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[member66170]

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[Noble Zarkon]

Really interesting read.

 

[Ornen]

Hard agree about almost all of this. Civ 6 is the most micro-intensive Civ game they've ever made — the design philosophy starts with "how many board game decisions can we put in front of the player", and then each expansion just added more board game decisions. The game at its core is about district placement, managing terrain, and relentlessly optimizing subsystems (why do great works need to have their own matching minigame)?

With Civ 7 dramatically reducing city/worker micromanagement, they're now talking about playing three 150-turn 'eras' in the time it took to play a single 150-200 turn game of Civ 6. Sign me up.

 

[thecrazyscot]

FYI "hard" is Internet parlance for "emphatically" when used in this fashion.

 

[Ambiorix]

I've been playing this series for a long time, and have liked all the various iterations, including the spin offs. I've also been active on the mod scene since Civ4. But I didn't get on with civ6 well and so haven't touched the series since shortly after it released (which means I never played Civ6 expansion packs). Incidentally, this is the longest period of my entire life I've gone without playing any Civilization - including the time between birth and playing my first game on my granddad's lap. That's not to claim that my perspective is infallible or my tastes the only correct ones, but looking at the big-picture trends in the series might tell us something about what Civilization 7 is aiming for. As a caveat: I haven't read every last article or watched every video so I might have missed something, and my memory about the older civs (6 especially, with only a couple hundred hours on it) is likely to be imperfect.

I'm excited about Civilization for the first time in over half a decade? Why?

It comes down to scale, micromanagement, and fungibility of sub-structures. What I want from a game of Civilization is grandeur, epicness, and high-level decision making. I want to choose what attributes my civilization has: its religion, who its allies and enemies are, build wonders, send armies, research technologies, and so on. Everything that happens at the "civilization scale". One step down the scale-ladder are things like cities and armies (be they stacks or carpets). Interacting with these is fine, but the problem is that as the game progresses, we have more and more of these that each matter less and less. That means that interacting with these ends up feeling less like making important decisions and more like rote middle management. When it comes to cities and armies, I want a relatively small number of each that I'm invested in, care about, and for them to all actually matter.

For cities, it's necessary to keep their numbers, or at least the numbers we have to actually interact with regularly, down. The early corruption mechanics didn't work, because while they made new cities less productive, more was still always better. Civilization 4 tried to solve this with maintenance (which meant it took some time before cities became productive) and via vassalizing defeated enemies. Civ5 had global happiness which meant more cities => smaller cities; and also conquered puppet states with an automatic building queue. Civ6 didn't have much in this regard that I remember (except scaling settler cost). None of the approaches really worked IMO: the late game was always tedious, except in 5 where it never felt like an end game as unclaimed wilderness ruled the land until the end. Civ7's idea of having unlimited "passive" towns that expand your territory and automatically produce gold & food, only a moderate number of which get promoted to "active" cities whose production queue we need to handle, might just be the ideal solution. At the end of the day, it will all depends on balance.

If managing too many unimportant cities is boring micromanagement, dealing with the sub-structure of cities is even worse. Its in the genes of Civilization that they have some, namely: buildings, pops, and tiles (and their improvements). But I'm never be attached to them so I don't want to spend much time dealing with them. From a game design perspective, such sub-sub-structure can be pushed to the background by making it fungible (without any unique attributes themselves): so a bank is a bank is a bank no matter where it is, and if I swap which tiles two different pops work on nothing at all happens. This is where I fell out with Civ6: the placement of districts and adjacency bonuses (both of districts and tile improvements) is a sub-structure of cities which is itself a sub-structure of the whole civilization. Placing them well mattered a lot in creating a successful civilization. Yet I had 0 emotional connection with them at all, so having to spend the majority of my play time dealing with them was not my idea of fun. I don't mean to denigrate those who enjoy that (and I have a lot of fun doing so in games like Terrascape which are only about this) but it is emphatically not what I, personally, want in a civilization game. I think Civilization 7 by, as far as I understand, rolling expanding a city's borders, building terrain improvement, and assigning where pop works into a single irreversible action, is taking a step in the right direction.

What holds for cities is also true for armies. While Stacks of Doom were not interesting tactically, they did keep the number of individual "armies" that needed dealing with fairly constant during the game. The actual units themselves were almost entirely fungible (except for promotions in Civ4), simply a way of adding strength to the stack, but the stack itself was the only thing the player had to interact with in practice. Civilization 5 changed that completely. The cost of having significantly more tactical depth to the game (besides the AI being excruciatingly bad at it) was having a huge number of units to deal with individually. And with promotions being ever more powerful and specialised, these units were no longer fungible either. This meant that, to conduct wars well, you had to think about each individual unit, decide where it should go and what it should do. Not just "archers at the rear, spears at the front" but which individual archer should go where - more XCOM than Panzer General. This is good tactical fun, but very much a small-scale type of gameplay rather than a top-level one. Corps and Armies were introduced in Civ6 to push the number back down, but it didn't really have any effect. I think Civ7 might just have the perfect solution here. The commanders are the units that we can care about because of their relatively small numbers and are non-fungibility, while the more numerous regular units are how production gets turned into military success. By "packing" units into a commander, the tedium of moving armies around is removed, but the tactical depth that comes from unpacking them to fight is still there.

Will Civilization 7 really have more focus on the grand-scale, top-level decision making than on small-scale, low-level management? Time will tell, but it looks like it is moving in that direction. Not just because of the above, but because radical new mechanics (like having to "upgrade" civilizations a few time during the game) seem to be aiming just for that. And that makes me optimistic that I'll be drawn back into this franchise which has been with me my entire life. Apologies for the wall of text, this last paragraph can serve as a tl;dr.


EDIT: Fixed some typos and appalling grammar, and needless repetition.

Hear hear.

 

[tedhebert]

Very nice writeup... I don't agree with all of it, as I still am a big civ 6 fan who likes micromanagement, but I see your point of view and understand most of it... Lifts even more my expectations for civ 7

Thanks for taking the time to lay down your thoughts in such an elegant way

 

[Trengilly]

Yes, I 100% agree with this.

I also went off Civ 6, although I did put a fair amount of time into it and played some of the expansions. My biggest issue with Civ 6 was just the general imbalance of all the game systems combined with the inability of the AI to actually present a challenge. It turned the game into a sandbox rather than an actual game you had to try to win.

Everything we are seeing in Civ 7 looks like they are trying to address those issues and I'm excited to get back into playing Civ after taking a few years off. (Old World has been my Civ replacement fix for several years now).

 

[thecrazyscot]

So we can expect 3 Ages of Pace on February 12, yes?

 

[stealth_nsk]

I'm playing Civilization since the very first and through all iteration and all spin-offs. While I have some worries about Civ 7, I totally agree what stepping away from Civ 6 micromanagement direction is surely the right way to go. For me at least (or I'm becoming too old and not ready to invest too much efforts into learning that many nuances for a video game... but I don't like this explanation).

One small note, though. Civ 6 has other mechanics to limit wide - in addition to settler and worker cost, it also have increased district cost and it's quite significant. I still agree with conclusions, though.

 

[ggalindo001]

I've been playing Civ since the original MS-DOS Civilization I and after the reveal and the various videos from the folks that visited Firaxis, I am very excited about the direction the game is going in. I've been stuck on the Civ switching mechanics (which I -mostly- am OK with) and have put some thoughts to in other threads -- but until I read this thread, I couldn't put my fingers on why I was so excited about this.

It is simply the return to the grand scale focus.

Last night, I watched the Ara 20 minute reveal last week -- and although the early game looked reasonable, when they showed their 3rd Act and what the map looked like, and the bazillion of choices -- it gave me an uneasy feeling of uber micro-management.

On the Civ 7 side, it wasn't just ridding workers, it was also the Commander concept for moving troops, promotion trees at the commander level only, balancing per era bonusues while allowing you to build the leader in a customized way, auto road building, trading, etc. So many good decisions around macro decision making vs. micro management.

The franchise is definitely going in the right direction here. And some possible positive side effects is by going back to this scale, it will make AI more customizable and likely more challenging, it will also make additions and mods more integrative (for example, adding a future 4th ERA, adding new civs and leaders, new units, etc.)

 

[j51]

As another old head (been with the franchise since Civ I.) I’m finding the focus on higher level decision making a relief as well. At youngest us old heads are middle age. We do not have time for all that micro managing.

 

[j51]

Good point!