Civilization VII coming soon!

The Game Room
81

Hold up, are you guys implying that Civ has become more micromanagey over time?

I only started with Civ IV, but my experience is the complete opposite. Civ IV was extremely complicated and “crunchy”, Civ V was greatly simplified and streamlined, and Civ VI added a little more complexity, but is still far simpler and more streamlined than IV.

That’s the main reason I’ve drifted away from Civ and towards more crunchy games, like Paradox (which is also simplified in the current gen vs the prior one).

82

Well, the answer is both yes and no.

Civ VI has way more going on than it used to. The thing is, most of it isn’t very consequential or connected. It used to be, way back in the day, that your main decisions were

  • Unit movement and combat
  • Where to place cities
  • What tiles to develop
  • What city things to build
  • What tech to research
  • The allocation of commerce to gold, science, and happiness

The genius of the first Civ games was that a limited number of in game mechanics all connected together to make an intriguing game. What tiles I developed affected my commerce which affected my research speed which affected my ability to build things, etc. etc. Creating a good GAME is not just piling shit on top of more shit. It’s making the game balanced and providing the player with consequential decisions. Civ used to do that.

Now additionally I have to select what research AND what civics to work on (and the distinction between the two is often very unclear) what policies to set, what to do with spies, what religions to work on, what to vote on in the World Congress, the district thing, diplomat assignment, relics (which I find so boring I still don’t know how they work) trade route setting, governor assignment and promotion, and I’m sure a few more I can’t recall.

The thing is, most of these things don’t really matter OR require no planning or thought. Your best approach now to civics is just to pick whichever one will take the least time. The World Congress is a bore, governors require zero thought, your best bet with diplomats is just spamming the closest city until it’s yours and moving on… I’m just clicking and clicking but not having to think about it, and can still win the game if I expand fast and get tanks first. It’s micromanaging, absolutely, but boring, brainless micromanaging of a pile of mechanics that don’t connect much with one another.

I’m not saying all the developments since Civ II are bad. Two, specifically, are excellent:

  1. Borders. The establishment of national borders fixed a significant weakness in the original games, and
  2. Strategic resources and luxuries makes expansion planning more interesting.

If you just slash most of that other shit out the game would be miles better. Fold civics back into research, PLEASE. Reduce religion and get the hordes of religious units off the screen. Relics? Dump it. More does not mean better.

83

They too have suffered from Incremental Game Design Syndrome (i.e. the same old same old thang with a few new wrinkles each iteration), and the latest (IV) may be the worst. The devs deliberately nerfed the capability to stack 6 heroes together, which was a dealbreaker for me since it would allow me to have an actual, you know, RPG party in my run-through, but I guess not. Lots of DLCs too.

[googling] Apparently after the uproar it caused they removed the hero stacking nerfs at some point. For me, coming from a HoMM perspective the relative lack of stellar user-made maps (i.e. being stuck with the random map module, tho some III modders customized it to the heavens with options) was one reason I stopped playing III. Some criticism of the generator in IV on Steam. Annnd I just confirmed that it has no scenario/map editor this time around, pbpbpbpbpb…

84

I haven’t played any of the older games, but I quite enjoy AOW4.

85

Does Alpha Centauri count? Because that edges out Civ II in my book. (Drone riots have ended.)

86

I’ve been an avid-to-obsessive player of Civ VI the last few years, and never played any earlier version. I’m optimistic about what I’ve heard about Civ VII.

My main complaint about the game is that it gets SO slow towards the end. When you’ve got 30 cities and 50 military units, and all of them need you to make a decision about them at least every few turns, most of which decisions will have a completely negligible effect on the outcome of the game…it starts to feel like a slog. If this new system of “ages” can make the game feel more like playing the first 200 or so turns of Civ VI three times in a row, I’ll consider that a big improvement. It would also eliminate the incongruity of having civilizations from radically different eras interacting with each other, which I’ve always found annoying.

And I’m excited about the disconnection of leaders from civilizations. Civ VI feels like a solved game at this point; for each leader, the internet fan communities have worked out the optimal strategy in great detail. At one point I stopped looking at those because it was feeling more like following a recipe than playing a game. With each game now having a combination of one leader and three different civs, each game will be completely unique and replayability will be much higher.

87

Six and a half hours to go!!

88

So there are no builders to improve tiles, no tile allocation in cities, you don’t finish the game with the same civ you started it…
At this point does this game deserve the name “Civilization”? IMHO this is just another “Humankind”, each new feature I read about diminishes my interest on the game.
I’ll keep an eye on it, in case it turns out to be good, but it is not Civilization.

89

Isn’t it coming out the 11th?

90

The “deluxe edition” releases five days early.

91

I’m installing it now … !

92

Every time there’s a new Civ game I go through the same internal crisis. I started playing Civ 2 in college and loved it. I was never great at it, but I could consistently win on lower difficulty levels. And I could choose different play styles and win conditions each game and get great variability.

I never really got into Civ 3, primarily since I wasn’t gaming as much (drinking and girls, lol). But after college I was living back home and bouncing around between jobs and had a ton of downtime, just in time for Civ 4. And whoo boy did I go nuts with that game. Again, I wasn’t ever a great player, but I loved playing that game over and over. I always picked big maps and slow modes so that I could manage every turn. I’d sit there and melt my brain for 12-hour sessions. More often than not I’d hyper focus on one objective (war) and lose sight of research and end up getting my ass kicked in the end game. Again, not a very good player, but I liked it.

Then Civ 5 and 6 came out, and I just never got into them. A big part of it was being an adult without free time to game, but it also didn’t help that the games simply felt a lot more complicated for me. New mechanics and new bonuses that I frankly couldn’t keep up with. I don’t want an “arcadey” game, especially since my favorite win conditions were usually technology or population, not conquest. But I also am not a serious enough gamer and I don’t have the brain wiring to really excel at a crazy hardcode simulation game.

I have a toddler now, so the odds of me getting time to dive into Giv 7 are low, but I’m still probably going to buy it and kick the tires. I’ll pray that its simple enough for my aging and less plastic brain to understand and I’ll hope that the mechanics aren’t so layered and complex that I can actually click “end turn” with some confidence that I’m actually ready. I don’t want a dumbed down game, but I also don’t want a game that leaves me lost. If I’m winning, I want to know that I did smart things, not just that the difficulty level is low enough that the AI is inept.

We shall see. Lol.

93

There is a bit of a dissonance between your screen name and this post…
No seriously it’s something I have been thinking about so your post really hit home. I actually have a reasonable amount of time but I have also noticed that I just don’t seem to have the will to handle a really complex game anymore. I actually noticed it first for Europa Universalis 4. I used to really enjoy EU2 back in the day but just don’t have the patience to master all the mechanics in EU4. It’s a bit sad but that’s life I suppose…

I have played a bit of Civ 6 and have enjoyed it so that still seems below my mental threshold but even for that there are some mechanics like religion and culture which I don’t understand well.

Anyway the reviews for Civ 7 are out and they are only middling, probably the worst reviews for a core Civ game ever. There are a lot of complaints about the interface but also some praise for the game innovations. Probably the game is salvageable after an expansion or two and I will wait for that.

94

It looks like Firaxis is already working on a patch to fix a lot of UI and Quality of Life issues.

95

Yet another video game released with every intention of “fixing” the problem with an expansion you’ll have to pay for. There might be a UI patch, but in about a year some $29 expansion will be out to fix things that should be fixed now.

Every review on Steam is some form of “this isn’t even finished.” Apparently you can’t even name your cities. I mean, this was not an entirely serious effort.

96

I’ve been playing it since Thursday and enjoying it, although with a couple of major caveats. The UI is truly awful, there are virtually no options to customize your game compared to Civ 6, the crisis at the end of each age feels far too powerful and the documentation is essentially non-existent. The only way to understand the mechanics is to read the message boards somewhere like Steam or Reddit.

Having said that, the innovations are, for the most part, good. Diplomacy is massively improved and impacts the game more meaningfully, the distinction between towns and cities means less micro management, commanders make moving armies around considerably less painful and combining barbarians and city states works well.

I think ages are a good idea but I’m on the fence about how it transitions from one to the next. It plays a bit too much like 3 separate games at the moment but I expect a patch will improve the balance.

Overall, it is very different to Civ 6 so takes some getting used to but the decisions the developers have made generally make the game better.

97

Good to hear that they are going to release a patch for the UI and some other stuff but I find it baffling that they apparently released the game in this fashion given the enormous experience that Firaxis now has with the series. First impressions matter especially when it comes to media reviews and the middling reviews the game has received are probably not going to change even if Firaxis does a heroic job with the patch.

At the same time, I am intrigued with some of the gameplay innovations and my biggest problem with the series is excessive micromanagement so if they have made some progress with that I will definitely take a look at it perhaps after an expansion pack or two and at a good Steam sale.

98

I’ve played through a game and a half, and overall my impressions of the basic gameplay are very positive; like everyone else I have issues with the UI, but these can be patched or modded. The graphics are gorgeous, but all the various icons and whatnot are all 2-3 times larger than in VI, so the screen looks very cluttered. The icons for the military units, however, are tiny and barely visible.

The transition between ages feels less dramatic than I’d expected; there are few visual cues anything has changed, so it feels like the same civ, just with new uniques.

Diplomacy/espionage is way better, independent powers (fka barbarians and city-states) work much better, city management is much easier (this may disappoint those who were really into optimizing district placement and Builder improvements, but I suspect they will find points to obsess over as the game becomes better understood). Likewise, trade and resource management is much less micromanagey, but has ample room to fiddle with if you want to fully maximize efficiency. There are no resource bottlenecks, where a lack of some resource completely prevents you from developing some sort of unit.

Army Commanders seem like a good idea, but I find their production cost is too high to get nearly as many as you could use. Refreshingly, it’s actually pretty easy to capture undefended cities throughout the game, as opposed to Civ VI where it was a huge hassle during the time between the invention of medieval walls and modern artillery.

TLDR: Great game, will be better in a year or so. Firaxis’ business model is kind of weird, but nobody should be surprised by that at this point.

99

It could hardly be worse considering the disaster that was that area of the game in CIV VI.

Question, does the AI in this one use its airforce? the one in CIV VI evidently considered anything flying to be witchcraft.

100

I’m curious how much of this issue is tied to the screen/platform you’re using. Does it get better/worse on a 4K laptop versus a HD laptop versus a Ultrawide desktop monitor? How does it function on a TV screen via a PC or a Console?

What’s the point of resources if that’s the case?