Problem Statement
I am going to put forth a Problem Statement (aka hypothesis) that many will find controversial, mainly because of what it doesn’t include, namely the UI, Ages, and Civ-switching. Even if those were done wonderfully, Civ VII would still not be successful. There are more fundamental issues at play.
Civ VII has fundamental design issues around Agency, Balance, and Complexity (ABC) that rob the player of emotional drivers critical to 4X games and significantly degrade replayability.
That’s not to say that the UI, Ages, and Civ-switching don’t need work. Significant improvements are needed. But working on them before the ABC issues would be putting the cart before the horse.
In the following sections I will walk you through the thought process behind this hypothesis. Then you can form your own opinion.
The ABCs of 4X - Agency, Balance, and Complexity
There are three key concepts that make the Civilization series special:
- Agency makes the player feel clever and creates fun within turns
- Balance makes the player feel powerful and creates fun across turns
- Complexity makes the player feel engaged and creates fun across games
Agency
Agency is the capacity to take impactful actions to blaze your own path to become the preeminent civilization (i.e., win the game).
The several key components to Agency:
- Capacity: both the existence and amount of power you can exert. Capacity implies constancy - you wouldn’t expect a one-liter bottle to degrade to 0.75 liters when you start a triathlon or suddenly drop to 0.4 liters after you switched from swimming to cycling.
- Impactful actions: actions that are both perceptible and “move the needle” towards your goals. If your actions aren’t impactful, they are busywork.
- Blaze your own path: there are many ways to reach one of the win conditions. You determine the milestones and your goals and choices drive your progress.
- Win: The game is not “Civilization Simulator”. A game without win conditions can’t even be called a 4X game.
Agency does not imply that you won’t experience setbacks (e.g., defeats in battle, losing out on constructing Wonders). All agency means is that had you prioritized the above items you could have avoided the setback, but usually at the cost of some other goal. Thus Agency is the primary driver for Civilization’s reputation for “Interesting decisions” that Sid Meier spoke of.
Civilization VII’s war on Agency
Civ VII’s design significantly undermines player agency, ruins player enjoyment, and has turned loyal fans into ardent critics. In particular, it:
- Dictates arbitrary strategies and milestones for win conditions (Legacy paths)
- Places arbitrary caps on settling and trading via the Settlement limit, Trading range
- Saps capacity for action (yields) across the civilization via the Happiness and War Weariness mechanics
- On Age reset, destroys what you’ve built, cripples your capacity for action, and forces you to re-earn what you’ve already accomplished
It’s pretty obvious Firaxis doesn’t understand that 4X games are a power fantasy. Mess with the sense of power and there is no reason to play.
Are Legacy Paths anti-agency?
Absolutely. Consider two different leisure activities - Sudoku and Lego.
Is Sudoku a series of interesting decisions?
No. Sudoku is simply a series of mechanical decisions - no trade-offs and no creativity. In the end there is only one right answer and almost always only one path to that answer. One section of the grid will only solve in a certain way; solve that and everything else falls into place.
With its empty grid begging to be filled, Sudoku presents a convincing illusion of choice but no ability to think outside the box(es).
Is assembling Lego a series of interesting decisions?
Yes. If someone described Lego to you, it might not seem that way - Lego has pieces with fixed dimensions that only assemble in certain ways and comes with instructions showing the “right” way to assemble the pieces. But Lego is the polar opposite of Sudoku’s illusion of choice - you can make the car any way you want, and the end result can still be called a car.
I’m not going to belabor this point any further, because there is an
entire movie on this subject.
How does this apply to Civ VII?
Like Sudoku, there’s an illusion of choice but a pretty clear path to winning:
- Max production output and build the first science building
- Switch to Tech and Culture projects
- Race to hit Future Techs/Civs (even post-nerf), cherry-picking Masteries with good policies
- Max happiness to chain celebrations and maximize policy slots
- Focus merchants on acquiring camels and wine
- Save influence for City-states and target non-hostile ones ASAP
- Manage civ relationships via trade until no more suzerains are available
- Speed-run through desired Legacy Paths
“But that’s min-maxing!” you say.
And I respond, “Is it min-maxing if the alternatives are ineffective busywork and buildings that will be useless before they pay back their construction cost?”
Once you've got your trade routes and city-states locked, your actions become less and less impactful as the Age progresses. And then almost all of your work is gutted with the Age transition. Rinse and repeat.
Is there any wonder why the players complain about replayability?.
Happiness: How Firaxis ensures you play the game their way
I could write a detailed analysis with calculations on how Happiness, the Settlement limit, and war weariness work together as a straitjacket to ensure you don’t grow too quickly, don’t get too frisky with your neighbors, don’t color outside the lines, but this quote from a player does it so much more eloquently:
Why [has Firaxis] developed the game where I need a specific [happiness] build? This game series has always been about building an empire - that usually involves conquering your opponents. I should not have to develop a specific plan, choose a specific game path, just to play the game. Mechanics like this make me just not want to play the game. (post on Steam)
Arbitrary limits
What’s even more damaging to Agency are arbitrary limits, even more so when those limits aren’t properly explained and signaled.
Exhibit A: Trading range
I’ll never forget my first game, on a “Standard” map, when I clicked on my first merchant and saw… nothing. Two civ capitals that were grayed out. There was no explanation of trading range and I had to find a video that explained the numbers. And a visual indicator of trading range? Shirley you must be joking.
Even better was the 1.1.1 patch, in which Firaxis proudly announced that they’d changed the Town Outpost focus so that it applied globally instead of just to that town. Most players were shocked to learn that it wasn’t global before. But who could blame them - there was no documentation and no visual indicator. For most companies, that type of “open mouth, insert foot” moment would be a PR crisis. For Firaxis, it was Tuesday.
The trading range in Antiquity is
ten traversable hexes. This leads to fun situations:
- Two cities might be close as the crow flies but unable to trade
- You have to incur a diplomatic penalty of settling too close to another Civ’s capital if you want to trade with it
- You’ll found a new settlement and then be told it’s “not connected to your trade network”
- Your settlements connected to your trade network can randomly disconnect on age transition
The uncertainty of Trading range compounds the problem, because you’re never quite sure if investing in a Merchant will pay off.
The best part is that Firaxis, which prides itself on the history scholars it has employed, has obviously never heard of the Silk Road, which spanned 4,000 miles (6,400km). Must have slept through that lecture.
There actually is a reasonable solution that would make Trading range limits much more workable. Establishing a trade route to one settlement in a civ should allow you to reach others in the same civ connected by roads (though it should still require visibility to the settlements and sufficient diplomatic agreements in place).
Returning to the primary point, these arbitrary limits make players feel powerless. Limits rob you of a sense that you’re controlling your own destiny, which is a major violation of 4X Soul.
Age Resets: Punishing good strategy and skilled gameplay
Robbing the players of their accomplishments and forcing them to re-earn them is humiliating and demoralizing. I’m not going to spend any time on this here because it’s common sense. A more thorough investigation of Firaxis’ degrading design philosophy can be found in the Flawed Design Principles section (
link).
Real power in Civ VII comes from Attributes and Policies, not Player actions
The final nail in Agency’s coffin becomes extremely obvious if you use the “Policy Yield Previews” mod. As the game progresses, adding a policy or Attribute point dwarfs buildings in terms of additional power. Chaining Celebrations and doing tech.civic projects increases yield much faster than anything else, making any other type of actions worthless.
If you’d like to see this for yourself, use the “Purchasable Action points” mod and see how it changes the game. To save yourself some major irritation, I’d recommend the "Automatically repeat a project” mod as well.
Conclusion
Firaxis’ high-handed, hamfisted approach of gutting player agency and dictating the “right way to play” isn’t arrogant so much as it is embarrassing. It exposes Firaxis’ complete ignorance of the motivations behind player engagement and how they’ve lost the understanding of what makes 4X games and the Civilization series special.
If Firaxis doesn’t see the error of its ways, the road to redemption will be very rocky indeed.
Balance
Civilization’s approach to Balance is what’s responsible for Civilization’s famous “One more turn” reputation (i.e., fun across turns)
Traditional approach to Balancing games
There are two primary types of balance:
- Symmetric balancing: game play features are balanced against each other around one or more quantifiable metrics, such as DPS; and
- Asymmetric balancing: game play features are not directly balanced against each other, and may be overpowered but are counterable, limited in lifespan, or balanced by opportunity cost
Symmetric balancing is primarily accomplished through nerfs and buffs, while asymmetric balance is accomplished through limits (charges, lifespan, cost, etc.) or counters to that particular type of advantage.
Generally, symmetric balancing is well-suited to games with an emphasis on real-time mechanics and is used in e-sports games.
Asymmetric balance tends to result in richer, more unique game play as features are not constrained to those which can be expressed in the chosen balance metrics. Opportunity cost itself is also an important mechanism for asymmetric balance. Those two World Wonders should be expensive enough that building both of them would either be difficult or impact other areas such as economic and military production.
Asymmetric features are both more fun to design but more challenging, requiring experienced designers to implement the balance well.
What if Chess were symmetrically balanced?
Patch notes: Chess 17.5.2
- Knights no longer move one space to the side.
- Dev Note: Knight’s lateral movements were causing the overall impact of mid-range pieces to be greater than intended and started to overshadow your leader and bishop/rook abilities
Civilization’s balance viewed through the traditional balance lens
Using the traditional definition of balancing, the Civilization series has been asymmetrically balanced:
- Civilization power waxes and wanes across eras: Different Civs are dominant at different points in time. It’s OK that I’m weak in the Ancient era, because I dominate in the Middle Ages. The fact that others are strong in the Ancient Era is a fun challenge to overcome.
- Wonders are OP but limited in one or more ways: Opportunity cost is the primary mechanism, and occasionally obsolescence for particularly powerful Wonders (e.g., the Great Library in Civ IV)
- Wonders that support different play styles counter each other: this is another type of counter – an indirect counter. A World Wonder that boosts science path victory might be countered by one which boosts a Religion path victory.
It feels like something is missing, something that the traditional mindset around balancing doesn’t account for. Could it be that there was something fundamentally different about Firaxis’ mindset around Balance?
What purpose did Balance really serve in prior versions Civilization?
When the pieces don’t fit, it helps to step back and question your assumptions.
- If we're designing a single-player game, why are we using a multi-player concept like Balance?
- In a single-player game, where does balancing end and AI tuning begin?
- Did Firaxis think about Balancing the same way others do?
- What if Civilization's version of Balance isn’t focused on human player versus AI opponents at all?
- What if it focused instead around being the “Secret Sauce” powering Civilization’s One More Turn magic?
What if Firaxis abandoned the traditional mindset around Balance and instead treated Balance as the “Secret Sauce” for Civilization’s One More Turn magic? |
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I’ll call this alternate mindset “imBalance” (or iBalance for ease of reading) to differentiate it from the traditional Balance mindset.
iBalance has a very different purpose:
- Provide multiple leader and civ abilities, technologies, buildings, and Wonders that are each fun, moderately overpowered, and always anticipated
- Ensure that there are enough of those that the next one always lands at least every 5-10 turns
Boom.
One More Turn achieved
If you take this one step further, this iBalance mindset is also a key component of replayability, as it:
- Provides multiple ways those items interact and can be combined to support multiple strategies and playstyles
- Provides enough variety that it would take hundreds of playthroughs to exhaust the possibilities
Unfortunately, the baby seems to have been thrown out with the bathwater with Civ VII.
Civilization VII’s shift to symmetric balance
Civ VII appears to have moved to a symmetric balance approach: Instead of celebrating diversity, the developers have ruthlessly removed (Torres del Paine) or diminished (Imago Mundi, Future Techs) uniqueness out of the game.
Unfortunately, a major weakness to symmetric balancing is that it forces almost all powers to be expressed in terms of the variables that are used for balancing. It heavily limits uniqueness and flexibility in design by ruling out anything that can’t fit in a cookie-cutter mold. Even worse, it works like blinders on a horse; over time designers forget that there’s a world of possibility outside of that artificially-constrained subset.
This leads to a major but largely invisible downgrade in Civ VII: formerly unique features (World Wonders, Great people, and even Leaders) that in prior versions boasted truly unique benefits have been homogenized so that their benefits all decompose into parameterized standard game mechanics instead of custom code. While this makes development, testing, and tuning easier, it leads to a “samey” feel to almost everything.
For more info, see the section on
Spreadsheet-driven design under both Flawed Design Principles (
link) and Deep Dives (
link).
Case Study: Gate of all Nations nerf (1.2.4 update)
“When a Wonder is a clear must-pick every game, it's time for a nerf,
so we've reduced the strength of Gate of All Nations”
1.2.4 Update Notes, nerfing
Gate's War Support from 2 to 1 |
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Let’s examine the above statement. First off is the implicit assumption that Gate is a “must-pick” because it’s powerful. As you have to build six Wonders for the Legacy Path, it’s quite likely that Gate is picked not because it’s powerful, but because it’s the least bad Wonder available
at the time.
What Firaxis should have done was first make the other changes to Wonder timings, then see if Gate was still “must-pick”. Instead Firaxis chose to be a poster child for Confirmation Bias.
Secondly, is Gate really all that powerful in its pre-nerf form? It saves you 90 Influence, which is 7-9 turns worth of Influence, only useful when at war. Instead of building the Gate, you could produce 4-6 units with that production as a deterrent and use influence only if needed and you’ll get a better result. In fact, Gate becomes massively underpowered in later Ages because your influence generation is higher.
In other words, Gate has gone from a semi-useful "Wow, that could help my non-Militaristic Leader play in a novel way" to "Not even worth researching the Mastery". Firaxis actually made the game less interesting than it already was.
Thirdly, assuming Gates were actually overpowered, it could have been handled with much more finesse. Firaxis could have:
- Changed Gates’ effect to be “+2 if your War Support is <3, +1 otherwise”.
- Upped the AI build priority, making it a fun race; or
- Made sure there were other good options at the same point in the Tech/Civic trees, creating one of those "interesting decisions" that Sid talked about.
Instead, Firaxis nerfed the wrong Wonder for the wrong reasons in the most hamfisted way possible. Two turkeys don’t make an eagle.
Firaxis, are you really sure want to send the message that “if it’s popular, we’ll nerf it!” How do you think the community will perceive that? Do you think it will inspire trust in your judgement? Do you think it will make the community love the game more?
Why throw away the Secret Sauce?
It’s unclear why Firaxis abandoned the successful approach of the past. The only potential answer I can envision comes from one of the questions I posed earlier: “Where does balancing end and AI tuning begin”?
It’s quite possible that the change in the approach to Balance was driven by a desire to improve the AI. One of the janky areas of prior versions of Civilization is that the AI could politely be called “Cheaty McCheaterson”. It relies heavily on resource and production bonuses to increase difficulty.
AI is fiendishly difficult, and the change in Civ V to one unit per tile (UPT) is generally regarded as the straw that broke the camel’s back. In previous versions all the AI had to do was assemble “stacks of doom” for use in combat. With UPT, the AI needs to coordinate movement of multiple units and deal with positioning them properly taking terrain into account.
Here’s where Firaxis deserves some credit in their desire to improve the AI. When you have a problem with non-deterministic systems, particularly constraint-based ones where no good solution is available (i.e., null solution set), there are only a few options available:
- Manual intervention/tuning: Calling this “cheating” is a little unfair - it’s adding modifiers such as production yields until a solution set exists (where previously none did).
- Relaxing constraints: The Commander assemble and deploy mechanic is more than just a streamlining for player management of armies - it’s a godsend for AI as it lowers the need for coordination and helps sidestep terrain navigation issues.
- Increase the universe of solutions: Simplifying systems such as trade and city-state relationships removes constraints, which in turn greatly increases the number of possible solutions and the probability that a viable solution set can be found.
- Ensure systems are optimization-friendly: Optimizers try multiple combinations of moves, calculate each combination’s score and grading the results, taking the combination with the highest score and then tweaking the moves until they find the combination of moves to see if that result can be improved. Using a Balance approach that is based around a quantifiable metric (as symmetric balancing is) greatly helps this approach.
Unfortunately, Firaxis fell victim to tunnel vision; they were so focused on improving the AI that they let the tail wag the dog and in doing so created major collateral damage to both Balance and Complexity (Player Interaction). Though the intention was good, the end result threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Conclusion: Major blocker for any Redemption Arc
The use of a fundamentally mismatched, misapplied balance approach (regardless of good intentions) is a major impediment to any recovery arc - this would require a major revamping of the game.
Complexity
Complexity is what’s responsible for Civilization's replayability. (i.e., fun across games)
At first Complexity might seem like a snooze-fest, but in writing this, I came to appreciate the subtlety of prior Civilization versions, the deft touch required to make the systems and mechanics simple but not simplistic. If there was a defining principle behind Civ’s systems and their complexity, it would be “An hour to learn, a lifetime to master.”
What is Complexity?
Complexity has multiple meanings. In 4X games complexity works on three axes, two of which are intra-civilization - Deep and Wide.
Axis 1: Deep Complexity
Deep refers to the level of complexity within a single system; Wide refers to the level of interaction and interconnectedness across systems.
As an example of the Deep axis, look at a budgeting/resource allocation system:
- A high complexity model would allow fine-tuned allocation by resource and/or location,
- A mid-complexity model might have budget categories and tax rates adjustable
- A low-complexity model would have minimal direct control (e.g., only maintenance costs)
For simplicity, we'll say that the Deep axis of complexity is defined by the granularity of control.
Axis 2: Wide Complexity
Wide complexity refers to the level of interaction and influence between multiple systems. Military units, for example, will have both an economic cost and an impact on happiness. The Wide axis is generally defined by the level of interdependency between systems.
Wide complexity also drives UI complexity:
- Highly-interdependent systems require specialty UIs, usually charts and tables.
- Mid-interdependent systems utilize map overlays to represent status (e.g., loyalty, influence, pollution)
- Low-interdependent systems are usually at the tile-level, and may only be visible when hovering (yield, appeal)
Axis 3: Player Interaction
The third axis is one I’ve already touched on, Player interaction (
link). I’ll link that to avoid repeating it.
The Civilization series has generally fallen in the middle on all three axes.
Civilization and Complexity
In addition to the general measures of Complexity, Civilization has the following distinguishing characteristics:
- System Flexibility by victory path: if you are focusing on a religious victory, you can make choices that allow you to link the religious and economic systems (e.g., you can buy buildings and units with faith)
- Abstraction mechanisms: Rather than fine-tune control, mechanisms such as government types, policies, great people, governors, and specialists mitigate the need for micromanagement while still allowing flexibility in play style
- Resource value changes over time: Civ VI Coal is a good example – it’s first useless, then extremely valuable, and finally a problem to be dealt with.
The above are not unique to the Civ series, but most of them are instantly recognizable to Civ players.
Complexity in Civilization isn’t so much about difficulty. It’s much more about the variety of ways that you can combine the various systems to reach your goals.
Civ VII: Complexity Limbo
I use the term “Complexity Limbo” to represent Civ VII’s approach, which attempts to achieve a state of pulchritude by being facile and anodyne, leading to a state of ennui, in which players are continually nonplussed and bemused.
Just kidding. Complexity Limbo in Civ VII is all about “
how low can you go?”
Check out these sections if you want the full horror show:
- Strategic Bingo (link)
- If you dumb it, they will come (link)
- The Phantom Audience (link)
You’ll note that the second item is really just a pointer to the third. That is, in itself, a meta-commentary on Civ VII’s faux complexity.
How Faux can you go?
Firaxis didn’t just gut Complexity in Civ VII. They doubled down, investing time and effort to replace each of the systems with cheap knock-offs:
- Trade: Trade now works like mail order. Make a merchant, and you take every worked resource from the target settlement.
- City-States: Now strategy-free! Simply spend influence before other civs and you’re like to win the race and lock in the City-State. Lose the race for a city-state and it’s gone forever. Don’t worry, it will disappear at the end of the Age and a new one will spawn in its place, allowing you to race again.
- Religion: Untouchable missionaries and irritating micromanagement, almost entirely worthless after the end of the Age.
I gotta say, Firaxis did an impressive job incorporating encrappification into Civ VII. What an incisive commentary on society. Gold star for them!
Why was Complexity scrubbed from Civ VII?
This one is baffling, as the individual systems are not very complex in and of themselves, so it would have been possible to cherry-pick certain ones to simplify while keeping others. Below are one or more possible explanations for the extinction of interesting gameplay systems:
- Overuse of Spreadsheet-driven design (link)
- Attempt to appeal to non-traditional audience (link)
- Overzealous attempt to improve AI (link)
All three could have been drivers, but given the breadth of the removal, one of the first two would likely be the primary cause. The attempt to improve AI might have driven some simplification, but certain items, such as City-State competition, worked quite well in prior versions, so it’s less likely that AI would have been the primary driver.
Conclusion
Whatever the reasons, Firaxis has massively over-simplified Civ VII. As a result, subsequent playthroughs do not feel sufficiently different enough to keep players engaged.
So far, Firaxis’ attempts to increase replayability have been skin deep (additional resource types, religious beliefs, and city-state bonuses). Though these changes add a minor amount of variety, they do not significantly impact gameplay, therefore they haven't moved the needle in terms of replayability.
Simply increasing variety won’t get Firaxis where they need to be. Real complexity forces different strategic approaches. That’s what drives replayability.
Firaxis will need to embrace at least some increase in complexity. Even if they do change their mindset, it won’t be a simple or quick change, but it will be crucial to their redemption arc.
Continued in the next reply, as the document needed to be split to fit within post size limits.
Even if you were genuinely too young to have lived through this era of games and game dev interaction (which I still doubt), you can and should do much better.
