Civ VII Post-mortem: Crafting a redemption arc

[socratic]

"over hundreds of years an empire changed" (whilst surviving a Crisis if you have it enabled) is not what you're trying to paint it as. The Roman Empire wasn't colonised. It was worn down by effectively, repeated crises, many of which weren't handled well.

Trying to shoehorn your own politics into a game because you don't like the game in question is, imo, questionable ethics at best. And a pretty off-topic tangent to entertain in any real depth. You're welcome to disagree, but I don't believe this accusation is being levelled in good faith, in any way shape or form.

In pure historical terms, many empires fell (some quickly, some slowly). In VII you actually have a significant chance to survive the fall of any historical empire, whilst evolving with the changing times (as things like trade and whatnot historically did).

You're not going to get a perfect realisation of non-colonising history in a game for which war is a large component of. Game mechanics demand abstraction.

Complaining about alleged genocide in a game that lets you launch nukes feels very selective.

I just want to say that I was in no way trying to make a political statement in that comment. This game has always had domination and I don't see anything wrong with that. I was referring to players who are used to playing civs like the Aztecs with the intention of carrying them into the modern day, and how that's not possible anymore in Civ 7 (despite being possible in every earlier entry). Personally, I actually like an Aztec > Mexico transition and am more disappointed that the Aztecs aren't in the game yet.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

My civ 7 post-mortem:

I think Civ7 succeeded when it made changes that improved on the 4X part of the game. For example, commanders, slottable resources that buff settlements, merchants that trade resources instead of just providing yields, cities vs towns, diplomacy with endeavors and sanctions, war score, are all changes that improve the 4X experience. In fact, I would argue that if civ7 had just done those changes with no civ switching or age transitions, civ7 would probably be a very good entry to the civ franchice.

Civ7 also simplified city management, like removing builders and citizen management, which some players feel dumbed down the strategy. Civ7 also introduced legacy paths which made the game much more directed and less open ended. I think many fans, especially the more hard core civ fans, want that more open ended strategy where they can shape their civ however they want.

Civ7 completely failed when it deviating too much (in the eyes of many fans) from the perceived core civ "soul". Many civ players consider the core civ premise to be guiding a civ from the stone age to the information age, to "stand the test of time". Civ-switching and age transitions really upended that. In civ7, the player identity is more the leader and the player guides 3 cultures through 3 distinct Ages. Your civ is not standing the test of time anymore. Your identity is not the same civ. Also the player is not having that continuous game from the stone age to the information age but rather, is playing like 3 connected scenarios. It is a very different experience that is hard for some players to adjust to.

Lastly, poor marketing and an unpolished release left a bad first impression that made it an uphill battle to recover. When Firaxis first introduced the civ switching and age transition mechanics, it turned some players off even before the game was released. And when the game was released, poor UI that lacked information as well as missing quality of life improvements like auto explore gave players a poor first impression.

Lessons for civ7 developers:

• Be careful not to deviate too much from the core civ premise.
• Focus on making the 4X experience strategic and deeper.
• Make sure UI and quality of life improvements are done at release

 

[Gorbles]

That’s because it isn’t, which has been demonstrated to you aud nauseum at this point

That’s not an opinion, it’s objective fact. There is a loading screen and poof units teleport, change, are removed etc

I'm not at all sure what you're trying to argue anymore here, sorry.

The Crisis? If turned on, you play through it. The Crisis is the period of time leading up to the transition.

That you dislike the transition? I know. I identified this as something you dislike and want to change / remove. But your idea of what to change / remove is what is the opinion. Other people have different solutions. The devs may even have more (though at this point it looks like even while transitions might change, the intent isn't to remove them at all).

I just want to say that I was in no way trying to make a political statement in that comment. This game has always had domination and I don't see anything wrong with that. I was referring to players who are used to playing civs like the Aztecs with the intention of carrying them into the modern day, and how that's not possible anymore in Civ 7 (despite being possible in every earlier entry). Personally, I actually like an Aztec > Mexico transition and am more disappointed that the Aztecs aren't in the game yet.

Wanting more granularity in your choices? Yeah, I completely get that. Wanting to carry your civ through the ages? Also completely understandable.

Calling something a genocide in a video game is all I was objecting to, really. There's scope for a nuanced, good faith discussion of that but it'd prolly have to be somewhere else (or in a PM).

 

[McSpank01]

Well what I don’t want is more popups full of text I never read as a replacement for actual gameplay and narrative.

One of the problems with Crises is that the game is designed around the idea that your civ crumbles and is rebuilt in the next age. However that never happens in your game. Crises are trivial to combat and now people turn them off altogether.

So you basically end an age, and instead of the crisis throwing your civ into disarray only to be rebuilt anew, you get a victory screen telling you how amazing your civ is, and what a success it’s been.. so it changes for no reason at all.

The concept of crises is flawed in of itself, but doing it in such a lazy, half hearted fashion makes ages feel even stranger

 

[Crashdummy]

Apparently now all we can do is Build An Empire To Fail The Test Of Time.

Best Civ VII description

 

[SupremacyKing2]

The concept of crises is flawed in of itself, but doing it in such a lazy, half hearted fashion makes ages feel even stranger

I don't think the concept is flawed. The idea of a big event that periodically shakes things up at the end of an Age, is a good one. The idea is to keep the player engaged. But the execution is very poor. I think part of the problem is that it is really hard to do a crisis mechanic that players will be prepared for that is genuinely serious enough to challenge the player but not too challenging as to ruin the game experience. I don't think players want a crisis that actually wrecks their civ and forces them to rebuild every Age. So a crisis cannot be too strong. But you also don't want crisis to be too weak. Civ7 did not find the right balance. Also, there are so few crisis that they are never really surprising. They play the same every time.

I wonder if the crisis mechanic would work better without age transitions. Just have periodic events that happen organically in the game that the player would have to deal with. For example, bring back the health mechanic from civ4. Unhealthy cities could spawn disease. Some diseases could be deadly and kill off a lot of your pop but just in one city, some diseases could spread to other cities but not be very deadly. And occasionally, the game would spawn the plague that both spreads fast and kills a bunch of pop. You could have empty areas of the map periodically spawn new independent peoples. Sometimes they would be friendly, but sometimes they would be very hostile and send "barbarians" to pillage the closest cities. And there could a revolt event that can spawn from certain civics or techs. So researching "enlightenment" could increase unhappiness in cities. If unchecked, the cities could go into unrest and spawn "revolutionaries" units that try to seize your capital. You could fight them or agree to switch to the government they want.

 

[McSpank01]

I don't think the concept is flawed. The idea of a big event that periodically shakes things up at the end of an Age, is a good one. The idea is to keep the player engaged. But the execution is very poor. I think part of the problem is that it is really hard to do a crisis mechanic that players will be prepared for that is genuinely serious enough to challenge the player but not too challenging as to ruin the game experience. I don't think players want a crisis that actually wrecks their civ and forces them to rebuild every Age. So a crisis cannot be too strong. But you also don't want crisis to be too weak. Civ7 did not find the right balance. Also, there are so few crisis that they are never really surprising. They play the same every time.

I wonder if the crisis mechanic would work better without age transitions. Just have periodic events that happen organically in the game that the player would have to deal with. For example, bring back the health mechanic from civ4. Unhealthy cities could spawn disease. Some diseases could be deadly and kill off a lot of your pop but just in one city, some diseases could spread to other cities but not be very deadly. And occasionally, the game would spawn the plague that both spreads fast and kills a bunch of pop. You could have empty areas of the map periodically spawn new independent peoples. Sometimes they would be friendly, but sometimes they would be very hostile and send "barbarians" to pillage the closest cities. And there could a revolt event that can spawn from certain civics or techs. So researching "enlightenment" could increase unhappiness in cities. If unchecked, the cities could go into unrest and spawn "revolutionaries" units that try to seize your capital. You could fight them or agree to switch to the government they want.

I think crises could work, but there is so many reasons why they won’t that I think it’s a bad idea to include them.

The main issue I think is that they are such an interruption to your gameplay, or should be. They should stop you doing what you were trying to do, so that you could take care of the crisis, but as a player I will probably get annoyed by that.
They also feel like they are taking your civ backwards, rather than forwards, taking stuff away rather than giving you things.

Ideally I think Crises should act like Dark Ages in Civ 6. Essentially they are opportunities for you to leverage the crisis to move your Civ in a certain direction, making choices where there is an element of sacrifice. Conceptually a plague is an overall bad thing for a civilisation, but what if it led to better wage equality for peasants and more social mobility as people died out (as kind of happened in England). What if a barbarian invasion was playing havoc on your borders but made it easier to recruit new troops and your whole society became more Martial.

Civ 6 kind of did these things with dark age cards, for instance internal trade routes became more valuable but I couldn't produce settlers, or science is boosted but culture sacrificed. It is that sort of choice the player should be making. Crises should inherently change the landscape of the game and make players play differently, and have to adapt to them. Above all, there should be a player incentive and bonus for engaging in them, not just penalties.

Overall however, I think Crises are a very hard concept to balance and make work, it certainly isn't easy and the half arsed way it has been implemented has pretty much killed the idea on arrival

 

[tman2000]

Maybe it'd be different if I didn't bounce off so fast, but I don't agree with this at all. I could play 6-7 civ IV games in the time it took me to do my first Civ 7 game. The game is really, really long. It's just not very good, the decisions are uninteresting, and the UI makes it actively hard to play.

Have you played online mode on a small map?

TBH, the game is actually most fun IMO in this setting, for what the game is.

Yes the game takes longer to play with three ages, but since each age is less of an experience that what would be desired, it's just three times a poor experience for a long, poor experience.

As for you initial comments, my converging opinion on why they made the game the way they did is the same as yours. I call it the League of Legends model. Not as competitive multiplayer necessary, but to have hundreds of characters to sell. You can't accommodate that much variety without incredibly bland balancing. The variety has to not really DO anything in order to have that much of it.

 

[tman2000]

I think crises could work, but there is so many reasons why they won’t that I think it’s a bad idea to include them.

One, Civ7, among its design choices, is also an unfinished game. Every last one of its systems could have benefitted from more polish, and crises might be more fun with simply better implementation.

Regardless, I have been thinking of Civ 8 for fun - which is complicated by the controversy of Civ 7. I want some Civ 7 features in 8, but I think that may be a non-starter.

The way I'd do crisis is using a Civ IV culture layer that generates a loyalty factor. Based on some global condition like global population size, I'd force a governing nerf on happiness in the form of a metered crisis. That's all. This would then start to affect loyalty and cause uprisings and loss of settlements and craziness. Then, on the tail of the crisis I'd reset the happiness mechanic altogether so it's less punishing and this would naturally cause loyalty to restore, and most of the cities you lost will be restored to you.

I'd even have the game remember your empire size at the crisis onset, and then spoof loyalty on the other side so that the crisis never interrupts your progress. The purpose of the crisis would be to maybe rearrange the borders of your empire a bit, possibly compel you to switch civilizations as a soft handicap for poor players, but not require it. In other words, a crisis is a thing to survive, which won't interrupt your progress over the long run, and if you're skilled your empire will retain the same culture and borders, but if you lack skill you might shuffle borders and change cultures, but your overall empire size will be retained.

Sort of a like a, "Oh, so you want to play an antiquity civ through to the modern age do you? Here's a skill check."

 

[Lazy sweeper]

That dotcom Civpedia hit me... I don't know if it's in the game, but that seems not to be the case...

Why?

Why firing the UI guy behind Civpedia?
This transmit me vibes the like of Bethesda writing director, the one that thinks gamers don't buy games for the story but because the have money to spend...


It's been a great read, and I highly suggest to take your time whilst trying to understand all the nuances.

The map work has been relegated to the gauntlet from years by now.
Humankind came out and DESTROYED civ, flat appearance.
The BIGGEST improvement was also the biggest barrier.
Firaxis completely neglected the MAP re-design, in favour of all the wrong, console-driven, decisions.

By this point PC players are watching Civ VII as a dead relative, by a long shot.
Post-mortem or not, it's dead without PC players.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Well what I don’t want is more popups full of text I never read as a replacement for actual gameplay and narrative.

One of the problems with Crises is that the game is designed around the idea that your civ crumbles and is rebuilt in the next age. However that never happens in your game. Crises are trivial to combat and now people turn them off altogether.

So you basically end an age, and instead of the crisis throwing your civ into disarray only to be rebuilt anew, you get a victory screen telling you how amazing your civ is, and what a success it’s been.. so it changes for no reason at all.

The concept of crises is flawed in of itself, but doing it in such a lazy, half hearted fashion makes ages feel even stranger

The whole idea of civ switching and era resets is NEVER going to work for the majority of the playerbase who is here not for Arbitrary Board Game Style Developer Fiat, but for the Narrative Role Play Sandbox.

If you want your civ to transmogrify it HAS to fall. Constantinople didn’t “evolve” into Istanbul, it was a brutal conquest and forced conversion.

So you van have the player play through it, which means a real live Kobayashi Maru thing that can’t be beat because your civ HAS to fall to justify the switch. Players will most likely hate this the way they hate Ed Beach Era AI that gets three settlers and a dozen warriors to start the game.

Or it’s done off screen via Developer Fiat regardless of the situation on the board which the majority of the playerbase will hate like they hate Civ7 now.

There is no way to square this circle.

I don't think the concept is flawed. The idea of a big event that periodically shakes things up at the end of an Age, is a good one. The idea is to keep the player engaged. But the execution is very poor. I think part of the problem is that it is really hard to do a crisis mechanic that players will be prepared for that is genuinely serious enough to challenge the player but not too challenging as to ruin the game experience. I don't think players want a crisis that actually wrecks their civ and forces them to rebuild every Age. So a crisis cannot be too strong. But you also don't want crisis to be too weak. Civ7 did not find the right balance. Also, there are so few crisis that they are never really surprising. They play the same every time.

I wonder if the crisis mechanic would work better without age transitions. Just have periodic events that happen organically in the game that the player would have to deal with. For example, bring back the health mechanic from civ4. Unhealthy cities could spawn disease. Some diseases could be deadly and kill off a lot of your pop but just in one city, some diseases could spread to other cities but not be very deadly. And occasionally, the game would spawn the plague that both spreads fast and kills a bunch of pop. You could have empty areas of the map periodically spawn new independent peoples. Sometimes they would be friendly, but sometimes they would be very hostile and send "barbarians" to pillage the closest cities. And there could a revolt event that can spawn from certain civics or techs. So researching "enlightenment" could increase unhappiness in cities. If unchecked, the cities could go into unrest and spawn "revolutionaries" units that try to seize your capital. You could fight them or agree to switch to the government they want.

As usual, the answer is to look at how earlier civs tried to shake things up.

Civ 3 (going back to it again lol) and Civ4 had periodic events like Barbarian Migrations and Plagues and weather events that were serious enough to get your attention and engagement, and could do real damage if you played poorly or were unprepared.

This was far FAR superior to Lazy Developer Fiat because the player *had actual engagement and agency*. You let the goddamn player *play the game* instead of deciding for them because you know better than them how to have fun.

It was also superior because it had a bit of a random element to it. There was no *visible* timer to it smacking you in the face with immersion shattering HERE COMES THE ARBITRARY GAMEPLAY MECHANIC causing you to start doing arbitrary gamey stuff like halting construction on a wonder or telling Magellen to drop anchor for two turns because you are already past the arbitrary Golden Age threshold and you want to save the arbittary Era Points. for the next Age.

More granular stuff like this works far better for a Narrative Sandbox, and it’s time to accept the fact that this is what Civ was for decades, and why it kept succeeding for decades.

We are on a computer, not a board game. There is zero reason to stay in clunky cardboard processor paradigm with stuff like Policy Cards

Bring back things like health, use that as a basis for triggering a Plague Crises. Expand your population too fast over your infrastructure and escalating plagues melts the snowball.

Have culture work like it did in Civ3 where each pop and tille as well as city has an identity that can be flipped. Cities with a high native culture will be constantly rebelling and outright assimilating foreign low culture conquoerors. A one dimensional military rush ends in the paint the map snowball evaporating into rebellion.

You get the point.

 

[McSpank01]

If you want your civ to transmogrify it HAS to fall. Constantinople didn’t “evolve” into Istanbul, it was a brutal conquest and forced conversion

I keep saying if, but it’s a matter of perception. Did the Roman Empire disappear after the fall of Rome or did it continue as the Byzantines? Is the Holy Roman Empire an extension of the Roman Empire or is it Germany? Did the English disappear when they were conquered by the Normans or did the Normans become English? Are the Americans just an evolution of the British Emoire that split off? How do the various dynasties relate to the entity we think of as China?

There are many ways to think about history and civilisation that are not restricted to the archaic label we have attached to it in previous games.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

It was also superior because it had a bit of a random element to it. There was no *visible* timer to it smacking you in the face with immersion shattering HERE COMES THE ARBITRARY GAMEPLAY MECHANIC causing you to start doing arbitrary gamey stuff like halting construction on a wonder or telling Magellen to drop anchor for two turns because you are already past the arbitrary Golden Age threshold and you want to save the arbittary Era Points. for the next Age.


You get the point.

Beautiful

 

[Lazy sweeper]

There are many ways to think about history and civilisation that are not restricted to the archaic label we have attached to it in previous games.

No previous Civ game thrown forced gameplay down the throat.
You are off mark... way off...

 

[McSpank01]

No previous Civ game thrown forced gameplay down the throat.
You are off mark... way off...

Um.. yeah all the games force some sort of gameplay on you. That statement makes no sense.

There haven’t been any previous games that split up into 3 mini games I’ll grant you, and I don’t love the way they do it in 7

 

[GeneralZift]

My 2c is that Civ7 is the most forced of the series, at least the modern series, so far. They take out a lot of player agency and remove many interesting decisions in order to streamline the game.

No "bad starts" means no variety and no comeback stories. Forced switch, well we already went through that. The predictability of the crisis. You can't really choose the improvement on a tile, you either improve or you don't and place an urban structure.

Sometimes player choice can be an illusion in games. Last night I booted up Hades and just via picking slightly different boons (those are power ups) at the start, the game became entirely different.

Unfortunately, Civ7 decisions do not have as much impact. I may be wrong, please let me know.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Um.. yeah all the games force some sort of gameplay on you.

There is a big difference between in-game situations organically "forcing" the player to respond in certain ways (but the player still has choice) vs the game forcing the player because it is baked into the very game mechanics and the player has no choice. For example, civ6 might "force" the player to earn era score to avoid a dark age but the player still has choices of what to do. In Civ7, civ-switching and age transitions are baked into how the very game is structured. The player might have been in a middle of a war or building a wonder but the game arbitrarily says "stop and pick another civ and start a new Age now". The player has no choice at all. The player is forced to end the Age and choose another civ whether they want to or not. I would argue that kind of forced gameplay is bad game design in a civ game. Civ is about the player building an empire, so interrupting that strategy and telling the player they are not allowed to build the empire they want, takes away the player's agency in the game. That is why it is bad.

 

[McSpank01]

There is a big difference between in-game situations organically "forcing" the player to respond in certain ways (but the player still has choice) vs the game forcing the player because it is baked into the very game mechanics and the player has no choice. For example, civ6 might "force" the player to earn era score to avoid a dark age but the player still has choices of what to do. In Civ7, civ-switching and age transitions are baked into how the very game is structured. The player might have been in a middle of a war or building a wonder but the game arbitrarily says "stop and pick another civ and start a new Age now". The player has no choice at all. The player is forced to end the Age and choose another civ whether they want to or not. I would argue that kind of forced gameplay is bad game design in a civ game. Civ is about the player building an empire, so interrupting that strategy and telling the player they are not allowed to build the empire they want, takes away the player's agency in the game. That is why it is bad.

Yes and i agree Ages are probably the biggest issue with the game and the decision to build the game around them has created problems throughout.

I’m not sure forced gameplay is the best way to describe that problem, I think the game is too linear and feels on rails and is too structured and less sandboxy. That seems more appropriate.

Having said all that, I still think that people massively overplay civ switching, missing out just how much of your civ is retained through ages, it really isn’t that your old civ is replaced entirely by a new one.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I’m not sure forced gameplay is the best way to describe that problem, I think the game is too linear and feels on rails and is too structured and less sandboxy. That seems more appropriate.

I think they go hand in hand. It is forced and linear at the same time because you are being forced to play in a linear way. But I absolutely agree that the linear, "feels on rails" is a big part of the issue. I think many players, myself included, want a more sandbox game.

Having said all that, I still think that people massively overplay civ switching, missing out just how much of your civ is retained through ages, it really isn’t that your old civ is replaced entirely by a new one.

Perception plays a big part of it. You are correct that the player does retain a lot from their old civ but the perception is that your civ is being replaced because you are asked to pick a new civ. The game actually calls it a "culture" but to many players when you are asked to select to play as Prussia or England, with unique buildings etc, it feels like you are being asked to select a civ. And since the player is now playing as this new civ, it feels like the old civ got replaced.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I keep saying if, but it’s a matter of perception. Did the Roman Empire disappear after the fall of Rome or did it continue as the Byzantines? Is the Holy Roman Empire an extension of the Roman Empire or is it Germany? Did the English disappear when they were conquered by the Normans or did the Normans become English? Are the Americans just an evolution of the British Emoire that split off? How do the various dynasties relate to the entity we think of as China?

There are many ways to think about history and civilisation that are not restricted to the archaic label we have attached to it in previous games.

The Byzantines and The Romans didn’t even have a language in common, much less anything else.

In Civ terms the eastern half of the empire had strong enough Greek culture that the cities eventually flipped back to their original Greek founders.

There is a big difference between in-game situations organically "forcing" the player to respond in certain ways (but the player still has choice) vs the game forcing the player because it is baked into the very game mechanics and the player has no choice. For example, civ6 might "force" the player to earn era score to avoid a dark age but the player still has choices of what to do. In Civ7, civ-switching and age transitions are baked into how the very game is structured. The player might have been in a middle of a war or building a wonder but the game arbitrarily says "stop and pick another civ and start a new Age now". The player has no choice at all. The player is forced to end the Age and choose another civ whether they want to or not. I would argue that kind of forced gameplay is bad game design in a civ game. Civ is about the player building an empire, so interrupting that strategy and telling the player they are not allowed to build the empire they want, takes away the player's agency in the game. That is why it is bad.

This is why you lost the majority of the fanbase that was here for the narrative sandbox