Civ 7 Wishlist

[Brainiac]

So, Civilization games were always about reaching a Kardashev level 1 (type I) civilization. Or probably more like a level 0.8, but you get the picture. You win the game by achieving actual or de facto dominance over an entire planet through any means, thereby giving your civilization access to basically all of the planet's resources.

And then what?

A civilization does not end at Kardashev level 1. It might fail, but baring that it will likely progress on to level 2 and 3 (solar system and galaxy, respectively). Winning a game of Civ and thereby losing that cool civilization you just built all the way from the stone age always annoyed me.

And I know, there are some very fine games available for playing with civilizations on a galactic level. But how about some continuity from that game of Civ you just won?

I am not talking including playability from Kardashev level 0 to 3 in one game. The game interface for playing towards level 1 would inherently need to be a planet-wide overview. Playing towards levels 2 and 3 requires a game interface so different that it will be a completely different game, anyway.

But on winning a Civ 7 game, it should be possible to boil the state of the planet and your civilization down to seed data for a galactic level game, naming conventions and so forth continuing. The win condition met informs your civilization on the galactic stage. A science victory leads to a science-focused galactic civilization etc. Coming from a Civ game, you will always be the human race on the galactic stage, but if you transcended, you enter the galactic stage as a machine civ.

Maybe Firaxis makes its own galactic level game to ensure continuity of civilization all the way up to a Kardashev level 3 civ. Or they team up with one or more of the major galactic game titles already available. Maybe from a won game of Civ 7, you can create seed data for all of the major galactic game titles, so that you can "continue" your game any way you like.

At the same time, in Civ 7, skip the future era. It was never very good in Civ games, anyway. Stop the game when humanity as a whole reaches Kardashev level 1, whether as a unified civilization or as the combined factions of humanity.

 

[reddishrecue]

As computers and machines get more powerful, why not keep instead of removing the features that have been added throughout this whole time, keep and add even more features. Sort of like a civ 4, 5 and 6 combined for civ 7 because civ 7 should demand that higher machine power and not rely on our current computers that might become obsolete.

 

[historix69]

So, Civilization games were always about reaching a Kardashev level 1 (type I) civilization. Or probably more like a level 0.8, but you get the picture. You win the game by achieving actual or de facto dominance over an entire planet through any means, thereby giving your civilization access to basically all of the planet's resources.

And then what?

A civilization does not end at Kardashev level 1. It might fail, but baring that it will likely progress on to level 2 and 3 (solar system and galaxy, respectively). Winning a game of Civ and thereby losing that cool civilization you just built all the way from the stone age always annoyed me.

And I know, there are some very fine games available for playing with civilizations on a galactic level. But how about some continuity from that game of Civ you just won?

I am not talking including playability from Kardashev level 0 to 3 in one game. The game interface for playing towards level 1 would inherently need to be a planet-wide overview. Playing towards levels 2 and 3 requires a game interface so different that it will be a completely different game, anyway.

But on winning a Civ 7 game, it should be possible to boil the state of the planet and your civilization down to seed data for a galactic level game, naming conventions and so forth continuing. The win condition met informs your civilization on the galactic stage. A science victory leads to a science-focused galactic civilization etc. Coming from a Civ game, you will always be the human race on the galactic stage, but if you transcended, you enter the galactic stage as a machine civ.

Maybe Firaxis makes its own galactic level game to ensure continuity of civilization all the way up to a Kardashev level 3 civ. Or they team up with one or more of the major galactic game titles already available. Maybe from a won game of Civ 7, you can create seed data for all of the major galactic game titles, so that you can "continue" your game any way you like.

At the same time, in Civ 7, skip the future era. It was never very good in Civ games, anyway. Stop the game when humanity as a whole reaches Kardashev level 1, whether as a unified civilization or as the combined factions of humanity.

Imho your idea does not work that well.

Civ is a game based on cities where you explore and expand by settling and conquering new cities to form your empire.
The 4X-formula applied to galactic scale (as in famous Master-of-Orion-series and other games) simply substitutes cities with planets, so when going from planetary scale to galactic scale your whole empire with hundreds of cities on Earth is simply summarized as planet Earth with a few properties (numbers) like population, resources, production, science output, etc. Managing each city in a galactic empire with hundreds of planets each with hundreds of cities is out-of-scale and no fun since there simply is not enough possible content to make the repetitive and redundant management of thousands (or ten thousands) of cities interesting.

It is different for games like Crusader Kings - Europa Universalis - Victoria - Hearts of Iron which share the same geographical scale on about the same map.

Imho best way to keep your empire is to play without Victory Conditions and maybe replace VCs with Achievements. I never liked victory in Civ series for the reasons you mentioned : Win the game and loose your empire.

About seeding the start planet of a 4X-Galactic-Civ-game : That is probably easier done by just letting the player customize the start planet and human race in the 4X-Galactic-Civ-game. Just keep in mind that the human race usually is just one of many races and customizing the human race probably does not add much gameplay. Also importing stats from another game for the start planet may result in unbalanced start conditions (in both directions).

You can always connect a Civ-game and a 4X-Galactic-Civ-game by writing a small app which calculates stats for your starting planet from a civ save game and writes a starting save game for the galactic game. That probably costs less dev resources than implementing the feature in both games ...

Edit :
As a compromise you could try to add space colonization inside the solar system, placing outposts on some of the more solid objects / planets. Each space object could have its own map based on size.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_by_size
However : big question is what benefit such outposts should give since all the resources / elements should be available on earth as well and transportation from one planet to another is expensive. Lack of atmosphere and magnetic shield, higher or lower gravity on surface, etc would make life and production more expensive than on earth ...
A possible benefit could be in astrophysical research about the (early) universe ... but I doubt that such research would help mankind solve its earthly problems.