Discussion On Why Civ 7 Doesn't Feel Like A "Civ" Game

[tman2000]

Civ 7 is a great successor to the series. Looks walks and talks like a civ game in every way. Yes, that's just my opinion. See, the thing is you don't speak for me. So the premise that some shift in player steam stats or popular opinion means that we need to put our armchairs together and fix something, is false. The game is different this time. The target audience is different this time. Civ 7 doesn't need to fundamentally change. Sorry if it's not for you.

MODERN AUDIENCES

 

[Kyriakos]

If Ara was called Civilization 7, name-wise it would still have been the seventh game in the civ series.
Imo no longer building a civlization that will stand the test of time, implies that Civ7 very loosely is a civ game and it would be more apt to be called "Leader" than "Civilization".

 

[tman2000]

I think the transition began on Civ V because of 1UPT. Because you can have only one unit per tile, and archers can shoot over one tile, it means that realistically a tile has only 150-500 m radius at best.
Then Civ VI added districts. The district ugliness, adjacency sudoku, simple and lazy research tree, and removal of larger maps don't help at all.
And the lack of forests. In antiquity, there was nothing but forests. But they are gone from VI and VII, it is like the starting year was set to 1000 AD.
No true governments. Do you remember those hilarious advisors from Civ 2? I don't know if Civ V had true governments, but Civ VI doesn't. You only get a different number of policy card slots and a small bonus for something. They don't feel different at all because --- they aren't.
There is more but overall, I think the "original" Civ was lost a long time ago. I just didn't realize it until Civ VII came out.

Yes I think in this post I said that VI was a radical experiment, perhaps worth doing, but not worth sticking with. A forgivable failed experiment.

You can see in this thread that I've said Civ VII would work better as a deck-builder than as a Civ game. I'd streamline experience and attribute trees and combine them, and greatly streamline tech trees, having more of absolute tech and culture progress and maybe let you choose between one of two nodes each time, and maybe choose to either go forward one node or research the sister node, but you have to research both sister nodes to go two steps up the tree.

Then, the rest of the game is completing activities that earn cards, which become your unique units, your slottable policies, your legacy bonuses. That's the natural evolution of Civ VI/VII as a board/card game. I would play that game. But it has to stop trying to be Civ to be the best version of itself.

Look, at this point Firaxis, go for it. Super streamline, make it a deck builder. You can have 3-4 legacy paths for each type for each age and add a couple ages. Then it would be really cool as a deck builder where each age is unique depending on the mix of chosen legacy paths. Maybe some cards give players voting power over what legacy paths will be available in a given age.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I think the transition began on Civ V because of 1UPT. Because you can have only one unit per tile, and archers can shoot over one tile, it means that realistically a tile has only 150-500 m radius at best.
Then Civ VI added districts. The district ugliness, adjacency sudoku, simple and lazy research tree, and removal of larger maps don't help at all.
And the lack of forests. In antiquity, there was nothing but forests. But they are gone from VI and VII, it is like the starting year was set to 1000 AD.
No true governments. Do you remember those hilarious advisors from Civ 2? I don't know if Civ V had true governments, but Civ VI doesn't. You only get a different number of policy card slots and a small bonus for something. They don't feel different at all because --- they aren't.
There is more but overall, I think the "original" Civ was lost a long time ago. I just didn't realize it until Civ VII came out.

Civ III unique units destoyed the feel!

 

[aelf]

If Ara was called Civilization 7, name-wise it would still have been the seventh game in the civ series.
Imo no longer building a civlization that will stand the test of time, implies that Civ7 very loosely is a civ game and it would be more apt to be called "Leader" than "Civilization".

It's wild how to some, previous marketing is what primarily defines a Civ game.

Contrast this with the OP's thesis that it's all in the game mechanics. This will either be a very fraught discussion or an echo chamber for certain sentiments.

 

[Kyriakos]

Civ III unique units destoyed the feel!

CivIII was the first title in the series that had visible borders, resource trading, animation in units and unique units (it also, for some reason, lost the event file that Civ2 expansions had, and also lost animated advisors; iirc there also was no civil war).
Overall, imo it was certainly an upgrade over Civ2.

 

[tman2000]

If Ara was called Civilization 7, name-wise it would still have been the seventh game in the civ series.
Imo no longer building a civlization that will stand the test of time, implies that Civ7 very loosely is a civ game and it would be more apt to be called "Leader" than "Civilization".

They should rename Civ 7 as "Civilizations: Legacies" then make it a deck builder with more strongly streamlined gameplay, leaving most variability to be expressed within the cards you collect mostly by completing legacy paths. Then add a compatible FTP mobile game with totally different graphics but the same gameplay that can crossplay.

Now it's about your leader and the "legacy" the collect in terms of building their deck.

You then add variations on legacy paths for each age to vary gameplay and make room for more types of cards.

FTP model you get 5 leaders, but pay to unlock more. Pay to unlock legacy paths. You can play a match with a legacy path if someone else owns it, and even get that card for the match, but you only keep those cards if you own the pack.

I'm saving your company 2k!

 

[Kyriakos]

I'm saving your company 2k!

I see what you did there.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

CivIII was the first title in the series that had visible borders, resource trading, animation in units and unique units (it also, for some reason, lost the event file that Civ2 expansions had, and also lost animated advisors; iirc there also was no civil war).
Overall, imo it was certainly an upgrade over Civ2.

Yeah, totally made it so that it didn't feel like a civ game.

 

[Shirotora Kenshin]

Reading this thread but have still no clue why Civ7 just don‘t feel good to me, and also no clue why it not feels to many of us like a Civ game hehe

 

[thecrazyscot]

Turn-to-turn gameplay feels like civ to me, and that's something no other game has been able to achieve imo

 

[tman2000]

When it comes to judging the AI, here's how I see it: the AI was better at being an opponent, in strict terms of a competitor, in past games, especially up through IV. This is because the victory types were straightforward and amounted to what the AI is naturally good at: getting big numbers. When a victory essentially amounts to "accumulate a lot of yields" then it's not so hard for it to be a competitor. For a standard Science victory, the AI is well geared in every Civ title to do those most basic of things: get lots of Science, and build something. With Civ V, victory conditions became more complex, especially the Diplomatic and Cultural victory types. The AI from then on has been less of a competitor—but still one, to some degree—and more of an obstacle to the player's victory, something to overcome. In the less strict terms of an obstacle, I think the AI is around the best it's been in VII: without bonuses that catapult it ahead from the first turn, it's better at getting in the player's way. Especially in wars, it manages to fight pretty cleverly.

This does seem to be almost the driving design premise of VII. I've been critical of how slowly they implement change even when pretty glaring bugs are present. I wonder if almost all of their focus is on tuning the AI. I know notque has observed the AI is pretty good, even if he has had to coax it to do its thing a little bit, to see it perform even better.

Still, this is a huge bet to place. If the satisfaction from AI improvements doesn't compensate for the lost satisfaction of game feel, it will have been a bad bet.

 

[tman2000]

Reading this thread but have still no clue why Civ7 just don‘t feel good to me, and also no clue why it not feels to many of us like a Civ game hehe

I was thinking, even without builders, they could have let you choose "do you want to create an improvement" or "do you want to cut down the forest for yields". So the decision to remove builders is just one decision. They also made the decision that you cannot change the landscape anymore.

I think Civ 7 removes some big things that seem obvious, but then we are distracted and don't realize other things were removed as well.

 

[tman2000]

I see what you did there.

I would play an age based civ-lite deck builder with good tactical play, though.

 

[tman2000]

Yeah, totally made it so that it didn't feel like a civ game.

I could be that Civ VI was really stretching the boundaries of how a civ game could not be a civ game, like as far as they can possibly go, and we just didn't realize it because it hadn't broken past those boundaries yet.

People assume this kind of teleology: "Well, games evolve and change and there are new audiences and each generational cycle has the same complaints over and over again. And anyway, Civ games are never good at launch, you need at least two expansions before they're fun."

What if it's the case that there is a core Civ experience, that each successive game both added to and subtracted from that core experience with the features they introduced, that Civ V and VI's poor launch states were unacceptable, and that it just took until everything totally broke with VII for us to finally have had enough.

I don't think Civ games ought to launch inadequate. I also do think there just might be a core civ franchise feel that its various iterations have both expressed and clashed against, but up until now they expressed well enough to feel contiguous with that franchise experience.

Like, each game adds things that adulterates the experience in some ways, but other things that improve it. Some games, like 4, add more than what is subtracted. Others, like 6, take away more than they add, but without breaching the feel of the franchise absolutely.

 

[Sync]

For me, Civ 4 was the last game that felt like a civ game to me. I bought 5 and 6 on release and quickly stopped playing both within weeks. I decided not to buy 7.

Maybe like me, you’re just too old now. You may no longer be the target market. I’ve learned that this isn’t a productive question to ask, as there’s no answer that will really satisfy you. Ignore any snarky replies that you may get and focus on playing the games that you enjoy.

 

[tman2000]

For me, Civ 4 was the last game that felt like a civ game to me. I bought 5 and 6 on release and quickly stopped playing both within weeks. I decided not to buy 7.

Maybe like me, you’re just too old now. You may no longer be the target market. I’ve learned that this isn’t a productive question to ask, as there’s no answer that will really satisfy you. Ignore any snarky replies that you may get and focus on playing the games that you enjoy.

I don't buy this argument. Nothing about Civ 7 screams "tailor made for a specific generation". Neither does it scream, "made specifically for people who have never played this franchise and have no expectations, but who would find the topic appealing".

I would also argue that 5 and 6 took substantive departures from the core formula - I don't mean hexes and OUPT - that in hindsight is more apparent since VII shows what part of that game feel was still in 5 and 6 irrespective of their differences from it.

Civ 6 with the social policies, civic tree and board game approach was radically pushing the boundaries of the formula. I don't think 5 was quite as much. I think 5 did 3 things that end up getting conflated. First, it had a very hollow late game, which everyone talks about. This had to be grafted in, and the result is a decent game, but not very much in the legacy of the franchise. Now, the reason the late game is hollow is because of the second thing, which is that Civ 4's mechanics were dumbed down a bit. I played 4 later than the other games, and it took me a long time to understand the importance of growing villas so my economy could support mid-game science race. It was easier to comprehend how resource exploitation worked, but even so, it asked a lot more of you than 5 did. On top of this "dumbing down" was a third feature, the hard settlement caps of 5. This was certainly an interesting twist, but a horribly inappropriate one given the dumbing down that coincided. A specifically tall emphasis 4x game needs more complexity to justify the limited scale. Adding scope for scale. They reduced both scope and scale, which I think made 5 seem bad.

If you break it down, 5's inadequacies are due to more than one issue that tend to be conflated because they interrelate. I'd say the main problem with 5 was the dumbing down, which was escalated by the other issues. Then, the solution was a set of gameplay features that weren't very "civ like".

 

[itix]

Yes I think in this post I said that VI was a radical experiment, perhaps worth doing, but not worth sticking with. A forgivable failed experiment.

You can see in this thread that I've said Civ VII would work better as a deck-builder than as a Civ game. I'd streamline experience and attribute trees and combine them, and greatly streamline tech trees, having more of absolute tech and culture progress and maybe let you choose between one of two nodes each time, and maybe choose to either go forward one node or research the sister node, but you have to research both sister nodes to go two steps up the tree.

Then, the rest of the game is completing activities that earn cards, which become your unique units, your slottable policies, your legacy bonuses. That's the natural evolution of Civ VI/VII as a board/card game. I would play that game. But it has to stop trying to be Civ to be the best version of itself.

Look, at this point Firaxis, go for it. Super streamline, make it a deck builder. You can have 3-4 legacy paths for each type for each age and add a couple ages. Then it would be really cool as a deck builder where each age is unique depending on the mix of chosen legacy paths. Maybe some cards give players voting power over what legacy paths will be available in a given age.

I had to spill it out fast because kids were pushing me

You are spot on with the deck builder. There is a bonus card to this, sometimes a malus card to that. With each civic, you unlock pick a new card from the pile. You get a new governor card, or maybe an envoy card. With each research, you unlock pick a new building card. In the beginning of each turn, you roll a dice and if unlucky, you get a flooding, massive eruption or a storm - lose/gain x yields. Or gain a great person - +1 movement to naval units, or gain 500 gold, or gain art card to your museum. Get a streak and you get a massive bonus. Another unlucky roll - I didn't gain enough era points and now I enter the dark age. Okay, lets play some policy cards again.

I don't say Civ 6 is a bad game, it just lacks strategic play. I believe I would love to play Civ 7, too, but it feels like Civ 6 2.0. They just changed some rules so you have 3 minigames instead of 1. Can be fun, no doubt.

 

[Uberfrog]

In all seriousness, Civ 7 is so different from the Civ franchise core, in my opinion, it would work better as a game if it shed more superficial elements it carries in order to appear as as Civ game.

I guess I just don’t really agree that the only similarities are superficial.

The turn to turn gameplay is exactly the same as other civ games. You improve tiles, you build units, you explore the map, you fight. The 4 X’s are absolutely present. I don’t know where this deck building idea is coming from, but you’re right, that would make it a completely different game!

I think it’s actually the superficial stuff that people are finding problematic. The very idea of a reset between ages really puts a lot of people off, even if the actual reset is not that severe. You can still keep all your core territory. You can still keep the majority of your units. Buildings become obsolete to encourage you to build different things, but the cities are still recognisably the same. And yet we still see complaints of “hard resets” and “three separate mini games” which really don’t chime with my actual gameplay experience at all.

 

[Kyriakos]

I guess I just don’t really agree that the only similarities are superficial.

The turn to turn gameplay is exactly the same as other civ games. You improve tiles, you build units, you explore the map, you fight. The 4 X’s are absolutely present. I don’t know where this deck building idea is coming from, but you’re right, that would make it a completely different game!

I think it’s actually the superficial stuff that people are finding problematic. The very idea of a reset between ages really puts a lot of people off, even if the actual reset is not that severe. You can still keep all your core territory. You can still keep the majority of your units. Buildings become obsolete to encourage you to build different things, but the cities are still recognisably the same. And yet we still see complaints of “hard resets” and “three separate mini games” which really don’t chime with my actual gameplay experience at all.

Imagine playing Europa Universalis and arguing that it's ok Russia turned to Britain, because it keeps its core territory