Civ 7 is making all the right decisions

[Wyvern_Parade]

I am excited about the changes because it seems like they are not just adding features solely because they 'seem cool' (they did this a lot in Civ 6 with mixed results), but rather as direct responses to pain points in previous versions of Civ and the 4X genre in general.

No builders, automatic roads, commanders, settlements without production queues, etc. are all great ways to reduce the mindless clicking that plagued Civ 6. Of course there is some complexity and strategy lost, particularly with the loss of builders, but I believe this will be made up for with more meaningful decisions regarding resources and diplomacy.

The Ages system is meant to prevent snowballing, give narrative structure and make the late game worth playing.

And while I feel the city limit mechanic is a little inorganic, that combined with a return to global happiness hopefully will find a balance between Civ 5's 4-city-tradition meta and Civ 6's endless city spam.

And the BEST feature that nobody seems to be talking about is the return of interesting Specialists gameplay. I was so upset that they were almost completely overlooked in Civ 6.

 

[Professor Phobo]

What's the Specialist mechanic?

 

[Wyvern_Parade]

What's the Specialist mechanic?

A few YouTubers who played the demo mentioned that Specialists can be placed in buildings and multiply those buildings' existing adjacency bonuses. Also there are skills in the Leader skill trees that give additional bonuses for Specialists, with higher bonuses if you have 3 or fewer cities - effectively boosting a Tall play style.

 

[Olleus]

Are we going to see a return of the old specialist vs cottages (now towns?) economic choice? One thing I really miss from Civ4 is the sense of having an actual economy, rather than a bunch of yield-collecting buckets.

 

[Olle Wernersson]

The most difficult thing would be to justify the "historical" pathways in a game where all the historical conditions that allowed for this evolution to happen are simply absent.

With these historical choices, we are asking Firaxis: What is the reasoning behind this being considered a historical choice? Not necessarily as flavor text, but as a factual historical snippet.

My initial concern with this detail stems from the claim that a certain cultural change follows some form of historical logic. Without any clear reasoning provided to support this, I believe I would find it somewhat unsatisfactory.

 

[CoconutTank]

Honestly, even declaring some choices more historical than others seems like a mistake. If you're going to open things up, lean into it, go fully weird. It's an alternate Earth. Wonders are disconnected and always have been. Great people are disconnected. Leaders are now disconnected. The Civilization chain doesn't need any basis in historical fact, we can just go crazy, there are no rules, dogs and cats living together, etc.

Not to mention the landmasses and the resource distributions are going to be different too, along with civs being randomly distributed. Certain civs opening up by having enough of a particular resource makes historical sense to me tho.

 

[Professor Phobo]

Not to mention the landmasses and the resource distributions are going to be different too, along with civs being randomly distributed. Certain civs opening up by having enough of a particular resource makes historical sense to me tho.

Yeah just categorize civilizations based on the terrain/climate they are most associated with and have jungle civs default to other jungle civs, seafaring civs default to other seafaring civs, etc.

 

[Krikkit1]

Yeah just categorize civilizations based on the terrain/climate they are most associated with and have jungle civs default to other jungle civs, seafaring civs default to other seafaring civs, etc.

No, if you have a seafaring civ it shouldn’t unlock other sea faring civs
(Carthage should not unlock Polynesia)
Instead having the terrain (towns on islands) should unlock Polynesia …Carthage is just good at being able to do that.

But if you don’t have the special requirements for any next civ you need one or two choices for the next age that you can choose no matter what. They might as well be ones that sort of fit with the IRL Earth history we all can lookup on wikipedia (or learned in school if it’s less obscure)