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

[tman2000]

Many people claim Civ 7 doesn't feel like a "Civ" game. Is this just a poor reaction to change, or is there substance to the sentiment?

One point of reference I use to consider this question is in the comparison of the Elder Scrolls series to its MMO, The Elder Scrolls Online. Some efforts were made to make TESO feel like a TES game. You can play first person, with sword and shield and an emphasis on action combat not present in some MMOs. There are environments which copy foot for foot their equivalent zones in the core TES games. So why does TESO feel nothing like a TES game?

The answer lies with the cadence of gameplay cycles and loops, of how you prepare for, engage with and follow through on combat encounters. How you engage with the world, what limits are placed on your movement, what you can do. The timing and patterns of response followed in seeing an enemy, either avoiding, sneaking around, or attack them. TES games and TESO simply have radically different cadences for all these systems.

With that in mind, I think we can analyze the "game feel" of Civ 7 versus other games.

One major change in Civ 7 that would restore the feel of Civ would be if you could place improvements anywhere within city radius not just adjacent to already built districts. The pacing, the tactile cadence of engaging near and far as needed with exploitable map resources helped create a sense of slowly encroaching on nature while symbiotically being interwoven with it for all civ games until 7. A notable example of this is building a city in a jungle biome before having the ability to chop jungle. How you are first subject to the land then begin to dominate and transform it but in a patchwork way.

The tactile cadence of that makes 7 feel fundamentally different. They could have kept that feel and still eschewed builders, just by letting you improve anywhere in your city radius. They also made biomes less dense with their core feature.

Civ 7 jungles have alopecia.

As for combat, the age system simplifies and standardizes units into specific tiers, but it’s not like having a bunch of swordsmen tear through your warriors wasn’t a thing in previous games. I suppose though it is different. It was a big deal to research iron working, find iron resources and on top of that produce swordsmen. In Civ 4, connecting to bronze so you could even build those axemen or spearmen was critical.

In Civ 7, tiers come through a simple upgrade in a short streamlined tech tree with relatively affordable upgrade costs for all units and otherwise limited variability. So it really misses the entire cadence of trying to set up to get particular units. The empire resources transform a constraint on access to unit upgrades into a bonus applied on top of them. I have yet to decide if it feels good. So far it just feels marginal (ie what matters more is having more units and a better economy). Even so, while the core concept of resources benefitting unit performance remains, the feel of it is totally different because a constraint that gates access is now just a minor bonus, although one which does stack.

I’m sure if you went through you could find other ways the streamlining has completely altered game feel away from most core Civ experiences. Government, diplomacy.

My thoughts are that many of these systems lose so much “feel” in the process of streamlining that there’s no reason to keep them other than to say they did. Like, let’s just not have government.

Civ 7's government system would be much better if it stopped trying to pose as government. What if golden age celebrations were more customizable and unique instead of tying them to a forced “guys we still have governments” thing. How cool would it be to have something almost like a deck builder system where you can assign 3-7 "cards" for each golden age celebration for custom bonuses on top of the system of having celebrations more often with more happiness and so forth?

However, by pretending to have a feature in past Civ games - government - Civ 7 produces a kind of muted "streamlined" version of its own design concept. Civ 7 deviates so much by streamlining so hard, it loses the "Civ" feel completely in many areas. However, it then also fails to provide a chewy, satisfying feel for the changes it has made.

So Civ 7 falls short of its design ethos by masquerading as a Civ game.

There are also ways to streamline game systems without abolishing them, or at least just improving them for the next game in the franchise rather than leaving them unchanged.

Diplomacy could have remained the same but with a more intuitive and transparent affinity and agenda system. Diplomatic behavior by the Civ 6 AI was notoriously non-transparent. Firaxis's excuse is they don't want us to know the full system because then we'd just play around it. What??? What a terrible design philosophy. Maybe Firaxis just isn't that good at making AI and they wanted to create diplomatic behavior that was somewhere between feeling totally predictable or totally random, to give the impression that the AI was "good" when it really actually wasn't.

In other words, there are many things that didn't need any change, just actually good UI and AI. Firaxis like many modern AAA devs seems to have a competency ceiling. Instead of iterating past systems to be improved over time due to working a problem for many years, they just mix up the formula and abandon progress.

I think therefore that Civ 7 doesn't feel like a Civ game, to the point of being a worse version of itself by holding on to superficial elements of the franchise.

For discussion, what other areas from Civ 7 represent a "game feel" that is contrary to how the Civ franchise has always felt? Could Civ 7 change to better fit the franchise (i.e.: still have no builders, but improve any tile within city radius)? Likewise, from the other side of the coin, are there traditional Civ elements that Civ 7 could let go of to be a better version of itself (i.e.: replace governments with golden age social policies).

 

[tman2000]

Civ 7 jungles have alopecia.

I think we can explain this by saying that the design philosophy of Civ 7 was to make access to yields very tight. Jungle improvements provide science, and we can't have too much of that!

Civ 7 was designed to be very stingy with letting the player build up yields, in part because this makes it notable when you do unlock major yields by overlapping bonuses and features. On the other hand, Firaxis's bete noire is their bad AI, and I think having tighter, more repetitive and narrower access to yield accumulation makes it easier to design AI.

If human players can just cheese the heck out of yields and snowball ahead of AI, then how could AI ever compete.

Thus, Civ 7's design seems intentionally handicapped, straightjacketed into a very tight and narrow experience with limited choice, so that the AI is easier to design.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Well, to me Civ7 does feel like a civ game. Civ switching is not immersion breaker to me (I understand it's subjective) and the rest of the changes are still more or less within the same game concept. I do what I always did, with looking for best city spots, planning buildings, building armies and the like.

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

For me it's because it's put leaders front and centre about civilizations. Civilizations swap out, which could be find if they were "dynasties" that you could pick a subset of like how you change god in age of mythology - groups of dynasties under a broad civilization you choose at the start.

I play Civ because I like the experience of leading a civilization through time. I don't play because I like number go up, and I don't play because I like Caesar.

What I get from a civilization game I do not get from Civ VII. So it is not a civilization game to me and I won't be buying it without major changes to how Civ switching works.

 

[Menocchio]

I think we can explain this by saying that the design philosophy of Civ 7 was to make access to yields very tight. Jungle improvements provide science, and we can't have too much of that!

This doesn't track, because a) they did that as well in Civ VI with campuses, and b) terrain yields are the least "tight" they've ever been. Tundra cities are useful for anyone, same with desert and rainforest, and plains hills are no longer the king of the universe. Civ VII throws yields at the player like candy on Halloween, comparable to VI late in its lifecycle when you had the yield inflation of Preserves, Faith bonuses, rebalanced Khmer, and more, to say nothing of things like the Secret Societies game mode.

Vegetated terrain in VII is sparse because making it as dense as it was in past games would make traversing the map incredibly difficult when movement is already more restricted compared to VI. Remember that "featured" tiles like vegetated, rough, wet all end movement by default—as opposed to VI, where they had a 2 movement point modifier.

Furthermore, this isn't really a new observation about the franchise. People complained about VI making forests less dense than V, both in terms of their visual density and tile count. VII also has the difference that tiles can't be chopped anymore (something I dislike), meaning that unless squashed by a district, tile features are permanent. To me this can be kind of annoyingly restrictive and I wish there was more differentiation. I think about Age of Wonders 4, in which new provinces have an array of buttons that show the possible improvements on a tile, so you can choose between building a farm/forester, or fishery/quarry, etc.

Civ VII to me feels like a Civ game. The difference isn't really any more of a shock to me than the transition from V to VI. I'd even go so far as to say that the transition from IV to V, and the overall shift from IV to VI, is much bigger. Civ IV is heavily a strategy game; VI is more distinctly a digital board game. This is fine for me, but not for others.

 

[tman2000]

For me it's because it's put leaders front and centre about civilizations. Civilizations swap out, which could be find if they were "dynasties" that you could pick a subset of like how you change god in age of mythology - groups of dynasties under a broad civilization you choose at the start.

I play Civ because I like the experience of leading a civilization through time. I don't play because I like number go up, and I don't play because I like Caesar.

What I get from a civilization game I do not get from Civ VII. So it is not a civilization game to me and I won't be buying it without major changes to how Civ switching works.

I'm not as upset about the "name of my country" change, but in terms of analysis, what civ swapping disrupts is the cadence of feeling like you're falling behind or pulling ahead as a civ. You can have a sense of your absolute progress through history as a unified culture against other cultures. The "race through history".

Civ 7 totally lacks that. You're racing through ill-defined ages I suppose, which ought to be defined in terms of:

1. legacy path progress
2. crisis status and response

These two features are all there are to tell you where your "empire you believe in" is relative to other cultures. They do so very ineffectually.

So the entire feel of your culture in a race against others, with relative progress behind and ahead is lost.

They could have added this "game feel" to the age systems. It would unfortunately require some narrative concessions that are politically incorrect. Being a thriving culture in the age of exploration means potentially being a thriving, successful colonial and imperial giant. Of leaving the other cultures behind to be the pitiful colonized. So I can see reasons why that was muted, as it's a bit more stark and forceful than Babylon inventing computers before the Aztecs.

 

[kaspergm]

For me it's because it's put leaders front and centre about civilizations. Civilizations swap out, which could be fine if they were "dynasties" that you could pick a subset of like how you change god in age of mythology - groups of dynasties under a broad civilization you choose at the start.

I play Civ because I like the experience of leading a civilization through time. I don't play because I like number go up, and I don't play because I like Caesar.

What I get from a civilization game I do not get from Civ VII. So it is not a civilization game to me and I won't be buying it without major changes to how Civ switching works.

I feel exactly like this as well.

Those things, as well as the jarring miss-matches that comes when coupling leaders randomly with civs (Benjamin Franklin leading Egypt, Napoleon leading the Han, etc.) totally kills immersion for me.

 

[tman2000]

Tundra cities are useful for anyone, same with desert and rainforest, and plains hills are no longer the king of the universe. Civ VII throws yields at the player like candy on Halloween

Well, again, that does actually reinforce the idea that Civ VII was designed more to be easy for the AI to play, rather than fun for the player.

Vegetated terrain in VII is sparse because making it as dense as it was in past games would make traversing the map incredibly difficult when movement is already more restricted compared to VI. Remember that "featured" tiles like vegetated, rough, wet all end movement by default—as opposed to VI, where they had a 2 movement point modifier.

Furthermore, this isn't really a new observation about the franchise. People complained about VI making forests less dense than V, both in terms of their visual density and tile count.

Well, you're talking about a very consistent (and disliked) design direction under the supervision of a single design lead.

Civ VII to me feels like a Civ game. The difference isn't really any more of a shock to me than the transition from V to VI. I'd even go so far as to say that the transition from IV to V, and the overall shift from IV to VI, is much bigger. Civ IV is heavily a strategy game; VI is more distinctly a digital board game. This is fine for me, but not for others.

I subjectively agree with this if I'm looking at the games visually and engaging with tactile pointy clickyness. The more abstracted big picture concerning the flow of the progress of the game, IMO, sees 7 as radically clashing in feel.

You raise a point though, which is that Civ is a strategy franchise. Moving away from strategy again seems to be hand-in-hand with the failure to design an effective AI which can manage strategic decision making competently. While I wasn't opposed to experimenting with the "digital board game" for VI, it's sort of clear now that that was an experiment that was loosely implied by V, attempted in VI, and should have been abandoned for VII maybe to be revisited later.

 

[tman2000]

Well, to me Civ7 does feel like a civ game. Civ switching is not immersion breaker to me (I understand it's subjective) and the rest of the changes are still more or less within the same game concept. I do what I always did, with looking for best city spots, planning buildings, building armies and the like.

Yeah, I guess, Civ Revolution also felt like a Civ game in that sense, but...

 

[aelf]

Everyone's idea of what makes a Civ game may differ. As I said in my so-called doom and gloom thread, the biggest influence on what the general playerbase thinks a Civ game is about is probably the most popular entry to date, which is Civ 6. Simply by weight of numbers.

But if you ask old fans of the series, you will find not an insignificant proportion who'd say that the series identity changed or was lost long ago, likely between Civ 4 to 5. So an exercise in trying to prove that Civ 7 is somehow more different from everything else before is liable to fall apart. It is quite different from Civ 6, yes, but there are many people who say that about Civ 6 compared to Civ 5 or Civ 5 compared to Civ 4. And those who only really got into the series with Civ 6 (which could mean they may have played earlier entries but not much) don't have a good enough handle on the history of the series to make that judgement.

 

[tman2000]

So an exercise in trying to prove that Civ 7 is somehow more different from everything else before is liable to fall apart.

I'm not making an effort to prove anything. I've highlighted a number of substantive areas where Civ 7 disrupts the basic game feel of the franchise.

 

[Menocchio]

It's debatable, probably unlikely, that terrain yield distribution makes the game strictly easier for the AI vis-a-vis the player. It makes awful starts—think of how common tundra starts are in this game, and its initial lack of a restart button—less punishing. Overall the AI needs to "cheat" less than it did in the recent past.

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. In VI so long as you surpassed the AI's massed numbers and combat buffs, you didn't have to use your brain too much during wartime.

But looking at it that way, at the role of the AI, again VII isn't a huge change from past games in the series.

 

[Gorbles]

I'm not making an effort to prove anything. I've highlighted a number of substantive areas where Civ 7 disrupts the basic game feel of the franchise.

In your opinion. What makes this any different from all the other back and forth about what people like and / or don't like about the game?

It's all still just vibes. Valid opinion, but what new ground are you expecting to tread?

 

[aelf]

I'm not making an effort to prove anything. I've highlighted a number of substantive areas where Civ 7 disrupts the basic game feel of the franchise.

That's a distinction without a difference.

 

[Uberfrog]

We should call this the No True Civ Game Fallacy.

I feel like every long-running franchise has people desperate to gatekeep and determine that at least one instalment is “not a true X game”. It usually just means they don’t like it.

There are plenty of people who think that Civ 6 wasn’t a civ game. It is the most popular game in the whole series.

There are plenty of people who thought that Civ 5 wasn’t a civ game. It is now looked back on fondly by many people who hate Civ 7.

There will always be people for whom the franchise peaked with Civ 6/5/4/3… and feel it’s gone downhill ever since. It doesn’t matter.

Civ 7 is a civ game.
Civ 6 is a civ game.
Civ Rev is a civ game.

They all have far more in common than their differences (which are numerous).

 

[itix]

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.

 

[tman2000]

That's a distinction without a difference.

Again, you're arguing about the argument.

I'm not trying to prove that Civ 7 isn't a Civ game, and then walk away with my "naner naner Civ 7 fans can just go cry" award. I'm trying to have a discussion about somewhat hard to define, but substantive elements that make Civilization as a franchise feel the way it does. I'm seeking more nuance in this discussion over Civ 7. It could be that admitting how far Civ 7 deviates, we might find and give permission for Civ 7 to deviate even further to at least become a better version of itself.

You seem to be having a "haters are wasting time" argument. Which is fine, but that's within the substantive conversation I wanted to have. Let's leave it at that in this post, for my part.

 

[Buckets]

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.

 

[aelf]

Again, you're arguing about the argument.

I'm not trying to prove that Civ 7 isn't a Civ game, and then walk away with my "naner naner Civ 7 fans can just go cry" award. I'm trying to have a discussion about somewhat hard to define, but substantive elements that make Civilization as a franchise feel the way it does. I'm seeking more nuance in this discussion over Civ 7. It could be that admitting how far Civ 7 deviates, we might find and give permission for Civ 7 to deviate even further to at least become a better version of itself.

It doesn't matter. The premise of the thread is Civ 7 is not or doesn't seem like a Civ game. You either have to establish that this is true or you simply assume that it is, that latter which would make the discussion highly dubious (more on that below).

You seem to be having a "haters are wasting time" argument. Which is fine, but that's within the substantive conversation I wanted to have. Let's leave it at that in this post, for my part.

What I say has nothing to do with whether you hate the game or not. It's merely stating the objective ontological limitations of such a premise for discussion.

But having said that, indeed if you simply assume that Civ 7 isn't like a Civ game and refuse to countenance disagreement with that, then you're really creating another thread to attract 'haters' of Civ 7 to come here and rail about what makes it not a Civ game, whether you explicitly intend to or not.

 

[tman2000]

Civ 7 is a civ game.
Civ 6 is a civ game.
Civ Rev is a civ game.

Fallout 4 is a civ game.

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 think instead of having a continuous empire between ages (which breaks down in the Modern Age), you should hard reset in each Age as if you were cold starting Exploration or Modern. However, your legacy points will give you cards in a "deck", and the other players will have "decks". The game is now a partial deck building.

This deck will follow typical deck building rules. You have a set of cards, with probability that any of them might be drawn, but you'll only draw a few of them at a time. These cards then might do different things. Maybe they can be included as golden age bonus policies. Maybe they're legacy social policies or traditions. Maybe they're a unique unit you can build, or an economic bonus.

Each age - being as streamlined as they are - are now a setting for deploying these decks you've built up as a legacy. Your meta-progression gives legacy cards and mementos to jump start your deck (with a trade off between cards that give you an antiquity head start, or are saved to be powerful in later ages). Then, you play these tight, narrow age scenarios basically competing to win cards while accumulating points. The legacy paths affect access to specific, powerful cards. But they do not drive player score and sacrificing trade-offs to win a legacy path might come at the cost of player score (more tied to size of empire, military, economy, etc.)

With this in mind, they can add in extra or customized sets of legacy paths. You can choose to play Exploration with "treasure fleet economic legacy" or with "craft workshops economic legacy". Etc.

This mix of systems would add meat and flavor to Civ 7's model. Instead, they are trying to doll-up 7 as if it's part of the Civ franchise. It's like eating furikake covered onigiri flavored ice-cream, but without flavor so as not to offend. Like, just give me strawberry and vanilla flavor if we're eating ice cream. I'll go get sushi if I want rice, seaweed still flavors.