Here’s another recent video from Firaxis showcasing the game. Again, not much on actual details but you can get a good look at it. Also, it seems Gwendoline Christie is the narrator this time around and I think she sounds great doing it (although I doubt anyone will ever top William Morgan Sheppard in Civ-V).
They took the worst mechanic of Humankind (forcing you to change civs at the end of an era) and inserted it in Civ…
I think I’ll still check it out if I can get it for free, but any enthusiasm I had for Civ VII just went out the window.
I think I’ll keep trying to win in Emperor in Civ IV for the foreseeable future.
Loads of people are making that exact comparison and agree with you. They are starting to call Civ-VII Humankind 2.0. It’s not a compliment.
Supposedly the devs wanted to “fix” what they saw as a flaw in the standard Civ gameplay. They saw many people would play to Renaissance era and then start over because the beginning is fun and the end game was more click end turn buttons to just get through things. This is their “fix” for that. Not seeing it myself but who knows…maybe they will pull it off. Civ-V wasn’t very good when it released but became excellent over a few years of DLC and fixes.
I’ve heard that as well (it’s a fix for end game malaise), but there are likely better ways to do that than radically switch civs (in the Gameplay showcase they went from Egypt to Songhai… and you had an option to become Mongolians if you had 3 horses… ). Perhaps it would have been better received if you could pick a new sub-leader in each age (or perhaps call it a “Governor” in age 2 and “President” in age 3 - that included difference bonuses and demerits)
Civs rising and falling reminds me of the decline mechanic from the game Small World.
It seems like the Age Transition Antiquity → Exploration → Modern is a soft-reset of sort to the game. All civs enter the new Age at the same time when it triggers, and there’s a separate tech tree for each age, so presumably all civs catch up to roughly the same tech level. You lose some of the things from the previous age. For example Antiquity buildings in cities will disappear when the Exploration age is triggered unless they are unique or have a Persistent keyword. Seems like you get some bonuses at the start of the new age based on what you achieved in the previous age, though.
I very much like the prospect of starting settlements as towns, with option of growing them into cities, or keeping them as quaint fishing villages/mining outposts or whatever. I’ve always felt that’s been missing.
you know it sounds like what the formerly Harvest Moon now known as Story of Seasons is trying to do …for almost 3 decades it was the only real farming RPG until Stardew Valley (which was just supposed to be an unofficial HM 1 remaster originally) happened then that opened the flood gates and now for the new games they’re cherry picking things from other games to integrate in their game to keep up … Is there going to be a season pass so I don’t end up with 5 games like I did for Civ 2 ?
did they get rid of districts tho and will the wonders be more useful … and will they be able to use gold fo finish the project? and will we have to worry about weather and global warming …
Oof. Not a big fan of what I am hearing.
To be honest while I was huge into Civ IV and once it had all the DLC Civ V, I never got THAT into Civ VI. And I think the way I play games like this has diverged from the Civ formula.
I’ve always been a huge fan of the giant earth maps with true star locations. 18 Civ Earth was great in Civ IV, V knocked it out of the park with like 40 civs on a giant Earth map (but you had to mod it), and 6 started off down that path but Gathering Storm’s rising sea levels mechanic broke maps larger than the Huge map and it took so many years for modders to fix that that it killed all of Civ’s momentum for me.
Meanwhile I’ve been playing more Grand Strategy games, especially Crusader Kings and Victoria.
Still… There’s something to the way Civ V combat worked on the giant Earth map that just really captured my imagination in a way that Vic 3 front lines or CK3 province whack a mole doesn’t match.
This, I can’t get into the combat of those Paradox GS games, give me my units in a grid no matter how unrealistic it is, (or give me Total War style combat, but that gets ridiculous once the armies exceed a certain size or for modern combat)
Whenever I get the hankering to play Civ, I reinstall Civ IV (from Steam, it’s super easy). Civ IV is peak Civ for me. Easy to play, easy to mod. The city development is the fun part for me. The combat is just kind of a sideplay.
It’s interesting to read about the newer Civs, but their gameplay just doesn’t do it for me.
I also love Crusader Kings, but it’s more of a dynasty simulator than a combat game for me. Europa Universalis is my go-to for strategic war.
Almost nothing they’re announcing sounds good to me.
I like the commander mechanic they are proposing (can stack some units on a commander making movement easier but also no doom stacks). Also, being able to sail up rivers is really cool and great. The rest I think I can do without.
If they got rid of districts and put in the commander and river thing and made the graphics as nice as Civ-V I’d mostly be happy.
Districts actually really grew on me eventually. I like them better than just spamming nearly every building in nearly every city.
Honestly I think what they need most is bigger maps. Quadruple the number of hexes and suddenly cities that take up multiple tiles work better and there’s plenty of room for units to take up tiles.
That’d be really cool. And I think modern PCs have the ability to handle it. Although, time between each turn could become a slog in late game. Consoles would be even worse.
I don’t miss the Doom stacks personally.
I haven’t played anything before IV, but in Civ IV what I remember is having to build dozens or hundreds of units to win wars, and then always following the same strategy:
Soften enemy stack. This is done by throwing away a few to a few dozen (depending on the size of the stacks) artillery weapons (we’d call them “suicide cats”, short for catapult). These would have a chance of withdrawing, but even a promoted cannon would struggle to not die when shooting infantry, so you’d typically mass produce artillery and use the disposable rookie units first. Artillery would do damage to a number of extra units in the stack (as many as 6 for modern units IIRC) so if your enemy had 100 units in a city you’d need like 20-30 artillery units, most of whom would die.
In late game you could add planes, which let you bomb an enemy square doing collateral damage, and they could do this without being damaged themselves unless the enemy had anti air or fighters, in which case you use your own fighters to clear a path for the bombers. Note that neither artillery nor planes could get opponents below a certain % health.
After you hit the enemy stack enough that their strongest unit (the stack is always defended by the enemy’s strongest unit) is either super damaged or very obsolete, you can start sending in your own strongest units. It might take multiple rounds of bombardment. Once this happens you keep attacking until you run out of strong units.
Hopefully you brought enough units to win!
That’s basically it. There was certainly strategy involved (balanced stacks had units like archers with high defense and units like horsemen with high attack, etc) but once you figured out the order of operations every battle was the same, and your army was either big enough to win, or it wasn’t.
Civ V and VI have much more engaging combat. Maneuvering units is fun, the fact that ranged units deal the real damage but are very vulnerable in melee is fun, zone of control and the units that ignore it are fun, etc.
And horse archers in Civ V were the greatest and most broken things ever. Waves of Keshiks with 5 speed who can move in, shoot, and move back out of range are just chef kiss
I’m actually a huge fan of districts for a similar reason.
In Civ IV and Civ V placing down cities that would eventually get high yields was fun. More so in V where I could see ‘dayum when I get this iron on a hill online my city’s production is gonna explode’ whereas in Civ IV it was more like “this is a city with many good tiles and over the course of the game I’ll improve every single one of them”, which is perhaps more satisfying when the game nears its end and you have massive fields of farmland and train tracks on every tile but doesn’t feel as meaningful during play.
Civ VI and districts really knocked it out of the park for me. I love messing with tile markers and planning out ahead of time 3 cities with a diamond of commercial hubs and harbors adjacent to a river and one of the cities giving me gold income in the stratosphere, or using trade routes and gold to rush building and buying docks and shipyards in a tiny island city that suddenly becomes an enormous production hub.
Civ V’s biggest problem honestly was the focus on tall empires. It was almost never worth going above four cities. There were Liberty builds you could run that would do OK wide, but in almost every case you’d have been stronger if you went tall instead. And that just doesn’t fit with the way I like to play Civilization.
Putting these quotes together, I think I can place my finger on my issues with what I’ve heard about the new Civ so far: it sounds quite “arcadey”.
If you think about a game like Civ, that represents something (in this case the development of human civilization), there are two design philosophies you can take.
First is the Arcadey approach, which a lot of focus on game mechanics and balance.
Second is the Simulationist approach, where your game mechanics are about creating realistic scenarios that resolve based on similar factors to real life.
The Paradox game, maybe minus Stellaris, are much further towards the Simulationist end than Civ is.
For a very obvious example, a game like Victoria 3 starts off with some Great Powers, like Britain or France, that are already well established and control half the world; other powers, like Prussia, don’t even have their own homeland united (and Prussia has a pretty simple path to forming Germany, while say Egypt has much harder time trying to form Arabia).
In comparison, in Civ games, everyone starts off with a settler and a scout (on high difficulties maybe the AI has more free stuff, but still - it’s not like the Egyptian and Babylonian AI have full on Civs while the French AI has to hunt and gathered for a few thousand years).
Now, my ideal placing on the scale for a Civ game is not the same as for a Paradox game (and not all Paradox games are equal; I love Stellaris, where everyone starts off with a planet and the same number of pops, unless they took a special Origin). If I wanted a fully Simulationist Civ game, I’d play the Rhyse and Fall mod for Civ IV.
But I do think that Civ IV and Civ VI were a little more Simulationist while Civ V was a little more Arcadey. And many of the new changes coming seem quite Arcadey as well, which I am not a big fan of.
My favorite example of this in Civ IV: with the Construction tech, if you have Ivory, you can build Elephants. They aren’t a unique unit - any civilization with elephants can use them for war.
Conversely, I hated districts, but liked getting rid of stacks.
Having looked through a fuller list of Civ VII things I admit SOME are good ideas. (Navigable rivers, yes please. Abraham Lincoln in charge of the Mongol Empire, why not. Why did they ever take away using rivers to move faster?) But switching civilizations midgame is just idiotic - it just takes away from the character of your play.
We have discussed Civ games many times on the SDMB and the thing I’ve written before about Civ VI is that it just isn’t compelling. Civ was famous for that “one more turn” feeling, and I didn’t get that at all with Civ VI. It’s a little compelling early in the game and not at all later, and I’m not exactly sure why I felt that way; I can’t really point at any ONE thing. It’s a gestalt thing.
Having thought about it I’m honestly of the opinion that part of the problem is that they added too much. Civ I-II-III were much simpler games, and they were better. There were some additions later in the series I liked - borders are an absolutely central part of the game. City states aren’t a bad idea, though they occupy way too much territory. Those are cool things. But there’s just too many goddamned mechanics in the game. I find assigning diplomats insanely boring, religion is just terrible and dull. Before I wanted one more turn because one more turn didn’t take long to do and it was eventful.
Civ VI would have been a better game had they just removed religion entirely, removed relics, and removed the united nations thing. Boom, better game. I’d also suggest simplifying the civilization characteristics; give every civ one unique unit, one building, and one game mechanic, and leave it at that. I just want to expand and get into a war with India. There are other things the game needed, more balancing stuff, but I cannot think of a single thing that needed to be ADDED.
Complexity is not always a good thing. A game is about the mix of mechanics. Yesterday I was playing “Ticket to Ride,” the board game, with my daughter; it’s a brilliantly designed game, incredibly fun, but there’s not a lot of rules. Soccer is a simple yet amazingly fun game. “FTL: Faster Than Light” is a brilliant game that is graphically simple and can be learned in three minutes. There are more complicated games that are horribly inferior. The genius of Civilization wasn’t complexity, it was that it was a well balanced, yet unpredictable, game that allowed you to tell yourself a story.
Ooof, I disagree. I love that religion in Civ V and VI has tenants that impact the gameplay rather than all religions being identical, and of course letting you build those religions instead of assigning traits to real world faiths works great. (There was a Civ IV mode that was like “the JEWS get more GOLD hahaha”…)
I used to dislike the religious combat mechanics in 6 but eventually I did a run where I focused on religion (as Egypt on a Giant Earth Map, I eventually managed to convert all of the Old World but couldn’t be bothered to go to the Americas to win the game - I did get a foothold via Greenland into Canada though) and that really warmed me on the mechanics. The issue I have with it is that doing well in religious combat requires enough focus that if I’m not going heavily religious in a game, it’s not worth bothering with.
And, I gotta disagree about how different Civs should be. Frankly I wish they were more different. I want Civ and government choice to radically change my play style. That was a fun part of Civ V - late game ideologies really shifted your play, especially internal trade as Communists or war as Autocrats. Civ VI governments and policy cards are really cool, but because governments are so customizable the ideologies didn’t feel quite as different to me.