I don't believe civ-switching is Civ 7's biggest problem. It is a problem for many reasons, and a marketing problem, but 7 suffers because it's over balanced. The latest patch proves that devs currently don't want to move away from this (unless they are secretly planning an overhaul they're not ready to address yet).
I would argue that this is the key issue. Overbalancing needs to end, so we can "break eggs", and I think this will - one way or another - thoroughly fix the game. I'll repost something which got little attention in another thread to explain.
To me, this is everything. If the eggs aren't broken, this will never be a good game.
I would argue that this is the key issue. Overbalancing needs to end, so we can "break eggs", and I think this will - one way or another - thoroughly fix the game. I'll repost something which got little attention in another thread to explain.
To me, this is everything. If the eggs aren't broken, this will never be a good game.
In the most recent patch notes, they comment about not wanting to overcomplicate the UI, referencing the "sheer depth" of complexity in different kinds of yield adjacencies and bonuses. This sort of triggered me, especially because I found Silla to be a bit underwhelming. Silla, like a few other civs, is just a couple extra yields here, some little adjacencies there.
When I think of playing civs like that, it just makes me think, "Well, I just want to optimize as many yields as I can, which involves repeat, rudimentary placement puzzles, and that's it." That's not really playing a strategy game to me. I strongly get the impression, from the patch notes, that they are aiming to create a gameplay experience that forces a casual audience to reflect upon many apparent choices and bonuses, but without alienating the casual audience with major strategic consequences. The "I feel smart doing this, but there's nothing smart about it." It really belies the notion of "sheer depth". More like, endless, barely relevant complexity.
Qajar is cool. There's a very specific set of mechanics that induce an asymmetric strategy: keeping settlements to a minimum. This is cool for representing an interesting, unique strategic choice, something I don't get from Silla (other than maybe if you have control over it, different diplomatic choices, though there actually isn't much strategic depth here).
Even so, the problem with Qajar is it's a one-trick pony. I either succeed in optimizing my specialists while minimizing settlements, or I don't. It's not like there are different ways Qajar's uniqueness could be used, different strategic mixes. Maybe, you could plan to stay tall and tight in preparation for finishing as Qajar, but then you have to play through these long, interruptive Age beginnings, middles and ends before even getting there.
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For civs like Silla, the sense that its unique qualities are giving you strategic options, while not symmetrical to other civs, still grant you meaningful choice, just isn't there. For civs like Qajar, it's more about feeling like you "pulled off" its intended strategy, which you can play a few times to finally accomplish at a satisfactory level, but then you've done it and there's no more meaningful gameplay to be had.
This all boils down to the conflicting design notion that Civ 7 has "sheer depth" in tile placement possibilities and resulting adjacency and bonus combinations, with the notion that the game has to be sufficiently simple and totally balanced so that this sheer depth doesn't actually matter. It's, as I said, just a series of little placement puzzles that grow immediately tedious and substantially lack meaning.
These placement puzzles are also handicapped by incomplete design vision. If cities have layers from history, why is there a bronze age grain warehouse next to my downtown palace? Why can't these cities have little features like avenues that represent the urban version of exurban improvements, reducing the sense of sprawl and fully integrating the concept of a layered, complex city with "depth". Why can't I go into a camera mode to take snapshots of cool cities from different angles to post on social media?
In any event, the only place where civ switching could have been interesting is in offering not railroaded strategic choices solely related to optimizing the available bonuses, but asymmetric strategies which preserve meaningful choice.
The extreme overbalancing of the game is a completely failed design concept and I continue to sense the developers are just committed to this vision and will not change it no matter audience feedback. It seems that the intent of the game was to sell civs like League of Legends characters where there would be so many of them, and they would be superficially unique, but to balance this the game needs to not actually allow any civ to have a meaningful, asymmetric affect on strategic choices. And that the audience of the game is absolutely the less strategically inclined casual console player, who (in the sense of the model customer envisioned by marketing) is looking for a chance to "feel" smart by being given a large set of choices with a couple very obvious optimal solutions that never change, in lieu of any strategic depth that would alienate people that aren't interested in learning the strategy basics or applying them.
You make a good point that in spite of the game's incredibly, impressively restrictive overbalancing, it still shipped with game breaking bugs that are pretty obvious and simple, but aren't being fixed very quickly or very well.
I was reminded, through Silla, that the diplomacy system is streamlined and overbalanced. There's a trade off between paying for peace, or getting yield boosts. If you had way too much influence, or if the initiatives were too strong, you would overboost your yields. If initiatives and other diplomacy were out of balance, then naturally peaceful civs in the lucky geopolitical positions would dominate, or, anyone seeking boosts would get swamped by war weariness.
These systems are far too intertwined. Growth itself - a subject of early contention that was minimally "fixed" - is itself intertwined with happiness, war weariness etc. It's all completely intertwined, and then within this massive, complex, mutually dependent system, they create "sheer depth" of endless ways to vary what sort of adjacency bonuses you get.
I bet you could mathematically describe strategic depth. It would involve describing decision trees which produce wildly divergent outcomes, but how the average varied combination of these choices converge to the same outcome.
I bet you could mathematically prove that the intertwined, interdependent balancing of Civ 7 disallows for strategic depth. That you could not within that system produce wildly divergent outcomes, as it would suppress them.
With this in mind, the junior design staff, while their inexperience has introduced additional quality issues to the game - according to your analysis - can do very little to improve upon the base problems with the game. They're stuck. The core design can't be improved upon unless its broken open like an egg.
I think Civ 7, ages and civ transitions and everything else aside, needs to break eggs.
All our discussions on designer skill level, preferences for civ switching or not are all moot unless some sort of change like this is made. The intertwined, overbalanced design makes it impossible for junior designers of any skill level to do anything meaningful.
- Commit to wild asymmetries. This means needing to add a few more systems, like a faith yield, for one. An example from the ideas forum was a "Stability" yield rather than a settlement limit. I commented that a religious civ could have a specific policy that supports Stability and breaks the core tall vs. wide balancing mechanism. However, that policy would nerf your Science or something. So, the idea are unique civs that totally break core systems but pair that with other penalties. When you have asymmetries, you end up with situations where monster overpowered civs can be countered almost every time, however, if you don't correctly identify and implement the counter, you will be totally overpowered by it. That's the design aim, I think, that's needed. It's not what's "cool for casuals".
- Asymmetries that genuinely can't be countered "broken civs" are beloved by the community. Patches always correct these, but until they do, discovering them and exploiting them as a community is bread and butter IMO and not a problem design needs to avoid at all costs. "Perfectly balanced with no exploits" and all that.
- Too much is intertwined in 7 and that needs to change. I'd disentangle government and diplomacy from their simplified relationship to global yield buffs. I'd redesign them to be meaningful, interesting systems, but not ones which are co-dependent on everything else for balance. Asymmetric mini-games. Something as simple as instead of a Science boosting initiative, just going back to trading for technologies. Instead of a culture yield boost, what about an initiative to build a wonder together where the junior partner gets a junior benefit while the Wonder's active in that Age.
- Growth is too tight, and the specialist feature is too intertwined with it. Redefine Settlement limits within the scope of the town vs. cities dichotomy, an obvious natural place to balance tall vs wide strategies that leaves from for dozens of "wild asymmetries". Imagine a civ that only has two town specializations, but the food one is double food, and there is more support for tall cities.
- The specialist feature railroads city development, supports snowballing, doesn't support meaningful choice once you understand how to optimize it, and inherently restricts adding variety to tall vs. wide balance. Just replace this with something else. I've had many ideas but the simplest one is good old city administrators. One administrator per yield type per city per Age. Hiring one works like building a food supported mini-wonder or project, and so you have to inherently specialize cities into select roles unless you have the food to hire all of them and are making super cities. You select your strategy "This will be a gold and production city" and then you queue those to roles in the administrator training queue, and you fill up the training queue a little bit with each growth even if you choose not to improve a tile. That's it. No more endless placing specialists here there and everywhere.
I'd go so far as to say the legacy paths themselves are boring because they are restricted by the overbalance. Some of my wilder ideas for improved victory paths don't actually work within the current balancing.
