Civilization 7 is in development

[Sullla]

The Machiavelli / Greece combo can be particularly strong because it grants so much influence, making it trivial to ally with all of the independent powers on the map. The most recent Civ7 patch did cap the combat strength bonus from resources at +6 which means that you can't go around getting +10 or +12 from iron/oil anymore.

Speaking of which... I just added a Machiavelli / Greece report on my website, this time exploring a variant that prohibits constructing any buildings and relying solely on rural districts. It ended up being, um, interesting: https://www.sullla.com/Civ7/RE-1.html

[Japper007]

Without "spoiling" that ending, it is so typical for this game to frustrate variants like that. Anything to slam the player unto the tracks again right? Choo choo all aboard Sid's Wild Ride. Also, again very typical that it's an undocumented interaction that seems more a bug than intention...

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

It's bad enough that Civ7 is asking the player to complete the same goals in every single game, but even worse is the way that it rips away control on two separate occasions with the forced era switches. I truly detest how Civ7 suddenly decides that the era is finishing with little warning ahead of time, then proceeds to tear down all of my cities, obsolete nearly all of my buildings, and teleport my units to random spots on the map (when not outright deleting many of those units!) I was disappointed by my Himiko game on Deity as dialing up the difficulty to its maximum setting did nothing to solve these problems. I've been able to play literally hundreds of new starts in games like Civ4, Master of Orion, and FTL over the years without getting bored, whereas I found myself getting tired after barely half a dozen games of Civ7. Not a good sign

I think this is the core of the problem with VII. Not the civ-switching - I love that part of the game. Everyone feels relevant all the time, and you always have a unique bit of kit coming into play, and the bespoke culture trees to further differentiate yourself (at the expense of delaying your civic development) is a really good choice.

But the way the switch is implemented - for whatever reason, the devs decided the best way to transition eras was to burn your entire civ to the ground twice per game, and force you start over. The Independent states you've built up a relationship with? Erased from the map, for basically no reason. Your armies? Scrambled around or outright deleted, again for basically no reason. Cities downgraded to towns, um, because.

Like, there's no gameplay reason any of that has to happen! The era transition comes, you adopt a new civ, MAYBE your buildings downgrade for balance purposes (though I'm not convinced even that's necessary), and then you continue on - you still have your armies where you put them, you still have your city-state buddies or enemies, you still have the cities you've invested in. That would build continuity through the game and it'd no longer feel like 3 loosely connected mini-games.

The fumbling of the age transitions is the single biggest flaw in Civ VII, in my opinion (that and the railroady gameplay, a lot of which goes back to the Age system), and the fact that it's so core to the game's design is, well, disappointing, since it's not the devs can just patch it out. Firaxis really needs to invest more in normie playtesters, because it's obvious the devs barely play the game in the same way that players do.

[Japper007]

I think after civ 5 the series has more and more catered to what I'd call "the nation scale RPG" crowd. And it's not that weird: a lot of popular mods for IV are basically that, and so are the extremely popular Paradox Interactive games. If you look at a civ game like an emergent RPG, civ 7 makes a lot of sense. The age transitions are the low point of an emergent story. But that design mentality is fundamentally at odds with classic 4X, where a player gets stronger and stronger

[Brian Shanahan]

I think after civ 5 the series has more and more catered to what I'd call "the nation scale RPG" crowd. And it's not that weird: a lot of popular mods for IV are basically that, and so are the extremely popular Paradox Interactive games. If you look at a civ game like an emergent RPG, civ 7 makes a lot of sense. The age transitions are the low point of an emergent story. But that design mentality is fundamentally at odds with classic 4X, where a player gets stronger and stronger

But 7 doesn't even work like the Paradox games. It neither has the roleplaying elements of Crusader Kings and Victoria nor the paint the map elements of the other games. I think it was a mishmash of ideas from other games with the most important coming from Humankind, and anything new solely thought up to avoid being labelled as a clone of X game with no regard to how it played out

The Civ series has gone full triple A, all sizzle and no steak.

[fluffyflyingpig]

Oh boy a new civ game, dont know how i missed it. Must have been living under a rock. Well lets just see what I've missed.

...


Oh.

Well, I guess I'll check back in sometime in 2030.

[TheArchduke]

Well, I have small hopes.

But. They make everything that annoyed people optional on June 17th. But without legacy paths, when does the age transition happen?

[Sullla]

This is the post with the upcoming changes from Firaxis: https://civilization.2k.com/civ-vii/news...in-jun-10/

Definitely some nice quality-of-life updates in there, though mostly it's things that everyone expected to be around on release (like Large and Huge map sizes). The biggest change that TheArchduke was referencing was the ability to turn off the legacy scoring altogether. But... I'm still skeptical that this does anything to bring players back to Civ7 or draw in new players. While the legacy scoring is a bad mechanic and the gameplay would be better off without it, those scoring goals aren't the biggest issue for Civ7 - it's the era transitions. You can ignore the legacy scoring right now in Civ7 if you want so the ability to turn it off altogether doesn't seem to do much to me. Put another way, the problem isn't that the game wants me to go collect 30 treasure resources in the second era, the problem is that if I don't collect those 30 treasure resources then all my cities will revert back to towns on the next era transition. It's the era transitions that suck, everything getting downgraded and buildings going obsolete and your units teleporting around the map, much more so than the fact that legacy scoring exists.

[Japper007]

I hope that we get a complete overhaul. It has happened before in the strategy scene (Stellaris was a disaster at release, but got overhauled completely through several free updates). However, Firaxis has a bad track record for just abandoning a bad title (Beyond Earth, or Starships) or making the overhaul part of the DLC (civ 5 BNW, much as everyone on this site, justifiably, hates it, was effectively a complete overhaul). With these dropping player counts I'm worried they'll just abandon ship and move up the release of VIII.

[yuris125]

I think the section at the end, "The Journey So Far, and What’s Ahead", strongly points towards that being the case. There will be an overhaul, and they do mention things which didn't work out, such as age transitions and lack of replayability. They also talk about how these things will take time to address - so I think it is quite likely that when they do address them, it will come as part of the first expansion (and then it introduces a whole lot of new problems, and it takes another expansion to fix them, reaffirming the meme that it takes two expansions for a Civ release to become a good game)

The real question is how era transition mechanics which were never going to be fun, such as downgrading cities to towns and forcing the player to fully redo the empire setup, made it through playtesting.... the meme about two expansions may be alive and well, but arguably no other Civ release had such a bad starting position

But I'm not as pessimistic about the game being abandoned like Beyond Earth and Starships - if only for the cynical reason that Firaxis have to try to salvage the game and bring in the cash they undoubtedly promised to Take-Two/2K before they get the budget to work on Civ8. Civ is supposed to be a big money-maker, and for all its problem is still in the top10 bestselling releases this year (according to the numbers shown at Summer Game Fest). If they manage to salvage this release, there's still a strong potential for many DLC sales - and DLC require a much smaller budget than the next game in the series. Whether it's a good thing is a different question.....