7 Certainly Has A "Vibe" That Puts People Off But Also Might Make It Great

[tman2000]

There seem to be three categories of critique of Civ 7

1. It's unfinished and rushed, eg.: bad UI.
2. "This isn't like what I'm used to. I don't understand the new mechanics yet so therefore I'm making incorrect strategic choices and have poorly calibrated pacing expectations."
3. It's vanilla launch Civ which has been very flat for the last two launches as well.

While there's a lot that can be said about these areas of critique, with the second category having a ton of nuance and arguments both in defense of the game but also commentary about how it could have been designed better, there's some other kind of "vibe" going on with Civ 7. I think it would be interesting to look at the 7 situation by trying to capture and discuss what this vibe is all about. There seems to be something about Civ 7 overall that creates frustration and disappointment in a lot of users. While a lot of this frustration is clearly ascribable to the above three categories, there's something else going on.

The most obvious area to look concerning the "vibe" is the era system. There's both the issue of not having a continuous play. It's throwing people off to have their armies disappear and things reset if they were in the middle of a war. This then becomes a question of whether the idea of age resets somehow breaks something that was essential to Civ as a franchise this whole time, or whether the issue is simply how crisis and age ending is paced and handled. Maybe it's the case that some essence really was lost, but it can possibly become a new kind of thing that accomplishes the thematic premises of Civ better than ever before. It's also a question of whether players just need to get used to the pacing and anticipate it better.

On the other hand, I think the vibe people are picking up on isn't necessarily just the age system, but how it exists to frame a streamlining that deeply changes how the game functions. The streamlining and victory conditions are designed to aggregate formerly micromanaged activities and lead the player into "big arrow" decisions. There's a lot of emphasis, I think, on combat. It's not that you have to fight, it's just that the part of the game that's anything other than moving troops around becomes hollower than it was in the past. I think that's the vibe shift.

There's a lot of debate about the UI from players who are looking for information they used to rely on in Civ 6 when maybe you don't need that information in 7. For instance, people complain about not being able to tell which buildings are which. What I've found is that it sort of doesn't matter. When you place buildings, the UI tells you via tooltip what you're doing, and the adjacency emphasis that 6 drilled into our heads is much less important now.

This really demonstrates the nature of the vibe mismatch. People are intuitively and habitually trying to engage with a gameplay layer from Civ 6 when that layer in Civ 7 is so streamlined and modified, that you just can't engage with it all that deeply anymore. This is misinterpreted as something being wrong with the UI. The disappointment and frustration comes from people anticipating these gameplay layers and while they're superficially there, in substance they aren't.

For me, the thing I struggle with is not quite perceiving what to do with certain victory paths yet. For instance, how to earn codices if you're falling behind. I've had a game with massive science yields and massive gold. Another game I prioritized science and then didn't get any. I admit that the UI being bad was a problem here because I wanted to see the breakdown of how towns were creating yields for cities to intuit it better, but that information was very unclear. For instance, it took me far too long to realize that the reason why one of my towns was creating so much more gold than others was because other players were sending trade routes there.

Let me compare this to Civ IV. I played it for the first time lately, and one thing that I didn't understand at first was how cottages need time to grow into towns, and how these are essential for producing gold, and how science is a direct product of gold yields. I somehow was stuck thinking science was its own yield for a while and I didn't understand cottages at all at first. So, I did very well in games until the mid-game when the other civs just started cleaning my clock in science. I had to understand cottages->gold->science to even be able to play.

With Civ VII, I don't have that sense yet. The UI and poor civolopedia don't help that much at all. I think I did well in one game because I picked 2-3 policies at random by intuition that happened to stack really well. I suppose that over time I will pick up on a "sense" of what to do. This is where I think the truth of the "vibe" of 7 will come to the surface.

Eventually we'll all better understand what the flow of 7 is supposed to be. I maybe have wishful thinking or bias confirmation, but I've sort of seen glimpses through the fog of that vibe. I think Civ 7 is supposed to be about big arrow decisions and really engaging with military units to create an edge in your "menu" gameplay which is supposed to be as streamlined as possible. The physicality of the settlement designs as dioramas you could almost touch hints to this.

To get to this point, 7 needs a lot of menu work. For example, natural disasters are very annoying. There should be a one button "pay gold to repair all" feature every turn. Menu surfing to repair every last flooded tile is WAY too tedioius for a game built around streamlining.

I also have issues with some victory conditions like the explorer artifact thing in the modern era, or even usability and readability of the resources menu. The inability to clearly see where and when city connections occur. This has to be fixed. I also have issue with micromanaging the creation of trade routes and doing missionary work. For a game that got rid of workers, I'm sure spending a lot of time managing civilian units who are doing what is frankly just spam work. Modern era town growth is very tedious and should be automated. I hate placing 10 specialists to start every round, every time, in the late game when I'm in the middle of a war.

That all said, this is all fixable and we the players will grow used to the game. Once we all (including the devs through their fixes, and mods too) "get it", there's tons of room for unique civ abilities, new game mechanics and mods. We just have to hone in on the new "vibe" which I don't think even the devs have quite hammered out.

 

[tman2000]

For trade and religion, their respective menus should let you access a production queue to directly assign production or purchase traders/missionaries. To not confuse players by hiding things in menus, you should still be able to purchase these civilian units in a standard city production queue. However, having a trade screen that combines information on your total trade yields, how many routes are available, visualizing where your current routes are going, and then finally allowing you to manage production of new units while looking at all that other information concurrently would make this part of the game much more pain free.

Missionaries should work like that too, and there should also be a natural disaster menu to clean up damage all from one screen.

For a game designed around streamlining, this is all no brainer stuff.

 

[Taefin]

I really like this “vibe” framing, and I have felt things in my first two games that have been difficult to put words to, but which I could imagine really making new players feel frustrated and bored.

My first antiquity age as Khmer the building part of the game felt like pushing through a tedious mental task while experiencing brain fog. All building and improvement placements felt empty, either clicking the best yields for a building, or clicking for more food or production while feeling like neither was adding up fast enough, especially once growth starts to slow down. And everywhere I looked to try to find non-obvious information of what my choices would do, I couldn’t. I also couldn’t figure out how to make my civ bonuses do anything for me, except for the elephants, so I conquered.

In my second game, the reward loop of building was absolutely captivating. I knew what each improvement or building was getting me, and knew how they were helping me with my goal of building wonders. Egypt also was a little easier to understand how my civ bonuses helped, when I tried the civilian unit and got the one that helped build wonders faster.

I would posit the vibe as: the game does not give you the satisfaction of showing you how decisions work/differ/matter until you learn to see that yourself.

 

[Isca Dumnoniorum]

“For instance, people complain about not being able to tell which buildings are which. What I've found is that it sort of doesn't matter.”

See, this is one of my biggest issues with the game as it relates to cities - often it really doesn’t seem to matter at all what you build, in what order or where.

At the end of each age I routinely have a long list of unbuilt buildings that I could put down but what would be the point? I haven’t needed them to get to the point of dominating the AI and they’ll will become virtually redundant after the age transition when they lose their adjacencies.

I’d prefer fewer, more powerful, buildings with more nuanced adjacencies - that would satisfy the move away from the districting of Civ VI but would increase the strategy associated with putting buildings down. At the minute it feels like a Humankind-esque hunt for the largest number which is hardly the most interesting way to play.

 

[tman2000]

I really like this “vibe” framing, and I have felt things in my first two games that have been difficult to put words to, but which I could imagine really making new players feel frustrated and bored.

Yes exactly. Our brains have structures for how things should work, and they're named similarly and look similar, but our structures don't work for them and it becomes an intuitively felt frustration.

As you said, the game should get better after people are more used to it. I think I need to stop doing full three era games and do what the pros have been doing and play antiquity over and over until I get a feel for it. For instance right now I may have underestimated how long it would take to do a couple things and should have settled new towns more aggressively. I've corrected, but that darn age timer!! And speaking to that age timer, people artificially hate on it because if that timer wasn't there, then someone snowballing would start to happen by that point anyway.

 

[tman2000]

“For instance, people complain about not being able to tell which buildings are which. What I've found is that it sort of doesn't matter.”

See, this is one of my biggest issues with the game as it relates to cities - often it really doesn’t seem to matter at all what you build, in what order or where.

At the end of each age I routinely have a long list of unbuilt buildings that I could put down but what would be the point? I haven’t needed them to get to the point of dominating the AI and they’ll will become virtually redundant after the age transition when they lose their adjacencies.

I’d prefer fewer, more powerful, buildings with more nuanced adjacencies - that would satisfy the move away from the districting of Civ VI but would increase the strategy associated with putting buildings down. At the minute it feels like a Humankind-esque hunt for the largest number which is hardly the most interesting way to play.

Yeah I ran into that playing as China when I bumped the difficulty up to sovereign and then chose to "prioritize" science AKA ignore a bunch of stuff that you can't ever ignore.

I was totally jammed because I started doing specialists early imagining I'd do some cool tall strategy with science. All that does is make it so you never make your city productive. You can buy buildings and supply food to cities, but you can't make them more productive if you don't build out the rural productivity base that warehouse buildings multiply. So if you want to do tall, you really have to have a good productive city and a few big support towns, and then found a new town and just plan on it never being productive and always getting food from other towns and then it's sort of just a "science" city. I haven't tried this yet, but you'd have to plan it very carefully or you'll get trapped. (EDIT: of course you can't really do this since you can't control how town yields distribute and you can barely even see in the UI how they're distributing - if I chose to make a city food productive I'd want no town food going to it, diverting to my science city)

If you build a large city without productivity, it never gets better, even with age resets. Also, ancient to exploration age reset makes you wait forever to get science buildings so if you did poorly with science yields in antiquity you'll be stuck in exploration. There are better science buildings up front in the modern age.

So, this long list of unbuilt buildings is just a result of not understanding the big picture of this yet.

You're supposed to pick either clay pits and mines, or lumber yards to build your productivity base. Or, if it's a raw productivity city, both. I have yet to get a feel for the right way to do this (ex: after three mines, you can plop down a stonecutter but never before). This applies to food buildings. At what point does that extra food building not matter for now.

Culture is bad too. All it does AFAIK is advance the civic tree. There are a ton of policies that apply in such specific cases (like the religious belief that if you convert a foreign treasure ship town you get one extra something or other). It borders on civ 6's policy boosts of almost memorizing specific minmax options. It's not minmax here, but it's very specific. I guess the key is to know how to balance enough exploration so you have the intel to know when to pursue this stuff. Or it's just the "sucker" belief for slow religion founders.

What I don't understand is people saying the game is easy on Deity. I had one run on like Governor where I snowballed into 2000+ gold a turn. It was just the particular set of policies I happened to choose. I haven't replicated that when I try other policies and strategies out. On Sovereign, I find myself falling behind the AI a lot of the time. Maybe I'm trying too many experiments instead of just expanding as fast as I can.

I've noticed the game really rewards large empires, even if you oversettle. It's relatively easy to get out of happiness slumps if you're ahead. The AI which oversettles almost always gains the advantage. It's almost like some AI are like, "I'm not expansionist, so my preference is to just lose".

 

[Canadian Bluebeer]

The vibe I get is that the game doesn't know what it wants to be, nor what it wants to accomplish.

(as in, put it back in the oven, and bake it some more. It's still gooey)

 

[Taefin]

And speaking to that age timer, people artificially hate on it because if that timer wasn't there, then someone snowballing would start to happen by that point anyway.

After 4 age transitions, I really wish you’d get a fixed number of turns after hitting 100% so you could budget your last few turns. It’s exciting the way it is, but I’ve gotten lucky, placing settlers in THE last turn, and the increments are abrupt and seemingly inconsistent (not actual values, but feels like 90 91 94 95 96 96 97 97 98 100).

Im excited to see the end my my current game that hit modern, with some AI having a strong lead. After that, I will have a good idea how VII stacks up against VI, HK and Millenia for me. By my second full game of each I knew why I didn’t want to play another to the end.

 

[joeycitation]

I definitely agree that non-warfare gameplay feels less fleshed out to the definite detriment of the game. Thankfully the warfare is very fun and has seen some great changes, but yes things like e.g. the absence of specific great works and the very niche and selective compartmentalization of great people really detract from the feeling that youre building up a holistic civilization rather than just a yields supply-chain to make the military competitive/quickly reach victory conditions.

 

[triplebassist]

Let me compare this to Civ IV. I played it for the first time lately, and one thing that I didn't understand at first was how cottages need time to grow into towns, and how these are essential for producing gold, and how science is a direct product of gold yields. I somehow was stuck thinking science was its own yield for a while and I didn't understand cottages at all at first. So, I did very well in games until the mid-game when the other civs just started cleaning my clock in science. I had to understand cottages->gold->science to even be able to play.

One thing that's worth remembering is that you're got some more context from being a series vet than you would have had back then. As an example, confusion you talk about wrt science wasn't something that bothered me at all, since I'd played a lot of Civ III, where science worked the exact same way. For me, the biggest hurdle to get over when Civ IV came out was the way city maintenance went from corruption + building maintenance to a scaling gold cost.

My point is that vets and newcomers are often confused by or dislike different things because vets expect things to be a certain way--the way it was before, and new people are coming in with fresher eyes. That doesn't mean one group or the other has a better sense of what may need to be improved, just that we experience the games differently.

 

[TheGrayFox]

Well another part of the context missing about comparing learning IV to learning VII. Is that IV came with an incredibly indepth manual which would've taught you anything and everything you needed to know about how science and cottages worked, city maitenence, religion, etc, etc. VII relies on a lot of in game tutorials and popups that specifically on board you into its changes and mechanics while playing... apparently these tutorials are a bit ineffecient at teaching everything that needs to be known and is actively undermined by its UI and Civilopedia, but once Firaxis cleans up the UI and actually adds all relevant info to tooltips and Civilopedia everything should be much easier to understand for everyone

 

[tman2000]

Well another part of the context missing about comparing learning IV to learning VII. Is that IV came with an incredibly indepth manual which would've taught you anything and everything you needed to know about how science and cottages worked, city maitenence, religion, etc, etc. VII relies on a lot of in game tutorials and popups that specifically on board you into its changes and mechanics while playing... apparently these tutorials are a bit ineffecient at teaching everything that needs to be known and is actively undermined by its UI and Civilopedia, but once Firaxis cleans up the UI and actually adds all relevant info to tooltips and Civilopedia everything should be much easier to understand for everyone

Apparently no one has figured out why the rural population religious icon is red sometimes.

 

[Sephi]

After 4 age transitions, I really wish you’d get a fixed number of turns after hitting 100% so you could budget your last few turns. It’s exciting the way it is, but I’ve gotten lucky, placing settlers in THE last turn, and the increments are abrupt and seemingly inconsistent (not actual values, but feels like 90 91 94 95 96 96 97 97 98 100).

Im excited to see the end my my current game that hit modern, with some AI having a strong lead. After that, I will have a good idea how VII stacks up against VI, HK and Millenia for me. By my second full game of each I knew why I didn’t want to play another to the end.

They could add a timer after the counter hits 100%. Once it hits 100% you get 5 turns to finish whatever you were doing. I am looking forward to read your opinion about the game. Your view on Millennia was very similar to mine.

 

[Taefin]

I am looking forward to read your opinion about the game. Your view on Millennia was very similar to mine.

I just finished my second game, this one on deity. This game, Confucius had crazy science and culture yields in modern, and started his third science legacy (you get a notification), so I built up my land/air units and invaded him, winning the military victory after taking his space ports.

Side note: Meiji Japan was so flavorful to play, both boosting my production with UB/UQ and getting 3-4 Mikasa respawns. Modern felt like it was split between using my bonuses to catch up economically and then pursuing a victory.

I think the main strength of VII’s end game is that part way through modern it becomes clear what you need to do to win (e.g., stop Confucius and build an H-bomb), and this is done through one exciting push. This reminds me most of Old World where victory might be securing the last ambitions or picking off 4 cities from the second place AI to get a score victory.

I would say that the memorable parts of the games more organic/emergent interactions with the map and AI civs, and the legacy paths felt more like the external pressure adding tension to these interactions. I don’t imagine games feeling repetitive because of the legacies.

Also, after this game, I think I finally (mostly) understand city planning. I did not realize that each specialist duplicated all adjacencies for both buildings in the hex. Suddenly I was seeing 20+ yield building when 2 specialists were on a +5 adjacency. I’m looking forward to applying this next game.

 

[UWHabs]

I just finished my second game, this one on deity. This game, Confucius had crazy science and culture yields in modern, and started his third science legacy (you get a notification), so I built up my land/air units and invaded him, winning the military victory after taking his space ports.

Side note: Meiji Japan was so flavorful to play, both boosting my production with UB/UQ and getting 3-4 Mikasa respawns. Modern felt like it was split between using my bonuses to catch up economically and then pursuing a victory.

I think the main strength of VII’s end game is that part way through modern it becomes clear what you need to do to win (e.g., stop Confucius and build an H-bomb), and this is done through one exciting push. This reminds me most of Old World where victory might be securing the last ambitions or picking off 4 cities from the second place AI to get a score victory.

I would say that the memorable parts of the games more organic/emergent interactions with the map and AI civs, and the legacy paths felt more like the external pressure adding tension to these interactions. I don’t imagine games feeling repetitive because of the legacies.

Also, after this game, I think I finally (mostly) understand city planning. I did not realize that each specialist duplicated all adjacencies for both buildings in the hex. Suddenly I was seeing 20+ yield building when 2 specialists were on a +5 adjacency. I’m looking forward to applying this next game.

Each specialist gives 2 science and 2 culture, plus half the adjacencies of the buildings, at the cost of 2 food and 2 happiness. So yeah, it's definitely important when you're planning out, to make sure that you put your high adjacency buildings together as much as possible, and focus the specialists on those tiles. It's not really worth it to throw specialists on the ageless buildings without adjacency bonuses.

 

[Stoic]

Unfortunately the game is not complete, missing essential elements such as fast movement, user interface and more. The serious problem and the balance with the eras I still see raw. 5 days after the release you see disastrous numbers of reviews and online players, something that hadn't happened for Civ, there must be a reason.... the criticisms are to be accepted and fair. The game has its solidity and good roots but it needs to be adjusted. For example, complement religion and diplomacy with possible victories. Too much linearity of the game

 

[tman2000]

Unfortunately the game is not complete, missing essential elements such as fast movement, user interface and more. The serious problem and the balance with the eras I still see raw. 5 days after the release you see disastrous numbers of reviews and online players, something that hadn't happened for Civ, there must be a reason.... the criticisms are to be accepted and fair. The game has its solidity and good roots but it needs to be adjusted. For example, complement religion and diplomacy with possible victories. Too much linearity of the game

I think the product itself is poor, but the game contained in the product is quite successful in some ways, but will be needing to live up to its potential to justify the product.

I have seen very little discussion on battle tactics. The new flanking system has been observed to be used by the AI, including interesting and effective defensive tactics. So, I'd love to see skilled players get into the battle tactics and this starting to make a different in competitive multiplayer outcomes.