@kaspergm I would love to help you, but...I'm kind of in the same position
Usually my decision to buy a game or not is a fast one. Many factors are involved, but it culminates in the feeling that I want to play a certain game. As someone playing Civ games since Civ3 I expected to just get cought by some kind "must have it feeling" for Civ7 soon.I could not really believe that first it, invested more time, considered enthusiastical and critical opinions. But the spark didn't fly over and it got even worse the more I saw...
It's not "my civ" anymore. Emphasize on
my. I'm not saying it is a bad game and I'm glad for everyone having fun with it. I can even name a couple of things I have seen which I think I would like (influence system, commanders, absence of workers, new system for working tiles/putting buildings on the map, merchants trading in a cities resources, scout special abilities)...the thing is just...Civ7 seems to have changed the target audience and -at least in its current shape- I feel like I haven fallen out here.
My way to play civ (or 4X games generally) is on huge maps in a sandboxish style. I enjoy to be a part of a virtual world which organically develops and which I interact with, sometimes with more and sometimes with less impact. Whether I "win" is secondary...I try to be sucessful with the nation/faction I lead, taking their ingame perspective. So what is more important to me is not constantly running into artifical mechanics/systems reminding me that I play a game, but instead deep features allowing me to roleplay. The features itself can be minigames...as long as they are fun and allow formentioned roleplay. And while I'm not always min-maxing, I want to understood what I going under hood.
That's what is needed both for strategic decisions and to estimate balance to apply houserules or mods to service my roleplaying demands.
Civ7 sadly runs contrary to the vision I described before in many ways:
- Huge maps with many nations are gone
- a very railroaded way of the game playing out (1st age: separation of continents, 2nd: "new world" discovery, 3rd globalization) prevents variation and limits replayability...why e.g. is it a must that the player start in the "old world"? And why is that kind of land distribution a must anyway?
- resulting out of the previous bullet point a quite limited choice of map scripts with pretty uniform landforms
- certain features/systems too simplified (e.g. government types, religion, largely missing scissor/paper/rock system in combat)
- Civ6's "religious combat" system was taken over in an even worse form, the need to manually send merchants and to babysit treasure fleets - how does that fit in the concept of reducing MM?
- the missing modern era
- an UI falling way back beyond Civ6 (and earlier title), interfering with smooth and informed gameplay
The separation of Civ 7 in "ages" deserves a separate, deeper look. Not because of that madatory civ change, I'm neutral here (like towards the choice of picking a lot of real-world-non-rulers characters as leaders) - you can debate realism/immersion here, but Civ was never perfect in that regard, so I see little change here for the better or worse.
What I want to focus on is the gameplay side of breaking the game into three chapters. It is what I call technically a hard reset (not a complete one, but with a great extend and very different to other catch-up mechanics like they are used e.g. in Millenia) and I won't dispute that this has advantages - both for the devs and a certain part of the audience. It cuts development effort, it is a help both in making the AI appear to deliver a better performance and avoids early defeats for players...and it probably appeals to most looking for quick, competitive games. The price for this is though considerable - and it is payed by those players who want a civ along the lines I described earlier in this post. I get that Firaxis learned from telemetry that (in their eyes: too) many player never reached the modern age or didn't play til victory. But neither "many" is "everyone" nor meeting a more or less arbitrary victory condition is a concern for every player out there. But what is my exact problem with chapters? Well, the hard reset breaks the organic development I love in 4X games and that way also immersion for my taste. It replaces a certain late game tedium of the classical civ I won't dispute with a end phase in every chapter where the looming age means that most things are just not worth to do anymore - because you can't finish them and/or because they are removed/rendered useless by the age change. That creates an ungood incentive to focus artificially on what is kept - with Gold literally being the best currency to store. The game kind of "explains" this by a dark period of non-played time passing between the chapters, further accented by the design of a crisis at the end of each age. While that might sound fun on paper or might play even out that way sometimes, it feels at minimum quite railroaded. I can turn the crisis off, but than it is off guaranteed. Why do I need to know in advance that there is a crisis or not? And the age mechanic can't be turned of, which means that e.g. mechanics like vanishing city states are a hard rule. I would really have prefered a more soft and sophisticated age system like Millenia uses it. Here a potential crisis emerges from how the nations are acting and the game uses softer mechanics for catchup (earlier age techs becoming cheaper) or obsolence. Not saying that Millenia is perfect here...but I would have expected that a series like Civ takes up the challenge to perfect something along these lines instead of replacing it by such a rigid system. Again - some people will enjoy it and it might be even wise commercially...if every game follows the same streamlined broad flow, the variation comes from playing varying civs and the meta system of leveling up via Mementos. A perfect environment for keeping players around and buying DLC. I'm also curious in what form the past cold war history will find its way into the game...
Finally the AI...it was announced as a focus and I don't dispute that for sure certain improvements have been made. However, from what I have gathered from viewing gameplay, these improvements are mainly on the tactical level...and even here it has to be factored in that rules have been simplified (for military units most of the time only strength matters, only one type of religious unit). I also concede that probably some effort has been spend on diplomatic AI (and as mentioned above, the entire influence feature is probably among the shiniest additions in Civ7). But does that also extend to the strategic level? Given the big boni the AI still gets beyond the fair level and the indirect help (reset by age transition, probably easier tile managment since rural improvements are terrain dependant and moved when overbuilt) I have doubts, when I see how little resistance the AI puts up in LPs even on the higher levels (of course I might especially err here, since w/o having your own gameplay experience it is hard to judge the AI. Or you can call me spoiled by Old World
)
Again, I'm far from wanting to dispute that others might already enjoy Civ7...just saying that what I seeing now doesn't cut it for me. If the game should improve at enough of my personal and perceived construction sites, quirks and shortcomings then I might change my stance in future.
