First Game Impressions

[Pistol90]

Combat looks really good, I lost my first war already.

Graphics, there are plus and minuses. Mountains and small rivers looks bad, cities and units good.

Biggest downside is basicly non-existing game setup ... you cant chose who you play against, standard is biggest map, very few map types (probably also very similar).

It now long time for two expansions, 10 DLCs, 20 patches and 20 mods to come out .... and made it better game.

 

[Uberfrog]

Squeezed in an early hour before the commute this morning. Rome / Lafayette / Sovereign difficulty.

It looks lovely. Feels very civ, and the music is wonderful so far.

Going in rather blind as to build order (the tutorial is fine but the UI not much help), didn’t quite build warriors quick enough. Managed to fend off the land units but hostile IP galleys are a pain in the neck with their ranged attacks.

Biggest downside is basicly non-existing game setup ... you cant chose who you play against, standard is biggest map, very few map types (probably also very similar).

The first time you play, they hide the advanced settings for some reason. In there you can specify your opponents and change age length, disaster/crisis intensity. You are right about the lack of maps/sizes though.

 

[Taefin]

100 turns of antiquity with Trung Trac as Khmer. I don’t think I really utilized the Khmer bonuses, but I let myself get super overextended through oliphaunt conquest. Finished the military legacy past just as my army was being obliterated taking the last city across a navigable river. Ballista are fun. Playing immortal and most AI are struggling (2-3 settlements only) except Ashoka who I warred with. The happiness crisis just started and I’m guessing I’m going to be giving back quite a few settlements to the AI as my empire shrinks back to a decent exploration age base.

UI feels like I’m playing an off brand 4x from 10 years ago, and the game is nowhere near as polished as HK/Millenia at launch. I’m enjoying the scrappiness, but one can only ask, “what happened FXS?”

Maybe what I am loving the most is how excited I am for my empire to collapse during the crisis. I achieved my legacy goal and would have ended a game of civ6 with the damage I did to the AI, and yet it feels like the game and world are just beginning. It sounds like happiness becomes game-able with experience, but I am enjoying not being there yet. Also, that culture and/or science can be neglected knowing you’ll reset later, makes it feel like there are a lot more options for acceptable play.

 

[Rob Airdrie]

Very jealous of all of you! All I get when I try to open is a crash report

 

[Gbest]

I presume I am very much in the minority as primarily a console player. Anyone tried it on console yet? Curious to know how it looks and performs and won't be playing until next week.

Bought it on both PC and PS5 so I can pick up a save from my bed when I am too tired for sitting on a chair and using the laptop.
Crossplay is great, but unfortunately you have to pay twice.
So far i only tested it a bit on the console, by starting a new game and the initial loading and graphics seem OK.

 

[Navelgazer]

There are a few non-intuitive things that I had to learn the hard way by trial and error (e.g. “why can’t I allocate that resource to the town?” “I clicked a dozen times to send my merchant to the city you suggested what do you want from me?”, etc) so I agree that the UI could be improved, but I’m really enjoying this. It’s like they put the best parts of Beyond Earth into the Civ package and I love that.

 

[King of Prussia]

Played thru the first age and these are my impressions so far. I will try to avoid beating the dead horse that is the UI.

IP are no joke. They can field armies that are comparable to those of major powers at times. Your combat bonuses from various sources do help, but be aware you will need your own army to hold them off if they are aggressive. In potato's stream, he lost his capital and another city to them, and barely saved his capital from being razed to the ground.

I enjoyed the new combat mechanics, when i wasnt fighting the UI.
I dont understand why when you click on the promotion screen, it has to take a moment to load. Its a super simple screen, with some UI elements lit up when you unlock something. Its like 30 buttons that just have to be lit up and a few intractable when you have point(s). You should already know what promotions are unlocked on the commander, but it feels like its taking a moment to go fetch the data from somewhere, and doing it in a poor manner. Just a thing that would annoy me if i worked on it, as a dev myself. Not a major issue.

Towns should be allowed to switch focus after so many turns and/or spending gold. I dont like being stuck with that choice for the rest of the entire age.

Selecting units has to be done on the model, not the UI which i dont like. The UI also isnt clear on which units have and have not moved.

Can we go back to hitting F(fortify) on units that can not fortify, just puts them to sleep like past titles. I think 6 also had this issue. I do not like having random options 1-2 tucked away in pop out panels for troops(6 had this issue too and maybe 5) Just have them all visible.

Items that can be bought with gold are hidden until you have the gold to buy them. Since they are hidden, you do not know how much gold you need to buy them, so you cant easily plan around it. There is no sound notification when you buy a unit either. This should be easy to rectify.

I have a lot more to learn about placing districts/buildings. Sadly the UI makes it harder to decipher this. I must say, while Civ 6s colors for different yields on roofs looked a little weird at first, but it was great for readability and seeing what it was. In 7 i am just moving my mouse around seeing what is actually there. Probably something a mod would have to change down the road.

I miss auto explore on my scout. After a certain point, you just dont want to deal with them. The scouts new abilities are both really good, so well done to whoever came up with that.

I had some weird bug with cities health, where a city at full health after repairing would have their health bar stay until i reloaded. Conversely, a city with no health left was missing it on reload.

Its a preference, but i would prefer the older diplomacy screens where you are the one they are talking to, and not whatever leader you are playing. Probably something never going to be changed for this title.

I had a unit die to plague in a city, without knowing it was taking damage as i both couldnt easily see its health bar, and there was no notification that it was about to die from it.

Overall i had fun. I have more UI complaints but i dont want to fill this post up with anymore right now. I also want to go to bed before 4am

Its a lot easier to write and complain about the things that are not "right" than what is or could be with some minor tweaks. I know i had more thoughts but im too tired to remember all of them. Some of my issues could be from growing pains due to the jump from 6 to 7 being rather large.

Hopefully they get the memo that the UI needs massive improvements, and they get it done faster than the usual AAA time. If we are still having tons of issues and complaints with the UI 3 or 6 months from now, then its not a good sign. If they want to support this game for many many years, they have to get it right quickly.

 

[Xefjord]

I will be comparing to Ara a bit since that's my main game as of late, but so far for me, this is my first impressions:

Positive vibes

1. The game is very visually engaging, and the specific cultural nuances behind every building, unit, animation, and element of sound design is phenomenal.

2. The diplomacy is really cool and really interesting in how it was implemented. It feels like I have a ton of ways to interact with Civs and city states from the get go. I have been playing a ton of Ara which has super bare bones diplomacy, and I forgot how much I missed espionage and these detailed diplomacy options.

3. I think the level of profile customization, and the ability to level up individual leaders to get tons of little perks is super cool. I definitely feel way more attached to the leader I have built up and leveled up over time. It by itself pushes me to want to finish games just so I can collect those items.

4. Everything loads extremely fast and the game is surprisingly small in size. Which all seem like really good optimizations for the amount of content and high quality of the graphics.

Negative vibes

1. I know everyone says the UI is awful. That same criticism got lobbed at Ara too, and it took some getting used to there, but it eventually made sense. Definitely as a first impression though, I am very confused navigating the UI for Civ 7. Imo, far more confused than I was when I first started playing Ara. There are so many pictures, icons, numbers, etc all over my screen and I don't know what most of them are. Many times helpful information is hidden behind an icon that I wouldn't know brings me to that page.

2. Readability is a serious struggle. And it's most apparent when I am trying to plan my city. I feel like I have a basic understanding of how the new city building mechanics work, but it was never explained well to me. I can't easily tell what buildings I have across my entire city though, what they are contributing, or why I can build some things in some areas but not in others. Why can't I build the great wall on any owned tile at the edge of my city? The heck? Everything about the city planning just feels awful compared to Ara. Obviously Ara focuses on that though so it feels way better. Ara doesn't have the same cartoon symbolism as Civ 6 with the colored roofs, but it just feels better, looks better, and plays better when it comes to the city building in pretty much every way to Civ 7.

3. Switching back to luxuries just giving very flat bonuses and happiness kind of sucks. I like that I actually think hard about the utility of every resource in Ara when planning what I grab. I get excited for specific resources because of the potential products I can make with them. In Civ 7. I am looking at Silk like "Oh boy! What can I do with this?" Nothing. The answer is nothing. I just expand my city onto it then it gets a passive buff. I did see I can slot some resources into cities. But I am not sure what it did if anything? This is another case of feeling quite spoiled by the gameplay complexity of Ara that they bring to resources, and feeling pretty disappointed with Civ.

4. I forgot how prevalent desyncs were in Civ games, since that's something I feel like I rarely if ever encounter in Ara. That and just general glitchiness. I had multiple friends crash, and I got stuck in a diplomacy screen totally unable to move or exit out. I had to crash the game and reload. Then we had an issue where everyone's turn got stuck on please wait. And we just had to all leave and rejoin. For one reason or another we had to have someone leave and rejoin like 5 times within 30 turns.

5. Speaking of 30 turns. While it feels like there should be less to do than Ara on the micromanagement side (the biggest complaint people normally have about Ara), it sure doesn't feel that way. Between the 4 of us playing in my friend group, it took us like 2 hours to get roughly 30 turns in. And this was despite me having many turns where I was kind of just moving units and hitting end turn because it wasn't clear on what I was supposed to be doing. In many ways it just feels like there is less to do per turn than Ara. But the turns still take longer. Which feels bad. I would be on turn 60-80 at least in an Ara game.

Meh Vibes

1. The game does a very good job of focusing everything on the leaders. In this sense, I barely even noticed when some of the AI were doing weird matchups (Like Napoleon leading Persia or Xerxes leading Aksum) but at the same time, it felt like the actual Civs of other players was rather unimportant. I notice the many interesting civ details when looking at my own Civ. But I feel like a ton of identity was lost for others. I still prefer the old Civ and current Ara system of leaders being tied to Civs and playing one Civ for all of history. That said, I adjusted to Civ faster than I thought I would. It's not so much a deal breaker at this point as much as a mild disappointment.

Ultimately the turns are moving forward. I am definitely enjoying the spectacle of Civ 7. But I wouldn't say I am having "fun" yet.

It feels super mixed to me. Some features are definitely cool, but I feel like I am pretty lost in the sauce right now and there is so much I need to be working towards I don't know about while I am still trying to relearn how to play the early game.

My friends are all Civ megafans, but they were nonstop complaining about a ton of stuff but then had to keep prefacing every complaint with "It's still fun though". I dunno. It felt more like a coping affirmation, they were still playing, but it didn't feel like they were having a ton of fun.

This is by no means a final comprehensive review though. I think Civ 7 and it's UI are awful at onboarding given how much has changed, and we may have a ton more fun when we fully understand the game better. But it's just been a rough early impression. I totally understand why it's sitting at mostly negative right now on steam.

 

[Riconatic]

I approach this only from technical side.
Signs of not true AAA game:
2 channel stereo audio.

Extremely poorly made HDR calibration screen. No reference image to adjust settings to ”artist vision”. It also blinks annoyingly when adjusted.

Suprinsingly high CPU loads on 4k graphics. Decent GPU memory consumption.

Absolutely zero documentation about DX12 vs Vulkan. Vulkan seems to consume less GPU memory. DX12 more GPU RAM, but less CPU.

 

[Melkus]

Saw the arrival of the game at 2am local time and of course did the stupid thing, started the traditional Egypt game immediately, former Emperor level (why the renaming...) and played it more or less until my body gave emergency signals.

It's surprisingly overwhelming at first even if you think you're prepared by the Previews and Twitch guys (Did Firaxis ask any women to preview, btw? - anyway...).
Didn't really get into any kind of strategy, just reacting to what was happening. (Partly because the Independents kept me on my toes and razed my first attempt of a second town mercilessly.)
Still, there seem to be a lot of strategic options early on (ways to spend money, influence etc.), so I'm confident it will get even more interesting when the learning curve eventually levels off.

I got a nice egypty start between two broad rivers (Standard Fractal map, lots of character in the map and not a blocky landmass at all), but there was a comical lack of river-adjacent desert tiles to place my Pyramids on (it is a very specific requirement). There was plenty of desert, but always a stupid lake tile or something in the wrong place inbetween. So this first game is already ruined.
What also got me off on a slower foot - I forgot you can't just cross a navigable river with your town expansion at first. So you end up with cramped space for your capital if you immediately settle on the Nile delta.
Overall some signs that the city puzzle might get even more headachy in this iteration.
Still - I was immersed and had fun in this first half-age.

The interactions with NPCs are fine gameplay-wise, but could use a bit more emotional grounding. The grunts and sighs feel... awkward. And there's a lack of visual distinction for the independent units - if you meet five IPs early, it's hard to care who's in front of you in particular. At least the hostile ones got a red outline, thank Sid. Those got stressful in a hurry and razed my careless attempt of a second town mercilessly. Also: the sniping boats were an early menace at the coasts. (a positive in my book, just hope the major AIs can deal with it)

The UX in general absolutely needs work, just clunky spots everywhere between some clever bits, but I'm sure they'll deliver it and narrow it down to a couple of annoyances, like they will always remain in every Civ til the end of time. Seeing the game evolve is a big part of the fun anyway.

 

[Daigotsu Max]

I really don't get the UI, UI, UI. It's a bit ugly and clunky sure, but you can still play the game? Saw someone get a refund over it and it baffles me. To each their own I guess.

 

[stealth_nsk]

After the game crashed on intro video, I had some bad feelings, but afterwards everything runs smoothly. Medium graphics works fine on my 7-year old computer (wasn't great even then) with standard map size (largest at the moment), at least in antiquity.

I haven't experience age transition yet, but so far the game feels exactly like civilization with a lot of new things, but a lot of recognizable ones.

 

[Nikolai II]

Can anyone be so kind to post a screenshot of the graphic options menu and of the gameplay option menu aswell? Much appreciated

Sure!

 

[Siptah]

I played a bit of my first game, sitting at the second escalation of the first crisis.

Went completely random and got Rome + Revolutionary Napoleon.

Hence, I tried to do a militaristic/cultural game. Had a lot of fun with it, but encountered more resistance than I expected. Tubman of Egypt had 5 settlements and produced 3 to 4 chariots per turn somehow. So it took quite long to get her down, and I think I've never built/killed so many units in the early game before. Already on a lvl 9 and a lvl 6 commander... Oh, and now Himiko declared war for some reason

I'm really bad on science (I think I need more cities vs. towns) but blazed through the civic tree with all that culture from kills. Napoleon's extra movement will spoil my next game, I'm sure of that - especially for archers, this is such a good and comfortable bonus. Legions are quite fun to play with.

Really enjoying this round! I don't think I've ever played that militaristic on a first round of a new civ game. I usually go much more peaceful and focus on buildings etc. In contrast, with this first game, I still feel that I have no clue where to put my urban districts and which buildings need prioritization.

Side notes:
- the tutorial popups are awful.
- there are many visual bugs. Maybe just because I'm on mac, but some are really annoying, like health bars not updated (i.e., a city shows it is at full health when it's actually not) or units that once were on a specific tile are still displayed there, despite having been moved away. They disappear if you move into the tile though.
- got the pestilence crises, which seems rather irrelevant.
- didn't have much chance to befriend IPs. There just so much to do with influence, and the other civs jumped on the IPs rather fast.
- only got for militaristic quests so far.

 

[Xandinho]

So far, I’ve only completed the Antiquity Age as Egypt led by Hatshepsut, and I can say the game is great and fun. There are some UI problems, but I think they’ll improve soon. I do find it a bit frustrating that there are only seven rival civilizations, especially since I prefer larger maps with more competitors.

Overall, my experience has been pretty good. The map is beautiful, and even with the standard Age length, I had an immersive experience with Egypt—I didn’t even explore everything the civ offers. The decoupling of leaders from civilizations bothered me less than I expected. I’m still getting used to the new battle system; I tried conquering an IP and was easily defeated. The addition of influence as a diplomatic yield was a great improvement.

I’ve noticed a few key things: gold is extremely important—possibly the most crucial resource in the game. Happiness is also vital, especially during crises. Culture and science are still important, but they don’t feel as critical for survival as they did in Civ6. Rural districts don’t seem like a big deal, so I’d prioritize improving resources over building farms and mines on normal terrain. Winning a scientific victory in the Antiquity Age wasn’t too hard—I got the 10 Codices easily without much effort.

In short, even playing just the Antiquity Age, I find the game fun and promising. I think it has high replayability since it’s unlikely players will fully explore an Age in one playthrough. I’m curious to see if the other Ages will be just as appealing.

 

[Riconatic]

All I need from UI this point is are effect popups everywhere. What happens if I select this civic or do that etc. Otherwise I am managing.

 

[Buckets]

40 turns in, good so far. Runs smoothly. Visuals too desaturated for me. Gameplay is pretty familiar, mostly solid. However, I don't know why some things are happening and the game just shrugs and smiles coyly at me.

 

[Ryansinbela]

Fixing the AI slightly to make them less annoying is something I would want
As well as leaning to be good at this game

 

[Timothy001]

Finished Antiquity. Random Gave me Ben Franklin and Rome. Had a late era hard fought war against Pachacutti as the Mississippians. Those Flame Archers are deadly. Lost 2 Archers, 1 Legion and 2 Legatus. But defeated him. Allied with Napoleon (Egypt). Friendly with Himiko. Got the Barbarian Crisis. Had to fight off 3 camps. Tonight start the Exploration Age.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

1. I still get all of my scouts killed by charging them out recklessly into the Wilderness.
2. It loaded and seems to work pretty well on my laptop. I still am really bad at using a trackpad though.
3. There is enough other new things going on ATM that the "lack" of civs and leaders at launch isn't going to worry me one bit for now.
4. When you build the unique quarter, does it tell you anywhere that it is the unique quarter? Maybe I'm doing something wrong.
5. It's going to take a while to get used to where to best put buildings and to naturally see good adjacencies etc.
6. I really need to build more dudes.