How To Fix Civ 7

[tman2000]

It's clear that the streamlining has led to uninteresting, rote choices for building, within repetitive often tedious victory paths that conclude early so we can reset the age and do it all over again. Today I've woken up and all over the internet there seems to be an emerging awareness that the game has actually flopped. I'm more interested in why and what could be changed to make it not so. Not with the intent to fix it, though that would be nice, but instead just out of curiosity and analysis.

I've previously written, indeed I've created a mod to this end, that the way towns work needs to be improved. So that wide emerges as a viable, interesting strategy of its own. However, this concept falls short in that I don't think I've given much thought into how to make tall itself more compelling. I've thought about it, and I know just what Civ 7 would need to stop being so boring. First of all, we're keeping cheaper, more numerous, more useful towns.

Another thing we're doing is relying on larger maps. Better terrain generation where biomes are larger and not merely lining up exactly with lines of latitude. More variability of terrain type per biome.

For cities, I propose this:

• Buildings no longer get adjacencies. Instead, they can only be built at all where they would have received adjacencies.
• You only get one building of each "type" per city, unless there's double adjacency. So either a library or an academy, unless your library's tile is adjacent to more than one resource.
• Tier 2 buildings require 2 of tier 1 buildings in your empire to be built for each one. Tier 2 buildings provide raw yield, Tier 1 buildings operate within the new specialist system (to be discussed).
• There are also miscellaneous or mixed buildings which produce fewer yields, but variable yields, and serve as a stop gap for city building.
• There are new rules about city layout. Not so much in the vein of having specialized districts (although you will sort of have de facto districts in a way if you double up your special buildings). Instead, your city will have to have the infrastructure to support special buildings.

Let's consider city layout rules:

• All buildings need adjacency to food buildings (people have to eat). This makes food buildings important hubs to support buildings along its radius. This allows for interesting decisions to be made about what second building might get paired with a food building.
• The second building in a food district supports the surrounding buildings with adjacency bonuses. One building could just provide gold per building. One could boost the natural yields of the surrounding buildings. One could provide happiness or influence depending on other global policies or government type.
• Happiness buildings function in a similar vein, but affect up to a 3-tile radius from their tile, with declining benefits as you go out. On the other hand, doubling up happiness buildings in a district will improve the yields for the 1-tile radius. This wouldn't be complicated or confusing if devs actually bothered to make a decent UI
• There are now municipal districts. Avenues. Plazas. These are one building slot tiles that connect into to food and happiness adjacencies and extend them. They also provide gold bonuses and interact with bridges. Long city routes multiply gold per trade resource slotted.

As for specialists, they now work completely differently. When you build a tier 1 of a culture/science/influence building, you get a specialist. These are not slotted into your city. That dumb and boring mechanic is out the window.

Instead, specialists now are slotted in a narrative attribute tree. This is a menu that functions like a role-play, with choose your own adventure options that develop your specialist over time. The other buildings in your city, what you're doing in terms of war or exploration, and the levels of relationship you have with other players affects the availability of narrative options. Ultimately, these specialists stack up yield sets (philosopher begins with +4 science, then can end the age with +8 science, +3 culture, +2 influence, +1 happiness). The other thing specialists do is add "historicity" to buildings. So in principle any building in a city, but more likely the one that spawned the specialist, will pick up special yields as well, maybe spawn great works. You can have a road or bridge that becomes historicized. The game script will automatically summarize the narrative events into the "story" of the building on its history tab. At some point, this will be relevant to tourism.

New great works and legacy building features:

• Great works are now permanent. Their function changes in different ages. Science works from antiquity continue to provide science but also incur a happiness cost (religious discordance).
• Plain buildings get replaced with ruins and rural improvements. No overbuilding, they go defunct.
• Historicized buildings continue to provide the yields they accumulated from specialist play (possibly very good, even in the next age), but have higher maintenance costs. The unique situation will determine if players want to try and preserve or overbuild.
• There will be buildings and policies meant to accommodate historicity. The monastery improvement will have great works slots for antiquity great works to provide half science yields but not happiness penalty. Maybe the dungeon will let you store antiquity great works without there being any yields.
• You can destroy antiquity great works but gain permanent science penalties for each one you destroy.
• It all depends on your religion policies and we assume that system will be updated, etc.

Anyway that's the idea. Basically make city planning and building more involved, more terrain dependent, adding in a narrative historical layer that matches the visual theming. And if that's too much micromanagement for you, just play a wide game with tons of towns since I think we should already have that kind of "Carthage" option as a viable strategy.

 

[Nic@Melbourne]

I’d cap buildings to population.
Some of the town bonuses need to be stronger to make them a more appealing option.

 

[tman2000]

I’d cap buildings to population.
Some of the town bonuses need to be stronger to make them a more appealing option.

That would emphasize tall. I suppose you’d have to have idle population which could passively create +1 science +1 culture, with happiness and gold cost until they end up working in a building.

 

[pmarc]

Maybe different city planning systems feel more interesting/fun for different people. I really don't see the way buildings work and the town/city balance as anywhere near the main criticisms brought up regarding Civ7, though. (In particular, the repetitiveness of building types across ages is something they could address without fundamentally changing the city building rules.)

One big reason choices seem less interesting for many experienced players is that the AI isn't competitive enough. If it were more competitive, making different choices early in the game could be the difference between winning or losing (which for many people, at least, makes those choices more interesting); maybe a better AI or reworked legacy paths would also make it harder to complete most paths every age, so the player would have to pick some and give up on some based on the situation in each game, decreasing the "repetitive" feeling from doing the same thing every game.

 

[tman2000]

Maybe different city planning systems feel more interesting/fun for different people. I really don't see the way buildings work and the town/city balance as anywhere near the main criticisms brought up regarding Civ7, though. (In particular, the repetitiveness of building types across ages is something they could address without fundamentally changing the city building rules.)

One big reason choices seem less interesting for many experienced players is that the AI isn't competitive enough. If it were more competitive, making different choices early in the game could be the difference between winning or losing (which for many people, at least, makes those choices more interesting); maybe a better AI or reworked legacy paths would also make it harder to complete most paths every age, so the player would have to pick some and give up on some based on the situation in each game, decreasing the "repetitive" feeling from doing the same thing every game.

It does need to ramp up a little, but that might exacerbate the feeling of being railroaded into a strategy

 

[pmarc]

Buildings no longer get adjacencies. Instead, they can only be built at all where they would have received adjacencies.

I don't think preventing the player from building e.g. a monument in a city with no mountains or natural wonders adds to the strategy. Building the monument in a spot with 2-3 mountains is not a tough call. Building a monument with no adjacency instead of a good library in the capital, because culture is your limiting factor in the game, is a less obvious choice that may sometimes be the right one.

If the problem this is trying to solve is that "it's too easy for each city to build every building", then instead of too many hard restrictions, an alternative would be to preserve the player's options but to make it too costly somehow to get everything within the span of the age... or perhaps have restrictions set up in a way that building some things in the city exclude others, because at least then the player makes the initial choice and not the terrain.

 

[tman2000]

If the problem this is trying to solve is that "it's too easy for each city to build every building", then instead of too many hard restrictions, an alternative would be to preserve the player's options but to make it too costly somehow to get everything within the span of the age... or perhaps have restrictions set up in a way that building some things in the city exclude others, because at least then the player makes the initial choice and not the terrain.

You can choose where to create cities though. And the tall ethos is that if you’re doing culture, then there are ways to really amp up yields in that one city you picked for culture.

 

[protocol7]

I think there are two main things they need to fix. Distant Lands is like a prison the designers put themselves in that dictates so much about the game and how it has to play out, making every game feel super samey. Crises is the other, in that it moved the most interesting transition points in the game off-screen.

 

[tman2000]

I think there are two main things they need to fix. Distant Lands is like a prison the designers put themselves in that dictates so much about the game and how it has to play out, making every game feel super samey. Crises is the other, in that it moved the most interesting transition points in the game off-screen.

Distant lands works on larger maps where there's room to grow both home and abroad. Though there needs to be more with resources and such.

Crisis is unfortunate. Some of them are tedious. Some of them seem like they'd be a cool thing you can interact with and shape the course of the crisis. There's an entire set of those crisis revolutionary governments in the one exploration crisis and it's over as soon as it begins. I think crisis should last longer but not necessarily be punishing the entire time, more like there's potential for it to be punishing and more that it adds in a dynamic that you have to worry about as you tech into tier 3.

 

[protocol7]

It would be cool if you played the crisis and had a chance of surviving it instead of being guaranteed to fail offscreen and required to replace your civ with a successor.

 

[Taefin]

I find it less interesting to muse about long lists of entirely different game mechanics, than how realizable tweaks could tie game systems together.

I very much agree that DL is one of the main problems, and is where I think a larger fundamental change could fix things. Maybe its as simple as not letting trade routes go over deep seas, while creating an incentive to get far away resources (so that distant parts of your home continent are also involved, thus reenabling Pangea maps). Treasure fleets could then generate at settlements disconnected from your capital, including outside of trade range on your home continent, and harvest all resources those settlements contain or obtain via trade.

 

[Menocchio]

The main thing I find myself disliking that I think could be changed without having to vivisect the game is the way buildings, especially urban districts, and population are tied together. Civ VI had an excellent system where cities could only build a certain number of districts based on their population, but it's also a game where district adjacencies are very strict and inflexible, buildings themselves feel unimpactful, and specialists are a complete waste.

Rural improvements already require population to plop down—this is good. It'd be better if urban districts both didn't give a "free" population and were limited by the city's total population in terms of the number you can have at once—possibly with the exception of unique districts. Right now you can found a settlement in the middle of nowhere and, with enough gold, instantly turn it into a fully-functioning city. It makes it hard to feel like your cities (and, by extension, your empire) are growing organically. While I'm glad they loosened up Civ VI's district minigame and gave it more diversity, I feel like they went too far and made it so that choices don't feel like they matter at all.

I think with the boost to food, and presumably town gameplay, coming with the next patch, this is a viable shift for the developers to make. We'll see what Tuesday brings.

 

[tman2000]

The main thing I find myself disliking that I think could be changed without having to vivisect the game is the way buildings, especially urban districts, and population are tied together. Civ VI had an excellent system where cities could only build a certain number of districts based on their population, but it's also a game where district adjacencies are very strict and inflexible, buildings themselves feel unimpactful, and specialists are a complete waste.

Rural improvements already require population to plop down—this is good. It'd be better if urban districts both didn't give a "free" population and were limited by the city's total population in terms of the number you can have at once—possibly with the exception of unique districts. Right now you can found a settlement in the middle of nowhere and, with enough gold, instantly turn it into a fully-functioning city. It makes it hard to feel like your cities (and, by extension, your empire) are growing organically. While I'm glad they loosened up Civ VI's district minigame and gave it more diversity, I feel like they went too far and made it so that choices don't feel like they matter at all.

I think with the boost to food, and presumably town gameplay, coming with the next patch, this is a viable shift for the developers to make. We'll see what Tuesday brings.

I really don’t think Tuesday will bring that much.

In any event your idea was bouncing around Reddit. I think there was this idea that population could be assigned as lesser specialists to a general pool (+1sci/culture) like idle resources. Then when you unlocked a building you could assign the idle population to them to build the district

 

[pmarc]

Right now you can found a settlement in the middle of nowhere and, with enough gold, instantly turn it into a fully-functioning city.

Not only gold, but also dropping camels with a bunch of +production resources in a new city. The equivalent in Civ6 was plopping a city in the tundra and chopping a district and its buildings in it.

 

[Menocchio]

I really don’t think Tuesday will bring that much.

In any event your idea was bouncing around Reddit. I think there was this idea that population could be assigned as lesser specialists to a general pool (+1sci/culture) like idle resources. Then when you unlocked a building you could assign the idle population to them to build the district

I think even "idle population" is overelaborating it. It really doesn't need to be much different from how Civ VI did districts, just with more choice and flexibility—and probably not as egregious of build times as the game goes on.

 

[Taefin]

I really don’t think Tuesday will bring that much.

In any event your idea was bouncing around Reddit. I think there was this idea that population could be assigned as lesser specialists to a general pool (+1sci/culture) like idle resources. Then when you unlocked a building you could assign the idle population to them to build the district

A different growth curve is going to bring food buildings and towns into what was probably their intended niche. They won’t be more complex, but the ability to actually balance and choose between more buildings will make the game more interesting, and less artificially constrained.

I’d leave idle specialists for humankind and old world (different uses but both games where their mechanics fit thematically).

 

[tman2000]

A different growth curve is going to bring food buildings and towns into what was probably their intended niche. They won’t be more complex, but the ability to actually balance and choose between more buildings will make the game more interesting, and less artificially constrained.

I’d leave idle specialists for humankind and old world (different uses but both games where their mechanics fit thematically).

Haha, yeah I guess since I modded in a better growth rate and played a half dozen games already it doesn’t seem like a big deal.

Yeah idle specialists doesn’t seem like a good idea.

 

[Larsenex]

It would be cool if you played the crisis and had a chance of surviving it instead of being guaranteed to fail offscreen and required to replace your civ with a successor.

One of the things which is keeping me from purchasing the game and playing it is the rotating leaders and civs which are forced upon you. I also really dislike the immersion breaking crap of any leader for any civ let alone historical figures who were never leaders but perhaps good in a field of study. I'm old school and would love to see a mod which fixes in place regardless of how the game progresses and crisis your civilization and its leader. On top of this Id like a way to fix the leader in place of the ai as well so I can pick and choose the civs and corresponding leaders for the entire game.
Regarding mods, do we have a titanic-enormous map that is available? Part of my fun is just exploring a vast mostly uninhabited world and choosing spots to settle.

 

[UWHabs]

I don't think preventing the player from building e.g. a monument in a city with no mountains or natural wonders adds to the strategy. Building the monument in a spot with 2-3 mountains is not a tough call. Building a monument with no adjacency instead of a good library in the capital, because culture is your limiting factor in the game, is a less obvious choice that may sometimes be the right one.

If the problem this is trying to solve is that "it's too easy for each city to build every building", then instead of too many hard restrictions, an alternative would be to preserve the player's options but to make it too costly somehow to get everything within the span of the age... or perhaps have restrictions set up in a way that building some things in the city exclude others, because at least then the player makes the initial choice and not the terrain.

Yeah, I don't think hard-locking would be the answer. Maybe you scale building production costs based on how many copies you own, or maybe scale maintenance. So if you own one library, it's 1 gold per turn. If you own 2 libraries, they cost you 2 gold per turn each. 3 would cost you 3 each. You'd probably have to increase their yields and specialist yields since doing my suggestion already your 3rd library effectively costs you 5 extra gold per turn, the 4th one could cost you 7, etc... so you quickly run out of the return if you're only getting 3-4 science back.

But you still need some sort of scaling, since I find that once my machine is up and running, I will often either have nothing to build, or nothing that I want to build. Although maybe you could also add in like masteries for techs, have like a "Library Upgrade", which would give you a bonus adjacency at a high cost. or you take all of the above, but apply them only to this mastery/upgrade. So it's not a problem if every city gets a library, but you have something that's almost like a world wonder that you only place in your best adjacency buildings.

 

[pmarc]

There is already a project to build science/culture directly if you don't have anything else to do in your cities (or nothing that would pay off by the end of the age). The yields are quite low (25% of production converted, if I remember well), maybe boosting that number based on science/culture buildings in the city would feel better, and would be coherent with the idea that your infrastructure makes science or culture projects more efficient.