In the six months since Civ VII’s release, Firaxis has issued five patches, and each time the concurrent player count and Steam rating has declined further. This is because, with a few notable exceptions, Firaxis isn't focusing on the most impactful issues. Unfortunately, the most critical flaws are not always the most visible, which has complicated recovery efforts. _
This post is an abridged version of a document available on Google Docs (link). Due to the length, this is split into the initial post and the first three replies.
A post-mortem is a standard software document produced after a release to analyze what went well and what lessons could be learned. It doesn’t imply that a product is dead nor is it a judgement on the quality of the product. The intention is the opposite - mindful reflection after being “in the trenches” so that follow-on versions and patches can improve. Even software companies doing quarterly releases regularly perform post-mortems as part of the release process.
I am a Chief Product Officer for Enterprise SAAS products, with over 25 years of software product management experience. I’ve also played Civilization since Civ I. My specialty is teasing apart complex product problems, creating a mental model to understand them, and prioritizing what issues to address first.
A fundamental problem with Civ VII is that game replayability needs more depth. This isn’t my opinion; it was stated by Firaxis in the June 10th check-in (link), alongside abrupt Age transitions and Empire identity.
Age transitions and Empire Identity are very specific and implied Firaxis already had some approaches in mind (and has, in fact, made progress since). In contrast, “game replayability” is extremely broad, and no examples are provided. There’s a sense that Firaxis too is struggling with how to “eat the elephant".
That’s one of the reasons I wrote this, to help split the problem into bite-size chunks. There are steps you can take to break a problem down. The first is to revise the problem statement above because it’s incomplete. A good problem statement doesn’t just state the problem – it also lays out the ideal state that is being deviated from.
But in order to articulate that ideal, what’s needed is a better, deeper definition of what makes 4X games and specifically the Civilization series so engaging – an updated mental model around the psychology of player motivation in 4X games.
With that mental model in place, we can use the emotional drivers to evaluate Civ VII’s design principles, gameplay systems, and mechanics with an eye to how they will be impacted in pursuit of the redemption arc. Some principles will remain untouched, others will need tweaking, and a final set will need to fall by the wayside or be tabled until they can be more fully developed and play tested in an expansion.
This document covers many of Civ VII’s gameplay mechanics and systems, but if we were to focus solely on those, we’d be treating the symptoms and not the disease. That’s why our first focus is on identifying the emotional drivers behind Civilization’s sirens’ call to play "just one more turn".
Once we've got those emotional drivers identified, then we can start to work backwards and look at what mechanics impact each of those drivers and what changed in Civ VII.
One of the biggest difficulties in getting a handle on Civ VII’s issues is that there simply isn't the vocabulary needed to properly discuss those issues. Without clear names for these problems, people are unhappy but can't articulate why. So they fall back to issues they can easily see and name, which may not be the most important problems to address.
Fortunately, Herson's video on Player Interaction provides a roadmap for bringing those nebulous problems into focus. Herson took a number of seemingly disparate items, found the common thread running through them, identified the issue, characterized the problem space and its boundaries, and most importantly established the term.
If we’re going to help fix Civ VII, we need that same rigor applied to several other problem areas: the over-balancing, the over-streamlining, and the over-simplification.
I’d argue this definition section is the most important section in this document, because even if you don’t agree with the guide's conclusions, you’ll come away with an expanded set of terms and concepts you can use in making your own. My goal isn't to convince you of my views on Civ VII; it's to enable you to more clearly articulate your own viewpoint.
What is a 4X game?
This sounds like a question that answers itself – Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate.
But assuming you check all four boxes, what would cause a game to fall out of the 4X category?
In other words, a 4X game can go beyond its eponymous elements and still be seen as a 4X game. The tangible, mechanical definition is no longer sufficient to define a 4X game. There needs to be a complementary, more concrete definition around the goals, ideals, motivations, and emotions that form the essence of a 4X game.
Fortunately, over time an unspoken consensus around the core identity of 4X games has emerged, allowing us to turn these unspoken ideals into a more concrete definition – the “Core values of a 4X” (aka "4X Core").
This is important, because as long as enough of a game’s 4X Core is intact, players will tolerate a fair amount of innovation and change (up to a point). The 4X Core definition should help greatly in evaluating Civ VII.
So what are the 4X Core Values?
Before establishing the definition of the 4X Core and the characteristics that define it, some ground rules must be set:
Characteristics should describe the motivations driving people to play 4X games, the resulting emotional needs being met, and feelings of success and fulfillment that keep the players coming back and playing again and again. Specific mechanics do not fit this requirement; the emotions they create do
Characteristics ideally surface unspoken beliefs about what a 4X game is
Characteristics must be universal and held by most (if not all) players
With those ground rules in mind, here’s a stalking horse definition:
“From stone age to space age”: a more general version would be “From humble beginnings to greatness” Time period and scale are immaterial. It can be from single-cell organism to universe (Spore) and there can be multiple types of greatness (military, scientific, cultural) but the main idea remains the same.
Sandbox: There are many paths to winning; you choose your path and milestones. While technically Sandbox doesn't imply an end goal or win state, both are assumed to exist, though you don't necessarily need to pursue them.
Control: Your decisions are the primary driver of your fate. Setbacks, when they occur, could have been prevented had you chosen a different course of action (with a few specific exceptions, such as natural disasters).
Power: It’s important to feel powerful (but not all-powerful). You have meaningful unique advantages that are both key to your identity and are also the starting point for the playstyle and strategy for that play through.
Adversity: When you look back at your “best” games, the ones burned into your memory are where you overcame significant obstacles. That could be a bad start location or an enemy holding a key resource that gives them a significant advantage. The games where you cruised to victory? They don’t even make the top 20.
Scarcity: Drives desire, action, competition, and drama.
Player interaction:Herson’s video nails the concept on the first try:
In addition to the standard 4X characteristics, Civilization has several unique hallmarks as well as unique jankiness. Interestingly enough, some of the jankiness is just as important to Civilization's identity as the unique features are:
Stands the Test of Time: Civ is at its heart a power fantasy about creating an empire that would "stand the test of time," something rich and eternal that remains standing when everything else around you crumbles. You can prevent Rome from falling, you can prevent the Egyptians from being conquered, you can make Carthage prevail, you can make all of them stand the Test of Time. (Credit to Foulweather and Crashdummy)
One More Turn: “Just one more turn…” is synonymous with the Civilization series. If you look at One More Turn as describing a driver, it’s a feeling of anticipation for what comes next that is so strong that it becomes a sirens’ call.
An hour to learn, a lifetime to master: Most of Civilization’s systems aren’t very complex in and of themselves. But the interaction between them creates a rich tapestry of possibilities and replay value.
World Wonders: Awe-inspiring. Game changing with an impact that reaches across your civilization. Wonders are expensive and you’ll need to choose carefully and accept that you'll miss out on some good ones. That trade-off is yet another reason why the Wonders you build feel like such an accomplishment and also a major driver for replayability.
Exploits are not a bug but a feature: In a game with many moving parts, some things will be overpowered (OP), and that’s ok. Finding and using them makes you, the player, feel smart and powerful. In fact, OP is a major source of replayability - trying different combinations of leaders and OP mechanics is fun.
History-adjacent, not accurate: Australia didn’t invent the wheel, so suspension of disbelief is necessary, though where possible it’s good to maintain “truthiness”.
Immersion: I am the leader of my civilization, the star of the show. This is not the Wizard of Oz ("Pay no attention to the man behind the keyboard!") The other leaders negotiate with me, sitting across the table, staring into my soul, locked in a battle of wills.
As long as the 4X Core is intact, players will tolerate changes to Civilization. But there is a limit to how far each release can go. That limit is one of the driving factors behind Sid Meier’s “Rule of Thirds” (link).
Now that we have more clearly defined what makes 4X games and the Civilization series so addictive, we can use those characteristics to evaluate Civ VII.
There are literally dozens of areas (link) we could explore, and doing so would turn this document into a novel. Since your time is valuable, I took a lesson from cooking shows. I explored many of Civ VII’s issues in depth and placed those detailed ingredients in the Deep Dives appendix (link). Then I pulled the Problem Statement and supporting evidence out of the oven fully baked and ready for you to devour.
I am going to put forth a Problem Statement 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 provide the replayability needed. There are more fundamental issues at play.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that the UI, Ages, and Civ-switching don’t need work. They need a great deal of improvement. But working on them before the ABC issues would be addressing the symptoms and not the disease.
As such, in the following sections I will walk you through how I used the 4X and Civ Core definitions to evaluate Civ VII. Then you can do the same, and perhaps create more tools we can all use in our discussions.
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
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 goals can’t even be called a 4X game. You don’t need to finish the game, but there should be one or more types of goals to shoot for (e.g., economic, military, and/or cultural), not just an arbitrary score victory.
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 assault on Agency
Civ VII’s design undermines player agency and significantly degrades player enjoyment. In particular, it:
Limits short-term decisions through reductive district placement rules and terrain homogenization
Takes most medium- and long-term decisions out of the players’ hands by dictating arbitrary strategies and milestones for win conditions (i.e., Legacy paths)
Places arbitrary, reductive caps via the Trading range and Settlement limit (link)
On Age reset, destroys your momentum, sabotages 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 has lost the understanding that 4X games are a power fantasy. Mess with the player’s sense of power and they have no reason to play.
Legacy Paths sabotage both the anticipation and the mystery necessary for One More Turn. By dictating the milestones, Legacy Paths take away the player’s ownership of a strategic plan, decimating any investment the player has in seeing how the plan might turn out.
Additionally, Legacy Paths destroy any sense of wonder or mystery about what comes next by laying out the entire plan in full. Even worse, the follow-on milestones are simply “do more of the same.” There’s no sense of progress and growth, no sirens’ call to keep playing.
Legacy Paths lead to No More Turns.
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 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 outshines any other action you can take. In terms of impact, chaining Celebrations and doing tech/civic projects accelerates your civilization’s progress much faster, regelating other actions to being window dressing.
Firaxis’ approach of dictating the “right way to play” demonstrates that they have lost the thread regarding the motivations behind player engagement and have 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 is a concept primarily used in multiplayer games, particularly competitive esports. Game play balance is symmetric - features are balanced against each other around one or more quantifiable metrics, such as DPS. Balance is primarily accomplished through nerfs and buffs, and is well-suited to games with an emphasis on real-time mechanics.
Although the Civilization series does support multi-player, it has never been at the expense of the single-player experience. Although the Civilization series technically has AI “players”, the focus has always been on improving the AI versus rather than changing the impact of technologies, Wonders, and buildings.
In the Civilization series, game play features are not directly balanced against each other; abilities may be overpowered but are counterable, limited in lifespan, or offset by opportunity cost. This approach results in richer, more unique game play as abilities are not constrained to those which can be expressed via simplistic metrics.
However, the whole concept of Balance seems woefully inadequate in expressing the genius of the Civilization series and how magical it feels to play. How did Firaxis make that magic? How was Firaxis’ mindset different from others’?
How did Firaxis approach Balance in prior versions of Civilization?
Why did Civilization feel so special? To tease out an answer, it helps to step back and question basic assumptions:
Did Firaxis think about Balancing the same way others do?
What if Civilization's version of Balance isn’t focused on human players versus AI opponents at all?
What if it focused instead around being the “Secret Sauce” powering Civilization’s One More Turn magic?
Firaxis’ secret sauce: Imbalance
I’ll call Firaxis’ mindset “iBalance” to differentiate it from the traditional Balance approach.
Civ VII appears to have moved to a symmetric balance approach: Instead of celebrating diversity, the designers have ruthlessly removed (Torres del Paine) or nerfed (Imago Mundi, Gate of All Nations) uniqueness out of the game.
Additionally, a major weakness to symmetric balancing is that it forces almost all abilities 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 into 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 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 standard parameterized game mechanics instead of custom code. While this makes development, testing, and tuning easier, it leads to a cookie-cutter feel to the leaders, civilizations, and game mechanics.
It’s unclear why Firaxis abandoned the successful approach of the past. Perhaps, with experienced designers departing in the ten years since Civ VI, the institutional knowledge fell below critical mass, and the newer designers weren’t experienced enough to grasp the elegant genius behind the iBalance philosophy. As a result, they discarded the unique approach in favor of a much more simplistic approach, one more suited to competitive esports than 4X games.
People are finally starting to understand that Balance is not a concept that should be applied to single-player games. Balance is boring. What's needed is unique, unbalanced civs and leaders that make each playthrough different, and then most importantly, AI that can leverage those unique playstyles.
At first, documenting 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.”
Complexity has multiple meanings. In 4X games complexity works on three axes, two of which are intra-civilization - Deep and Wide. Deep refers to the level of complexity within a single system; Wide refers to the level of interaction and interconnection across systems.
Axis 1: Deep Complexity
Deep complexity is best explained through examples. Take a look at a budgeting/resource allocation mechanic:
Wide complexity refers to the level of interaction and influence between multiple systems. Military units, for example, don’t just increase martial power. There are trade-offs; the units have both an economic (maintenance) cost and an impact on happiness (both negative and positive via garrisoning).
Historically, the Civilization series has generally fallen in the middle on all three axes. 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.
Almost every aspect of Complexity has been nerfed in Civ VII. Civ VII gameplay has devolved into a weird kind of “parallel play” with very little give-and-take interactions with the other players. I’ve taken to using the term “Strategic Bingo” to describe what Civ VII has become.
Just as a sampling, Civ VII strips your ability to:
Alter city-state loyalty
Bargain for resources
Bargain for anything else (Techs)
Counter opponents’ wonder production
Demand the AI player cease skulduggery (religious conversions)
It’s astounding by how widespread the impact is, how well it's hidden in plain sight, and how complete the extinction is. When viewed in total, it constitutes a major downgrade to Complexity.
This could not have been accidental or a side-effect. The scope is too wide and the change too airtight. This could only have been an explicit design principle.
But why? I understand that Firaxis wanted to simplify game play. But this isn’t simplification - it’s outright elimination of interaction. It can’t be a performance issue; these systems work on the Nintendo Switch for Civ VI, so it can’t be hardware constraints.
I’ve racked my brains on this one, and so far the most likely explanation is that it was impossible to keep the interaction systems’ impact consistent across the varying Legacy Paths within each Age. Legacy Paths have created yet more collateral damage to the Civilization Core values.
Firaxis didn’t just strip Civ VII of Complexity. They threw good money after bad, investing time and effort to replace each of the systems with cheap knock-offs that look good from afar but fall apart under close examination:
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 likely 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.
If Firaxis had just left well enough alone, the time they invested in making the Complexity knock-offs could have gone to play-testing and improving Ages and Civ-switching.
This one is baffling, as the individual systems are not very complex in and of themselves, and it would have been possible to cherry-pick certain ones to simplify while keeping others.
Whatever the reasons, Firaxis has over-simplified Civ VII to the point where 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 and 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.
The problems with Civ VII aren’t skin deep; they go all the way to the core. The faulty systems are a reflection of flaws in the underlying design principles.
Below are the principles most damaging to Civ VII:
Sid Meier’s advice is optional: There seems to be a pervasive “anti-experience” bias among the new generation of developers and designers. It’s not just that established principles are ignored; those principles aren’t even regarded as worth learning. What is missed is that successful rule-breakers understand the rules they are breaking intimately and choose to break them in specific ways to avoid the problems the rules were designed to guard against.
Regardless, when the rules in question were created by the person whose NAME IS ON THE GAME, it’s a pretty sure bet that the rules embody the “secret sauce” behind the game's success.
And yet Firaxis designers cast aside multiple rules of Sid's, as covered in more detail in the Deep Dives appendix (link).
---------------------------Note: this was after deduplication of the games credits for VII (link); -------------------------------------------------- the original number of Civ VII Designers was 34
The ratio of designers to developers is also important. Fewer developers per designer means less resources to plan and build each feature out, particularly interactions with other systems and potential error conditions. That in turn means there is a much higher chance the feature will have to be polished further post-release, slowing down work on new features.
If you’re looking for the smoking gun on the Rule of Thirds violation, you’ve found it.
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Players that do too well should be penalized: Power scaling in 4X games has a peculiar side-effect: snowballing, wherein early leads tend to compound over time. Success begets more success.
Experienced designers realize that snowballing, while unavoidable, is not necessarily undesirable. It is both a reward for a game well-played as well as a signal to the player that it might be time to increase the difficulty on their next play through.
Firaxis decided that snowballing is public enemy number one. Even worse, they decided to use Age transitions to stamp out this menace.
I shouldn’t have to explain that players don’t like having their work taken from them, as it makes them feel like they are not in control of their destiny (a major violation of one of the 4X Core values and of Sid’s principles). Using the Age transition doubles down on this mistake by tainting a feature that long-time players were already unsure about. Age transitions have become synonymous with (and as popular as) income tax. --------------------
Firaxis, are you really sure this is the message you want to send? How do you think the community will perceive that? Do you think it will inspire confidence in your vision for the game? Do you think it will make the community love the game more?
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. Correlation does not equal causation.
Assuming the Gates was 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.
What's extremely strange is that Firaxis doesn't seemed to have considered the case Foulweather raised - that the Gate of All Nations might have been the only Wonder available at that point in the game. You'd be forgiven for thinking they jumped straight to nerfing the Wonder without asking any questions. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt - unless we see evidence they've done that more than once, there's no reason to conclude that they are negligent.
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Exhibit A -- Modern Age yields (aka The Evidence): this Reddit post (link, text below) details a discovery by a player that Modern Age yields are massively inflated due to two bugs in the building effect code. One that caused effects to be calculated on the total number of buildings of a particular type (instead of individually) and the second, which applied those huge bonuses to every tile with two buildings (apparently walls qualified as buildings as well).
Players had been saying for a good while that the Modern Age passed much, much too quickly (link). So what was Firaxis' response - did they check that the code was working correctly? Of course not. They picked up their nerf hammer and went to town, boosting the prices of Explorers and Factories to slow Culture and Economic victories.
Think about that for a second - the yield levels were too high. And yet their instinct wasn't to look into the oversupply. It was to boost the prices. This wasn't a one-time mistake - they did this repeatedly over the space of multiple months and multiple patches. On top of that, they increased the city growth rate as well, pouring gasoline on the fire and making it scale faster to match the supercharged speed of the Modern Age.
The whole time, their spreadsheet model showed the game was working one way, but the code was working completely different way. And they blindly trusted in the spreadsheet model, ignoring the reality right in front of the eyes, never even considering that there might be a problem in the code.
The designers interfered in the standard bug handling process - bugs should have been profiled by Support or QA, then passed to the responsible programmer for investigation. This is a prime example of too many chefs in the kitchen, a designer with too much time on his hands stopped a bug from being addressed and instead poured gasoline on the fire.
As a result, all of the balance work the designers did was based on the busted yields. They weren't balancing the game they designed; they were balancing a completely different game. Firaxis never figured out that the game was not working as designed and documented - it was a player that found and documented it. Who knows how long Firaxis would have kept hammering away, nerfing indiscriminately?
It seems that Firaxis' default response is to nerf, even when it's obvious that they should be following standard software processes around profiling issues. It certainly sheds light on the nerfing of the Gate of All Nations. Why bother to investigate, understand, and fix a problem when you can just nerf your way out of it?
And here's the real tragedy of the Modern Age yield issue. Once they fix their bugs, they’ll need to rebalance everything. All of the previous balancing work (2-3 patches’ worth) has been wasted effort. Effort that could have been spent fixing other parts of the game. All because of designer malfeasance.
One final bit of salt in the wound -- there were 201 QA testers listed in the game credits, which is now significantly more than the total number of people at Firaxis. Firaxis should be livid. The should be holding 2K accountable for not providing the services that Firaxis is being charged for (via cost-accounting).
Spoiler(Reddit post) PSA: Some Modern age buildings are absolutely busted! :
Well it turns out that some buildings have hidden scaling that was either forgotten to be referenced in their descriptions or was coded by the same person who thought that Grocers should give +1 Food on unimproved tiles (because working unimproved tiles is totally a thing in Civ VII, lol).
First, effects stack per building, per city (hello again, bridge economy). Every Laboratory gives +1 Science on quarters in all cities with a Laboratory. This means that if you have five Laboratories, these five cities will all get +5 Science on every quarter. If you got seven City Parks, each rural Vegetated tile in those seven cities will give +7 Happiness! Broken? Just a bit.
Second, these buildings do not actually check for Quarter but for districts with any two constructibles. Got a district with Ancient Walls and an Inn? Yes, that counts. Doesn't matter if it's just Walls. Doesn't matter if the building is from a previous age and should not count towards forming a Quarter.
Buildings affected:
Aerodrome: +1 Interception range stacks per Aerodrome in empire
Cannery: +10% Growth stacks per Cannery in empire
City Park: +1 Happiness on Vegetated tiles (actually only works on rural tiles, at least) stacks per City Park in empire
Laboratory: +1 Science on Quarters stacks per Laboratory in empire, any tile with at least two constructibles counts.
Stock Exchange: +1 Gold on Quarters stacks per Stock Exchange in empire, any tile with at least two constructibles counts.
Tenement: +1 Happiness on Quarters stacks per Tenement in empire, any tile with at least two constructibles counts.
Custom city names - Toxic positivity 1, Common Sense 0: When Ed Beach announced they had restored renaming cities (a feature dating back to Civ 1), I was nonplussed as Ed gushed about the Firaxis designers’ ability to google ancient city names and implied that justified ruining player immersion and crippling player investment.
News flash: It's the players' story, not the designers'. You can’t “build something you believe in” if someone dictates what you name it. How would you feel if the doctor who delivered your baby got to choose the name?
You can tell Firaxis really did not like being told to restore custom city names, because in an incredibly petty move, they made sure the custom names display in ALL CAPS. There's no better showcase for the arrogance of the designers and their utter disdain for customers.
Removing the ability to change names is so obviously a bad idea that it should have immediately been killed. That it made it to release speaks to a culture of toxic positivity where common sense is shouted down.
Games must be finished: Firaxis stated that for Civ VII, they wanted to address the problem that "players don't finish games."
I'm reminded of the story of Abraham Wald and the bullet-hole patterns on surviving WW2 bombers. Failed attempts to increase bomber survival rate concentrated on armoring the areas with the bullet holes. Wald realized the areas WITHOUT the bullet holes were where the planes that didn't survive were hit and that those areas were what needed more armor.
Similarly, the Civ series had thirty years of phenomenal success despite players not finishing games. So why on earth would they feel that finishing games is a problem that needs to be addressed?
Illustration of aggregate damage pattern on a WW2 bomber, showing that a similar plane survived a single hit
to the fuselage or fuel system close to 95% of the time, but a hit to the engine only 60% of the time.
Spreadsheet-driven design: The game play systems in Civ VII and how they work together do not feel like they were handcrafted by an experienced game designer. Instead, it feels much more like the systems were created in a spreadsheet model and implemented as is.
An experienced designer would quickly point out that what works in a spreadsheet feels fundamentally off in actual gameplay. Certain gameplay systems, such as Attributes and Policies, end up having an abnormally high leverage impact, while others, such as Wonders, feel positively banal.
The End Result: Boring leaders and civs defined using plugged-in stats instead of handcrafted unique abilities
Case study: Ashoka, World-Renouncer, has an ability that “Buildings get +1 Happiness Adjacency on improvements".
Reread Ashoka’s ability description until you feel you understand it and then ask yourself:
How long did it take you to parse out the meaning?
Does it sound interesting, or does it sound like word salad?
Based on that description, does Ashoka WR feel like a fun leader to play?
Can you tell just by reading it if it’s a good ability?
Are you aware that the ability effectively resets with each Age transition (because obsolete buildings), and that the resulting drop in Happiness could kneecap your yields for the early part of a new age?
If you showed that ability description to a Civ V or VI player, do you think it would entice them to play Civ VII?
If you showed the ability description to an imaginary “non-traditional” audience, would they be interested in Civ VII?
But don’t take my word for it – Firaxis has admitted as much. Every time they nerf a feature with useful abilities (Imago Mundi, Future Techs) they are forced to concede that it “overshadowed … leader and civ abilities.” It’s a tacit admission by Firaxis that “we nerfed it because it highlights how mediocre Civ VII’s leader and civ abilities are.”
It's also interesting the the Ara: History Untold team learned from Civ VII's mistakes. In their Dev Journal, "The Great Differentiation" they stated that "We wanted to avoid simple numerical differences or passive rewards." Will the Civ VII designers admit the approach isn't working, or will they pursuse the insanity path and make ever more stat changes, hoping that the next patch will finally result in a game that's fun to play?
Let the player design the game in the Settings menu: The discussion of Collapse mode has me worried. Not the feature itself, which seems interesting, but that it’s currently being done as yet another setting, not integrated into the game.
Based on the absence of a roadmap (a real one, not just a list of features) and from the way Firaxis has been spitting out disconnected changes, from the outside looking in it would appear as though Firaxis is thrashing. I’m really hoping that those looks are deceiving, and that the Firaxis designers are quietly constructing pieces of a larger whole and are intending to assemble the pieces into a unified gameplay system (e.g., unify Continuity, Regroup, and Collapse into game play similar to VI's Golden, Normal, and Dark Ages).
If not, Firaxis is in danger of losing Civ VII’s identity – it could splinter into different games, which will impact future design items, as the different settings permutations could shackle the ability to make other game play changes. --------------------
The player must be protected from adversity and FOMO: Something about the maps and terrain seemed off, but it wasn’t until I saw the video “What’s going on with Civ VII’s balance?” that it clicked. One of the points mentioned is that there is no “bad” terrain in Civ VII – even desert terrain has good food and production. It’s impossible to have a poor starting location.
Ten million players have successfully overcome bad starting locations. Ten million players have survived the heartbreak of another civ completing the Pyramids one turn faster. And yet those people kept on playing for “one more turn”. If anything, the experience drove them to get better.
So how did Firaxis go about fixing something that wasn’t broken? Using World Wonders as an example, did Firaxis make it easier to see other civs’ in-progress Wonders? Or add interesting mechanics for rushing production? Or espionage options for sabotaging Wonder production?
No, Firaxis emasculated wonder effects, turning them from World Wonders into Vanity Districts. Firaxis abandoned a signature feature of the Civilization series because they disrespected the customer base enough to think they couldn’t handle a little adversity.
Why on earth would Firaxis add unremovable training wheels to the game? Perhaps the next point might shed some light. --------------------
If you dumb it, they will come: Dumb down the game play and a huge “non-traditional” audience will magically appear. This line of thinking and approach did not end well at all for Bioware and Dragon Age: Veilguard.
Though experiment: if someone invented a quilting kit that didn't require sewing, would you try it out? Probably not, but not because quilting isn't fun. It's because the quilt is incidental - quilting is a social activity. It requires dedicated time for a group of people to meet in person and dedicated space to house the quilt in between quilt-making sessions.
Now apply that same dispassionate viewpoint to Civilization. To the player, the attraction is not about the game. It's about the sense of accomplishment, slowly building a strategy to achieve greatness from humble origins. And like quilting, Civ has its own real-life requirements - a dedicated swath of time free from distractions.
All this is to say that while there is certainly room to grow the audience by 20% there are multiple reasons why a potential audience from a different demographic would exclude themselves. Not the least of which is a $70 price tag. --------------------
Civilization Clue - Immersion was killed in the Diplomacy screen with a 3rd-person view: In previous versions of Civ, the other leader was staring at you across the negotiating table, cajoling and intimidating you in their own language, immersing you as the leader of your civ. In Civ VII, you’re reduced to a spectator, watching someone else speak for your civilization. And apparently they got Minecraft Villagers to do the voice acting. --------------------
I assume it was meant as a message of empowerment. It worked better than the marketers could have hoped for – the Designers heard that slogan, were inspired, and dreamed big, thinking “It’s ok to ignore the loyal player base. We’re not doing it for them. We’re doing it for ourselves, because we believe in it. How could we ever fail when our intentions are pure, and our conviction is strong?”
Using conviction as the sole compass ignores the necessity of external feedback and market validation. Passion alone is not enough for practical success.
In total, these design principles paint a picture of an inexperienced design and development team determined to dictate how the game “should be played.”.
But you really can’t blame a puppy that isn’t housebroken; it’s a failure of leadership. When the inmates are allowed to run the asylum, the result is a comedy of errors. If you paid $70+ for that result, the comedy turns into a tragedy.
The primary cause of Civilization VII’s woes springs from designer inexperience. It’s become obvious that over the last ten years there has been enough turnover at Firaxis that the experience level dropped below critical mass, as seen by multiple epic fails:
Ignoring Sid Meier’s advice (especially the Rule of Thirds)
Not understanding the player archetypes and using their feedback inappropriately (Sid again)
Not fully understanding the 4X genre and what are the third-rail characteristics (the “4X Core”)
Fixing “problems” that didn’t need solving (Players don’t finish games)
Concocting design principles that had little basis in fact (e.g., “Snowballing is bad”)
Designing and balancing for multiplayer at the expense of single-player
Over-streamlining systems to the point where they lost meaning (e.g., catastrophes and repairs)
Needlessly aggravating the core player base by removing basic long-standing features (e.g., renaming cities, one more turn), generating feature debt that delayed addressing the real issues
The secondary cause is executive negligence, particularly failure to: --------------------
Enforce Rule of Thirds and kill half-baked ideas (Crises) that diluted development resources
Force disciplined hypothesis testing of proposed design principles
Ask pointed questions in design reviews (“If you have to create a ‘Repair all’ button, doesn’t that indicate a bigger problem with the system itself?”)
Recognize the need for a dual-UI strategy (PC and console)
Push for an Early Access release on Steam and focus on getting the PC version right, then quickly expanding to other platforms after full release
Prioritize Steam Workshop support to ship during Early Access (a large number of mods on civfanatics have still not been ported as those modders have abandoned the game)
Delay the game when it was clear it was not ready for prime time
You’ll notice that even though the executive list is longer, it’s secondary in priority. That’s because even if the executive decisions are good, there are thousands of day-to-day decisions that impact the final product. Executive competence alone cannot make up for designer inexperience.
Throughout all of this, what’s conspicuously been missing is a Roadmap. Just so we’re clear, the graphic below is not a roadmap. It’s a grab bag of disparate features.
A roadmap sets out a vision -- a destination to reach and describes the paths to that destination. For comparison, check out the Ara: History Untold Dev Journals and the vision they present:
The vision is clear, the developers are honest about weaknesses, willing to admit mistakes and change, and have decisive plans to address those weaknesses. This is the kind of leadership, vision, and direction we should be expecting of Firaxis.
A roadmap does something even more important than just setting out a vision and listing features. Done well, it establishes the developer and game as a thought leader. It's akin to staking prospecting claims in a gold rush. if you're the first to establish a compelling vision for a particular gameplay area or mechanic and are then able to execute, you'll be seen as the innovator in that area. Even if someone else does the same thing 20% better, it won't matter - they'll be seen as the follower.
Those thought leadership claims aren't forever; they reset about every five to ten years. Interestingly enough, with both Humankind and Millennia failing to stick the landing, the window for establishing thought leadership in the "stone age to space age" 4X space was wide open.
Note the use of the past tense in that statement. That's because the Ara: History Untold 2.0 update (link) just staked out thought leadership claims for a significant portion of the landscape. Oxide Games (and Stardock) are attempting to "run the table" and make Firaxis play by Oxide's rules. And so far they are succeeding -- Ara 2.0 is making a compelling case for establishing the definition and rules for what a next-gen "stone age to space age" 4X should be.
And Firaxis? Firaxis hasn't even shown up to compete. They are in danger of forfeiting thought leadership in the genre that they created.
Every time Firaxis had the chance to make a tough decision that would cause short-term pain but put them on the path to recovery, they chose the easy way out.
As a result, six months later, very little has changed. And now, Endless Legends 2 and Ara 2.0 are releasing, and have lured away most of the content creators and the buzz in the 4X sphere. Unless Firaxis follows Ara's lead and overhauls leaders and civs away from statistics and passive abilities, stops the self-destructive nerfing and balance jihad, and restores player interaction and a moderate level of complexity to the game, then it's a foregone conclusion: Civ VII will not stand the test of time.
And that puts Firaxis in a dangerous position. With Marvel's Midnight Suns not being a a huge hit either, Firaxis would do well to remember the lessons of Monolith, Bioware, and Bungie. Past success is no guarantee of continued survival.
I'd highly recommend checking out the Ara: History Untold 2.0 update. The more I play it, the more I'm feeling it hit much closer to the mark of what Civ VII should have been. Reading the overview, my reaction was "wow, I wish Civ VII had implemented it like that."
The supply-chain aspects are still there but toned down, and are now more like an added layer of depth for Production, similar to the Culture depth that was introduced in Civ V.
The Paragons (Heroes) are partly city advisors but also can be slotted into your government in roles, allowing you to augment your play style. It does what Civ-switching in VII attempted to do but without shattering immersion or throwing away your previous work.
The ability to undo actions by cancelling the orders makes me much less worried that I might mess something up and much more willing to experiment.
I'm still getting used to the irregularly shaped regions, though I suspect that they subtly work to limit Infinite City Sprawl.
The UI, while leaps and bounds beyond Civ VII's, is a lot to take in at first. I do wish they 'd hidden a couple of sections of the UI in the tutorial and gradually revealed them over the first 20-30 turns.
I suspect those weaknesses will fade over time as I play more, But overall, I'm already feeling that that Ara 2.0 has set the bar very high for what a next-gen "stone age to space age" 4X should be.
Note: All of the items below are relevant to Civ VII’s problems, but not all are high-impact. The critical ones are mentioned in the main body with links to more detail below. The other items, even though not as important, make for interesting discussions and are included for the sake of completeness and to demonstrate how widely I cast the net when writing this. If nothing else, they prevented me from falling victim to confirmation bias.
Sid’s principles should be part of Firaxis’ hiring process. For developers, if you can’t name and explain three, it’s an automatic disqualification. For designers, that number should increase to five.
Inexperienced designers tend to think that they can outsmart gravity. What's truly brutal about Sid's Rule of Thirds is that designers may think they are flying, right up until they hit the pavement. In other words, the consequences are subtle at first, until they are not, at which point it's probably too late to turn back.
As an example, two ideas that are perfectly good on their own may impose constraints on each other that end up with the whole being less than the sum of the parts. "Separate Ages with their own win conditions" together with "make naval conflict matter" end up with Distant Lands being cordoned off and losing the feeling of freedom that's part of Civ's core experience.
Second, by capping the amount of change, it’s easier to back out or tone down a change because the level of interactions between new changes is lower. If Firaxis were to decide to increase Player Interaction by restoring some of the kneecapped systems, they’ll discover that for each system they attempt to revert, the yields, power scaling, and AI will change. It could take months to reach an equilibrium, and it’s unclear how many of the systems need to be restored to restore some of the replay value.
The more change you introduce, the more problems will occur. Sid's Rule of Thirds is there to protect designers from themselves - violate it at great risk.
In Civ VI, the Designer role was called "Designer/Programmer" while in Civ VII it was "System Designer". That change alone speaks volumes about the erosion of the role. From Civ I to Civ VI, design has been done by someone who is also an experienced coder. PowerPoint jockeys will work miracles in Marketing, and Spreadsheet sorcerers will dazzle the finance people. But in keeping with the tradition of Civilization designers, you needed to be able to get down and dirty with the details of garbage collection.
Only 43% of the Civ VII designers would have qualified to be designers on prior versions of Civilization. All of those people had worked on as developers on Civ VI or Midnight Suns; none of the new Designers had development experience on a AAA game.
Similarly, in terms of experience, 75% of the Civ VI designers had previously been on a design team for a major game. For Civ VII, that number fell to 29%. In fact, for 58% of the Civ VII designers it was their first major game - their primary experience was in the classroom at graduate programs.
This may seem elitist. But it has already had severe consequences. Nowhere is this more evident than the recent the Modern Age Yield disaster, where the designers' lack of technical ability and ignorance of basic software processes led to them bypassing standard bug evaluation procedures and jumping straight to nerfing Cultural and Economic Legacy Path progression, squandering months of precious time. It will require even more to reverse those blunders.
Just ask the 70 people laid off if they would support higher standards for the Designers if it meant they got to keep their jobs.
I took the Moby games data on staffing from Civ VI and Civ VII and used them to create a cost model based on Firaxis headcount, and then added 2K headcount as overhead cost.
As Firaxis is finding out, if you don’t get the DQ right, you’re building your house on sand. I’m not going to bore you with the details, but I spent a full day categorizing, deduplicating, and recutting the data from Moby Games. Moby focused on Roles; I focused on people as roles are fungible, but at the end of the day only one person gets a paycheck. I’ll document that in more detail when I release my data set.
(For reference, I’m still paying off my student loans from my MBA in Finance twenty-six years after graduating, so I do feel compelled to use those skills every so often.)
Before we jump into the deep end with costs, let’s start with the change in headcount. You’ll notice a large jump in the team size, both Firaxis’ directly, and the full 2K team.
The Firaxis increase happened for two reasons - additional engineering and QA needed for multi-platform support, and an increase in the art team to reflect the need for more assets for the civs. I’ll release the full spreadsheet with my numbers after I clean it up and document it a bit more.
The full team size also happened for a number of reasons - for example, Firaxis went all out on hiring local musicians for each of the civ types. And of course 2K services (and costs) were also added, though a full examination of this is a matter for another day. For now it’s enough to know that the cost of Civ VII increased dramatically.
Note that the credits reflect everyone involved during a release and therefore tend to overstate the numbers somewhat. However, there are ways to filter out employees that departed, so I was able to mitigate much of that. The data set (link) documentats how I did this.
For purposes of explaining this analysis, I’m going to do a “back of the envelope” calculation and avoid the vagaries of Cost-based accounting. The emphasis is on understandability, not pinpoint accuracy.
SpoilerCost model assumptions :
I’m going to make the following simplifying assumptions:
For cost-accounting purposes, Civ VII started in 2020 and accounted for 20% of the Firaxis head count, increasing by 20% per year to 100% at EOY 2024 (remember, I’m trying to keep it simple)
Fully loaded cost of head count was $100K in 2016, increasing by 3%/year (pre-Covid) and 5%/year (post-Covid)
All of the other 2K organizations (including marketing, localization, QA, foreign language voice acting) are represented by an additional +75% cost modifier to the Firaxis cost. This is the major simplifying assumption, but It’s easy to change once the model is established (and arguably it’s not much more arbitrary than how 2K would allocate it).
Cost breakdown
-----------------------------------------Note: The annual costs are in thousands of dollars for readability (everything to the right of "Fully loaded HC cost")
At the end of 2024, the back of the envelope cost of Civ VII is $130m, all inclusive. That’s probably less than what 2K estimated (because accounting and political reasons), but it is in the ballpark compared to other recent AAA release cost leaks.
According to the Steam DB page (link), the highest sales estimate was 1.2m copies. Working off the initial sales and prices and assuming an average $85 price (with Valve getting a 22% cut), that’s about $80m in revenue to Firaxis/2K. The Switch 1/console sales would have needed to be 60-70% of that to break even (about 2m copies total).
For the purpose of this analysis, I’m going to assume they hit somewhere in that neighborhood, and I’m going to ignore the fact that the goal is not simply to recoup costs. While important, both of those are quickly overshadowed by the future costs.
The yearly cost of Firaxis is just north of $50m/year, including 2K overhead (though I reduced it to 50% to reflect it being ongoing versus launch). You can argue the fairness of that overhead, but 2K’s opinion is the only one that matters.
As a result, Firaxis must sell another 850k to 1 million copies each year at $70 (or equivalent DLC) just to pay peoples’ salaries. That number is higher, of course, when sale prices are taken into account.
Firaxis, unfortunately, was nowhere near close to that. The layoffs began marching towards inevitability once the hoped for Switch 2 sales surge failed to materialize.
The Studio head, Heather Hazen, had access to the financial numbers. She likely knew since the Switch 2 launch that layoffs were becoming increasingly inevitable (i.e., a mandate from 2K senior leadership) and would have been keeping a careful watch on sales at that point.
At the start of August, she likely would have asked Department Heads for a stack-ranking of people. After the Steam 4X sale, 2K would have told her how much cutting was needed; the only latitude Firaxis had was in where to make the cuts. Heather would have met with her exec team to make that decision (HR head, Chief Operations Officer, Chief Creative Officer, Sid, and Ed Beach). There probably was also discussion on timing (before Labor Day weekend versus on the day Silksong was to be released), though ultimately that would be 2K’s call as it impacts the stock price.
And yes, that means the 2K CEO knew the layoffs were going to occur when he made his statements about Civ VII in the media. In hindsight it’s clear that the statements were done to inoculate against stock price drops. If you parse his comments, you’ll see he was indicating confidence in the cash flows (aka “long tail”), as much as if not more than in the game. Paired with the layoffs, the message to Wall Street is “we just cut the costs, so you’ll still get the ROI on the cash flows.”
Is the CEO a bad person, or is he simply playing the game that Wall Street requires? There’s a lot at stake here - people have retirement money invested in the stock. Lots of people, not just the executives.
A word about being the Executive in these situations
I’ve been in this situation twice in my career. My heart goes out to the people impacted, and it’s no picnic for the Executive either. You have the enormous responsibility of carrying out the process as compassionately as possible. Additionally, you have to consider the impact on the people who remain. Not just the morale; you have to ensure that the remaining people have the resources to right the ship and get back to a good place.
It’s a very isolating position to be in; there’s no one you can talk to about it, express your own worries, and get advice. You have to put on a confident face to the rest of the world. That might seem disingenuous, but look at it this way - if you don’t show confidence, how can you expect anyone else to feel hope that you can recover?
Again, these problems don’t compare to those of people who are let go, but it’s always good to know the other side of the story. It’s not as black and white as it might first seem.
These changes balance keeping the spirit of Civ VII while making major nods to the core player base. Those might not have righted the ship, but they would have stopped it from taking on water and should have arrested the slide in Steam ratings.
I managed to identify 80% of the people impacted by the layoff (LinkedIn + Regex). The numbers are below, and it saddens me greatly that the wrong people paid the price.
The people most responsible for this mess weren't held accountable: the Designers. Only was designer was let go, while the developer numbers have fallen to Civ VI levels. Also, given the UI we received, doesn't the UI team staffing seem high?
(Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that the Executives aren't included in this number. There's a reason for that - in June the COO departed voluntarily to take a role at another company. It's likely no other layoffs were made at the Exec level for that reason, as Firaxis would have been in the middle of changing the org structure to distribute the COO's responsibilities to others. Additional changes would have created chaos at a time when they needed stability. More importantly, calling the Execs out would have distracted from the Designer and UI outliers).
There’s more to examine - for example, someone should be asking why, if there were 201 QA engineers in total (including 2k personnel), is the quality in such shambles? Similarly, with 118 Localization personnel, why is the quality of translation on narrative events so poor and why are regressions on localization fixes not uncommon? And when I say "someone" should be asking, I mean Firaxis. Firaxis should be asking those questions of 2K. 2K is holding Firaxis accountable; it's only fair that Firaxis does the same, particularly since Firaxis is being charged for 2K's QA and Localization services (via cost-accounting).
It's also important to understand what actually happened and how organizations make these decisions. Firaxis is not out of the woods yet; if they don't right the ship within the next six months, more layoffs are likely, probably in Q1. But if 2K doesn't like what it's seeing and gets impatient, it could happen as soon as December.
The scaling model for civilization power does not feel like it was the result of an experienced game designer’s work. Instead, it feels much more like the systems were created in a spreadsheet model, using Monte Carlo simulations and player data to optimize to a targeted Legacy Path milestone completion speed. The resulting gameplay system variables are spit out in configuration files used by the game code. An experienced designer would have quickly pointed out that what works in a spreadsheet falls apart in actual gameplay.
Adding unique abilities to an existing model is time-intensive and prone to breakage. Aversion to adding more to the model leads to abilities that are simply variations on the same metric ("+1 Food/Gold/Culture/Science adjacency on resources")
The player interaction models and rich complexity of previous versions of Civlization would be too complex to model in a spreadsheet, leading to them being abandoned in favor of simplistic gameplay mechanics
Civ-wide World Wonders of previous versions would create variability that would significantly complicate the model. Thus World Wonders were reduced to Vanity Districts.
Certain subsystems can become more powerful than intended (policies and attributes)
You have to pick your metrics very carefully as they are extremely sensitive to data quality issues (like the Modern Age Yield bug)
Heavily optimized models are brittle and changes ripple throughout the model. Even a simple change can generate pages and pages of stat changes. While that might make patch notes look impressive, the players become numb to all of the changes and lose faith the patches are making noticeable improvement
The biggest problem is that this approach quickly becomes an all-or-nothing affair. It requires unique Leader abilities to be represented quantitatively and that gameplay systems such as trade bargaining have both inputs and outputs wired into the model. That's extra effort on top of any coding work.
Over time, the model begins to warp the designers' mentality. Because it's harder to put in new unique abilities, they simply create variations on existing ones. And while the model metrics might show a well-balanced Leader or Civ, humans are hard-wired for pattern matching, and quickly catch on that there's nothing innovative. And the kneecapped player interaction model quickly dooms replayability.
4X UIs are a delicate balance of showing enough information while not overwhelming the user. Firaxis jettisoned their accumulated UI experience, and instead pioneered a new design concept: Enswitchification, tethering the UI with the restraints of an aging console platform. Instead of investing in developing a PC skin and a Console skin to give each user type a UI experience optimized for that platform type, Firaxis created a Least Common Denominator UI that was a poor experience everywhere.
Why did Firaxis spend their money on hiring historians rather than on developing a UI that presented the critical information needed for gameplay decisions? That's like deciding to become a bodybuilder and then hiring a hairdresser to help.
Author’s note: One of the biggest difficulties with the discussion around Civ VII is that there are so many issues and certain ones are so divisive that they suck all the oxygen out of the room. The more subtle and arguably more damaging problems are only rarely surfaced and discussed, and I wanted to make sure that while covering many issues, I dedicated sufficient air time to those subtle issues.
For this reason, I split the issues into categories for analysis. As I did that analysis, over time the “ABCs” narrative coalesced and became the central theme. Though I didn't use the categorization in the main text, I retained it here as I wanted to make sure people knew that I'd cast a wide net and not simply cherry-picked certain items.
Issues by Category
Unforced errors: obvious errors that were avoidable give the game an unpolished, "beta" feel
Amateurish UI
Uninformative UI - critical information was buried under multiple clicks, if not outright unavailable
Undocumented systems - quarters
Horrendous QA (even on tent pole features such as prior-age building yields)
Bad land unit pathing (esp near rivers, also ignores roads)
Strange merchant pathing (this one has an explanation - apparently the AI uses Merchants as scouts, so they’ll prefer a longer route if they can reveal a few more tiles. Unfortunately, the player Merchants use the same logic so you can end up with the path to establish a trade route taking 5-10 extra turns)
Bad naval unit pathing (routing into ocean when not needed)
Cross-map unit blockage (incredibly annoying, especially with Treasure Convoys)
"Unable to save file" bug (regression introduced in 1.2.1, still present as of 1.2.3)
Insult to injury: features present in prior version which were needlessly removed (or dropped due to Nintendo Switch limitations)
Renaming of cities (Civ I)
Auto-explore (Civ I/II)
One more turn ( Civ I/II)
Restart
Hot seat multiplayer
Map sizes
Map lenses
Map search
Strategic map (Civ II?)
Color coding
Domination victory (Civ I)
Popular leaders (e.g., Cleopatra, Victoria, Tokugawa) ($$$)
Lightning rod problems: new features poorly designed and implemented or returning systems oversimplified
Ages
Power resets on ages - the better you did, the more you were punished
Destructive Civ switching
Distant Lands
Crises
Environmental catastrophes
Legacy paths (aka win conditions)
Map design
Religion
Diplomacy
Treasure fleets (esp because this gated cities in the Modern Age)
Treasure Convoys (major improvement, but undermines goal to make naval fleets matter)
Trade (esp trading range limits)
Settlement limits
Archaeology
Fundamental issues: the biggest issue by far is that despite all of the new features, the game has very little replayability. After about the third play through, everything starts to feel the same.
"Balance"/FOMO
Interaction
Agency
Inability to counter opponent moves (e.g., predatory religious conversions)
Excessive linearity of Legacy Paths
Power scaling correlated to Attributes and Policies versus player decisions and actions (especially where they happen irrespective of player actions and simply accrue based on tech tree progress.) Players quickly realize that getting to Future Techs/Civics and stacking attribute points is much better than most buildings. (nerfed in 1.2.3, naturally. See "agency")
Low-payback improvements - Improvements which come too late in an age and provide limited or negative ROI
Ornamental improvements - improvements which look good at first glance but made little difference in reality, leading to disillusionment. World Wonders are the poster child for this problem
Over-reliance on metadata - very subtle but powerful issue, responsible for leaders feeling "samey"
I am sure this is a great analysis, and I will make sure to read it when I get a chance. But, and sorry to be a party pooper, having played civ since 1, there will be no redemption. This is clearly Empire Earth 3 territory here (hell, throw in Spore or even the ET game for good measure). If another civ comes out I am positive it will be nothing more than a cynical attempt to squeeze this venerable franchise out of money. Yes they will trot out Sid again to gleefully pitch it, because why would he turn down some cash?
That should not trouble us. What great video game artist wants to make Civ 8? They want to make their own take. The franchise has run its course. We have a wonderful library of entries - five replayable civ games that we can always go back to (and civ 6, which can be also be fun in moderation). Heck, I would wager the next great video game artist in this genre will want to use AI to make a mod of civ 4.
I was born and raised in the model where you buy a base game, buy a few expansions, and then wait for the next base game. That is an antiquated and nearly obsolete model for better or worse. And frankly, on a personal level, maybe 25 years of civ is enough. At the end of the day it's kinda just the same game with minor variations.
The one lesson I've learned from Civ 7 is that the Civ community is far more toxic than I would've ever imagined. The amount of vial and vitriol towards this one game has been honestly kind of shocking. It's one thing to not like it but some of y'all take it to an insane level and I just do not get it, at all (and I've put hundreds of hours into every game in the series too, fwiw).
So no, I'm not reading your ridiculous manifesto, nor am I going to bother clicking on this thread again because a) we've seen it dozens of times already and b) we all know exactly where it's going. I just do not understand the point in being so miserable about pretty much anything, but y'all do your thing.
Why comment on somebody's opinion piece calling it ridiculous, without reading it, and commenting that you're not going to 'bother clicking on it' as if somebody is expecting you to.
There's nothing miserable about it I don't think, he just provides very in-depth feedback on every aspect of the game.
Video game designers heavily appreciate this form of feedback because it comes from a place of deep thought and not just meaningless backlash on Reddit.
He provides opinions and sources, it's laid out very neatly and intellectually. This is very much good work, it's not toxic or vitriol.
It's NOT (strictly) hate when people critique --- it's coming from a place of care for an IP, it's coming from a place of constructive criticism. Sometimes to build on something, you have to take it apart and figure out what makes it tick, what's wrong with it, what's good with it, and which aspects cause which reactions in players. It's between an art and a science.
EDIT: I just have to reiterate that if I was in the position of OP and saw this reply I probably would be devastated. And for what? I think it's quite rude-ish.
Why comment on somebody's opinion piece calling it ridiculous, without reading it, and commenting that you're not going to 'bother clicking on it' as if somebody is expecting you to.
There's nothing miserable about it I don't think, he just provides very in-depth feedback on every aspect of the game.
Video game designers heavily appreciate this form of feedback because it comes from a place of deep thought and not just meaningless backlash on Reddit.
He provides opinions and sources, it's laid out very neatly and intellectually. This is very much good work, it's not toxic or vitriol.
It's NOT (strictly) hate when people critique --- it's coming from a place of care for an IP, it's coming from a place of constructive criticism. Sometimes to build on something, you have to take it apart and figure out what makes it tick, what's wrong with it, what's good with it, and which aspects cause which reactions in players. It's between an art and a science.
While what you say might be true for this case, and I know it is true for many others, the title doesn‘t suggest constructive criticism or deep analysis. Starting the thread by calling the game already dead isn’t promising. But finding good titles is hard, and especially ones that don‘t evoke unwanted associations in (specific) readers. That‘s why most of the academic papers I read nowadays have 20+ words in their title, and i think the shortest I ever managed to write is 6 words. But if it is 3 words and heavily suggestive of what’s to come and we‘ve had dozens of threads that suggested the same in their title, it‘s no surprise that people have had it.
I will read the thread later on though nonetheless, because on first glimpse it seems better than most and interesting. Whether I agree with the verdict and argumentation remains to be seen.
I feel sorry for you if you see things this way. From my point of view 7 is going the way of settlers, sim city, need4speed, fallout. I loved that games but new versions are too much different. From my point of view my last turn will be in civ 3 or civ 6.
While what you say might be true for this case, and I know it is true for many others, the title doesn‘t suggest constructive criticism or deep analysis. Starting the thread by calling the game already dead isn’t promising. But finding good titles is hard, and especially ones that don‘t evoke unwanted associations in (specific) readers. That‘s why most of the academic papers I read nowadays have 20+ words in their title, and i think the shortest I ever managed to write is 6 words. But if it is 3 words and heavily suggestive of what’s to come and we‘ve had dozens of threads that suggested the same in their title, it‘s no surprise that people have had it.
I will read the thread later on though nonetheless, because on first glimpse it seems better than most and interesting. Whether I agree with the verdict and argumentation remains to be seen.
My apologies - Post-mortem is a term of art in the software industry used to indicate an in-depth review of the development and release process, not a commentary on the end-product itself. (Thus the name of Soren Johnsen's GDC talk, "My Elephant in the Room: An 'Old World' post-mortem"). My intent for the title was to communicate depth of thought rather than signal that I was writing it off from the get-go. Quite the opposite, though I'll admit I that the release of the Settler edition made my conclusion more sharply worded than the original version I had written. Perhaps with time and distance I'll restore the original version.
Yep, but post-mortem by definition is performed after the end of the product lifecycle. So, by naming your analysis post-mortem, you imply that the game is dead already.
I might, over time, find a lot to respond to in this, because I was thinking of drafting a similar document. Mine was going to (will?) have as its center what it is that accounts for the one-more-turn experience.
With you, I think the heart of that is one's experience over the entirety of the game, what you call "from humble beginnings to greatness." I shared recently in a thread that, after I win a game, I often fire up the initial save for a kind of "I knew you when" moment of nostalgia. I like marking the difference between seven hexes (I play Civ V) and an empire that spreads across the pangaea, my humble warrior with the panzers I had at the end of the game. I like remembering that "hell, I didn't even know where the other civs were at this time."
Anyway, the appeal of Civ is for me the gradual progress from point A to point Z. I like it that the game takes 300 turns (takes me that long; I know others play faster) and that I can only make incremental progress one turn to the next. For me, that long arc provides the benchmark against which I experience any shorter stretch of the game. Here's what I mean. At the start of the game, my city has two surplus food, needs fifteen to grow to size two and so it will do so on turn 8. That sets a standard pace for growth. The move from pop 2 to 3 requires 24 surplus food, but in the first eight turns maybe I get some way to make my surplus more than 2, my borders expand to include cattle or something. So I am able to keep up with that standard pace.
The same is true for all sub-systems. Money comes in at a standard pace. Culture has its standard pace. Science has its standard pace.
Once this standard pace is established, I can feel anything that represents a meaningful acceleration. Some things are standard accelerations. You need more culture for your next social policy but you also produce more culture. You need more science for the next tech, but you also produce more science. But somethings are significant leaps. Goodie huts are the first ones. If I'm due to grow to size 3 in twelve turns, but I hit a goodie hut that helps me do so instantly, that feels like a windfall, like I've rocketed ahead, relative to what I know is the standard pace. Even in the places where I'm just keeping pace, I feel that. Places where I know I'm slipping behind become a source of tension: is there something I could do in game to rectify that?
Civ is ultimately a race to a destination. It's like Chutes and Ladders or Sorry or like watching the Kentucky Derby if you've bet on a horse. You are watching yourself and others make progress to a goal. Anything that makes you feel like you are making speedier progress to that goal than the others are making feels exhilarating.
Within that framework, here's the one-more-turn-ness of Wonders, for example. It's a little race within the bigger race. If I've started on a wonder, I want to see if I turn out to be the one to get it. Most of the Wonders have game effects incommensurate (in a good way) with their costs. So if I am the first, it's an accelerant for the rest of the game. If I'm not, I've wasted hammers I could have used for something else, so I'm slipping behind.
Then the other thing I would say, and that you also touched on, is that the various sub-systems are partly (but only partly) fungible. I can produce lots of warriors if I have good production in my city, but I could also do it if I have lots of faith and get Holy Warriors in my religion. So you can try to exploit the things in the map or your UA that can most easily give you accelerants on one strain or another, and that can partly cover for weaknesses elsewhere. But only partly. Most (or all?) of the incarnations don't let you get World Wonders any other way than production. In Civ V, if you had low culture, that will bite you once the modern age hits and tourism starts. So you're managing the various strands to the max that you can manage each one, you're conscious of whether you're ahead of the pace, at pace or behind pace for each one. And you keep wanting to play until you get those significant leaps.
I'll give another example of a significant leap. (Again in Civ V), when you conquer a city it is in resistance for a number of turns equal to its population. During that time, you pay for its buildings, but don't get any of its yields. So I will often play some number more turns after conquering a city, just to see those yields kick in. In lots of ways the game puts a windfall right around the corner, and that creates a powerful incentive to play until you hit that windfall.
All (as I said) against a benchmark that you pick up once you've played a few games through to the end.
I haven't purchased Civ VII. I think the setbacks at age transitions would drive me crazy. For me the gradual progress needs needs to be mostly forward progress. I'm not allergic to some setbacks, but the "humble beginnings to greatness" dynamic requires that the overall movement of the game be a pretty steady forward (upward, outward) progress. That dynamic also requires (for me) that it be the same entity that started out humble and ends up great, so civ-switching would drive me crazy.
So here's my tl;dr: remember that the game is fundamentally a race and that people will be motivated by opportunities to increase the pace of their progress in that race against discernible benchmarks.
Oh, and it's crucial that the other racers could conceivably win. The reports of people winning at deity in their first game are just absurd.
I agree that balance is harmful and greatly limits the game's possibilities (for example, Mali in Civ 6, which is interesting). It's also terrible that eras invalidate your efforts; you're just wasting time because the last era is the one that matters. However, what discourages me the most from playing is the snowball effect: you only have to play until turn 20 at the most to know if you won or lost (if you have the skill). In real life, the bigger your empire is, the more difficulties you encounter, and often you even become stuck in conservatism towards the past, and only crises free you from being like China.
While what you say might be true for this case, and I know it is true for many others, the title doesn‘t suggest constructive criticism or deep analysis. Starting the thread by calling the game already dead isn’t promising.
Yep, but post-mortem by definition is performed after the end of the product lifecycle. So, by naming your analysis post-mortem, you imply that the game is dead already.
Are you guys for real? I thought you were around 30 and up? From an era when hundreds of games released their post-mortems on Gamasutra and the like because they wanted to talk about the development of their game. Share some of the secrets, pat themselves on the back, give back to the community.
Age of Empires 2 had a post-mortem ready in months (6 months post-release) while being actively patched and with Age of Conquerors in active and announced development.
Same thing with Diablo 2's post-mortem (4 months post-release), done by a company that prided itself and lived up to actively supporting their games for years after release.
And this has gone for years until game dev and marketing became a more tight-lipped affair where it's better to not say anything as corporate politics, PR, millions in marketing campaigns and investor confidence erased all avenues of listening to the nerds behind the courtain speaking their mind.
Jumping someone for using what's a perfectly normal wording in the game design talk business which you've spend inordinate amount of your life on (all the years spent on CifFanatics) is just... 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.
Yep, but post-mortem by definition is performed after the end of the product lifecycle. So, by naming your analysis post-mortem, you imply that the game is dead already.
In games development it's common to do retrospectives after launch. They're often called post-mortems too. There's less of an enshrined standard as games dev is a lot more dependent on the studio's history and culture, vs. software which has a bit more regimented standards to how company lifecycles tend to go (which in turn ensures most successful companies evolve in similar ways).
I'm a big fan of VII, and I'll admit it's ~1.20am so I've scrolled past the massive walls of text for now, but I just wanted to share that.
The one lesson I've learned from Civ 7 is that the Civ community is far more toxic than I would've ever imagined. The amount of vial and vitriol towards this one game has been honestly kind of shocking. It's one thing to not like it but some of y'all take it to an insane level and I just do not get it, at all (and I've put hundreds of hours into every game in the series too, fwiw).
So no, I'm not reading your ridiculous manifesto, nor am I going to bother clicking on this thread again because a) we've seen it dozens of times already and b) we all know exactly where it's going. I just do not understand the point in being so miserable about pretty much anything, but y'all do your thing.
I have to say that the Civ community is actually one of the least toxic communities I have been in throughout my gaming lifecycle. Matter of fact, I find the Civ 7 discord more toxic than this very site. Even if you don't like the opinion presented in this thread, look at how much time and care Kenshiro70 put into articulating it, even formatting it for easier readability.
I would argue that your response is actually toxic behavior by posting about how "horrible his opinion is that you refuse to read it" instead of just hitting the back button.
The forums will probably look like this until Christmas probably, or until the first expansion. This is just part of the launch it seems for this franchise.
In regards to "I just don't get it":
Some people who dislike the game wish to express their frustration that a beloved sequel came out and didn't meet their expectations. Others wish to share how it could meet their expectations. Both know that the developers do tend to browse these forums so it is a satisfying place to "shout out into the darkness" with a small hope that someone that matters will hear you. The message isn't always healthy or constructive, but some of us aren't very good at communicating. Some of us aren't as good as we think we are at 'armchair game design'. It can get tiresome seeing all this negative spam for anyone just wanting to enjoy the game just like it can get tiresome seeing people hushing criticism and saying that Civ 7 has already been 'fixed' by the patches until the next expansion/more civs. As the Steam reviews show, this game has polarized the fanbase and the most fervent of each side is growing tired of hearing the other side.
When Civ VI came out, I played it on Ipad. I hated it. It felt boring, silly, Eureka's and Inspirations far too gamey, and so many civs that felt like they all played the same to me.
About a month ago Epic offered Platinum for free. And suddenly, I am playing as Australia building a dam in my city trying to build a breathtaking national park. Half of Scotland flipped to me because of lack of loyalty, and I conquered two of Montezuma's cities after he declared war on me (big mistake, never declare war on the Aussies).
A week ago I buy on Steam sale all of Civ VI including the leaders and New Frontier expansion for 30 bucks (I really wanted the mods which are only on steam as well, sorry Epic). I am once again losing sleep to a video game for the first time in years.
Post mortem may be premature, doctor. We can rebuild Civ VII. We have the technology.
I agree with the problems but i disagree on your decision to ignore Age transitions and Civ switching, because most of the problems you have listed are a consequence of Age transitions and Civ switching
Except things like "Games need to be finished" which is actually a cause tha led o Age transitions, but that is places in an appendix, when in reality is a root cause which ended causing a chain reaction
I agree with the problems but i disagree on your decision to ignore Age transitions and Civ switching, because most of the problems you have listed are a consequence of Age transitions and Civ switching
Well, Humankind has Civ switching and while the game has its own issues already spelled out over threads during its 4 years on the market (yes, Humankind was officially released 4 years ago), most of the issues that Civ 7 struggles with are novel to the game. So it's perfectly fine to try and tackle them as issues that can't be traced to mechanics present in another title, as they didn't cause those issues to manifest on their end.
Oh, and we just got a wonder rebalance (though probably not quite the sort of redesign that Kenshiro was pointing at).
I haven't played 7 yet, but I see from your pictures that they're still continuing the trend of bland information screens since 6. I don't know if this is just laziness from a studio which otherwise prides itself in its map artwork, or reflective of some modern design I'm just not attuned to.
Who looks at a white outline of a tank and thinks "yeah I can't wait to try that out..."?
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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.
