Civ-Switching

[Leucarum]

I doubt civ switching is going anywhere.

I doubt Civ evolution is going anywhere...

But given Civ7 and Humankind's receptions I doubt any developer is going to touch Civ-Switching as a mechanism to enable that any time soon!

 

[Kwami]

Honestly, I find this argument a bit puzzling. In Civ 6, you could already play a game using Advanced Start in any Age, set a turn limit, or play on online speed, adjust tech costs etc —there were plenty of options to tailor the experience and experiment with different playstyles and try new things.

Now with Civ 7, it seems the game forces that kind of gameplay. And suddenly, some players are discovering that short sessions with varied civs at different eras with clearly outlined goals can actually be a lot of fun.

But these things aren't the same. I'm not playing an advanced start in VII. I'm starting from the beginning and what I get in the second era is what I created in the first era. The advanced start system in VI was pretty barebones and not very fun to play.

And it's not about making the game shorter. It's about keeping the game interesting. Getting a whole new kit in each era keeps it interesting for me. Playing a shorter game or using online speed with all of its balance problems is not interesting to me.

 

[Kwami]

Hmm... I'd argue that Civ switching as implemented seems to enable a lot of compounding, creating balance issues. Civ7 is very much a game of stacking bonuses to make number go up. Picking Maya gives you good science, picking Abassid on top compounds it into the stratosphere, in a way that going from, say, Aksum into Abassid doesn't. Similar combinations are out there for Culture, City State stacking, etc... And this becomes very obvious with leaders who are biased towards some of the civ evolution paths which synergize with each other. I don't neccessarily think this is an insurmountable issue, but at the moment I think civ switching is a net negative on balance.

And there's no reason you can't scale the bonuses from civs to each era... So later civs don't have to be more powerful...

There are always going to be some civilizations and combinations that are more powerful than others. Part of the fun is finding those combinations! Or, well, it would be if there were more civilizations to choose from. The alternative is a perfectly balanced game, which doesn't exist and wouldn't be very fun, anyway.

Still, I find it fun that each civilization is strong in its era. The old system where you started as, say, America and didn't get your unique units and buildings until the game was almost over wasn't great. And it wasn't great to start as Rome and use up all of your unique things in the first 20% of the game, either. And there was a huge balance problem when a late-game civilization started next to a couple of early-game civilizations. That was especially true in multiplayer games since the AI was never very good in any Civilization game, but it did matter somewhat in single-player games, too.

I hope that those two paragraphs don't sound contradictory. I'm not expecting, or wanting, a perfectly balanced game. But there must be some level of balance or else it just gets silly.

I absolutely love mixing and matching leaders. Out of the new innovations in Civ7 this is by far and away the best thing they have added. I just don't see why you need civ switching to have this? Honestly, the main blowback against leader mixing seems to be culture war chest thumping, and is coming from a minority. I doubt Firaxis care. I expect this is evergreen now as a feature with or without civ switching. But I absolutely agree with you that it's great we have civs like the Mississippians and leaders like Machiavelli.

I think that if the game was released without civilization switching, but with mixing and matching leaders, then players would have expected a "default" leader for each civilization and a "default" civilization for each leader. In fact, that still seems to be the goal for a lot of people posting here. They insist that Firaxis is secretly planning to sell us $1,000 of DLC so that we can finally match leaders to civilizations the "right" way.

I do hope that the mixing system remains in all future Civilization games, though. And I hope that Firaxis is able to ignore the people demanding a "default" match for everything so that we can still have fun leaders like Machiavelli and Ada Lovelace and fun civilizations like the Mississippians and maybe someday the Hittites and Olmecs and others.

Crises are a mess. They don't really do anything other than mildly irritate a competent player, while the AI frequently gets bodied. I don't know how Firaxis fix it without making them harsher on the player but not the AI, which probably wouldn't feel good either and is meaningless in multiplayer. I get the idea they were aiming for, but their implementation works way better in Stellaris, where you can far more convincingly just dump a msssive threat at the player to match their snowball. I don't think it's a good use of dev time to try and fix a feature which a large chunk of the player base just switch off... So I'm not sure if Civ 7 will have the narrative that you think it does for a lot of the player base.

The narrative is there. I don't think that the game sells it well enough. That's evident by the frequent misunderstandings that I see posted here about one civilization evolving into another Pokemon style. I don't know if the crises can be made into something more interesting than they are. Maybe, though! The barbarian one is fun. The others are lacking. Part of the problem might just be related to balance, but part of it is a lack of ways to do anything about the problems. A city gets the plague and... well, and nothing. It just is. Move your units out of the area and just wait a while.

But I like the idea of the crisis system. And I like the crisis policy card system, even if it needs some tweaks. The developers just need to make the crises more engaging and add more of them so that they don't feel stale so quickly. Well, and fix the AI. But that last one never happens, so maybe giving the AI a break is actually the better solution.

Also, there's plenty of regions with a high degree of cultural continuity back into the mists of time, even if the rulership has inevitably shifted. China and India stand out in particular, so I don't really agree with that being an issue...

I don't want to get too far into this idea, but China isn't really one culture and people, right? There's Tibet, the Turkic peoples in Xinjiang, the Mongolians, and all of the various other cultures and peoples that make up the modern Chinese empire. And historically, they were not a united nation. Parts of China have enough continuity to say that there's always been a "China" and "Chinese people" and "Chinese culture", but it's much more complicated, really. And India, too!

The current implementation of the three Chinese civilizations actually reinforces the narrative that the game is trying to tell. You start as the Han, which is what we typically think of when we think of "Chinese". The game skips over a lot of time and the Mongolian rule to give us the Ming, which is again "Chinese". The Han people are back! But the Ming have to rebuild the wall that had been neglected. And they have to set up a new, complicated government system to replace the ones that came before it. After more time passes, the Manchurians take over as the Qing and everything is new and different again! That's a great story. Unfortunately, the game doesn't do enough to sell it. I think that most players don't want to read anymore and so they just click the boxes away and then say that nothing makes any sense. I'm not sure how to fix the problem. A more constrained game featuring just one civilization could rely on videos or something, but that would be almost impossible to do with a game like Civilization.

I'm not against civs evolving over time. This seems to be the direction of travel for 4X games, and I agree that generic changes have the potential to feel flavourless. I don't think the right answer is clear yet, but from Humankind and Civ7 it seems as if confusion, disconnection and identity issues are if not inherent to, then difficult to solve in civ switching. I agree that the solution to evolution over time in Civ is worth trying to find, so I don't begrudge Firaxis for trying, but I think civ switching has issues that make it a bad choice for the task at hand, and I would love to see Firaxis go back to the drawing board.

Maybe for the next game? I just don't think it's possible to give up on the switching system in this game.

Fun is subjective, I find I finish far fewer games of 7 than I did in 6. A personal grudge is that I like far more civs in antiquity than in exploration, and the only modern civ I really enjoy is Nepal, so my desire to continue playing drops very rapidly with civ switches. I almost always feel that it's a loss. And for players who love more modern civs, having to wade through earlier eras to get where you want isn't a great feeling.

I also prefer the antiquity civilizations, then the exploration ones, and then the modern ones. But I think that's because the modern age just isn't as well done as the other two. If the age itself was more interesting, then the civilizations in it could be more interesting. If the developers are going to "redo" something, then I hope it's the modern age. It's fine to have ideologies and to try to provoke world wars. It's fine to have railroads and factories. But... I don't know. Something is missing. It doesn't matter who you play as or who you're against. And you can completely ignore ideology if you don't want to pursue that military path, which cuts out a big part of the age. Of all the ages, the modern age is the shortest, easiest, and more boring.

That's probably why I don't like the modern civilizations as much as the others. They just don't matter very much.

I would love to see stats on how many players had a "main" civ (or couple of civs) in Civ6, and what proportion of games they played with it. I definitely had a shortlist and didn't rotate much. My suspicion is that players in that camp are likely to be far more hostile to civ switching.

Not me! I tried to play someone new every time until I got through the list and then I tried to play someone that I hadn't played in a while each time. I like variety.

Frustratingly Firaxis seem to have known 7 was launching with far less civs than would feel good... While wanting to charge premium prices to get to where they needed to be at launch. I think we're all lying if we say that isn't annoying.

Yeah, but I felt the same way in previous games when they had pre-order DLC and purchasable DLC right after release. I absolutely agree that this game needs about 2-3 times as many civilizations as it launched with, though. Maybe that was never economically feasible for the developers, but that's their problem to solve.

I definitely was glad they removed all unlock criteria. It's a permanently-on option for me.

Same!

I don't like that they effectively released a product with not enough civs and expect us to pay to make the product playable. At this point, me buying expansions is definitely contingent on them showing signs of being willing to re-evaluate their core design. I'm not happy to pay if it's just "stay the course," and with games like EU5 on the horizon... I don't want to give up yet, but my playtime has definitely nosedived.

EU5? Talk about games that want to sell you $1,000 of DLC!

 

[TylertheDestroyer]

I say this because it's my conviction, not for anyone else. Btw i play Civ since Civ 2, so i think i'm a long term fan too and i like the new path of the game. You know different opinions...

Please point out where I've stated or even implied that you don't have the right to share your opinion with us...? You like the game's direction/current state and that's great for you, you are completely entitled to your opinion but to insult and lash out against the people here saying they don't like the game or its direction is silly especially when you are in what seems to be the minority and the game we're discussing is sitting at overwhelmingly negative user reviews and has less players than a title in the series that is almost 15 years old.....

 

[Leucarum]

There are always going to be some civilizations and combinations that are more powerful than others. Part of the fun is finding those combinations! Or, well, it would be if there were more civilizations to choose from. The alternative is a perfectly balanced game, which doesn't exist and wouldn't be very fun, anyway.

Still, I find it fun that each civilization is strong in its era. The old system where you started as, say, America and didn't get your unique units and buildings until the game was almost over wasn't great. And it wasn't great to start as Rome and use up all of your unique things in the first 20% of the game, either. And there was a huge balance problem when a late-game civilization started next to a couple of early-game civilizations. That was especially true in multiplayer games since the AI was never very good in any Civilization game, but it did matter somewhat in single-player games, too.

I hope that those two paragraphs don't sound contradictory. I'm not expecting, or wanting, a perfectly balanced game. But there must be some level of balance or else it just gets silly.

Not contradictory, I think we both agree that balance isn't the most the most important factor. I'd say though, that Civ7's more fleshed out civs mean that even modern era civs have abilities that would mostly work in any era. It's ironic that the edition where Firaxis wanted to make Civs which work well in their "golden era" is the edition which shows they didn't have to do that in the first place.

I think that if the game was released without civilization switching, but with mixing and matching leaders, then players would have expected a "default" leader for each civilization and a "default" civilization for each leader. In fact, that still seems to be the goal for a lot of people posting here. They insist that Firaxis is secretly planning to sell us $1,000 of DLC so that we can finally match leaders to civilizations the "right" way.

I do hope that the mixing system remains in all future Civilization games, though. And I hope that Firaxis is able to ignore the people demanding a "default" match for everything so that we can still have fun leaders like Machiavelli and Ada Lovelace and fun civilizations like the Mississippians and maybe someday the Hittites and Olmecs and others.

Firaxis seem to have been chomping at the bit to free themselves from this particular shackle. I think we can rest assured it's evergreen.

The narrative is there. I don't think that the game sells it well enough. That's evident by the frequent misunderstandings that I see posted here about one civilization evolving into another Pokemon style. I don't know if the crises can be made into something more interesting than they are. Maybe, though! The barbarian one is fun. The others are lacking. Part of the problem might just be related to balance, but part of it is a lack of ways to do anything about the problems. A city gets the plague and... well, and nothing. It just is. Move your units out of the area and just wait a while.

But I like the idea of the crisis system. And I like the crisis policy card system, even if it needs some tweaks. The developers just need to make the crises more engaging and add more of them so that they don't feel stale so quickly. Well, and fix the AI. But that last one never happens, so maybe giving the AI a break is actually the better solution.

I suspect making crises more engaging is easier said than done. The barbarian one probably comes closest to having fun gameplay, but if Firaxis are at best scoring 1 out of 6 on their design for a system it might be better to abandon it than try to make it passable.

I don't want to get too far into this idea, but China isn't really one culture and people, right? There's Tibet, the Turkic peoples in Xinjiang, the Mongolians, and all of the various other cultures and peoples that make up the modern Chinese empire. And historically, they were not a united nation. Parts of China have enough continuity to say that there's always been a "China" and "Chinese people" and "Chinese culture", but it's much more complicated, really. And India, too!

The current implementation of the three Chinese civilizations actually reinforces the narrative that the game is trying to tell. You start as the Han, which is what we typically think of when we think of "Chinese". The game skips over a lot of time and the Mongolian rule to give us the Ming, which is again "Chinese". The Han people are back! But the Ming have to rebuild the wall that had been neglected. And they have to set up a new, complicated government system to replace the ones that came before it. After more time passes, the Manchurians take over as the Qing and everything is new and different again! That's a great story. Unfortunately, the game doesn't do enough to sell it. I think that most players don't want to read anymore and so they just click the boxes away and then say that nothing makes any sense. I'm not sure how to fix the problem. A more constrained game featuring just one civilization could rely on videos or something, but that would be almost impossible to do with a game like Civilization.

I made that a quick point for the same reason you'd rather not go into it in too depth. My use of the phrase "cultural continuity" was hopefully doing a lot of heavy lifting. I do like that they deblobbed China and India - though I think it works best for India since China has a more consistent history of being a politically unified polity.

Maybe for the next game? I just don't think it's possible to give up on the switching system in this game.

Staying the course seems to be failing, my nightmare scenario is that the game files suggesting a 4th age are true and we end up with Firaxis trying to ram in a 3rd age transition while the first 2 are a mess with far too few civs. Out of the features which are provoking a response from the fanbase, I think Civ switching is the easiest to hit reverse on, while also having inherent flaws around continuity, identity, and "follow-ability" which I don't see a solution to. Eras might not be popular at the moment, but I think the path to fix that (jam in as many customization options as humanly possible) is at least visible.

I'd personally be happy if they added a way to "transcend" your civ while having some interesting gameplay for doing so... But I don't think it would solve the problem for players whose favourite civs arrive later. It would at least reduce the harm being done by civ switching.

I also prefer the antiquity civilizations, then the exploration ones, and then the modern ones. But I think that's because the modern age just isn't as well done as the other two. If the age itself was more interesting, then the civilizations in it could be more interesting. If the developers are going to "redo" something, then I hope it's the modern age. It's fine to have ideologies and to try to provoke world wars. It's fine to have railroads and factories. But... I don't know. Something is missing. It doesn't matter who you play as or who you're against. And you can completely ignore ideology if you don't want to pursue that military path, which cuts out a big part of the age. Of all the ages, the modern age is the shortest, easiest, and more boring.

That's probably why I don't like the modern civilizations as much as the others. They just don't matter very much.

Modern being bad is definitely a part of the problem, but I don't think it's the whole of it...

A large part of the joy I get from previous civs is honestly the alt history of seeing Maya, Zulu or Egypt dominating the modern world. Losing the civ I want to play, or having to play through ones I don't is just a feels bad. And the icky connotations around colonialism are horrible - e.g. no modern indigenous new world civs is frankly something Firaxis really should have seen was an issue.

I'd also throw another problem - Civs in later eras with terrain biases. This doesn't feel like "I'm playing the map" it feels like "The map is playing me." It's not engaging gameplay to go, "I have mountains = I click the Inca button," It's a random seed dictating your next best move. And it makes otherwise fun civ transitions awkward because you can't get the biases you'd like to have, or forces you to play options you aren't as into just to have a better game in a later era... I think the only civs which "play the terrain" should have been antiquity civs so the player still feels like they have agency.

I agree that Modern is a hot mess, but that's a whole other thread...

Not me! I tried to play someone new every time until I got through the list and then I tried to play someone that I hadn't played in a while each time. I like variety.

I expect this isn't going to be universal, but I'd be surprise if players with a shortlist are quite a large community.

Yeah, but I felt the same way in previous games when they had pre-order DLC and purchasable DLC right after release. I absolutely agree that this game needs about 2-3 times as many civilizations as it launched with, though. Maybe that was never economically feasible for the developers, but that's their problem to solve.

EU5? Talk about games that want to sell you $1,000 of DLC!

Fair, but if I'm going to spend my money somewhere, Paradox appear to have learned their lessons from Imperator and are responsive and open in a way which Firaxis aren't. Who knows maybe EU5 will flop, but it's nice that it looks as if that's waiting in the wings for me to jump ship to if Firaxis decide the iceberg ahead of them looks like something they can drive through if they don't change heading.

 

[lymond]

Moderator Action: This going at each other will cease now. Discuss the game, not each other. I will not repeat this. If it is repeated, some thread bans may be handed out, or the thread may be closed. Everyone has a right to their opinion of the game, as long as they are civil about it. -lymond

 

[Krajzen]

I think if we really had to do switching then much better decision would be to have constant civs, from ancient to future era, and the possibility/need of changing leaders disconnected from civilizations (changing civ-fitting leaders has always been a pipe green, no way devs would waste resources for 3 historical leaders per every Eurasian civ). So you take the Greek civ and then you lead it as Alexander, then Saladin in the second era and Benjamin Franklin in the last one. It would be infinitely more bearable - you could even pretend those are changes in dynasties, or cultural eras, or types of government. It would also still enable us to have leaderless or archeological civilizations.

Alternate idea - let's simply go further with the civ6 idea of introducing more leaders than civs - and this time call this "Incarnations" of a single Civilization. So you take "India" with its baseline aestethics, graphics, soundtrack etc and then it has one Incarnation called "Maurya" led by Ashoka and equipped with the ancient stuff, and another Incarnation called "Maratha" led by Shivaji with the 18th century stuff etc. They could even have separate city lists. This solution above would preserve the classical mode of playing and standing the test of time, while also solving a lot of the old problems such as "how to have both ancient and islamic Egypt, or both ancient and modern Greece, or both Italy and Rome", "how to name civilization X", "what to do when the presence of civ Y excludes Z" etc. It wouldn't let us include leaderless or archeological civilizations though. Maybe their problem could be solved by giving such civs generic randomized avatars, or some creative stretching of history to turn them into "Incarnations" of other civs. So for example we have "Andean" civilization with "Inca" being one incarnation and Caral being another while still being led by Pacachuti as the least evil etc.

Sadly, between e.g. those two options and simply keeping the universally acclaimed system of civ6 devs have decided on one of the strangest decisions I have ever seen in the history of gaming, and here we are.

 

[moondog385]

I think if we really had to do switching then much better decision would be to have constant civs, from ancient to future era, and the possibility/need of changing leaders disconnected from civilizations (changing civ-fitting leaders has always been a pipe green, no way devs would waste resources for 3 historical leaders per every Eurasian civ). So you take the Greek civ and then you lead it as Alexander, then Saladin in the second era and Benjamin Franklin in the last one. It would be infinitely more bearable - you could even pretend those are changes in dynasties, or cultural eras, or types of government. It would also still enable us to have leaderless or archeological civilizations.

Alternate idea - let's simply go further with the civ6 idea of introducing more leaders than civs - and this time call this "Incarnations" of a single Civilization. So you take "India" with its baseline aestethics, graphics, soundtrack etc and then it has one Incarnation called "Maurya" led by Ashoka and equipped with the ancient stuff, and another Incarnation called "Maratha" led by Shivaji with the 18th century stuff etc. They could even have separate city lists. This solution above would preserve the classical mode of playing and standing the test of time, while also solving a lot of the old problems such as "how to have both ancient and islamic Egypt, or both ancient and modern Greece, or both Italy and Rome", "how to name civilization X", "what to do when the presence of civ Y excludes Z" etc. It wouldn't let us include leaderless or archeological civilizations though. Maybe their problem could be solved by giving such civs generic randomized avatars, or some creative stretching of history to turn them into "Incarnations" of other civs. So for example we have "Andean" civilization with "Inca" being one incarnation and Caral being another while still being led by Pacachuti as the least evil etc.

Sadly, between e.g. those two options and simply keeping the universally acclaimed system of civ6 devs have decided on one of the strangest decisions I have ever seen in the history of gaming, and here we are.

I think giving certain civs certain attributes might work. Say, give civs from the Indian subcontinent a shared ability, give civs from the Andes a shared ability, give civs from Central Europe a shared ability. Maybe call it a “Heritage Ability” or something and you upgrade it as you move through the game. This lets you still have dynasties and archaeological civs.

I agree with the devs that leader switching could prove very confusing — not to say civ switching isn’t for some players. Perhaps government changes should be more pronounced and dramatic instead. They should feel less like stat changes and more like you’re actually having to change the way your empire is managed. For example, choosing democracy might actually require you to need your populations’ consent on certain things.

 

[Krikkit1]

I think if we really had to do switching then much better decision would be to have constant civs, from ancient to future era, and the possibility/need of changing leaders disconnected from civilizations (changing civ-fitting leaders has always been a pipe green, no way devs would waste resources for 3 historical leaders per every Eurasian civ). So you take the Greek civ and then you lead it as Alexander, then Saladin in the second era and Benjamin Franklin in the last one. It would be infinitely more bearable - you could even pretend those are changes in dynasties, or cultural eras, or types of government. It would also still enable us to have leaderless or archeological civilizations.

Alternate idea - let's simply go further with the civ6 idea of introducing more leaders than civs - and this time call this "Incarnations" of a single Civilization. So you take "India" with its baseline aestethics, graphics, soundtrack etc and then it has one Incarnation called "Maurya" led by Ashoka and equipped with the ancient stuff, and another Incarnation called "Maratha" led by Shivaji with the 18th century stuff etc. They could even have separate city lists. This solution above would preserve the classical mode of playing and standing the test of time, while also solving a lot of the old problems such as "how to have both ancient and islamic Egypt, or both ancient and modern Greece, or both Italy and Rome", "how to name civilization X", "what to do when the presence of civ Y excludes Z" etc. It wouldn't let us include leaderless or archeological civilizations though. Maybe their problem could be solved by giving such civs generic randomized avatars, or some creative stretching of history to turn them into "Incarnations" of other civs. So for example we have "Andean" civilization with "Inca" being one incarnation and Caral being another while still being led by Pacachuti as the least evil etc.

Sadly, between e.g. those two options and simply keeping the universally acclaimed system of civ6 devs have decided on one of the strangest decisions I have ever seen in the history of gaming, and here we are.

This is where I think having the NAME under player control is good.