Civ VII Post-mortem

[socratic]

You are making alt history; you are playing history. Because in history, most of the pre-Columbian civilisations were wiped out. The Quechua are hardly a direct successor, are they (nor are they wholly Incan).

You are making alt-history, until you want to do something the game doesn’t allow and suddenly actual history matters again.

 

[Gorbles]

You are making alt-history, until you want to do something the game doesn’t allow and suddenly actual history matters again.

Like when you have to build a rocket to Mars, or Alpha Centauri? Or any other win condition? Or when you have to unlock specific build paths using specific techs and civics? There's no other way of getting to Machinery!

Yes, pretty much all games can be reduced to "do what you want, so long as you follow the game's overall rules". I can't run off of the edge of the map in Hades. I can't select two weapons.

So where's the line? Short of keeping literally everything the same and never changing a thing (because nobody wants that), where do we draw the line?

Because while the developers have said, outright, that they reached big on the 33% of new stuff this time around, let's call 33% the average. Sometimes they hit it. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they exceed it. How much new-ness appeals to you personally? What things are you okay with the game enforcing, and what things are you not? And how does that impact the 33% target?

 

[Core Imposter]

It's unacceptable to have a limit of only one unit per tile. Leads to things like having archers firing arrows a distance, according to scale, of miles and miles. This must be changed, or nobody will buy the game.

Or like me, who for the last three iterations bought the game and having them on the shelf ...right there.... just to legitimize my right to criticize this nearly unrecoverable design blunder.

As for all of the stuff the OP listed, it's worse than I thought. I reckon.

Repent.

 

[AD1730]

It's unacceptable to have a limit of only one unit per tile. Leads to things like having archers firing arrows a distance, according to scale, of miles and miles. This must be changed, or nobody will buy the game.

Or like me, who for the last three iterations bought the game and having them on the shelf ...right there.... just to legitimize my right to criticize this nearly unrecoverable design blunder.

As for all of the stuff the OP listed, it's worse than I thought. I reckon.

Repent.

I don't mind 1UPT, and much prefer it to doomstacks. However, I would have liked to see a less blunt instrument used to solve the doomstack problem, given that they used 1UPT in two games before Civ 7.

 

[Core Imposter]

I don't mind 1UPT, and much prefer it to doomstacks. However, I would have liked to see a less blunt instrument used to solve the doomstack problem, given that they used 1UPT in two games before Civ 7.

Well stacks needed to be reworked. but. The problem (1UPT) is that you are trying to use tactical combat on a strategic level map. Or, really, with the way cities are now sprawling all over the map the overall scale of the whole map is off. People talk about Civs and Leaders and say, can't you disengage with reality and just forget the whole inanity of the situation. Well, I can't abide with the scale problems. And I won't play the stupid game till it's fixed. I might even stop buying the games because at this point it's hard to think Firaxis will ever make another true Civ game.

 

[GeneralZift]

Even though it doesn't fully make sense, the way the tactical board plays and feels like a chess set is why I like 1UPT.

 

[Crashdummy]

I think changes are welcome untill they fundamentally change the reason why the franchise thrived. And to me, that reason was the feeling of taking a single Civ and make it thrive, to take into reality the "build your Civlization to stand the Test of Time" or untill they fundamentally change the gameplay, which was a smooth fluid sandbox gameplay.

Agres and civ switching affected both those things, those are not welcome

Commanders, new combat, navigable rivers, towns/cities, workers/no workers, etc do not go against those things, those are wlecome, even if i might not like some

That is my opinion on how much change can be done to Civilization. Notice games like Mass Effect, Halo, Dragon Age, etc failed because they fundamentally changed how they were played

 

[Core Imposter]

Even though it doesn't fully make sense, the way the tactical board plays and feels like a chess set is why I like 1UPT.

They think they are playing chess. Okay. That's it. I give up.

 

[GeneralZift]

They think they are playing chess. Okay. That's it. I give up.

You should definitely give up spouting vitriol and try relaxing a bit. I don't think I'm playing chess - it just feels fun, as if I'm playing chess.

Obviously the game makes more sense if the ranged units could only fire point blank. But the capability of artillery to hit from far away, and for archers to focus down a unit, for cavalry to sweep in dramatically, this gives the map more intrigue, as if it's a tactical map, even when the map is strictly strategic.

In other words, the way combat is since Civ5 and onwards is structured to benefit good positioning, tactical maneuvering and the strategy lies in the armies as a whole.

Plus there is a visual aspect. Large armies look large because they fill large areas of the map. Whereas stacked armies don't fully show how big an army is just from looking alone.

 

[AD1730]

They think they are playing chess. Okay. That's it. I give up.

Do you believe that there should be any limit to how many units should be able to occupy a tile?

 

[Gori the Grey]

For the issue of scale, I just pretend that the terrain of the tactical-level battlefield just so happens to exactly resemble that of the strategic-level theater.

 

[Skojardu]

Do you believe that there should be any limit to how many units should be able to occupy a tile?

Jumping in, but your unit cap should be based on your national population. Ideally the composition of armies would cost population from your cities a la Civ Colonization. It is rather novel that armies cost just "production" (eg modern war drones)

 

[Siptah]

Jumping in, but your unit cap should be based on your national population. Ideally the composition of armies would cost population from your cities a la Civ Colonization. It is rather novel that armies cost just "production" (eg modern war drones)

I agree, and I liked that e.g., Humankind handled it that way. Yet, I don't see this in civ 7 in particular, as they tied population also to buildings and improvements. It's apparently not part of the system that you lose population throughout the game. Not even pestilence or famine reduces your population. Only nukes do, and I somehow have a feeling that is also a leftover (as is the famine warning). So, the way it currently works, you can have inactive specialists, but inactive buildings/improvements (from having not enough pop) doesn't exist.

 

[socratic]

You should definitely give up spouting vitriol and try relaxing a bit. I don't think I'm playing chess - it just feels fun, as if I'm playing chess.

Obviously the game makes more sense if the ranged units could only fire point blank. But the capability of artillery to hit from far away, and for archers to focus down a unit, for cavalry to sweep in dramatically, this gives the map more intrigue, as if it's a tactical map, even when the map is strictly strategic.

In other words, the way combat is since Civ5 and onwards is structured to benefit good positioning, tactical maneuvering and the strategy lies in the armies as a whole.

Plus there is a visual aspect. Large armies look large because they fill large areas of the map. Whereas stacked armies don't fully show how big an army is just from looking alone.

I think the big problem with UPT is that it loses a lot of that strategy when in conjunction with the other systems (mainly gold and production). Once you start having higher production than your enemies, you can just march up and wipe them out with shear numbers, no strategy required. Now you’re just left with having to individually move 1000 troops across the ocean to stop Greece from winning a culture victory. Bleh. The strategy only exists for the first part of the game, then becomes a chore. Civ 7 kinda helps with this by adding Commanders, but it isn’t enough imo. There should be some unit cap or system that makes large armies more punishing to sustain. I actually play Civ 6 with an imaginary unit cap of 2 units per City to keep things interesting.

 

[Core Imposter]

For the issue of scale, I just pretend that the terrain of the tactical-level battlefield just so happens to exactly resemble that of the strategic-level theater.

Drop the pretense and put both hands on the wall.

 

[Gorbles]

It's unacceptable to have a limit of only one unit per tile. Leads to things like having archers firing arrows a distance, according to scale, of miles and miles. This must be changed, or nobody will buy the game.

Nobody buys a game because of 1UPT. Am I reading you correctly?