Firaxis cannot control for all possible Civ/Leader Combos, and multiplayer gaming might reach a new peak as a consequence.

[AntSou]

Speculation:

I think discussions about combos will be as present online as adjacencies and yield porn were in Civ 6, or probably more.

There will be the more historically, narrative driven approach, and then there will be the min-maxers looking for the holy grail of broken combinations.

Any tweak that Firaxis does to a Civ/Leader, or some other element of the game, or any new introduction of a leader or civ or mechanic, will have exponential implications in the entire gaming meta. Multiplayer discussions will be dominated by this feature. This at a time when Firaxis are reducing the time commitment required for multiplayer games might mean the online side of Civ 7 will have more engagement than it ever had, both in the number of gaming sessions and in the amount of online discussion regarding strategies.

This depends on other factors, but I'm excited about the potential of multiplayer in Civ 7, even though I never played much of it in previous civ games due to the time required.

 

[Josephias]

Well, they are not hiding this is one of their intentions when decoupling leaders and civs.
It opens up a big door for potential overpowered combos, but at the same time the more reduced game span and systems with wich one leader-civ combo interacts will probably help them tweaking and adjusting.
How frequent and effective is this “maintenance” in the competitive scene is to be seen, but they will be succesful if they adress potential leader-civ bans in a reasonable time.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

There's certainly going to be some power combos.

How much this breaks the game is yet to be seen, because you only have that combination for 1/3 of the game and because of the rubberbanding in Age transitions.

If you can string 3 power combos in a row with the same leader, it infers that the leader needs to be balanced.

 

[moysturfurmer]

If you can string 3 power combos in a row with the same leader, it infers that the leader needs to be balanced.

I hate to be this guy, but it would “imply” that it needs to be balanced, and we would do the inferring

 

[Thenewwwguy]

Well, they are not hiding this is one of their intentions when decoupling leaders and civs.
It opens up a big door for potential overpowered combos, but at the same time the more reduced game span and systems with wich one leader-civ combo interacts will probably help them tweaking and adjusting.
How frequent and effective is this “maintenance” in the competitive scene is to be seen, but they will be succesful if they adress potential leader-civ bans in a reasonable time.

the goal, i’m sure, is to make sure no combo is *too* great. there will be tiers and metas cuz there’s no reason to set a floor, meaning that some combos will be better than others. But civ isn’t a game with a major competitive scene and there’s not really been huge emphases on balancing before, so i think they’ll be sure to keep certain abilities limited to certain amounts of “goodness” so that they never become overwhelming in combination

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I hate to be this guy, but it would “imply” that it needs to be balanced, and we would do the inferring

You're lucky that I'm not supposed to use my moderator powers for villainy.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

There's certainly going to be some power combos.

How much this breaks the game is yet to be seen, because you only have that combination for 1/3 of the game and because of the rubberbanding in Age transitions.

If you can string 3 power combos in a row with the same leader, it infers that the leader needs to be balanced.

Given that Leaders are based (loosely) on historical characters in specific Ages, the attributes/bonuses that we've seen so far are very general: + Resource capacity, + Culture per imported Resource, + production per Town, etc. That means there is a wide range of interactions potentially between these bonuses and the actual in-game situation, even in a single Age: numbers of towns, cities, resources, etc will dramatically change the actual benefits from any Leader.

Then you change Ages, and the situation in regards to Towns. Cities, and Resources changes, and quite probably the situation with your neighbors: you may find that your peaceful Leader is now facing a combination of distinctly Expansionist/Militarist states and Leaders and the old bonuses are nowhere near as valuable.

I can foresee a bunch of post-release posts again, this time focusing on Best Combinations of Civs and Leaders/Age, most of which will remain theoretical for most games, or be 'tweaked' out of existance if they prove to be OP.

 

[Navelgazer]

This reminds me of the competitive scene in Pokémon, where they way more combinations to think about, an infinitely larger competitive scene, and much less balance in general. Certain strategies are discovered, become ubiquitous, and other strategies are discovered to counter them, while there are nonetheless always alternative niche strategies that are fairly popular and understood even if they're not the most prevalent ones.

That said, I think one thing that Firaxis is doing in terms of balance is to design Leaders to fit particularly well with their most-associated Civs. Like, if they design Augustus and Rome to work super well together intentionally, they can get a better idea of what "OP" might look like than if they designed Civs and Leaders to check and balance each other in some way. Like, if Leaders and Civs were decoupled in Civ6, then we could have had Jadwiga leading Kongo for the ultimate Super-Relics combo and no "Can't found a religion" malus. But Civ7 doesn't appear to be being designed in that way. "Unintended" OP combinations will for sure be discovered (and it will be fun to do so!) but if the conceptual design is "let's give each leader someone we know they'll be wildly good with," then I think it'll lead to less game-breakage.

 

[Askia Muhammad]

Speculation:

I think discussions about combos will be as present online as adjacencies and yield porn were in Civ 6, or probably more.

There will be the more historically, narrative driven approach, and then there will be the min-maxers looking for the holy grail of broken combinations.

Any tweak that Firaxis does to a Civ/Leader, or some other element of the game, or any new introduction of a leader or civ or mechanic, will have exponential implications in the entire gaming meta. Multiplayer discussions will be dominated by this feature. This at a time when Firaxis are reducing the time commitment required for multiplayer games might mean the online side of Civ 7 will have more engagement than it ever had, both in the number of gaming sessions and in the amount of online discussion regarding strategies.

This depends on other factors, but I'm excited about the potential of multiplayer in Civ 7, even though I never played much of it in previous civ games due to the time required.

Played Civ 6 with a group of people each week for an hour. It was a wonderful experience and some of the most fun I’ve ever had, despite me not being the best player. We did it in a competitive yet, immersive manner with a role play element being carried on in Discord and a website where we would post a blog post game

Would absolutely love to see more multiplayer in Civ

 

[Thenewwwguy]

This reminds me of the competitive scene in Pokémon, where they way more combinations to think about, an infinitely larger competitive scene, and much less balance in general. Certain strategies are discovered, become ubiquitous, and other strategies are discovered to counter them, while there are nonetheless always alternative niche strategies that are fairly popular and understood even if they're not the most prevalent ones.

That said, I think one thing that Firaxis is doing in terms of balance is to design Leaders to fit particularly well with their most-associated Civs. Like, if they design Augustus and Rome to work super well together intentionally, they can get a better idea of what "OP" might look like than if they designed Civs and Leaders to check and balance each other in some way. Like, if Leaders and Civs were decoupled in Civ6, then we could have had Jadwiga leading Kongo for the ultimate Super-Relics combo and no "Can't found a religion" malus. But Civ7 doesn't appear to be being designed in that way. "Unintended" OP combinations will for sure be discovered (and it will be fun to do so!) but if the conceptual design is "let's give each leader someone we know they'll be wildly good with," then I think it'll lead to less game-breakage.

no way yeah i play competitive pokemon too—when there’s so many options, the question doesn’t become balance, it becomes “can you produce answers to existing threats when a new wave of pokemon comes out”, or even “can you turn this pokemon into a meaningful threat to the existing issues”

 

[AriochIV]

I'm not sure how making things mathematically impossible to balance improves the multiplayer experience.

 

[pokiehl]

They commented on this in an interview. Balance is absolutely on their QA team’s radar due to all the potential combos.

 

[Thenewwwguy]

I'm not sure how making things mathematically impossible to balance improves the multiplayer experience.

it’s because a meta is going to form either way, so as long as the meta isn’t too centralizing, complete balance is unreasonable

 

[Josephias]

I'm not sure how making things mathematically impossible to balance improves the multiplayer experience.

As others commented, here absolute balance is not your priority, but tweaking options that are perceived too good to avoid. Disparity of tactics, situations and scenarios make a fun game of finding exploits and counterexplouts for the community. You only need to ensure there is no “obvious” solution to that game.

As I news to commute to work I play regularly Empires & Puzzles to kill spare time in bus/train. You see the developers there make an extensive use of game statistics to identify if a hero card is always used, is doing insane amounts of damage or similar indicators (also in the lower level: less used, most early killed,…). This gives them insight on what to tweak. As long as there are no clear outliers on some of these scenarios, you’ll say there is certain balance.

 

[Naokaukodem]

To be fair I'm wondering if devs know about the meta even in single player... and the answer might be "no". (example : Civ3 ICS) So multiplayer... Civ6' was terrible. It required an amount of experience that was quite unfun, when for example you couldn't do anything against 10 horsemen on your land (against Scythia), or got rushed by war carts (Sumer ? Well, Gilgamesh), eagle warriors and the like. We players learned to ban Tomyris and Gilgamesh, and some even banned all the DLCs leaders on top of that. And that doesn't even end there ! There was the middle-game rushes (caravels on archipelago maps where all your cities are costal with campuses inside) and Flight, ignominous.

But there's something even more troubling in multiplayer : the kicks. I never figured out why, but when anyone entered a game without in the title "welcome all", it was immediately kicked out with no word. No matter if you asked for an explanation, you were kicked again without a word. This is really annoying, upsetting and draws a fearful picture of multiplayer. Brrr... That's why I wish a general lobby to come back, it is essential for the good sanity of the community, even if it has some risks of slip, but it worth a try IMHO.

As to multplayer meta, it couldn"t be worse than Civ6'. For what it's worth... (multiplayer is not very frequented) Ah and have an option to hide reloads, so that we don't have to refreash the page to see all the starting games at one glance...

 

[bbbt]

I definitely think/hope the ages will make multiplayer more viable. If anything, it's a nice "break point" where you can play three different 2-3 hour sessions on different days to finish a game instead if one go.

But imbalanced leaders has always been an issue, and is usually considered a con for multiplayer, not a pro. It's why you have community balance mods to try deal with that, ban lists for multiplayer (with the feature built into Civ 6 now), house rules like "free reroll if you get Venice" in Civ 5, etc... I think that's one of Civ's "balancing acts" is better balance for multiplayer can often mean more boring/bland abilities for single player.

 

[GeneralZIft]

I'm not certain it will be as amazing for MP as people suggest. I used to play vanilla Civ5 MP - it's not that bad, because the Civs/Leaders are pretty baseline, there is nothing too crazy, not too many factors to consider besides your actual playstyle.

I'm worried that all these dozens and dozens of bonuses for each Civ will make the game unbalanced, combined with the combo-system, the "any leader" system - it sounds like there will be eventually overpowered combinations...

This sounds like a negative thing for multiplayer. People will eventually discover all kinds of awful loopholes that will make entertaining YouTube videos (How To: Build 7 units in one turn)
My basis for saying this is that pre-day-1 Spiff already found crazy exploits for Egypt.

Now, combating terrible balance is a fat reset button which may or may not solve this problem depending on implementation. It's to be seen, but I'm hesitant to basically say that the MP is going to be amazing straight off the bat.
I'm more easily convinced that it will actually be a horsehockyshow - a very entertaining one though

 

[Leyrann]

My basis for saying this is that pre-day-1 Spiff already found crazy exploits for Egypt.

In a build that still has to go through the majority of the QA testing.

Heck, for which he was (only mostly unofficially) doing QA testing.

Not to mention that Spiff has previously revealed that when it comes to truly big exploits, he often contacts the game devs ahead of time and makes them aware of it - there have been videos where he literally said (paraphrased) "I told them about this months ago and they still haven't fixed it, so I'm putting it on YouTube". Considering he's practically a certainty for a pre-release copy, that's even more exploits he'll be able ot make them aware of before the game is released.

That being said, I'm not expecting much in terms of balance for Civ VII multiplayer. It's practically impossible to balance a 4X game for multiplayer, and I don't see why Civ VII would be different. At most I could see it being too complex for a single meta to emerge but I'm not convinced of that until I see it. (personally I also don't think devs should put disproportionate effort into balancing multiplayer, precisely because it's so difficult - imo, the percentage of number tweaking that's done with multiplayer in mind should be equivalent to the percentage of games that are multiplayer, out of all games played)

 

[AntSou]

My basis for saying this is that pre-day-1 Spiff already found crazy exploits for Egypt.

Tbf Spiffing Brit would find the needle in the haystack.

I understand your worries, yet there's a different balancing act that comes of it, which you can see, for instance, in Magic the Gathering Modern. If the paths towards OPness are many, the balancing occurs on those grounds alone. It is wild and out of control, even with banned cards, and I think that's what draw many players to it, while others avoid it.

In Civ 6 OP civs and leaders would be locked to the player picking them (unless duplicates were allowed? But duplicates are lame).

In Civ 7, even with theoretical OP combinations, factors specific to the game you're currently playing may still make some paths better than others. So not only are there more paths available by default, developments through out the game might make selection of one Civ over another the better choice, and this may be difficult to predict and plan in advance.

 

[GeoGeo]

This reminds me of the competitive scene in Pokémon, where they way more combinations to think about, an infinitely larger competitive scene, and much less balance in general. Certain strategies are discovered, become ubiquitous, and other strategies are discovered to counter them, while there are nonetheless always alternative niche strategies that are fairly popular and understood even if they're not the most prevalent ones.

I'm imagining a roster of 100+ leaders broken into meta tiers like OU, UU, etc.

And Ben Franklin turns out to be the Civ 7 version of gen 4 Garchomp and is banished to Ubers.