Civilization 7 is in development

[haphazard1]

I will second Krill -- I am looking forward to hearing from players who give Civ VII a try. I am glad there are gaming 'early adopters' who try things out and then give the community the benefit of their experience. Thanks to all of you. I have gotten cranky and resistant to change as I get older, and I did not much like the design choices in Civ 5 and 6. So I am reluctant to give the benefit of the doubt to Civ 7. Hopefully I am worrying over nothing and the game turns out to be great.

[yuris125]

I would consider buying it if not for the DLC model which they seem to intend to continue from the tail end of Civ6. I understand there are some glaring omissions in the list of leaders / civs available on release (I heard that e.g. Gandhi and England are missing), makes it so obvious that they will be released as DLC. I'm not hyped enough about Civ7 to support this by buying on release

Looking forward to opinions of RB members who will pick it up though

[Borsche]

The Rhye's and Fall mod was somewhat like that, forcing certain things to happen to certain civs at certain points.  It had some fans.  Of course the optimal approach was to deeply deconstruct the mechanics and manipulate it to your advantage, like look up exactly when/where a civ will start and spawn-camp them.

I wouldn't write off immediately that the era-oriented play couldn't make for a fun game.  There are board games like this, a series of stages where only some stuff carries over, two that come to mind are Ra and Brass Birmingham.  Civ maybe could actually use some rubber-banding - how much do we see everyone abandoning single-player games 80 turns in when they know they're already ahead and don't feel like actually winning.  Civ has gradually been becoming more like Euro board games and that's a good thing, and necessary in the world of minuscule online attention spans.

I do want to see exactly how this is implemented since, I'll be honest, game journalists aren't exactly the most reliable when it comes to documenting the mechanics at a granular detail. That said it doesn't sound like the right approach. I do agree with you that a priority of new civ designers should be that players abandon fewer games, it's just tough seeing that this would be the particular way of doing it. I already don't enjoy the false dichotomy between tall vs. wide that's seemingly gone on for over a decade now - games like Civ should be about growing wide and tall and not necessarily rewarding those unable to do so. Though I could concede that it would make sense to give smaller/backward/underdog civs some other types of win conditions to strive for. That's typically where culture and space might've filled a niche, although space requires a tech lead and culture may not be the player's cup of tea.

[greenline]

Something I always found amusing about Civ 6 was that it's harder there than in most other Civ games to win with a 'tall' / OCC setup. Most players just don't realize it because the AI is terrible, but there's far less output you can squeeze out of one single city in that game despite using Civ 5 as a baseline for many of its mechanics.

[LKendter]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/civilization-vii/review

"With Civilization 7, Firaxis is trying to energize the 4X genre and make it more elegant, but not at the cost of scale or scope. The best example is the new Ages system. Beginning in the Antiquity Age, once you reach a certain number of goals – technologies researched, Wonders built, Gold earned, – you graduate to the next Age, and a lot of what you and your opponents have built is either reset or removed.

Apart from your capital, all of your cities are turned back into towns, which means they can’t build anything – you have to grow them out again, and then spend Gold to convert them back into functional metropolises. Stray units are deleted. When you grow into the Exploration Age, you carry over six units; when you transition to the Modern Age, you keep nine."

OUCH! I'll see what people say, but that comment makes me lean further away from buying it. This breaks the whole snowball concept of 4X games. Early gain is worth more than late gain.

I'm stockpiled on other games to play new, but older games I want to go through one more time. At the minimum I'll delay until it goes on sale.

[yuris125]

Based on a stream I'm watching, cities stay as cities if you accomplish certain objectives and get an economic golden age (or at least it's an option you can pick as a result of getting one). The number of units carried over depends on how many military commanders you have

Although it looks like the game has glaring UI issues and Civilopaedia omissions, so it's not entirely on the reviewer for missing this

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I'll write something up for my first game. 

The war to be the One True Frenchman has already begun, for example:


(no points for guessing which leader I took out for my first spin)

[Brian Shanahan]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/civilization-vii/review

"With Civilization 7, Firaxis is trying to energize the 4X genre and make it more elegant, but not at the cost of scale or scope. The best example is the new Ages system. Beginning in the Antiquity Age, once you reach a certain number of goals – technologies researched, Wonders built, Gold earned, – you graduate to the next Age, and a lot of what you and your opponents have built is either reset or removed.

Apart from your capital, all of your cities are turned back into towns, which means they can’t build anything – you have to grow them out again, and then spend Gold to convert them back into functional metropolises. Stray units are deleted. When you grow into the Exploration Age, you carry over six units; when you transition to the Modern Age, you keep nine."

doesnt exactly sound promising. they say its an attempt to make the game more elegant, but just wiping out a bunch of cities and units on age up seems like they're trying to 'fix' the problem of 'having nothing to do' by just hitting the reset button over and over.

Arbitrarily taking away your hard work is never a good design choice for a builder game.

Hard work =/= good decision making though. Losing settler and wonder races, losing a stack to a military blunder...I'm not giving the devs the benefit of the doubt, but I'm willing to wait a couple of weeks for a considered judgement.

Losing settler races or similar are very different than the game just taking away your units, your buildings, your cities arbitrarily just because you've hit a break point within the game. There's a solution for the first (and to be honest, it's not so much a problem as a balancing of priorities, i.e. strategy), get better; with respect to the second, no matter how good you are at the game, it's a punishment.

[Krill]

Brian, do you know the mechanics which control the era changes? Because unless you can answer an honest "Yes", you don't know what you are talking about and your opinion is just that: an opinion, based on feelings, not fact.

[sunrise089]

I saw a soundtrack list where the tracks were called “France,” “America,” “China,” etc. Do people know if the soundtrack is entirely composed of those tracks presumably created for the game, or does it also feature historical music?