First Game Impressions

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

Disasters are absolutely awful and unfun. It's set on the lowest level yet I'm still having to repair something every other turn. At least as annoying are the notifications that pop up every time a disaster happens anywhere on the planet.

I have no idea why we can't just turn them off completely.

I like them when I'm in the right mood but fully agree you should be able to turn them off.

 

[Professor Phobo]

I wish there was some kind of risk/reward gameplay mechanic where you could get some kind of bonus at the cost of advancing a disaster meter, and when it was full, you had to pick a disaster from some menu of options based on the risks you were taking, and then the disaster would happen.

 

[Albertan Civfanatic]

Switching from one age to the next does actually clean up map clutter quite a bit, for a time.

 

[Albertan Civfanatic]

Resource management is actually cool.

 

[Albertan Civfanatic]

Yeah, it sucks your cities revert to towns. But hey, you do get a huge gold amount at the start of a new age to upgrade to cities, so it's not a total loss.

 

[Albertan Civfanatic]

The music in this game just melts my ears with glory, especially the medieval themes in the Exploration Age.

 

[theadder]

Yeah, it sucks your cities revert to towns. But hey, you do get a huge gold amount at the start of a new age to upgrade to cities, so it's not a total loss.

It’s more of an opportunity to reconsider things imo.

 

[Jeppetto]

Yeah, it sucks your cities revert to towns. But hey, you do get a huge gold amount at the start of a new age to upgrade to cities, so it's not a total loss.

That may be the intention. Much like you can relocate Capital to more fitting location for the next Age, you have the Ability to change which of your Settlements are Towns and which are Cities based on new strategy and needs. Though it only sounds that way - not sure If you can actually always reinstate what you had, or whether such choice at that point matters, and it may still ALSO be for the purpose of snowball-stopping on top.

 

[Albertan Civfanatic]

That may be the intention. Much like you can relocate Capital to more fitting location for the next Age, you have the Ability to change which of your Settlements are Towns and which are Cities based on new strategy and needs. Though it only sounds that way - not sure If you can actually always reinstate what you had, or whether such choice at that point matters, and it may still ALSO be for the purpose of snowball-stopping on top.

Yeah. Just when you think this game dropped the ball, you learn what the game is actually trying to do and you start liking it.

 

[queenpea]

I'm playing a Rome -> Norman -> America game, and in the Modern Age all my Roman and Norman regular buildings have transmogrified into the Mayan and Shawnee models. So much for "building in layers."

View attachment 718645

Ugh. Is this a bug? Very disappointing if it’s coded in.

 

[Archanist]

Ugh. Is this a bug? Very disappointing if it’s coded in.

Not on my PC right now, but IIRC each modern civ has a culture setting for antiquity and exploration buildings. While it's hard coded into the XML, I don't think its set in stone and a mod (or preferably Firaxis) would be able to keep old styles

 

[ThichN]

I've sunk a lot of hours into Civ7, so this isn't so much a first impression. But... this game is a total masterpiece. I am so tired of clickbaity YouTubers making money off of an invented misery (one video in my feed today just said "DISASTER" on the thumbnail ). The paranoid, tin-foil-hat side of me wants to say that there is a concerted effort to make $ thru views from minor issues in a long-standing franchise. There certainly are bugs and issues to fix (let's beat the dead UI horse), but in no way does it warrant the barrage of hatred. "Mixed" reviews on Steam? I'm shocked. Sure, the price point is high, but this game is deep and will certainly provide you with hours of entertainment. I've already logged 1 hour per 3 dollars I spent. A team of game devs spent years on this... yet you could go out to a nice restaurant for the same $ amount. This is one of the best games in the genre. Not later. But now. And I was skeptical! The fixes, DLC, etc. will be the icing on the cake.

I invite you to try it, open your sense of wonder, and embrace this as what I think will go down as one of the best entries in the series. Btw, I'm not discounting people's criticism, it's valid and fine to log your issues so that they can be fixed -- and looks like the team is working on it! (which is awesome of Firaxis) -- but just saying that it really is not a deal-breaker at all and the vitriolic aspects of the criticism smack of some kind of weird Internet-age privilege. Maybe it's my old age, having dealt with far worse launches / cryptic UI.

Happy Civ-ing!

(Background: Civ fan since Civ1. Favorites in the genre are 2, 4, and 5, SMAC, and Old World. Least favorite is Civ6.)

 

[Wyvern_Parade]

Just finished my first game: Jose Rizal, Maurya, Majapahit, Meiji Japan. Overall impression: a good game with some rough edges but potential for greatness.

Quick speed with Long Age setting was a nicely paced game for me. I felt like I had enough time to use all my units and pursue victory paths without each Age getting stale.

I enjoyed pretty much all the new systems, particularly Independent People, diplomacy, and resources.

The UI leaves a lot to be desired, and some important information is either missing or difficult to find. But it's not unplayable or a reason to refund a very fun game in my opinion.

I'm looking forward to exploring the strategy in more depth as I feel I'm still just figuring out things like town specialization, building adjacencies, when/where to overbuild, etc. Exciting stuff!

 

[AriochIV]

Not on my PC right now, but IIRC each modern civ has a culture setting for antiquity and exploration buildings. While it's hard coded into the XML, I don't think its set in stone and a mod (or preferably Firaxis) would be able to keep old styles

I'm assuming that it's happening because America has been assigned the "native American" default tileset, which I think is silly, but that's beside the point. In their first big livestream, Firaxis made a huge production out of showing that when you transitioned from Roman to Normans in exploration: look! you see some new Norman buildings, but you can still see the Roman buildings that haven't been overbuilt yet! But that was bunk; if they had chosen an Exploration civ that didn't use the Mediterranean tileset, the Roman buildings would have changed.

This is a completely cosmetic thing that many may not care about at all, but it matters to me... and more to the point, it was specifically touted as a feature. I don't like being lied to.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Kind of doing the relic cultrual game right now, even though I didn't really want to. The belief that gives two relics for converting a city state doesn't seem too bad.

 

[Brutus2]

Just finished my first complete game. Won Economic Victory as Xerxes, King of Kings. A lot of this was learning the specifics of how everything works. Overall, I had a ton of fun and I'm super excited to jump in to my next game with a better understanding of how it all works. All of the new features like civ switching, ages, towns and crisis are really fun but also the more subtle things like how yields and city building works. You really can build great cities in any terrain and I really like how resources work and how gaining multiple copies stack bonuses. I like the urban and rural district mechanic and I love how unique improvements stack on top of the basic improvement making them always an improvement to any tile where they can be placed. We all agree the UI needs tweaks but the game is still really fun.

Here is my feedback but please keep in mind these are just things I would love to see improved and I really like game overall.

• No XP gained for memento unlocks while in offline mode. This really hurts as I play a lot on Steam Deck or my laptop when travelling and don't always have internet. It feels really bad to spend hours playing and not get credit for anything you accomplish even after you reconnect. Steam can still grant achievements in offline mode, the game should do the same.
• Resource management screen is frustrating having to move one resource at a time. The screen needs a "remove all" and "clear all slots in this settlement" button.
• Please stop using red text for anything you can not currently build or afford. Red text on dark background is almost impossible to read.
• We really need better info to help decide which policy cards to slot. It's basically guessing which one will give the most yields. Like if a card says +2 on each culture building, how could I possibly know how many culture buildings I have in my empire and if that card is really worth using. There was a mod in civ6 that told you what you would gain from each policy card before you select it. If it needs to be a mod again, so be it but it would be great if this was just officially part of the game.
• Naval units have no "alert" option, they can only "sleep." That makes no sense.
• We need a unit list that actually lets you find the unit. It is too easy to put a unit on alert (or sleep for naval units) and then forget where you left them.
• Units need to be larger or have larger icons on the map. It is so hard to see units both enemy and your own.
• We must be able to turn off score victory at the very least.
• The "continue" option from the main menu seems to load the last autosave but not a manual save even if it's newer? When I use the continue option, I always have to re-do several things but when I load my last save it is right where I left off.
• It would be nice to have a list of my current trade routes so I know if I should build another merchant or not.
• Why no edge scrolling? This needs to be added.
• I keep getting the pop up telling me that I am suffering from war weariness even when I am ahead in the support. In fact if I mouse over the war icon on the ribbon, it specifically says that I am not getting any war weariness from this war but the turn blocking warning keeps happening.
• Is there something wrong with the continent lens? It clearly shows islands off the coast to be the same continent name and coloring as the homeland but they behave like distant lands in every way.

 

[Taefin]

Kind of doing the relic cultrual game right now, even though I didn't really want to. The belief that gives two relics for converting a city state doesn't seem too bad.

That’s the one I did. I found I had to make all the city states myself, since the AI never did in any age.

I finished my first game on culture. Having about 600 gold/turn made buying explorers easy and I barely missed getting 15 exploration era relics, since I declared war to try out modern units, and enemy units blocked the last relic (real Indiana Jones’s feeling). Finished turn ~60.

Culture might be the fastest victory type for me. The limiting factor for military victory was the AI getting ideology so late. Factories are much deeper into the tree than hegemony (which unlocks antiquity relics).

That was the most fun I ever had finishing a game of civ (or HK or Millenia). Took me probably 20 hours.

 

[StargazingDog]

Kind of doing the relic cultrual game right now, even though I didn't really want to. The belief that gives two relics for converting a city state doesn't seem too bad.

I could have probably done cultural with relics in my game, as I discovered SO many of them while overbuilding. I tossed each and every one of them. After about the eighth one, I thought that maybe I should have kept them.

 

[NowhereMan80]

I've sunk a lot of hours into Civ7, so this isn't so much a first impression. But... this game is a total masterpiece. I am so tired of clickbaity YouTubers making money off of an invented misery (one video in my feed today just said "DISASTER" on the thumbnail ). The paranoid, tin-foil-hat side of me wants to say that there is a concerted effort to make $ thru views from minor issues in a long-standing franchise. There certainly are bugs and issues to fix (let's beat the dead UI horse), but in no way does it warrant the barrage of hatred. "Mixed" reviews on Steam? I'm shocked. Sure, the price point is high, but this game is deep and will certainly provide you with hours of entertainment. I've already logged 1 hour per 3 dollars I spent. A team of game devs spent years on this... yet you could go out to a nice restaurant for the same $ amount. This is one of the best games in the genre. Not later. But now. And I was skeptical! The fixes, DLC, etc. will be the icing on the cake.

I invite you to try it, open your sense of wonder, and embrace this as what I think will go down as one of the best entries in the series. Btw, I'm not discounting people's criticism, it's valid and fine to log your issues so that they can be fixed -- and looks like the team is working on it! (which is awesome of Firaxis) -- but just saying that it really is not a deal-breaker at all and the vitriolic aspects of the criticism smack of some kind of weird Internet-age privilege. Maybe it's my old age, having dealt with far worse launches / cryptic UI.

Happy Civ-ing!

(Background: Civ fan since Civ1. Favorites in the genre are 2, 4, and 5, SMAC, and Old World. Least favorite is Civ6.)

I couldn't possibly care less what click bait Youtubers think, eithe way. I haven't watched nor will I watch one video there about this game. Having said that, this is the endless thing with the internet that just because it's an opinion you disagree with, you're bothered by it. I'm sure you wouldn't have this same reaction to a Youtuber with "TOTAL MASTERPIECE" in the thumbnail instead of "DISASTER".

I'm extremely disappointed it and have already essentially stopped playing. It's all opinion....if some are enjoying it that's great for them. But the changes have made it a totally different game and it really should have been renamed because this is absolutely not "Sid Meier's Civilization". Again you personally obviously like it, and that's great for you. But if you can't understand why anyone who has played a lot of Civilization would be put off by a completely different version of it....then you're guilty of the same thing you're frustrated at when it comes to YouTube.

 

[Sagax]

Finished my full 3-age playthrough. I was rating my excitement as 7/10 in related threads here, and ironically my first impression score for this game is also 7/10. The new features are interesting from the gameplay standpoint, but so, so much is missing from past games or shipped in a rudimentary state. "Promising, good-looking barebones" is how I would describe it.

Random observations:

1. If you are completely new, or want to learn the fundamentals before coming up with OP game-warping combos, then Mississippi + Ibn Battuta is as generalist as you can get. The focus on food and not-so-obvious utility is so generalist that sometimes I was wondering if I was playing with any bonuses at all. Glad to have this for my first game to learn, but will probably avoid in the future. The Burning Arrows are OP, though.

2. "Micromanagement is dead!.. Long live micromanagement!" Yes, they removed all the micro caused by workers and reduced the micro from unit movement. What they don't tell you is that it got replaced with micromanagement that for most players used to be automated - and that is citizen management. In the past, most of us would probably just let citizens work tiles by the default logic, and only occasionally turn on a specific yield focus, or go into city manager and manually assign crucial tiles. Now it is manual at all times, exacerbated by the fact that Civ 7 cities grow much faster and bigger than ever before. What used to be a slog of endless production queues is now a slog of endless citizen assignments. Although I admit, once you place your quarters just right and start adding specialists, it does feel good to see numbers go brrr.

3. UI needs work, less because of the aesthetics, and more because so many instances lack key functions/information that you need to make a decision. Some notable examples from memory:
- When AI approach you with a peace proposal, you cannot exit the screen to look at the map and figure out what city you want in your deal. ANY attempts to close the peace negotiation screen is viewed as you rejecting the proposal.
- Map search is sorely missing, in a game with gazillion resource types that also switch their functionality between ages.
- No sorting functionality in any kind of long lists, from trader destinations to the city list during resource allocation. Good luck finding that one particular town among your settlements.
- Ageless buildings aren't marked as such outside of the production queue - this becomes a problem once you start working on high-yield quarters and can't easily tell if you can overbuild the existing building or not. I've bricked a few unique quarters because of that.

4. Alliances are a trap. 9/10 times the acceptance is immediately followed by AI demanding a joint war, and refusal to accept immediately ends the alliance on top of a big relationship hit. You should probably avoid them until you go deep enough into some attribute trees, or are on a warpath anyway.