I'm still sticking with 7 and will be getting the DLC at the end of the month because I bought the preorder for Crossroads. However, I'm burnt out on playing. Mostly I'm planning to learn how to mod and want to implement a couple of ideas I had to see if the core experience of 7 can be improved through simple, meaningful changes.
I finally did a nice clean modern victory on deity. I finally see what people are saying about it. It was sort of boring and a matter of waiting out the turns to win.
There are some details worth noting. The explorer culture victory is atrocious now. Getting locked out of dig sites makes it really hard to get there first in front of 6 AIs, and the natural wonders barely help. Unless you really want that victory, rushing explorers is a huge waste of gold or production, unless you have a mega empire with 10 productive cities. My map this time had me allied with a northern hegemon, and I decisively diminished my rival in the South. The distant lands hegemon declared on me, but he completely controlled his continent and it was not worth trying to spin up a landing force and fighting an entire continent's swarm of units. He never developed any meaningful navy and was way behind in tech. I think he might have oversettled. Why?
My ally was just barely ahead of me in science, I pulled ahead but he was dominating in all other yields. I don't know why AI doesn't try to actually win. Anyway, I pulled a science victory with nothing else to do the entire age.
Some observations at this level of play and experience:
The more I play the more I see all these problems. It was different when I played modern only 2-3 times, two were a disappointment but one was halfway fun and left me thinking, "I'm sure I'll play a couple more games and stumble into a really fun modern age where this stuff works even better." That hasn't really happened. Those one or two kind of halfway fun runs haven't repeated. Honestly, I think they happened on a very low difficulty level where I could invade 5 cities simultaneously. The combined arms aspect was fun.
The one thing I haven't tried yet is tiny, online speed to see if condensed tactical play is fun.
I don't know what to make of 7 anymore. I'm left still being pretty confused about how it all comes together, whether certain buildings are really useful or not useful at all. What also bothers me is the bloat. The commander abilities (leadership tree...), the attributes, the civics most of all. The way that civ specific abilities just overpower in certain situations creating a totally different experience when what should happen is that they create a different quality experience with trade offs.
For instance, this modern age play was with Confucius. So, is that why it didn't feel like food buildings mattered to me? Gold felt slow to pick up, compared to say, Xerxes. That's a trade off then, but, what do I do about it? Without gold I just waited until my production just barely caught up right when my science victory projects were researched and ready to build. That's great, I guess, but I was left not doing anything the rest of the age other than waiting. It was great to have gold as Xerxes, and if there were AI players seriously rushing a culture or science victory I would have lost that game, but instead I had all the time in the world to produce 10 full stack armies and wipe out an entire civ before casually researching Ivy.
If I was facing military problems and had poor military production, I guess I could use diplomacy. Okay, so I can make hub towns. Only, it's unclear how these work. And what if I've already specialized my towns and the map is full? So I just do it ahead of time knowing in advance? Well, then the play style is a "solved problem" and what's the fun of playing?
Civ 7 is both streamlined, but also has bloated feature differentiation, but also has a lot of broken or unclear things. When you do figure out feature differentiation, which is sometimes very difficult to do given what information is hard to access, then the streamlining makes those features seem as if they have a solved pattern. If you get a good start position, the solved meta works better, and if your position is really bad, there's little you can do to catch up. Unless you play on lower difficulty, in which you're just running through a set of legacy paths and victory conditions that become very repetitive. It's not working for me as well anymore.
In the first couple of weeks it was fun to realize I didn't understand how a system was working, go back, then play better and use the game systems more. I still feel like I'm hoping that will continue to happen, that I'm missing something, and that it will still get better. I don't think that's going to happen much anymore.
For instance, I think I might not be optimizing my use of specialists, because there's something about generating happiness I think I'm missing. On the other hand, I think people are solving this using Ashoka and so forth. Then, let's say I really optimize and go Angkor Wat. Well, if I have time to get Angkor Wat and continue plopping specialists, then I'm already doing so well I don't think I need them. You know? This play should be a trade off with another leaving me weak in some other way.
I have not really figured out how to cleverly level up commanders. I just go either infantry/cavalry or ranged/siege combat upgrade, then 6 units per slot, then maybe ignore terrain. I've stopped trying different things. If I have a commander, I need it now, so I can't really specialize like a logistics commander and a fighting commander. I rarely have done enough naval let alone air combat to really specialize those commanders. It seems like it would be fun to use these commanders more, but it's not happening. Maybe I'm missing something. It feels like I'm not really missing that much though, at this point. When has someone genuinely used airdrop effectively to really push units forward in a big war?
So, I think Civ 7 is probably just the big broken mess people are saying. Too streamlined, while too complicated, while broken.
I think with this model of game, you need Antiquity to be longer and bigger. Exploration needs to be much better scenario driven with true distant lands colonization and colonial wars. Modern needs a much tighter, managed scenario. Either a more inevitable world war with big unit production bonuses so anyone can spin up a few armies without having the perfect production to do it and it all comes down to nuanced advantages. Where there's just no food anymore, grocers for instance adding mere adjacency bonuses to buff buff buff. Or, a more solid railroad tycoon game.
In fact, modern screams of a need to stop being an open ended 4X and instead exist as parallel scenarios that use your pre-built empire as a setting. Explorers should be an exclusively narrative based, kind of espionage based puzzle minigame (not actual puzzle solving, but rather trying to infiltrate, research, explore, prepare). Railroad tycoon should involve a little actual micromanagement of trains and routing. There's a way to it that's very simple (think Ticket to Ride as a very simple rail based board game compared to more complex ones), but with depth. Science could have that modern era thrill of endeavor and failure in big projects. There should be a more curated world war, with forced alliances, being dragged into war.
When you look at China's civs, they all feature slightly more dressed up narrative events. Other civs don't have this at all. I imagine they once intended all civs to have narrative structure like China, almost like organic mini-scenarios, but with much much more depth than what we get even with China. I wonder if the Modern Age wasn't designed with a scenario focus in mind.
It sounds like 5 games in one and overly ambitious, but I play civ 7 and feel like I'm playing the bones of that game. Modern doesn't feel like civ. Something's off about it.
Like I said, I'm taking a break. I'll test out the rest of the DLC in a couple weeks, but probably just to see what it's like, then I'm done. I'll be in the forums a bit, and if I have time I'll try my hand at modding, but civ 7 has lost me for now, sadly.
I finally did a nice clean modern victory on deity. I finally see what people are saying about it. It was sort of boring and a matter of waiting out the turns to win.
There are some details worth noting. The explorer culture victory is atrocious now. Getting locked out of dig sites makes it really hard to get there first in front of 6 AIs, and the natural wonders barely help. Unless you really want that victory, rushing explorers is a huge waste of gold or production, unless you have a mega empire with 10 productive cities. My map this time had me allied with a northern hegemon, and I decisively diminished my rival in the South. The distant lands hegemon declared on me, but he completely controlled his continent and it was not worth trying to spin up a landing force and fighting an entire continent's swarm of units. He never developed any meaningful navy and was way behind in tech. I think he might have oversettled. Why?
My ally was just barely ahead of me in science, I pulled ahead but he was dominating in all other yields. I don't know why AI doesn't try to actually win. Anyway, I pulled a science victory with nothing else to do the entire age.
Some observations at this level of play and experience:
- Food buildings really don't matter that much, but there are a ton of them to build. You'll slam into happiness problems long before wanting to densely pack more specialists. I still don't know what exactly people are doing to mitigate happiness problems other than those couple of civics.
- There are a ton of production buildings, but it's hard to prioritize them. Ironworks makes sense waiting for factories and military academy and aerodrome, but I've heard they don't pay off? Maybe an idiot not thinking of specialist boosts thought that. I still don't understand why specialists sometimes boost production and sometimes not.
- What am I doing with culture? Liberalism, globalism, all these late civics, what do they matter? I suppose in the exact right war conditions, some of the combat boosts might help.
- Science and factories and ports. Civ bonuses that boost gold through trade. These seem to be all that really matters.
- You either have an interesting scenario or you don't. Very rarely, the AI will be fun to fight, with air units. They're not very good at combined arms. The rest of the time they are wildly inconsistent, including with tech level and all else.
The more I play the more I see all these problems. It was different when I played modern only 2-3 times, two were a disappointment but one was halfway fun and left me thinking, "I'm sure I'll play a couple more games and stumble into a really fun modern age where this stuff works even better." That hasn't really happened. Those one or two kind of halfway fun runs haven't repeated. Honestly, I think they happened on a very low difficulty level where I could invade 5 cities simultaneously. The combined arms aspect was fun.
The one thing I haven't tried yet is tiny, online speed to see if condensed tactical play is fun.
I don't know what to make of 7 anymore. I'm left still being pretty confused about how it all comes together, whether certain buildings are really useful or not useful at all. What also bothers me is the bloat. The commander abilities (leadership tree...), the attributes, the civics most of all. The way that civ specific abilities just overpower in certain situations creating a totally different experience when what should happen is that they create a different quality experience with trade offs.
For instance, this modern age play was with Confucius. So, is that why it didn't feel like food buildings mattered to me? Gold felt slow to pick up, compared to say, Xerxes. That's a trade off then, but, what do I do about it? Without gold I just waited until my production just barely caught up right when my science victory projects were researched and ready to build. That's great, I guess, but I was left not doing anything the rest of the age other than waiting. It was great to have gold as Xerxes, and if there were AI players seriously rushing a culture or science victory I would have lost that game, but instead I had all the time in the world to produce 10 full stack armies and wipe out an entire civ before casually researching Ivy.
If I was facing military problems and had poor military production, I guess I could use diplomacy. Okay, so I can make hub towns. Only, it's unclear how these work. And what if I've already specialized my towns and the map is full? So I just do it ahead of time knowing in advance? Well, then the play style is a "solved problem" and what's the fun of playing?
Civ 7 is both streamlined, but also has bloated feature differentiation, but also has a lot of broken or unclear things. When you do figure out feature differentiation, which is sometimes very difficult to do given what information is hard to access, then the streamlining makes those features seem as if they have a solved pattern. If you get a good start position, the solved meta works better, and if your position is really bad, there's little you can do to catch up. Unless you play on lower difficulty, in which you're just running through a set of legacy paths and victory conditions that become very repetitive. It's not working for me as well anymore.
In the first couple of weeks it was fun to realize I didn't understand how a system was working, go back, then play better and use the game systems more. I still feel like I'm hoping that will continue to happen, that I'm missing something, and that it will still get better. I don't think that's going to happen much anymore.
For instance, I think I might not be optimizing my use of specialists, because there's something about generating happiness I think I'm missing. On the other hand, I think people are solving this using Ashoka and so forth. Then, let's say I really optimize and go Angkor Wat. Well, if I have time to get Angkor Wat and continue plopping specialists, then I'm already doing so well I don't think I need them. You know? This play should be a trade off with another leaving me weak in some other way.
I have not really figured out how to cleverly level up commanders. I just go either infantry/cavalry or ranged/siege combat upgrade, then 6 units per slot, then maybe ignore terrain. I've stopped trying different things. If I have a commander, I need it now, so I can't really specialize like a logistics commander and a fighting commander. I rarely have done enough naval let alone air combat to really specialize those commanders. It seems like it would be fun to use these commanders more, but it's not happening. Maybe I'm missing something. It feels like I'm not really missing that much though, at this point. When has someone genuinely used airdrop effectively to really push units forward in a big war?
So, I think Civ 7 is probably just the big broken mess people are saying. Too streamlined, while too complicated, while broken.
I think with this model of game, you need Antiquity to be longer and bigger. Exploration needs to be much better scenario driven with true distant lands colonization and colonial wars. Modern needs a much tighter, managed scenario. Either a more inevitable world war with big unit production bonuses so anyone can spin up a few armies without having the perfect production to do it and it all comes down to nuanced advantages. Where there's just no food anymore, grocers for instance adding mere adjacency bonuses to buff buff buff. Or, a more solid railroad tycoon game.
In fact, modern screams of a need to stop being an open ended 4X and instead exist as parallel scenarios that use your pre-built empire as a setting. Explorers should be an exclusively narrative based, kind of espionage based puzzle minigame (not actual puzzle solving, but rather trying to infiltrate, research, explore, prepare). Railroad tycoon should involve a little actual micromanagement of trains and routing. There's a way to it that's very simple (think Ticket to Ride as a very simple rail based board game compared to more complex ones), but with depth. Science could have that modern era thrill of endeavor and failure in big projects. There should be a more curated world war, with forced alliances, being dragged into war.
When you look at China's civs, they all feature slightly more dressed up narrative events. Other civs don't have this at all. I imagine they once intended all civs to have narrative structure like China, almost like organic mini-scenarios, but with much much more depth than what we get even with China. I wonder if the Modern Age wasn't designed with a scenario focus in mind.
It sounds like 5 games in one and overly ambitious, but I play civ 7 and feel like I'm playing the bones of that game. Modern doesn't feel like civ. Something's off about it.
Like I said, I'm taking a break. I'll test out the rest of the DLC in a couple weeks, but probably just to see what it's like, then I'm done. I'll be in the forums a bit, and if I have time I'll try my hand at modding, but civ 7 has lost me for now, sadly.
