Civ VII Post-mortem: Crafting a redemption arc

[aieeegrunt]

A bug goes through many stages from being reported, to a fix being included in an update.

Very little of this process actually involves or even requires playing the game. Most bugfixing comes down to available resource. But cheap shots are popular, it seems.

Funny how the community can identify them amd then a modder can fix them sometimes in a matter of days

The Science Typo AI bug completely crippled the AI. It was detected and fixed in days. Fireaxis let it sit that way for months. Same thing with the luxury bug.

 

[Gorbles]

Funny how the community can identify them amd then a modder can fix them sometimes in a matter of days

The Science Typo AI bug completely crippled the AI. It was detected and fixed in days. Fireaxis let it sit that way for months. Same thing with the luxury bug.

Indeed. Still has very little to do with playing their own game or not.

 

[tman2000]

A bug goes through many stages from being reported, to a fix being included in an update.

Very little of this process actually involves or even requires playing the game. Most bugfixing comes down to available resource. But cheap shots are popular, it seems.

It seems that the only cheap ones are Firaxis.

Lots of game companies are capable of fixing major bugs quickly, and lots of game companies neglect them for years. It seems to reflect more on the capabilities and commitment of a developer, rather than the burden of some process that can't ever be helped.

 

[Gorbles]

It seems that the only cheap ones are Firaxis.

Lots of game companies are capable of fixing major bugs quickly, and lots of game companies neglect them for years. It seems to reflect more on the capabilities and commitment of a developer, rather than the burden of some process that can't ever be helped.

Generalisations are cheap. Even Larian had outstanding bugs on release with BG3. Hades (by Supergiant) did too.

Regardless, you're moving the goalposts. The original claim was a pithy thing about Firaxis not playing their own game. I pointed out that this isn't really relevant to getting the bug fixed.

Hotfixes, again, tend to be a process thing. They have literally nothing to do with playing the game or not. Studios that put out more timely hotfixes and patches compared to other studios will have different internal workflows, probably different cost-benefit analyses as well. Sometimes these are, yes, better than other studios. But given the hotfix and patch cadence of VII after release, it suggests VII has picked up the pace compared to past titles (which is good, because it needed it).

 

[James_Champagne]

He mentions how in civ6 when you got a Great Writer and they compose Romeo & Juliet, it gave you a sense of accomplishment ("my civ wrote Romeo & Juliet"). But in civ7, you just get these generic codexes that get erased when the Age ends. He says getting these codices before the end of an Age just felt like homework.

This, this, this, a THOUSAND times underline this. The codices are so bland . . . I miss the old Great Works

I disagree with him on the city-states though. I liked the city-states in V and VI. Although just today I found out that VII can have city-states, but that you need to befriend independent powers first. I literally had no clue about that at all, and it's funny that with all the tutorial tips I don't recall seeing anything about that. But I guess the Ai didn't care much about it either because in my first game by the modern era there was only one city-state period on the map.

Speaking of which, I decided to finally resume my first VII campaign today (that I began on February 6, but which I hadn't played since the very end of April), and finally finished my very first playthrough . . only took nearly 7 months! (essentially, I did the Modern Era in one sitting, losing to Augustus Caesar when he launched a space rocket before I could). I will say that the game does run a lot smoother on my PC now than it did back in February-April: no more ugly black blotches on the map when I zoom in, no more freezing when I select a unit or scroll on the production screen list, and I like there's edge scrolling now. A lot of my original complaints still remain, though, not just related to the civ switching but things like the repetitious music, the fact that I feel very uninformed about what's going on with the other civs (I REALLY miss VI's gossip pop-ups), the cluttered graphics and boring-looking leaders, and, of course, the almost constant exploding volcanos. In 120 or so turns I saw the 4 volcanos around my empire explode 60 times (one in particular amounted to 19 of those). I made the mistake of choosing moderate disaster intensity because I thought it would be more like VI, but I was wrong . . . but maybe one of the patch/updates has fixed this for when you start new games. And the AI seemed very passive: they declared war against each other a few times, but as far as I could tell not a single city changed hands or was destroyed, and not a single civ was conquered by another. I actually went through the entire game without getting one war declared against me, despite the fact I had almost nothing of an army and wasn't even bothering to defend my cities that hard . . . maybe they just didn't want to deal with the constantly exploding volcanos of my territory.

I confess I still don't really understand how merchants/trade routes work, should I start a second game in the future I'll probably read some of the wikis first.

Oh yeah, and that "slot your resources" screen that's constantly popping up is also super-annoying. That's another aspect of the game that I kind of thought I understood but at the same time didn't really.

Is religion even a factor in this game? I remember it being in the Exploration Age somewhat but it seems to vanish completely in the Modern Era.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I confess I still don't really understand how merchants/trade routes work

Pretty simple. Build a merchant unit. Send them to a city-state or other civ to get their resources. When you open the trade panel, it shows you the resources in the settlement that you can get if you send a merchant there. You can get more trade routes or make the trade routes longer by improving trade relationships in diplomacy.

Oh yeah, and that "slot your resources" screen that's constantly popping up is also super-annoying. That's another aspect of the game that I kind of thought I understood but at the same time didn't really.

Bonus resources can be slotted in any settlement (city or town) but city resources can only be slotted in cities. And of course empire resources cannot be slotted in settlements at all and are just automaticlly applied to all settlements. You see the empire resources at the top of the screen.

The thing to remember, that can be tricky, is that you can only move resources between connected settlements. So settlements must be either connected by roads or by the fishing quay building or ports. So for example, if you have some settlement on an island that does not have the fishing quay and your costal city does not have a fishing quay, then that island settlement won't be connected to your other settlements. Any resources in that island settlement cannot be slotted in your other settlements. So if you try to slot a resource and it does not work, that is likely why. The screen will tell you that the settlement is not connected but it might be hard to see on the UI.

Is religion even a factor in this game? I remember it being in the Exploration Age somewhat but it seems to vanish completely in the Modern Era.

The religion system is very undercooked in the game. You found a religion, pick beliefs and can send missionaries out to covert settlements, either to get relics for the culture legacy path or to get extra yields for your settlements based on your religious beliefs. But that is basically it. The religion crisis at the end of the Exploration Age can also depend on what cities are converted. But there is no religious warfare and converting cities is simplified. And religion is only in the Exploration Age. It disappears completely in the Modern Age. So the entire mechanic only matters for one Age.

 

[James_Champagne]

Pretty simple. Build a merchant unit. Send them to a city-state or other civ to get their resources. When you open the trade panel, it shows you the resources in the settlement that you can get if you send a merchant there. You can get more trade routes or make the trade routes longer by improving trade relationships in diplomacy.

I didn't even know there WAS a trade panel!


keep in mind that, because such big gaps of time existed for me in this playthrough, I sometimes forgot about things I thought I knew. It probably doesn't help matters that over August I did a marathon playthrough of VI again, so as a result I was kind of still thinking in VI mode for a lot of things.

 

[Krikkit1]

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

The Leveraging is a good idea. If there were More/Better Legacies tied to the Crises, and that was communicated to the player
(X Crisis is happening… do XYZ for ABC possible Legacy points/actions)
Essentially make the Crisis a 5th Legacy path that doesn’t appear until the end of the Age.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I didn't even know there WAS a trade panel!

It opens automatically when you select the merchant unit. It looks like this. On the left you see the possible trade routes and the resources you can get. The map has a lens that colors tiles in green to show cities within range. Once you select your destination, in the Merchant panel in the bottom right corner, you click the button on the far right to send the unit to that destination. The merchant will automatically travel to to within the green area. Once it reaches the destination, click the button in the unit panel to start the trade route.

 

[James_Champagne]

It opens automatically when you select the merchant unit. It looks like this. On the left you see the possible trade routes and the resources you can get. The map has a lens that colors tiles in green to show cities within range. Once you select your destination, in the Merchant panel in the bottom right corner, you click the button on the far right to send the unit to that destination. The merchant will automatically travel to to within the green area. Once it reaches the destination, click the button in the unit panel to start the trade route.

View attachment 741425

Is this how it looked when the game was first released? Because this does not look familiar to me at all, and I'm pretty sure I did at least a few trade routes in Antiquity . . . or maybe I just thought I did!

I guess I'm also curious as to if there's a screen that lets you see all your active trade routes at once. I know VI had it but I wasn't able to find it in VII

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Is this how it looked when the game was first released? Because this does not look familiar to me at all, and I'm pretty sure I did at least a few trade routes in Antiquity . . . or maybe I just thought I did!

Yes, it always looked this way.

I guess I'm also curious as to if there's a screen that lets you see all your active trade routes at once. I know VI had it but I wasn't able to find it in VII

No, I don't think there is a screen that shows you all active trade routes.

 

[Krikkit1]

Just to emphasise that the 'Byzantines' literally called themselves 'The Roman Empire' and saw themselves as the direct continuation of the Roman empire that started in Rome. They did not think of themselves as something separate. It is very much a western thing to try and differentiate it from Rome, quite often done by western rivals to push up their own claims to be the legitimate heir to Rome.

Which is why they are a good example for allowing the player to control the label…If I go from Rome to Byzantines(which will eventually be in) I should get to decide if I want to keep calling myself Roman or not.

 

[Kenshiro70]

Another update. I heavily streamlined the ABCs section, so it should be simpler, easier to follow, and much more focused.

I moved the sections I cut into Deep Dives.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Civilization is basically a game about progress. It's a
game about rise, rise, and more rise. --Sid Meier

I'll continue with my ad hoc reactions to things in your treatise that resonate with my own sense of what makes for a good 4x game.

You're quoting Meier from a talk he gave on the psychological underpinnings of the appeal of Civ games. He had initially thought that it would be fun for players to experience a major set-back and bounce back from it; the bounceback would be "more glorious and more dread than from no fall," as Moloch puts it in Paradise Lost.

He found out that players didn't like that, and so he shifted to a model where there is no "rise and fall" but only "rise, rise and more rise."

I think, and I have said recently in another thread, that there's a second advantage to the "rise, rise and more rise" model, and that has to do with the onboarding of new players. Civ is already complex enough that, when a new player starts to pick it up, that player doesn't need to be told, a third of the way through his or her first game, "now you're going to start losing things, and the challenge is to lose as little as possible." It would be like Monopoly hitting a stage where all of your hotels start getting sold off and you need to shift the strategies you'd been using earlier in the game and just try to minimize how many of them get sold off. If that was a dynamic in Monopoly, nobody would ever have learned the game. They'd throw up their hands in frustration and say "I thought I was mastering how this thing goes and now suddenly those plans are all out the window."

I have a larger point as well. This dimension of your OP, and the talk by Sid Meier on which it is based, makes me think it's time to retire the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 mantra (since that is this-next-game-to-the-previous) and instead work out a stable core of features that will be true of any good 4x (these psychological underpinnings) and say "every new iteration has all of those, and then goes on to differentiate itself from its predecessor in some measure).

 

[timmychompchomp]

It seems that the only cheap ones are Firaxis.

Lots of game companies are capable of fixing major bugs quickly, and lots of game companies neglect them for years. It seems to reflect more on the capabilities and commitment of a developer, rather than the burden of some process that can't ever be helped.

In watching the live streams for years, I have come to some conclusions about what is going wrong with Firaxis. I have an extensive background in high level entertainment and media. I don’t want to be too specific because these opinions of mind could be aimed at individuals. I will some up my personal opinion with this. Uninspired teams, no matter how capable, will always miss the mark in the end. No amount of money or talent can make up for a lack of inspiration and passion. Glaring bugs that linger forever and the ai inability to interact with all game systems in Civ 6 are clear indicators of passionless development. The UI in Civ 7 is clearly another example of it. Something is systemically wrong there. The talent is there.

 

[AD1730]

I'll continue with my ad hoc reactions to things in your treatise that resonate with my own sense of what makes for a good 4x game.

You're quoting Meier from a talk he gave on the psychological underpinnings of the appeal of Civ games. He had initially thought that it would be fun for players to experience a major set-back and bounce back from it; the bounceback would be "more glorious and more dread than from no fall," as Moloch puts it in Paradise Lost.

He found out that players didn't like that, and so he shifted to a model where there is no "rise and fall" but only "rise, rise and more rise."

I think, and I have said recently in another thread, that there's a second advantage to the "rise, rise and more rise" model, and that has to do with the onboarding of new players. Civ is already complex enough that, when a new player starts to pick it up, that player doesn't need to be told, a third of the way through his or her first game, "now you're going to start losing things, and the challenge is to lose as little as possible." It would be like Monopoly hitting a stage where all of your hotels start getting sold off and you need to shift the strategies you'd been using earlier in the game and just try to minimize how many of them get sold off. If that was a dynamic in Monopoly, nobody would ever have learned the game. They'd throw up their hands in frustration and say "I thought I was mastering how this thing goes and now suddenly those plans are all out the window."

I have a larger point as well. This dimension of you OP, and the talk by Sid Meier on which it is based, makes me think it's time to retire the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 mantra (since that is this-next-game-to-the-previous) and instead work out a stable core of features that will be true of any good 4x (these psychological underpinnings) and say "every new iteration has all of those, and then goes on to differentiate itself from its predecessor in some measure).

I agree with this. I do wonder if it would be different if the crisis were an endgame thing only (similar to Stellaris at launch) rather than having two others at the end of the first two eras. Perhaps the crisis would then serve as more of a final boss than something seen as an impediment to the player’s progression? Having the crisis take place solely in the modern era likely provides greater justification for it being something truly global in scope, where such a justification is lacking in the earlier eras (in my opinion).

 

[aieeegrunt]

In watching the live streams for years, I have come to some conclusions about what is going wrong with Firaxis. I have an extensive background in high level entertainment and media. I don’t want to be too specific because these opinions of mind could be aimed at individuals. I will some up my personal opinion with this. Uninspired teams, no matter how capable, will always miss the mark in the end. No amount of money or talent can make up for a lack of inspiration and passion. Glaring bugs that linger forever and the ai inability to interact with all game systems in Civ 6 are clear indicators of passionless development. The UI in Civ 7 is clearly another example of it. Something is systemically wrong there. The talent is there.

This is 100% a poor management problem.

 

[EpicWestern]

In watching the live streams for years, I have come to some conclusions about what is going wrong with Firaxis. I have an extensive background in high level entertainment and media. I don’t want to be too specific because these opinions of mind could be aimed at individuals. I will some up my personal opinion with this. Uninspired teams, no matter how capable, will always miss the mark in the end. No amount of money or talent can make up for a lack of inspiration and passion. Glaring bugs that linger forever and the ai inability to interact with all game systems in Civ 6 are clear indicators of passionless development. The UI in Civ 7 is clearly another example of it. Something is systemically wrong there. The talent is there.

In a way I feel like it's the opposite. The designers are passionate about the game and the franchise and have big bold ideas to move forward in a positive direction, but for some reason are unwilling or unable to subject themselves to the monotonous grind that is vigorous playtesting.

 

[Kenshiro70]

I have a larger point as well. This dimension of you OP, and the talk by Sid Meier on which it is based, makes me think it's time to retire the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 mantra (since that is this-next-game-to-the-previous) and instead work out a stable core of features that will be true of any good 4x (these psychological underpinnings) and say "every new iteration has all of those, and then goes on to differentiate itself from its predecessor in some measure).

I agree (which is why I staked out the 4X Soul items), and the devil's in the details. Age Resets are obviously bad. But how about the simplification of trade? On its own the impact isn't huge. But combine it with other changes, such as the removal of strategic resources, and the impact is magnified.

To me the Rule of Thirds isn't a precise tool but rather a shield against emergent interactions. Interactions that might not be foreseen but in total damage the psychological underpinnings. Placing limits on the changes minimizes the potential damage.

It would be interesting to know how much of the damage was intentional versus unintentional. Certain things like custom city names, removing the Restart button, and no auto-explore were apparently intentional. The devs probably knew those wouldn't be popular (at least I hope they did). But "Make naval gameplay matter", on the other hand, was something everyone could get behind. And yet when combined with other changes it ended up completely warping the game (distorting maps, fencing off distant lands) in ways that were far worse than the intentional items. Wild, isn't it?

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Uninspired teams, no matter how capable, will always miss the mark in the end. No amount of money or talent can make up for a lack of inspiration and passion. Glaring bugs that linger forever and the ai inability to interact with all game systems in Civ 6 are clear indicators of passionless development. The UI in Civ 7 is clearly another example of it. Something is systemically wrong there. The talent is there.

If you watch this panel from PAX West where the dev team talk about "history is built in layers", especially Ed Beach and Andrew Johnson, they have tremendous inspiration and passion. So I strongly disagree that the dev team lacked inspiration or passion for the civ franchise.

If anything, the new ideas like age transitions and civ-switching, are born out of the dev team's passion. It is clear from listening to them talk about history. They wanted to take the ideas of civs changing throughout the ages and implement it in a civ game precisely because of their passion for history and for the civ franchise.

Now, clearly many civ players don't agree with their vision for civ7 because they feel it departs too much from previous civ games. But those missteps do not come from lack of passion.