[Civ VII]Learning from Napoleon - A Civ VII Exploration/Tutorial

[Qgqqqqq]

Thanks for the overview. What does the 'Play as Greece/Charlemagne/Rome' mean in the last screenshot? Could you have retaken over from the Greek civilization?

[Japper007]

Thanks for the overview. What does the 'Play as Greece/Charlemagne/Rome' mean in the last screenshot? Could you have retaken over from the Greek civilization?

It means those civs unlock based on having played those civs (i.e. Greece, Carthage or Rome) in Antiquity. You also unlock civs through your leaders (if you play as Ben Franklin or Tubman you unlock America f.e.) and through doing certain things. In my last game, for example, I was playing Trung Trac of Maya, and I only unlocked the 'Abbasid through hooking up three camel resources (because Camels are OP, I settle way out of my way to get them). These things are static it seems, I've had the Inca unlock the same way (i.e. settle next to three mountains) twice now, so you can force a strong civ if you want.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

How do the AIs seem to perform, in a general sense? They do seem to expand and develop fairly well, unlike Civ 5 at release.

They can keep up in the antiquity age, but by the end of Exploration I was totally smashing them, and the gap didn't close in the Modern Age. They're a bit more competitive than Civ VI AIs, though, and more of a challenge in wartime - I actually lose units now!

Thanks for the overview. What does the 'Play as Greece/Charlemagne/Rome' mean in the last screenshot? Could you have retaken over from the Greek civilization?

What Japper said. When choosing your next civ, it will display the unlock options for all of them. Every civ can be unlocked by playing the appropriate earlier civ or leader (Confucius automatically gets Chinese civs, Napoleon gets Normandy and France no matter what, Aksum always unlocks Abbasids and Buganda as "geographic" choices, etc), and you can unlock others via stuff on the map - Camels for Abbasids, Horses gets you Mongols, coastal settlements unlocks Chola, mountains Inca, iron Normans, and so on and so forth. 


Part V: The Age of Exploration


Welcome to our second Age, the Age of Exploration! This era, despite medieval aesthetics, is pretty heavily centered on Renaissance and early modern history, especially northern European and north Atlantic history, with a great deal of emphasis on religious wars and treasure fleets and colonization and so forth. So there really IS no medieval age, and despite that, I've taken a civ that peaked in 1066. Ah well. Civ never was a historical game, and people who try to roleplay it as one (looking at you, people who exclusively play True Start Earth) are doing it wrong, in my opinion. 

Anyway, like I noted last time, I took the Normans a)because they're my people, b)they're the obvious bridge between Rome and France, and I gotta play as France as Napoleon. I get a fancy castle that grants happiness and culture, insta-fortified cities, a frankly broken knight unit (although it is amusing to see my screen name in the game), and we still have Napoleon's boosted movement and culture boosts. 


 
The game really pushes you to colonize & to engage in religious wars. Lots of people are mad about this, but I don't get nearly as hot and bothered about historical colonialism as others do (besides, do these people complain about playing as Germany in Hearts of Iron?), so no worries! The real drawback though is that the game is clearly funnelling you towards one specific playstyle. I'll indulge it this time, but I'm curious to see how viable alternative paths & ignoring exploration are. 

Here's where the Age reset leaves us. My cities are all downgraded back to towns:




However, 6 receive swordsmen (upgraded from Legionaries) as garrison units, as well as my two army commanders holding my ranged and siege units left over. On the first turn, you spend your accumulated legacy points from the previous Age to set yourself up for Exploration. Thus, while there's SOME rubber-banding at the age transition - the city -> town downgrade, the reset of the tech tree, military demobilization, buildings losing their adjacency bonuses - you DO still get rewarded for your progress in the previous age...provided you hit the arbitrary benchmarks (Train a siege unit!) that the devs set up. If you played well but developed your civ in an unfocused, generalized way, you'll be hit harder. Overall, the game feels much less sandboxy than previous civs and more on rails. 






I didn't unlock any Golden Ages due to my own bumbling through the Ancient era, but I did get a good number of points. I opt to increase my settlement limit by 2, improve my gold income, and upgrade Napoleon with a few more bonuses. I also move my capital from Rome to Neapolis, which is renamed Rouen. I do this because it automatically upgrades Rouen to a city, and I figure having a coastal capital will be profitable later in the age. I do hate the lack of city naming, though. Let me set my own theme, Firaxis! While I'm on it, let me name military units or AT LEAST my commanders! I'm an AGEOD player, I think naturally in terms of division - corps - armies, I'd like to be able to designate, say, my first commander as Legio I Italica or whatever. It gives the units identity and lets me keep track of their stories down through the ages, instead of being nameless grey faces. I feel so strongly about this that in Civ VI, the lack of unit renaming before 2 promotions was one of my biggest irritations about the game. Devs said "oh the unit needs to be special for you to give it a name," but screw you guys! How about you play the game the way you wanna play it and let me play it in mine!? Bah. Anyway, no renaming in Civ VII yet, instead the game does it for you. What joy. 

Complaints aside, Rouen is actually quite lovely:


The diorama aesthetic is gorgeous, and the city looks like a place I'd want to live. I'm improving, slowly, at recognizing the proper buildings amidst the visual fluff of the houses, too. The Palace is obvious, but can you also spot a Granary, a Monument, an Altar, and a Bath? (those are all the ones I can pick out at the moment). I'll get better at this as I gain experience, I think - when I played the game I was totally lost in the wash of detail but that was also true of Civ VI, and by now I can tell at a glance exactly what buildings are in each district or even under construction there. 

Rouen is also home to the best resource in the game in the first two ages, Camels. Let me explain how the resource system works for a moment:


In Civ VII, resources are divided into Empire (I would have said "Imperial" but these guys are all over the map with their verbiage), City, and Bonus resources. In the age of Exploration you also have Treasure resources, and in the modern age Factory resources, tied to the economic victory systems. Anyway, Imperial resources give a flat bonus to your entire Empire. Gold makes buildings cheaper to purchase, for example, while Iron improves my infantry combat strength. One game I had to fight a psychotic Marquis de Lafayette who swarmed me with Chevalers boosted with 3 horse resources for +6 combat strength - the buggers hit like dump trucks and one-shot most of my early medieval units. 

The other resources are attached to cities or towns for various boosts. Bonus resources can attach to a town or a city, while city resources, obviously, only can be slotted into a full city. For example:


Silk boosts Rome's culture by 10%. Others granted flat production increases, or happiness, or food, whatever. 

Resources are acquired either via improving a tile in your empire (duh) or via sending merchants to foreign cities. Activating a merchant in a foreign settlement sets up a trade route to that settlement and provides copies of its resources to you. I see merchant caravans and trading ships dotting the map on these routes, but haven't tested to see if I can pillage them or not. 

Anyway, camels provide 3 extra resource slots to a city, letting you pile the bonuses on to a single city. They're essential if you want to gain an economic golden age, which demands 20 resources hooked up to cities. Most of the exploration age is about finding Treasure resources abroad and hooking them up. We'll look at that system in a bit. 

Moving on! The Age also resets all players to the start of a new tech tree:


I haven't talked much about Masteries, but most techs have two levels now. Unlocking the first level lets you progress deeper into the tree, or you can research the Mastery for an additional buff. For example, Mastering Cartography increases food on fishing boats. While my naval units can immediately enter deep ocean, sending civilians requires another tech (and to my chagrin, sending land units overseas requires still another, although I discovered some ways around this). So my early research goal is Shipbuilding, to enable my age of Norman imperialism around the globe. 

New civics tree as well:

 
The religious system is buried in here, but I admit I don't understand it much yet. One of those things for future games. 

The more important tree is the Norman traditions tree, which I prioritize first:


Every civ has its own traditions, remember, where the devs stuffed lots of the individual bonuses. I like this system a lot - your civ organically grows stronger and more distinct over time, and you can choose which bonuses you want to prioritize unlocking. Coupled with each civ being specifically tailored to its own age, everyone always feels competitive and well-suited to their situation. Normandy receives boosted cavalry strength, a bonus to fortification construction (including my two unique buildings, the Motte & Bailey), an extra policy slot (excellent), boosted culture & happiness on palaces, and a few bonuses to farms & conquered settlements. I find my habit is quickly evolving to racing through these trees as quickly as I can, and prioritizing culture to do so, but maybe I should try a scientific game sometime to see how it compares!

A few more bits of housekeeping at the start of the age. It's time for a medieval government:


Here I opt for Feudal Monarchy - Food is always good, while the other option will boost Chevaler construction and the myriad ships I'll want to spit out, so either option is good. Finally, I slot my policy cards:



I only have Roman traditions at the start of the age, as all the Classic policies are obsolete and the medieval ones aren't researched yet. Not sure how I feel about that - why not at least let us continue using the old Antiquity policies until replaced by medieval ones, as before? Well, no matter. I slot the production boost & the boosted town yields since my starting military seems sufficient. NOW we can finally start to play the Exploration Age!

A cog spawns in Rouen, which ventures down the roaring Rubicon to the sea:


Cogs are your basic naval unit, capable of both ranged and melee attacks, and honestly quite strong against an opponent who lacks a navy. Everyone knows how much I love ships, so I've been looking forward to this age for a while.

Shortly after, my cog ventures into unknown:


Each turn you end on Deep Water you take a randomized amount of damage from rough waters, but as you can see there's an offshore island just two turns' sailing away (deep water ends your movement). I should be able to weather that just fine, and naval units can heal outside your borders now, too. 

I soon find a small island, with the village of Tarnovo present, and whales, dyes, tea, and spices - all great Treasure resources!


I spend my influence to begin the process of befriending Tarnovo, intending to try and play with city-states more this age, and I'll need to get a settler here quickly.

The Exploration Age is centered on Distant Lands, which are basically any continent besides the one you started on. Luxury resources on Distant Lands are Treasure resources - once improved they begin to generate a Treasure fleet, which you then sail to your home waters to trigger a massive boost of gold and gain Economic victory points, mimicking the Spanish Main and the piracy that plagued the area. I never actually found an AI treasure fleet to plunder, though. Anyway, so many resources will quickly generate Treasure Fleets, so this is a fine spot to settle. 

I quickly churn out a settler (technically a Sokeman since I'm Norman and get a unique unit) and send to found the city of Bayeux:


The insta-walls are going to be nice to have since Tarnovo hasn't yet been reconciled to my existence. 

Meanwhile, south of Rouen at the city of Ravenna I complete my first Donjon:


Building both a Motte & a Bailey in the same hex grants you your unique district. The Donjon instantly spawns a Chevaler when built - fantastic. Meanwhile, the buildings generate culture and happiness, which lets me speed through the civics tree to stack even more bonuses, and spend more or less my entire existence in Celebration. I begin to dimly realize that the settlement limit is more what you'd call a guideline than an actual rule, and will begin to move past it this age. 

I'll need the fortifications at Ravenna, as it's still the frontier with the old Persian Empire. Except the King of Kings has been overthrown - the Persians are toppled and in their place, the Mongol horde has arisen:


Well, there goes the neighborhood. Lovely. One of my generals spends pretty much the entire age on permanent frontier duty with his army near Ravenna, keeping a watchful eye to the south. 

Meanwhile, by turn 30, after making repairs off the island of Bulgaria, my cog once again pushes to the east and finds a new world:


We'd already met Amina, leader of the Hawaiian civilization, when one of her cogs passed near my colony of Bayeaux. Now I can find where she lives. 

Sailing up the coast, we find a large river estuary, and in one of the fun bits of Civ VII we enter it. As we sail upriver we meet more emissaries from yet another civilization - Catherine the Great's, um, Khmer, I think?


Turns out it's Majapahit. I'm not good with the new civ symbols yet. I'll get there.



It does kind of amuse me how many Civ leaders were contemporaries of each other, despite Firaxis trying to "broaden the net," so to speak, of leaders. Lafayette, Frederick, Napoleon, Ben Franklin, Catherine, Ada Lovelace, Harriet Tubman, Tecumseh, Simon Bolivar - their lives all overlapped. 9 leaders out of 25, in a game ostensibly about all of human history, lived in the same century from 1750 - 1850. It's honestly remarkably a bit narrow-minded, to say nothing of strange choices like Tubman and Lovelace. 

Anyway, we send Catherine a friendly greeting and are informed that her great capital is just a little ways up the river:



My investment in city-states starts to pay off. Far to the west, the small state of Tondo swears allegiance, and offers us Cloves as tribute:


I really like this new system of choosing your suzerain bonus. Great job there, devs. 

40 turns in, I finally found my own religion - Hinduism, after an effort to make a custom religion founders on the rocks of crashes to desktop:


It seems I really need to prioritize spreading it, as I see no real benefits to my own cities following the religion? Eh. I take a culture boost to try and rocket through the civics tree even faster. I'll need to invest in temples and missionaries (done with old fashioned gold and production, no Faith resource in this game!). 

A few turns later, the city of Lundres is founded on an island south of Bulgaria, which will serve as a base for colonization of Amina & Catherine's homelands:

 
There's no England in the game yet, so, Britishers, this is the closest to London you're going to get. Sorry about forcing you relive 1066 and all that. 

By this time, my government has evolved to fully 6 policy slots from techs and celebrations:


I stack more culture and happiness. This grants me new civics faster, and more frequent celebrations, which grant me still more policy slots...Culture is REALLY good in this game, guys. I think much better than science. 

Tarnovo eventually offers to join us, but the suzerain bonuses here are underwhelming:


I didn't realize at the time that I could spend influence to incorporate the city into my empire. Should have. Ah, well. At top of screen, notice my gorgeous encampment graphics - when your soldiers are resting they get period and culture-appropriate tents on the map. I love the detail. 

And by turn 45 my capital of Rouen has grown quite sprawling indeed. It's beautiful to look at:


Do I know what any of these buildings, apart from the Donjon (lower center) are? NO! Not a clue! I will work it out eventually, but I think the devs erred a little too much on the side of realisim. I miss Civ VI/Humankind/Endless's color-coded buildings to clue you to the function. Roof or trim colors or even just banners flapping in the breeze would help a lot to make the cities more legible. As it is, it's pretty, but it's an incomprehensible mess to me, hwich makes city-planning hard. I also didn't really grasp the adjacency system or the specialist system yet - thanks to Japper for explaining it a bit up above - so I was just plopping building wherever the current adjacency was highest.

I think that's about enough for today. We've gotten ourselves about 20% through the Exploration age. We have two colonies set up overseas and explorers making their way through the foreign continent. At home our cities are forting up, but all the action is overseas. Next time we'll find ourselves embroiled in our first war since Xerxes took a swing. See y'all then!

[haphazard1]

Thanks for the update! The age transition is interesting. Not sure yet how I feel about them, will have to see a few more to decide. The rubber-band effect bothers me in a strategy game, but I get that they are trying to avoid the runaway effect in later parts of a game. Having your civ always be appropriate to the age is a nice idea; no more uselessly late civ-specific stuff for America, for example. It certainly sounds like your civ-specific cultural tree needs to be heavily prioritized, since it gives the only policies you can use at the start of a new age. (You would most likely want to do so anyway, since you presumably picked that civ for a reason. But even more so, given the age transition.)

I am amused that camels of all things are THE key resource. Very strange choice. In desert regions, sure, but globally?

When you mention planning colonization of Catherine's continent, is this meaning conquest? Or is there unclaimed land still to be had there? I would hope the AIs are strong enough at expanding to have claimed pretty much all the land.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Regrettably no. Check out the minimap from turn 45 of Exploration:



Now, maybe it's partially because of the destruction of two of the five civs on the continent, but there's huge swathes of unsettled land that will basically go unclaimed for the entire game. Tubman and Xerxes both have 4 settlements, total, Xerxes in a nice cluster south of me, while Tubman is scattered all along the west coast. I basically never settle either the tundra to the north of me or the central belt below me, because the settlement cap means I pay -5 happiness in EACH settlement for every settlement I cross the cap with. That means I needed to prioritize cities in Distant Lands since they count double for the Expansionist objectives in the age - so all my new cities were colonies overseas, rather than filling in the territory on my home continent. 

With only 3 civs on a continent built for 5, I think all of us were reluctant to go significantly over the settlement cap, and the robots weren't smart enough to strongly prioritize the cap-increasing civics and technologies. So they both hit 4 and stopped for ages (though they also settled new colonies overseas), and we didn't get many city-states spawning to fill the gap, either. 

The same dynamic was true, to a lesser extent, on the distant continent. The robots did a better job there, but there were still plenty of spaces to place cities - I'll build a few in those unsettled areas north of Catherine, for example. 

Overall, I'm not super thrilled with the settlement cap, and not sure what it brings to the game. It or the settling AI definitely need work.

[haphazard1]

Thanks for showing the land situation. That's...not good. How many independent powers/city states are there? If those fill in the gaps, that would be something. But big swatches of land going unclaimed into modern times is just...bad. It reminds me of Civ 5 at launch, when the AIs often just did not expand because the game was designed for "small empire" play. The settlement cap appears to be doing something similar in Civ 7, railroading the player and the AI into small empire play.

There needs to be something to prevent ICS, or at least limit it. But this seems to go too far in the opposite direction. Pretty much any even moderately habitable land gets occupied by humans, going back as far as there is history. Why Firaxis seems to dislike building large empires in their empire building games is a mystery to me.

[shallow_thought]

It feels a little harsh to the Normans to say they peaked in 1066. In terms of raw conquest, they've got another
(roughly) 200 years of expansion left in the British Isles alone, not to mention the glories of Norman Sicily and and arguably a tilt at Byzantium itself.

While I'm in the business of being fair, while I'm not the fan of Napoleon that Chev is, "one of histories most infamous leaders" seems a bit strong, Firaxis flavour text writers. I'm pretty sure I could pick 5 nastier (successful) ones in 30 seconds. Give me a few minutes and I could probably get a lot more.

Really enjoying the thread.

[civac2]

Really enjoying the report as well. Very well written.

[greenline]

I wouldn't mind seeing the subtle Civ 6 solution for ICS come back: increased minimum distances between cities. Civ 6 didn't even have any ICS problems per se: you wanted to cluster cities together not because a million cannibal cities were better than one big one, but because district clustering was so strong. Building compact Civ 6 empires still meant building big powerful metropolises, and it rewarded good long term planning even more than Civ 4 city planning.

[Japper007]

I've been going over my city cap dramatically recently. As long as it has lots of resources, I'll probably plop a town down. The raw yields are worth having fewer celebrations and maybe needing to pour more production into happiness buildings. Also almost all the Unique Quarters (all? from what I've seen so far) have happiness as the main yield of the second building. An arena or menagerie is easily 10 happiness and a good city (i.e. one with lots of mines) builds it in a few turns. And every Age the yields on buildings and tiles get bigger. I do prioritise settlement limit researches, but I do more of an overexpand-->fix cycle than the other way around.

I could of course, be completely wrong. With the AI as BAD as it is right now, I've no clue what is even a good performance, nothing to measure against. Maybe in a few years I'll look back at this post and cringe.