jacobins at the moment. Note that they're cheaper than modern military units, to start:  Peacefully throwing down Avenues wherever I can and getting my new age infrastructure in place keeps me out of trouble for the first 40 turns or so of the age. My jaw-dropping culture and constant celebrations whisk me thorugh France's tree by turn 31, and I can turn to the wider culture tree. Meanwhile, things get spiced up when I ally with Charlemagne of Mexico, who requests support against Meiji Empress Catherine:  I do need to take cities to win a military victory at some point, so I accept. Catherine's capital of Tokyo just so happens to be the massive Mahapajit city I failed to conquer in the last age:  Again, totally vulnerable to a naval attack from the nearby rivers, and I have my army & fleet still here from the previous age. The French Imperial Guards quickly fight their way into Tokyo's southern districts, opposed only by Japanese cuirassiers:  You never totally outmuscle the AI militarily anymore, since their units get upgraded at the start of each Age. No more tanks crushing spearmen, which helps the robots keep up a bit better than previously. Not enough, obviously. In the north, a second army of howitzers & cuirassiers, mostly, bears down on Wilwakikta:  Amina joins the war and threatens my right flank at Tokyo, while I press the urban fighting for the city:  Remember, to capture a city in Civ VII, you need to occupy EACH urban district. Some of them are fortified and need to have their health blasted down before you can march in, as above. I still need to clear the cuirassier from the hex, too, once his defenses are dropped. Note my battleships ('74s, wooden sailing ships, not modern dreadnoughts) floating in the nearby river, lending fire support. Nothing can live in range of a navy in this game. Turn 41 and we get to Ideologies, which function kind of like Pantheons in Antiquity and Religion in Exploration:  Once you unlock them, you choose one and get various bespoke bonuses, BUT you also become enemies with all opposing ideologies. It can shake up diplomacy in the final stages of the game. Again, I'm Revolutionary Napoleon, not Imperial, so I roleplay into Democracy:  On the front, my Guard defeats the bulk of the Japanese army at Tokyo, opening the way to Amina's capital of Kampala (note the culture gains!):   Tokyo falls fairly easily thanks to my navy, but the war with Amina's Bugandans actually becomes a very slow, grinding affair of attrition. She's well inland, only my armies can reach her.  The new front after Tokyo. Note the natural wonder visible on the map! They're much more subtle than in VI. We sweep through Kampala while Amina regroups...  Leaving the new front:  In the north Catherine's made a stout defense of Wakikta with her cuirassiers, but my siege & cavalry army up there is gradually forcing her out of the city. With how easily I swept up Amina's first city, I thought La Haina would be a walkover, but the struggle for Amina's capital turns into a brutal, Stalingrad-like affair as we burn our way back and forth through the city districts. The AI mounts one of the most creditable defenses I've ever seen. Urban fighting leaves most of Wilwakikta a burnt out shell:  Lots of districts here have changed hands multiple times. I lost no units but had to send reinforcements from the mainland to really get a grip here. Almost all my land ranged units are up here, but I lacked the melee strength push ahead against Catherine's swarms of horsemen. At last, by turn 44, the last cuirassiers are driven off and we take the city:  Catherine has only a single field cannon left, which can't stand on its own now. I'll be able to join my two armies at La Haina now, pushing this one from the north & my Tokyo army from the west. 44 turns in, and, yeah the AI can't really play the game in the modern age:  Again, I have no idea what I'm doing at this point. I'm fucking up my districts, I don't know how specialists really work, and yet, I have 1,000 culture and 350 science (I'm not even pushing science) only 45 turns into the new age. Anyway, La Haina turns out to be a very tactically tricky puzzle. I didn't annotate this screenshot, try and learn to read the map with me:  Approach from the west is limited by a trio of mountains down to just a pair of tiles, bumping into the western fortified districts of the city. Approaching from the north has to thread between one of hte mountains and a volcano (which DOES erupt and fuck up my units, yes). The south is limited to two tiles by the other mountain, AND it's hard to tell, but the central district of the city sits on a high bluff above the waterfront down below, so I can only attack the easternmost district from the wharfs. FInally, the real key to the position is the navigable river & lake at the far east - you see that Amina has floated a '74 gun ship there, and she has more in the lake. Hence the tactical situation at Tokyo is reversed - the AI has naval superiority, and those ships actually repel my first attempt to rush the city. My two guards in the south can't coordinate their attacks, due to the cliff - one can hit the western & central districts, but not the eastern, while the other can ONLY attack the eastern. All the while the battleship can shell them. For all its flaws, Civ VII ahs really nailed the hex-based wargame part of it. It's come a long way since Civ V and is legitimately fun in its own right for me. With the support of field cannons & the guard, I do manage to overrun the vulnerable western district:  However, there are now Bugandan infantry garrisoning the center, and the attack on the eastern end is faltering due to the naval gunfire. I need to pull back, regroup, heal, and bring in my second army from the north to crack this nut, but my stubbornness refuses to admit that for a turn or two yet. By turn 47, I've managed to capture the central part of the city - but Amina stages a surprise amphibious counterattack over the lake, crushing my right and hitting my vulnerable ranged units in support. At the same time, a cavalry counter from the north manages to regain the western part of the city for Buganda:  Now I have two guardsmen hopelessly entangled in the city and surrounded by superior forces (3 Bugandan infantry, a unique unit called the Abambowa, the cuirassier in the west, and no less than 3 74s in the river and lake). My units are running low on health and I realize I can't actually win this fight. To the north, my own cuirassiers have upgraded to the tier II modern cavalry unit, the landship (a Great War-era tank):  note the culturally unique unit skins! France deploys the famous Renault, Prussia gets the horrible A7V box, presumably Britain will deploy the Mark I, etc. Anyway, my new tanks sweep down from the south and try to open up an escape route to the west for my encircled infantry, while the heavily damaged guardsman who can't escape loads up into my commander, and I pull the commander back through the field gun to the southwest.  Turn 49 and I've pulled totally away from the city in the south, trying to establish a right flank out of range of Amina's navy:  In the north, my second army is arriving and pressuring the city from that direction. Crucially, I also ahve most of my siege guns and field cannon here, which will be the key to destroying the Bugandan navy. My tank anchors the western end of the position and new infantry from the north push into the blasted, burnt out central district. Amina has retaken the water front and the west, and still holds the east, but her grip is tenuous. Turn 51 and the siege guns in the north (flanking the volcano) have managed to shell the eastern district into submission, while fresh guardsmen from the north have captured most of the rest of the city. Amina is down to a single infantry unit still fighting in the ruins of the waterfront, and her still-powerful navy on the water:  Turn 53 and I'm at last able to storm the last redoubts of La Haina:  The siege guns had turned to blasting the navy out of the water, and only one damaged 74 is still afloat out in the lake. A Bugandan commander also holds the waterfront with his personal guard, but commanders are incapable of any fighting other than a bit of self-defense, so he'll have to evacuate or die. At last, by turn 54 the battle is drawing to a close:  Amina still fields two commanders and the fast-sinking 74, but her capital is mine and will not be retaken. It took 10 turns from my first attacks on the city to finally capturing it. I immediately try to exploit to the southeast, around the shore of the lake, towards her city of Zala-Bet-Makeda before she can erect new defenses:  No more warships, so I should be able to take it with my tanks and guardsmen. And indeed by 59 it's firmly under control and my army is pushing still further east and further south:  The last Japanese and Bugandan cities are on the eastern and southern edges of the continent:  You can see the southernmost edges of Zala-Bet-Makeda in the north of that screenshot. My own navy was busy sweeping up Catherine's island cities to the north, but now it's reversed course and is sailing around the western edge of the continent to assist with the capture of Kalanten. I dispatch one commander with 4 units south - the city is surrounded by water and not much room for maneuver there - while the rest sweep over the plains towards Buganda's last redoubt on the coast. And we'll call it there. Next session, I'll finish off the two enemy civs, and hopefully earn enough points to unlock the Manhattan Project. Negatives of the modern age: mostly that the AI can't play the game. It's terrible at city planning and at deploying specialists, leaving me to race ahead of it by leaps and bounds. Again, third-highest difficulty, my first-ever game - I should be struggling here. But I'm not. Positives: warfare is a blast. Cities evolve from quick sieges in the Antiquity Age, when they're only one or two hexes, to more drawn out affairs in Exploration as serious fortifications and numerous districts appear, and by the modern age if two armies clash over a city (as at Catherine's northern city or, especially, La Haina) you get something like Stalingrad or Berlin. The Battle of La Haina, with Amina's clever use of a defensive navy, her surprise counterattack from the southeast right as I got stuck into the city, was the most fun I've ever had fighting the AI in a Civ game. Commanders really ease re-deploying your armies and make it less of a pain to manage modern-age units. Next time, we'll wrap up the game for good.
I Think I'm Gwangju Like It Here
A blog about my adventures in Korea, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
Once again, I'm really enjoying this thread and glad that you posted it Chevalier. I hope that you're enjoying the tactical combat side of things as you described in this game so well. Unfortunately, I have to say that I'm not enjoying these same game mechanics in Civ7 and if anything they're making me want to play less and less. This screenshot is so damning to behold:
The comparative empire yields on those ribbons are just... yikes.  In your first game, without really understanding the gameplay, your France has 5x the science, 15-20x the culture, and almost 4x the COMBINED city count of your warring opponents. These AI opponents have absolutely no idea what they're doing, not even the slightest. In an ideal strategy game, the gameplay would quickly recognize that this match is over and move on to the next new start. (Master of Orion is really good at doing this with its Council mechanic, Endless Space 2 is pretty good as well.)But that's the exact OPPOSITE of what Civ7's gameplay does! Faced with an incompetent AI that can't play effectively, the gameplay bends over backwards to compress the field closer together with each new era and to stretch things out for as long as possible without reaching a resolution. Zooming far ahead in science and culture gets undercut by the era transitions where everyone just gets set back to identical tech/civic progress twice over. Most of the victory conditions in the Modern era are nonsensical (culture) or ridiculously tedious (science) far beyond what's needed to determine a victor. The military victory condition should be the best because of the tactical combat system but everything is absurdly dragged out and padded there as well. Forcing the player to capture EVERY urban district to capture cities is just lunacy given how many of them there are in the lategame. I'm glad you were enjoying the tactical combat in this game but it looked like a pointless, hideous slog to me. Maybe fun for a game or two, but in every single game? Your French civ had almost 10x the science rate of those AI turkeys, it's absurd that it took that much time and effort to run over their cities! All those fortified districts plus the AI's ability to spam out units (they are clearly too cheap in their cost for a One Unit Per Tile system) just feels miserable to me, and that's been my impression in my own games as well. The combat system has a lot of excellent ideas but it's undercut by the ridiculous amount of padding - none of it which will make the AI actually be able to win wars, mind you, but designed instead to force long grinding combats out of the player. This... does not look like fun to me. The game's been out for one week and I'm not feeling much urge to boot it up and play right now. I would really like to enjoy this game because it does have some cool features but the negatives are outweighing the positives by a lot right now.
Thanks for the modern age update, this game has been interesting to follow. You mention the power of naval forces -- is it the power of the ships themselves, or assisting landings of ground units, or something else?
Also, how does unit support and management work? Sulla mentions that units are cheap to build and spam out. What limits are there on army size? Gold, happiness, something else? Forces get limited during age transitions other than using commanders to preserve them (if I am understanding correctly), but what limits you during an age? (February 17th, 2025, 16:40)Sullla Wrote: In an ideal strategy game, the gameplay would quickly recognize that this match is over and move on to the next new start. (Master of Orion is really good at doing this with its Council mechanic, Endless Space 2 is pretty good as well.) To be fair, I don't feel that the victory conditions other than conquest in ES2 are particularly quick - I've certainly not seen Sullla play any of them out on stream (I personally quite like them, because ES2 keeps you clicking away terraforming and growing all the way to the end, but it's busywork). And MOO doesn't really have any victory condition other than "conquest" - you have to have enough pop to win the vote, between you and your allies. No "science" or "culture" equivalent. Both just let you go quickly from "I'm set up to beat up" to "done" if you are going to go down route 1. Which may be better than tedium, but - just as I enjoy the late game ES2 building - some people may enjoy the predictable but mechanically fun (for them) process of capturing late-game Civ VII cities. In the big picture, it's great to be getting a variety of (well written) perspectives on Civ VII, so thanks to CMF for the thread. I probably wont be shelling out myself, for a variety of reasons, but I do like to be well informed.
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
I've found the Science path relatively painless. Academics, an opening tech that unlocks "schoolhouses" (no idea what these represent, an American thing I guess? And ironically with how the adjacencies work, you'll probably be using them to pave over the universities and academies where your academics are... bizarre) can net you hundreds of SPT. That makes the tree fly by in a few dozen turns once you get them down. If not, Labs will get you to oneturning stuff. And production is plentiful: usually the victory projects only take a few turns for a well set up city, and the ridiculous pile of gold the game throws at you means you can buy buildings to speed it along even more.
That said I don't think it being "painless" is at all a good thing for a victory condition, why are devs always so scared of a concede function if the AI is beaten and winning is a formality? Age of Empires 2 has bots that resign before the player has to tediously full illiminate them and it is over twenty years old! I also just don't think this system achieves what it sets out to do. You can accumulate Unique Quarters and Leader Attributes and all sorts of other bonuses, and the AI is bad at this. Rather than rubberbanding a bad player back into the race Mario Kart style it just knocks everyone back to the start and gives the one who did well a headstart halfway down the track! How is that not making the snowball problem worse??? I could see a system like this working if say, a player who's behind gets to keep their stuff while you have to start fresh, but as it is everyone loses everything but you get to have a headstart. (February 17th, 2025, 16:40)Sullla Wrote: Once again, I'm really enjoying this thread and glad that you posted it Chevalier. I hope that you're enjoying the tactical combat side of things as you described in this game so well. Unfortunately, I have to say that I'm not enjoying these same game mechanics in Civ7 and if anything they're making me want to play less and less. This screenshot is so damning to behold: I agree with a lot of what you say. Some of it is just different strokes - I really enjoy the mechanical process of hex-based wargames, and in fact I was first drawn to Civ back in the V days since it moved to a hex-based system. For example, I really enjoy WDS's Napoleonic series... ...and War in the East 2: So I really like the combat, basically. Civ for me is most fun as a procedurally-generated campaign creator, giving me new and interesting geographies to fight over. It'll never be as detailed as War in the East, but that's okay, because at least it's new, and nothing else does that for me. But your larger critique - that the AI can't play the game, and the Ages mostly stretch out the game rather than pulling you with momentum to the end (as the devs intended) - is true. The robots do decently enough in Antiquity, but they can't engage with treasure fleets or distant lands, they don't understand specialists, and they can't plan cities or synchronize them with the right civics. I've only lost one game so far, to a monstrous Confucius who devoured an entire rival civ in Distant Lands in antiquity and had triple my yields when I met him in Exploration thanks to his enormous population. That AI won with brute strength, as he had so many specialists SOME of them were bound to be good. And, while I think the unique civs being strong in each era is a great change, maybe the best of the entire swap to Civ VII, the Ages system is starting to feel like a straitjacket after only a few games. If you want to win the game, you'll play the same way every time. Each Age is a miniature game of Civ, and the devs set it up so that each mini-game can only be won by playing their way. Conquer this many settlements to gain Expansionist points. You want to do it peacefully? Screw you, player - here's a settlement limit, good luck getting enough settlement points with that in place. Want an Economic victory? You have to settle Distant Lands and gain their treasures! Everybody's 16th century Spain now! So I hit the same checklists each time. I expand out in antiquity and play normally, for the most part, sometimes warring, sometimes not. I make sure I end the age with at least 3-4 cities with my unique quarter built, if I have one. Especially the Mayans, they're busted as hell (15% science converted to production on their quarter). In Exploration, I send out my cog, find exactly where Distant Lands are within a few turns becuase they're ALWAYS in the same place, scout for a few early settlement sites, and take it. I found a religion mostly for the Expansionist points. Scoot my treasure fleets home. Then in modern, I rush a victory condition because by this point hte game is over, only the game doesn't recognize it.* *At least military victory doesn't require you to clean up the whole map. You earn enough points for the Manhattan project to unlock and the game waves the white flag at taht point, mercifully. Quote:Thanks for the modern age update, this game has been interesting to follow. You mention the power of naval forces -- is it the power of the ships themselves, or assisting landings of ground units, or something else?Maintenance in theory limits army size, but you can still make gold by the thousands by the Modern Age. Towns make good gold sinks, but there's no way that you could ever have an army large enough to actually harm your income in any way. So, the only limit is - commanders are expensive and so you'll only be able to bring so many over during an age transition (in theory, as Mayan Ben Franklin I had production oozing out of my eyeballs and so I had carried fully 5 entire army corps over into Exploration...purely for deterrence against Xerxes though since I had sworn off military victory this game). Otherwise, no, go nuts. Even the shoddiest player should be able to eventually bury the AI in divebombers if nothing else, I still haven't seen them make use of air power. Let's wrap this up: Part IX: Closing out the Modern Age A lot of the modern soundtracks really have this beautiful Gershwin style to them. Rhapsody in Blue is my favorite of his, and I think matches the spirit of the age well in Civ VII. We left Napoleon of France having just conquered the core of the Siamese & Bugandan empires, after a particularly fierce fight for the Siamese capital of La Haina. Taking those cities largely ripped the heart out of Catherine & Amina's resistance, as my armies are able to divide after the victory and race after their final cities. The two women would accept peace now, but I want to finish off the AI to clear the board a bit. I'll go over the settlement cap but I have nearly 1,400 spare happiness since I'm France so we'll deal.  Given Sullla's cogent critiques, I think it's important to note that long, drawn-out sieges like the Battle of La Haina are the exception rather than the rule in Civ VII. Most cities won't be as well-fortified as the AI capital, and it's also very rare that they'll have a practically-unkillable naval squadron lending gunfire support to the defense. More common are single-hex towns like Kihei here. You can also see how combat works - similar to VI, in that strength differential makes most of the difference. Here, a field gun, my tier 2 unit (looks to be basically the famous French 75 millimeter cannon of WWI notoriety) has a base of 40, bombarding a town with base defense 55. I get +4 combat strength for having two flanking units, +5 from my Commander's Order promotion (essentially making him a Great General from VI), and +3 from my strategic Niter resources. (I like how Strategic Resources work - Niter, Iron, Horses, Oil, all give combat bonuses to relevant units for each copy you have. In one game, AI Normans with six horse resources made my life hell with Chevalers, which were all but unkillable in the open field and could only be fought from my walls. My only complaint about this system is that resources are generated afresh at every age transition, and you automatically have the relevant improvements upgraded if you're working that tile. So, like, I suddenly just have five Oil in the modern age on turn 1. No idea where it is, none of the joy of building my own refinery, it's just poofed into existence. Mechanically I understand why it works that way, but emotionally it's, well, less fun.) That means that the ranged unit can do decent-ish chip damage to a town, even though siege units are meant to do the job. Compare how a field battle looks. Landships are the Tier II cavalry unit to Tier I Cuirassiers, essentially WWI tanks vs. 19th century armored horsemen.  The tank has a base of 60 combat strength to the horseman's 55. That's typical of tier transitions in VII - about 5 points of strength per upgrade. But then I get +6 for all my oil resources! Another +3 for my Shock Tactics civic in government, and +3 for having researched Combustion's Mastery on the tech tree. The enemy gets -4 points for his injuries, -1 for war weariness, countered by his single oil resource, a combat boost from the difficulty, and a +2 bonus for defending on a forest tile (easier to see in game than in the image). The result is 72 effective strength vs 54 for the cuirassier, an 18-point difference that results in a one-shot kill here. I can...also attack Catherine's Ship of the Line on a navigable river tile with my tank?  I can only imagine that this is an event similar to the French cavalry charging over the ice to capture the Dutch fleet, only this time down with tanks.  The Siamese fleet made prize by French tanks, 1823, fanciful painting by Charles Mozin. Anyway, even non-siege units like these ranged cannon can quickly chip down an undefended town like here, but if Amina had an army in garrison I'd be driven off rather easily. I think this system, at least, works well. It takes only a turn or two to blast down the town's HP and occupy it with my guardsmen:  I also unlock Flight, just in time for the new flying units to make not a damn bit of difference. Air power is a bit expanded in Civ VII, with the new dive bomber unit slotting in between fighters & bombers:  Bombers are your strategic bombers, the B-17s, B-52s, etc, meant for attacking infrastructure but also quite good at blasting units off the map. "Attackers' are your fighter-bombers, the Stuka, the P-47/P-51, modern day A-10s or F/A-18s, ideal for targeting units. Finally, Fighters are the classic interceptors, the Spitfires, ME-109s, F-4s, F-22s of the world. I have never once used a fighter on an enemy air unit in any Civ game, ever. That hasn't changed, even with the Age system. Ah well. Anyway, other than incidents like this, the war is quickly wrapped up as my battleships conquer distant islands with minimal resistance and my army cleans up the continental cities. In the meantime, with 1,400 happiness and culture pouring into my cities, I reach the end of the Civics tree before turn 70:  That's all of France's unique civics, 3 unique Ideology civics, and the default civics tree, all done. Does ANY of this help me win a culture victory? Nope! A "culture victory" in Civ VII just needs you research Natural History, which is one of the default civics available at the start of the age, and then play a goofy minigame of sending Explorer units out to "research" artifact locations at universities (hope you built those science buildings in your culture victory attempt), then go and dig up those artifacts to display in your museum (hope the AI, which instantly learns where the artifacts are when you research them, doesn't get there first. Good news is they love to spam Explorers, and you'll often get a conga line of dozens of the buggers streaming through your territory from every other civ on the map. No, you can't close your borders to them. No, you can't kill them with military units. Just gotta hurry), THEN when you've ticked enough boxes the game will decide you're allowed to build a World's Fair wonder, and then you win! I didn't bother with any of that. One interesting incident - as I was redeploying my army to garrison duties in the closing turns of the war, an army corps of 3 infantry divisions, 1 cavalry division, and 2 supporting artillery batteries, all packed up in the general, found a Siamese cuirassier blocking the path home:  Generals normally can't fight. They have HP and can take a hit or two, but they can't directly attack. You need to unpack your units and THEN attack with them in this new system. However, here I'm given this interesting button with a bunch of dots on the interface panel, lower center (sort of highlighted). Intrigued, I click it:  The corps runs right over the cuirassier without bothering to unpack. That's a nice quality of life feature. It hasn't come up again in several games, so I don't know the exact triggering conditions, but it's nice to have. Anyway, Catherine is soon lamenting her downfall, and only a few iceball island colonies remain for Buganda:  So it's time to wrap up the game. I've discussed Culture victories. Science victories Japper mentioned above, but they're the same as always - research techs, unlock projects. In this case, your projects are Trans-Oceanic Flight (not sure if that actually extends your planes' range or not), Break the Sound Barrier (again, unclear if it gives a bonus to planes or not), and then Launch Earth Satellite. That all just unlocks the FINAL project, which is manned space flight. Economic victories require you to engage with the railway, factory, and resource system:   Here's the resource screen in the modern age. Building a railyard in your capital (MUST be your capital) and then in another city connects those two cities with a rail line...most of the time. Rome, despite being next door to Rouen, never did get connected, and I don't know why. So it's buggy. If the city is overseas, you need BOTH a port building AND a rail line. Why do you need trainyards to connect to your capital through a port? Don't know! Anyway, if all those hoops are jumped through, you unlock a factory! That gives a modest gain to production - nothing game-changing like Civ VI - and lets you slot factory resources. That's chocolate, coffee, cotton, fish...You can slot one type of factory resource per settlement, but as many copies of that resource as you have resource slots. They give little bonuses like +3% culture per, or +5% production to naval units (that's citrus, appropriately). Each slotted resource gives you a point. Earn enough points and you get a Great Banker, who travels around and sets up banks in enemy capitals. Do it in every capital and you win! I really don't like how every victory type is "accumulate points via arbitrary measurements" (slotted factory resources, slotted artifacts you've dug up, conquered settlements) and then run a final project of some kind. They all feel like different flavors of the same thing, instead of like fundamentally different activities. Surely there's a better way to show off your culture and earn a World's Fair? Why not simply have the Great Banker available for purchase via an astronomical sum of gold, and have factory resources earn oodles of gold in addition to their other benefits? Also, rail lines are a disappointment. They let you teleport units from one city with a railway to another connected one, but there are NO ANIMATED TRAINS on the map, ever! We had automated trade caravans and trading ships back in Rome: Total War days of 2004, for goodness' sake. Victoria III has animated trains running between cities! These little atmospheric touches give me great joy and I'm super sad they're not in Civ VII. Oversight by the devs there. Anyway, for military victory, predictably you first have to conquer enough cities, double points if they follow a different ideology from you:  Interestingly, every Milestone grants you "legacy points" for the next age still, which doesn't exist. Oversight by the developers who just built the same victory system for all 3 Ages, or a hint at an upcoming Information Age DLC? Anywawy, conquering enough settlements, fair enough, for some reason enables you to build the Manhattan Project and then Operation Ivy.  No, no other leaders are close to victory.  I don't like how nukes are gated behind military victory. If you're a Science civ being eaten by a more military powerful neighbor, you have zero chance of trying to turn the situation around with wunderwaffen in Civ VII. There's no tense science race as two players race to nukes and the first one to get there starts flinging them around, turning the tide of battle. Instead, you ONLY get them after you've ALREADY conquered much of the globe, and then you get one (1), not that it matters as Operation Ivy is immediately available and the game ends when you complete it, so why bother building nukes at all when you can just end the game? It's just a win-harder button, and while I appreciate thematically that the game ends when one person has a nuclear monopoly (since that functionally is how it works in practice in other games), I feel like these design choices close out a lot of interesting potential paths in the modern era, and throw away a lot of the advantages gained by ensuring every player reaches modern times on roughly similar footing. Anyway, Amina's surrendered capital of Aksum has 120 production, best in the empire at this point:  Those are rookie yields, by the way. Even I can do much better now with a few games' experience under my built. Nevertheless, Aksum shall host the Manhattan Project. Except I build it in Rome instead for reasons unclear to my memory. Probably pride. For the record, my own capital of Rouen is better at everything except production:  It's a bit too sprawling, as I didn't Overbuild enough obsolete buildings, instead chasing the highest current adjacencies. The result is poor gold generation as I pay maintenance on lots of old buildings. Happiness doesn't matter, I'm France. A few turns later, Rome completes its Oppenheimer remake:  There's no drama. I just proceed with Operation Ivy & fusion weapons.  I could spend 9 turns building a nuke...or 13 and just win the game. Gee. Make interesting decisions every turn, eh, Firaxis? Looks like I'll win on about turn 100. Here's my core as we start the final countdown:  Rome never did get a factory as I couldn't get the rail lines to link up for some reason. Catana was a space-filler settled at the end of Antiquity, as was Ostia. Ravenna was a great harbor city and bulwark against Xerxes, Lille was settled in modern times for those resources up in the tundra. Note the vast swathes of unsettled land have been the exception, rather than the rule, in my games - I think two AI civs dying early caused that. Greece:  These cities never did quite pay off as much as I wanted. They were always lagging in production, it felt like. Pompeii grew agonizing slowly - only size 20 for my fourth settlement ever! I really fucked the food situation there. It was a good base to seize Athens, though. Aquilia was supposed to be my west coast exploration base, but it was mostly unneeded. Tubman took over those islands instead. My island colonies:  Bayeux was crippled by my lack of understanding of the city building game, but it was a good unit factory. It and Lundres churned out plenty of Treasure fleets in exploration and were excellent naval bases in my various wars. Sainshand was super irritating and if I were to replay this game I'd kill it. Fucking Xerxes settling a one-tile island directly astride my trade routes. The western bits of Siam and Buganda, where our wars started centuries ago:  The navigable river near Tokyo shows how great that system can be. Great addition by the devs. The Bugandan core. See how close La Haina was to Aksum and I STILL struggled (briefly) to conquer it:  The southern reaches of the continent. Why Catherine ignored that beautiful coal & spice spot north of Maungakiekie to settle an iceball tundra city, only the Settler AI knows:  As the clock ticks down, Xerxes belatedly declares war on me:  Alright then. To amuse myself while clicking end turn, I begin carpet bombing his colonies while marching my units over to occupy the bombed-out husks:  Did Xerxes build a credible army, navy, or air force to threaten me before declaring this surprise war? Did he achieve force superiority over my homeland, which directly borders his, or send adequate defense troops to a single colony, many of which border my own, before declaring war? C'mon. We all know the answer to that question. Anyway, predictably, bombers shred cities and my infantry mostly just needs to walk inside:  More combat system. Combat is all about stacking bonuses. Xerxes has 12 oil boosting his cuirassiers (why is he still fielding cuirassiers? Don't know!), but it doesn't matter, I have nearly a dozen effects boosting my guards:  A few turns into the war, Xerxes at last launches a mighty invasion of Ravenna:  A single cuirassier and a lone ship of the line. Yep. He has 14 cities and somehow only 72 science. How is that even possible. I have twice as many cities as him, sure, but I have nearly 15x as much science as he does. I have 2,000 culture (doing dick all, since the Culture tree is finished and Future Civic wasn't repeatable for some reason). Tubman built only 7 cities out of her 18, for some reason. Charlemagne only 12. Their yields are abysmal across the board. The AI has done better in subsequent games, but this first one was abysmal. While I'm on it, the terrible UI gives no notification of units or cities being attacked on interturns. Since I'm not paying attention, Xerxes does capture Lundres, briefly:  This was the first inkling I got that there were even enemies near the city. Turn 94 and I reach the end of the tech tree, too.  I built mostly culture and happiness, remember, and still hit future tech before turn 100 in the new era. The devs need to do a lot of balancing, I think. At least the game is pretty to look at:  Well, the Manhattan project gave me a nuke for free, and I might as well use it. I nuke Xerxes' capital of Qaraqorum more or less out of pure spite:   I try to move a tank in to occupy the ruins, but it dies instantly to radiation. Oh. Well, that's good to know. Thanks lads, your sacrifice will not go unremembered.  Bombers do about as well against Ships of the Line as you'd expect:  Building an aerodrome in a city essentially makes it uncapturable by the AI. They can't account for air power at all. At Bayeux/Londres, a tank scuttles across the strait and re-occupies my city. Meanwhile, Xerxes walked his army up - packed inside the commander - to my border fort near Bayeux. I, um, shoot him:  Turns out killing a commander just dumps all the units out of him, I have no idea what "routing" does. Combat penalties? Who knows? At sea, a squadron of Nelson's finest attacks my fleet of 4 Iowa-class battleships:  Note, though, that this is the AI turn (see the "Please Wait" over the turn button at lower right). Naval units shoot back now! No more maneuvering for decisive alpha strikes, like decided Civ VI PBEMs 4, 7, 12, and 20. Oh, yeah, and the Iowas blast the 74s out of the water, obviously. Xerxes, having fallen flat on his face in the ten turns since the surprise war he planned started, comes and offers a random city for peace:  Sure, whatever, I don't care. Just bugger off so I can hit end turn a few more times. By 1859...     ...that's it. You get one more age transition screen and a little screen informing you that you have won. You even get legacy points to spend for the next age, because the devs made the modern age victory the exact same as the previous two ages, even though the game is over. ...sigh. No replay, no score screen, no Dan Quayle, because of course not. Why would those things exist? On the one hand, Civ VII is fun. A lot of the new ideas for the series work well - the civ-switching ensures everyone is always relevant and has something distinct to play with. The bespoke Civics trees for each civ are brilliant, maybe my favorite innovation. The refinement of city building from Civ VI is solid, once I got a grasp on it, and allows for lots of flexibility and player choice. I like the new growth and tile system...I think. The combat itself is polished - units have distinct roles to fulfill, terrain matters a lot, commanders really streamline organization and maneuver, etc. Graphically, the game is lovely, my favorite art style yet. Cities, landscapes, units, everything is rendered in loving detail. On the other hand, the game is rough and lacks polish. It feels like a school project one of my 8th graders handed in as "good enough." The game is good enough. The UI is functional...ish. It explains nothing, hides information. Why can't I see my trade routes? Why can't I see which cities are connected to each other? Why can't I have a list of my units? Why can't I see the AI's relationships with each other? Why is rest to heal on a separate menu? Why are there no hotkeys? Why are the quit to desktop and quicksave buttons - my two most commonly used buttons on the entire damn menu hidden in a separate sub-menu for no reason? Who designed this, and why? More important in the "rough edges" area - the AI sucks at the game. It doesn't know how to build cities, it doesn't know how to settle, it still can barely move and maneuver armies (only competent-ish on the defense, no offensive capability whatsoever). Single players will quickly run out of opponents, because the robot can't do it. Multiplayer has no hotseat capability because Reasons. Live multiplayer isn't fun for me, and only has one age at a time anyway. Other areas lacking polish - the victory screens are boring, last too long, and lack any kind of flair. Why no graphs? Why can't I rename cities? Why can't I rename commanders? (still pissed about this from Civ VI. "oh we wanted you to only rename important units, so you have to get two promotions first." That's how you play, Ed Beach, not me. actually, hang on, this is the root of many problems, I'm taking this discussion back out of the parentheses). At a deeper level, there are some serious design flaws in Civ VII. The age transitions break the game into three distinct minigames. Any progress you make that's not aimed at one of their four pre-defined legacy paths is largely pointless. You finished the tech tree in sub-100 turns? Great. That gets you nothing at the start of the next age, unless you translated it into legacy points. You built a massive army? You'll keep a few units (and zero ships). You had a beautiful culture and lots of great works? All swept into the rubbish bin at the end of the age...unless you earned them legacy points! The result is that you HAVE to play the way Ed Beach wants you to, the way he defined as "fun." In antiquity, you MUST a)conquer foreign settlements - you can't earn enough expanionist points peacefully, not while staying under the settlement cap. b)acquire codices. IF you have fantastic science but you don't translate it into codices that you display in your library, you gain nothing. A minor complaint since you'll have the libraries and codices anyway, but still. c)you HAVE to build world wonders for a cultural legacy point. Otherwise culture does nothing for you. (note again: generating culture does not help you win a culture victory at all! Most wonders are tech-gated, not civic-gated!). d)you HAVE to trade and acquire resources. Generating gold any other way does nothing for you. In exploration, you MUST settle distant lands and send home treasure fleets. There is no other economic path. You MUST convert distant lands cities to your religion. Oh, and EVERYONE gets a religion, no exceptions. No converting holy cities. No religious combat. No killing missionaries. No even blocking other missionaries. No way to really generate new beliefs. You MUST convert cities and display the relics generated for a culture point (again, NOTHING TO DO WITH CULTURE GENERATION). THe relics can only be generated in a highly specific way you choose when you found your religion. Oh, you chose "convert enemy capitals" for your relics? Screw you, you can't convert holy cities. You chose "convert cities generating Treasure fleets"? Screw you, the AI doesn't do that anyway. Guess you're not getting a cultural legacy this go-round. In modern times, you MUST conquer cities of an opposed ideology. Conquering them before the AI has an ideology does nothing. Then build a wonder. For science, you must run the space projects, then build a wonder. For culture, you must dig up artifacts...then build a wonder. For economic victory, you must - well, slot resources, THEN spend gold to build banks. That's new, at least! None of these victories is especially onerous or bad the first time around. But you HAVE to chase these every time. If you don't, then you don't earn the "legacy points" to spend at the start of the next age. That means every game quickly funnels down into the same few pathways - only 4, maximum. Most of the time you'll be pursuing all 4, whicih means every game quickly becomes generic. Even civ variation doesn't come into play here, because EVERY game will have 3 different civs. you'll ALWAYS be changing up your uniques, your new civics, your new inherent bonuses - which isn't a bad thing by any means, but it DOES mean that Civs won't distinguish games from each other, because that baseline level of variety will always be there. There's sameness amidst the diversity, if that makes sense? Like how every new Netflix series is the exact same even if it's ostensibly different. No, I'm veering too close to politics here, let's swerve. Anyway, Civ VII lacks replayability at the moment. A few games are fun. I even had fun throughout this one, because everything was new, even blasting Xerxes' stupid 74s with dive bombers. But you can quickly exhaust everything Civ VII has to offer. Even with ostensibly 30 different civs at launch...well, if you play on standard size, with its maximum 8 civs (woah, hold on to yer butts), in a single playthrough you'll see 24 of those 30. In two playthroughs you'll probably have seen them all. As for leaders...I've had Xerxes in every game I've played. I've had Amina in almost as many. I've never once encountered Hatshepshut, Pachacuti, Machiavelli, or Tecumseh in something like 6 or 7 games now. Right now, I can't recommend purchase. It needs about twice as many civs, to give true variety on playthroughs. The UI and AI both need huge upgrades to reach an acceptable level. The legacy path system might be baked into the game, but I'm hopeful that new civs will break those mechanics, like Venice did in V or Mali did in VI. As it is, though, I'd wait until the polish is present in the game - via mods, if nothing else. Then you can play a few games and have some fun, I expect. Just don't do it too soon, because there's not a whole lot of depth here. You'll quickly find yourself trodding the same path, every single game. In the end, it seems that you can only build a civ that Ed Beach believed in. Well, at least nuking Xerxes was fun.
I Think I'm Gwangju Like It Here
A blog about my adventures in Korea, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
i dont think i realized that you can complete a game in like 100 turns, that feels kinda wild to me. not that its necessary a bad thing - the early EARLY part of civ games can leave something to be desired as you wait for options to open up via new settlements and workers and buildings. i guess if your design philosophy was to make sure people actually finish games, cutting the amount of turns needed to reach the conclusion is one of the ways to do it.
and yet you still ended in a situation where you were just hitting end turn waiting for the game to be over. that's feels impressive from a design standpoint
Thanks again for posting this, and offering your thoughts and experiences with the game.
 It really seems like Firaxis has a very specific idea of how the game should be played, and the player has very limited freedom to do anything else. For people who like playing the 'intended' style, Civ7 will probably work very well. Everyone else will have a lot of issues. Add the problems with the AI, the UI, and the lack of polish and Civ7 (as launched) is rather disappointing. Hopefully it will improve with time and further work, as previous entries in the series have done.
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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
