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

[Qgqqqqq]

Wait, Maungakiekie - is New Zealand in the game (as a minor civ)?

Thanks so much for posting your thoughts.

[luddite]

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! 

When they first announced the age system, I thought it would just be 3 minigames, like a best-of-three series. Win the first two? No need to play the 3rd, you already won. Win one lose one? You and the other person are now head-to-head in the 3rd age, like the US vs the USSR in the cold war. Those "legacy points" seem unnecessarily complicated and restrictive... just let people win however they want in each age!

Incidentally, civ4 *does* have the ability to start a game in the later ages. But for some reason no one ever wanted to play that way.

Well, anyway thanks for the detailed playthrough and I'm glad there are things in the game that you like.

[RefSteel]

Thanks for writing this up - it feels like there are the makings of a really good game in there if they weren't all still packed away in railroad boxcars.  If the developers are able to recognize what makes it unpopular, it's still possible they could turn into something great, or even that modders could ... with one or two unfortunate exceptions that might wreck the whole thing:  I doubt if the game will ever have strong AI, and if they never add even hotseat play as a possibility, finding competent opponents to play against may be ... challenging.

Incidentally, civ4 *does* have the ability to start a game in the later ages. But for some reason no one ever wanted to play that way.

Don't look now, but there's a Classical Start Pitboss underway right now, on a random map with Advanced Start, no less!