I tried my best to like Civ VII

[Carazycool]

I've played every installment of Civilization since I stumbled upon a demo for Civ II on AOL when I was a kid. I've put in well over 10,000 hrs over the years, and I've loved every single version from Civ II to Civ VI.

I tried to like Civ VII. I really did.

My first several attempts at playing had me quitting soon after the Exploration Age began out of sheer disinterest.

There's so many aspects of the game that they've dumbed down. They've removed any ability for the player to make their own decisions... When an AI settles close to you, the game forces you to have a negative modifier with the opponent about it... When you're deciding where to place a city, you have extremely limited variety of factors to consider... making so city placement is never even an interesting decision in the slightest.

You've got one option... Settle on a fresh water tile for a 5-5-5 city center yield. That's basically the only factor to consider. You can't settle on resources, so that doesn't factor into the decision. And all of the adjacency bonuses in the game are dumbed down to ex. "buildings get +1 food adjacency bonus for ALL resources," etc. They don't even bother to differentiate between Luxury and Strategic.

They've taken away the player's ability to (micro)manage their cities' yield focus, while simultaneously requiring the player to be constantly making BORING micromanagement decisions about buildings/tiles every few turns in every single city/settlement for the entirety of the game.

They've made building & tile management so incredibly rigid and boring. You can't swap tiles between friendly cities - not even tiles that have never even been worked. Every tile has only one single improvement that can possibly be made on it from the beginning of the game until the end of the game. If you are going to work a flat desert tile then you will be putting a farm on it. And the only thing that modifies a farm's yield is what buildings you build elsewhere in that city. And that's it. There's literally no difference between a desert tile or a plains tile or a grassland tile or a tropical tile. If it's flat, you MUST build a farm on each one of them. If they are "vegetated," you MUST build a woodmill on each one of them. If they are "rough terrain," you MUST build a mine on each one of them. And they will all give the exact same yield. And there's no such thing as wooded hills tiles. And there's no such things as deforestation, nor planting trees, nor terraforming.

So there's no such thing as deciding what improvement to put on what tile... and there's no such thing as learning new techologies to make use of specific situational strategies... There's no such thing as focusing on production and then switching to focusing on science in order to get a certain tech and then switching to food focus in order to make use of the new happiness tech... or because you've gained the ability to build farms on hills... or desert...

And once you hit an arbitrary number of Settlements, that's it. And if you found a 6th settlement when your arbitrary cap is at 5, everyone in your entire empire just gets angry... because... who knows...

And what i've written is only the tip of the iceberg. The way they reset the whole game between eras... and suddenly everyone in your empire is unhappy about every prior building. But you can't tear them down. You can only try to research technologies that allow you to build more new buildings so that you can build new buildings on top of the old buildings that make people unhappy (however the UI completely ignores this) and cost extra maintenence (the UI also completely ignores this) because... everyone... hates... old... buildings... i guess?? ... like ... what?? It doesn't even make any sense.

Sorry guys. You blew it on this one.

 

[ProMeTheus112]

I don't agree with some of your points, for example, on a specific kind of tile like flat desert, you can build a farm, or a unique improvement, or a wonder, or a urban tile (or ofc nothing at all). Also tile types don't have the same yield (flat desert vs flat plains etc).
Also the settlement cap is not a hard cap, I think it's really interesting. If you manage your hapiness and other stuff well, it may be well worth building over the cap, even going over by 2 or 3 or maybe some more. And that cap will vary a bit depending on your tech/civ path and yield and a few other factors.
The soft reset in general after an age helps with making a wide range of strategies viable vs the AI that gets bonuses, for example.
I think you make probably other interesting points comparing with your extensive experience of previous games but just wanted to point these out. For me Civ7 right now best I have played yet (played since 1), very curious how they are going to further improve on it now and stuff. Like I think this is a 9/10 potential or maybe more.

 

[Carazycool]

I don't agree with some of your points, for example, on a specific kind of tile like flat desert, you can build a farm, or a unique improvement, or a wonder, or a urban tile (or ofc nothing at all). Also tile types don't have the same yield (flat desert vs flat plains etc).

Flat desert's base yield is +1 production, right? and flat plain's base yield is +1 production i'm pretty sure. Flat grassland and tropical are probably base yield +1 food. But still, they're all simply +1. So there's no such thing as bad land, nor good land. It's all just +1.

Natural disasters throw some random buffs. But when starting a game, you can found a city right in the middle of the desert and it won't be different than if you were in plains.

I know some UIs exist in the game that you can build on top of a rural district. But that's still not a decision that is interesting because you first are forced to build the only option for the rural district (farm, woodcutter, mine, etc.), and then you just plop the UI on top of it. And repeat (if you have a UI from your leader or from a Suze).

Building a wonder or urban building on a tile is a decision to just not use a tile's base yield, rendering whatever the tile was irrelevant as soon as you urbanize it.

In Civ VI, I found it fun to plan out cities that were sometimes on the edge of crappy land. Flat desert had base 0 yield, but there existed several interesting ways to make desert cities worthwhile - with the most basic option being to build urban centers (districts) on top of all the flat desert tiles. But I am finding myself really disappointed in how it doesn't matter how you plan out your cities... all the land is exactly as good as all of the other land - desert, plains, grassland, tropical... doesn't make a difference.

 

[rocksinmypath]

I don't understand how you can point to having the option of settling on a resource as something that made settlement decisions interesting in the past, while completely dismissing resource availability as a major factor in settlement decision in Civ 7. It's arguably the most important factor in settlement decision in Civ 7; far, far more important than fresh water.

 

[Siptah]

I don't understand how you can point to having the option of settling on a resource as something that made settlement decisions interesting in the past, while completing dismissing resource availability as a major factor in settlement decision in Civ 7. It's arguably the most important factor in settlement decision in Civ 7; far, far more important than fresh water.

Especially in distant lands.

I think the fact that all tiles are +1 is a drawback. It needs much more knowledge of the game and training in reading the map to see which spots have beneficial terrain. Aside from resources, many hexes of the same type can be a reason to settle, because it means huge boosts from only 1 or 2 warehouse buildings. And then there is the city vs. town dichotomy: some places (e.g., islands) make horrible places for cities but incredible towns. Now add your many abilities on top that may interact with terrain and also priorities for tech masteries for maximum benefit etc. In summary, I don’t think that choice where to settle is gone at all. It just not as obvious and very different.

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

I'm not sure how I feel about all biomes being roughly equal. I understand why they did it, since it could be annoying to spawn somewhere terrible, but I do miss the variety of spawns in VI and having to work around a bad one. I've said before that asymmetry is good and excessive balance is bad, I think that applies here.

That said, I thoroughly disagree with the notion that VII is simplified. A lot of the "choice" in VI was false choice , and whilst the decisions required in VII have clearly changed, I don't believe they are any less complex. Settlement locations are still important; some resources are far better than others, optimising adjacencies can make an enormous difference, understanding where to place and what to do with these towns is critical, knowing when and how to abuse the settlement cap is important. If you think it is that simple, my bet is that you would get absolutely roasted in a competitive multiplayer game by someone who understood the mechanics and knew how to optimise their position.

Edit: also worth noting that the biomes aren't identical. Maybe it is too early for a meta to have formed but at a guess, I'd say plains and desert > grass for the added base production, and vegetated tropical & tundra for the added science and culture respectively. Scouting land and finding these spots will make a difference.

 

[Carazycool]

I appreciate the responses. I would really like to have my mind changrd about what I see as a significant lack of interesting decisions to be made over the course of a game.

 

[kaspergm]

I'm not sure how I feel about all biomes being roughly equal. I understand why they did it, since it could be annoying to spawn somewhere terrible, but I do miss the variety of spawns in VI and having to work around a bad one. I've said before that asymmetry is good and excessive balance is bad, I think that applies here.

Making the biomes (roughly) equal is imo. a terrible decision both from a gameplay AND from a realism pov. I agree very much with your point about asymmetri and balance. I think they're (again) solving something that wasn't a problem. Yes, starting in the middle of desert or tundra would be horrible in previous civs, but point was, that you generally didn't start in those locations (unless you chose to pump up the number of civs on the map). Historically, the major civs spawned in fertile lands, and the game adequately mimicked this in its choice of starting locations (unless you were a special civ like Russia or Mali, who had special means of coping with those terrains, something that was perhaps not particularly realistic, but worked well enough for gameplay). Sure, it worked better in Civ5 than in Civ6 (who famously sometimes dumped player in a completely barren ice scape, although this literally never has happened to me in my 4500 hours of play time, making me suspect it's again a consequence of overpopulating the map, but I can't prove that). Still, I think it was overall a non-issue, and the game had features to balance these starts, like extra yields from forests and bonus resources, and desert starts also had fertile floodplains to make these starts viable if not optimal (my main complaint with Civ6 maps would be that the lower latitude tundra areas generally had too little forest compared to real world, where the lower lattitude boreal areas are almost completely covered in conifers).

 

[Horatio Thorne]

I've played every installment of Civilization since I stumbled upon a demo for Civ II on AOL when I was a kid. I've put in well over 10,000 hrs over the years, and I've loved every single version from Civ II to Civ VI.

I tried to like Civ VII. I really did.

My first several attempts at playing had me quitting soon after the Exploration Age began out of sheer disinterest.

There's so many aspects of the game that they've dumbed down. They've removed any ability for the player to make their own decisions... When an AI settles close to you, the game forces you to have a negative modifier with the opponent about it... When you're deciding where to place a city, you have extremely limited variety of factors to consider... making so city placement is never even an interesting decision in the slightest.

You've got one option... Settle on a fresh water tile for a 5-5-5 city center yield. That's basically the only factor to consider. You can't settle on resources, so that doesn't factor into the decision. And all of the adjacency bonuses in the game are dumbed down to ex. "buildings get +1 food adjacency bonus for ALL resources," etc. They don't even bother to differentiate between Luxury and Strategic.

They've taken away the player's ability to (micro)manage their cities' yield focus, while simultaneously requiring the player to be constantly making BORING micromanagement decisions about buildings/tiles every few turns in every single city/settlement for the entirety of the game.

They've made building & tile management so incredibly rigid and boring. You can't swap tiles between friendly cities - not even tiles that have never even been worked. Every tile has only one single improvement that can possibly be made on it from the beginning of the game until the end of the game. If you are going to work a flat desert tile then you will be putting a farm on it. And the only thing that modifies a farm's yield is what buildings you build elsewhere in that city. And that's it. There's literally no difference between a desert tile or a plains tile or a grassland tile or a tropical tile. If it's flat, you MUST build a farm on each one of them. If they are "vegetated," you MUST build a woodmill on each one of them. If they are "rough terrain," you MUST build a mine on each one of them. And they will all give the exact same yield. And there's no such thing as wooded hills tiles. And there's no such things as deforestation, nor planting trees, nor terraforming.

So there's no such thing as deciding what improvement to put on what tile... and there's no such thing as learning new techologies to make use of specific situational strategies... There's no such thing as focusing on production and then switching to focusing on science in order to get a certain tech and then switching to food focus in order to make use of the new happiness tech... or because you've gained the ability to build farms on hills... or desert...

And once you hit an arbitrary number of Settlements, that's it. And if you found a 6th settlement when your arbitrary cap is at 5, everyone in your entire empire just gets angry... because... who knows...

And what i've written is only the tip of the iceberg. The way they reset the whole game between eras... and suddenly everyone in your empire is unhappy about every prior building. But you can't tear them down. You can only try to research technologies that allow you to build more new buildings so that you can build new buildings on top of the old buildings that make people unhappy (however the UI completely ignores this) and cost extra maintenence (the UI also completely ignores this) because... everyone... hates... old... buildings... i guess?? ... like ... what?? It doesn't even make any sense.

Sorry guys. You blew it on this one.

It sounds like you haven’t played it enough to understand all the new mechanics so you’re just focussing on what you feel has been taken away. I had to play for about 50 hours before I really started to get this game. I hated it for the first 30 hours. Now I really like it.

Some of your specific complaints really highlight that you just don’t know how to play this game yet. The settlement limit really doesn’t matter because you should easily be able to have lots of excess happiness to offset the penalties. On my current game all my settlements have at least 30+ happiness in the modern era. I already have 30 settlements and could add 5 more with no problems if I wanted to. What the settlement cap does do well is preventing any player getting an absurd number of settlements right at the start of the game and gaining an insurmountable advantage like in Civ VI.

My advice is definitely to keep playing. I’m amazed how much I like it now after initially hating it.

 

[Evolena]

Now add your many abilities on top that may interact with terrain and also priorities for tech masteries for maximum benefit etc. In summary, I don’t think that choice where to settle is gone at all. It just not as obvious and very different.

I think the research order with Masteries that have an effect on the yields for this or that type of Improvement is still being explored, yes.

 

[Siptah]

I think the research order with Masteries that have an effect on the yields for this or that type of Improvement is still being explored, yes.

I don‘t really have a clear preference there yet. But I also haven‘t invested the time to really know all connections and „+“ signs in order to make good choices for beelining yet. Hopefully, a patch makes this easier to assess in the future.

 

[King Flevance]

I know that every release from Civ 4 and beyond has been accused of dumbing down the game by taking things away from the player. There is a strange behavior in people to crave innovation yet hate change. But being familiar with the life cycle of Civ games, you should be aware that a lot of evolution is going to happen to the game's mechanic over Civ 7s lifespan. So many of these smaller complaints will shift or even be fully rectified over the next couple years. This doesn't invalidate the criticism, but just a reminder that every release has a wave of criticism.

They've taken away the player's ability to (micro)manage their cities' yield focus, while simultaneously requiring the player to be constantly making BORING micromanagement decisions about buildings/tiles every few turns in every single city/settlement for the entirety of the game.

I personally am glad they have removed micromanagement of tiles. I am no longer required to remember to 'bean count' to optimize my strategy to compete. This makes the game more tedious, not more strategic. Micromanagement by itself is not strategy, it can involve strategy but you can also have micromanagement be absent of strategy for the sake of micromanagement. The decisions in Civ 7 are not "micromanagement decisions" as you say, these are more decisive strategic choices. The idea here is to force you to map out an efficient strategy for a city and have to prioritize for the long term with short term decisions. This actually adds a LOT more strategy to city growth and development than the old method of worker spam & citizen shuffle + build every building.
For example, upon founding a new settlement, I often have to choose either fishing or farming, but rarely both. Both is possible here though because fishing buildings are less punishing by being built on water, not land. This saves some real estate for districts. You have to weigh the benefits of each. Additionally, I then decide if they will be woodcutters or miners/quarry workers by counting those tiles. I never build both a sawpit and a brickyard anymore, a city gets 1 or the other for production. It irritates me when I conquer a city with both a sawpit and a brickyard and it wastes my real estate for only 2 woodcutters or similar. I suspect we will get more flexibility with ageless buildings in an upcoming patch sooner rather than later. For this reason, I also agree farm/woodcutter tiles should be able to be toggled at a cost for terraforming to offer us more flexibility with food and production the backbone of every city's development strategy.
Every city you place you should immediately form its urbanization plan roughly so you know which tiles you want urban and which rural. This will possibly shift over a city's lifetime but will mostly hold true. Obviously, take note of resource placement, coast. rivers, and mountains. Decide if this city is ideal to build wonders. (You may change your mind later) It is also very important to know if a city is designated to be just a town early in its life cycle so that you can get it online and contributing ASAP rather than growing and not helping much for most of the age. All of this actually requires picking a strategy and following through to get your strategy online vs. spamming workers to upgrade the tiles and needing to tediously click on tiles and shift things around so that your strategy works. This system still allows for really good optimization and tough decisions and various methods to reach your goal.
One expansion growth strategy I use in founding new cities is to prioritize farms until the town grows to a 5-7, then convert it to a city and start building districts on any farms to push my farms to the outer undesirable tiles. If I plan to fish the coastline that is on the 3rd ring, I wait until I push these tiles back to the 3rd ring through urban districts and relocate my farmers to fishermen and get my fishing quay online. If it is a farming layout, I push my farms to their desired tiles. If this is a coastal city, this does not work that well. Lakes can be difficult to urbanize and, as Siptah pointed out, small islands only ever have the fate of being a town. (Though seeing some civs gain the ability to urbanize coastal to a degree would be cool.) Plus, all of these plans will be disrupted if a jerk settles by a small town and a real estate war happens to claim tiles. Now you have to grow in a way that claims tiles instead of based on population momentum. Additionally, I have founded mining towns that have almost no food output even with focus on farms/fishing because the land sucks (desert rough, optimal placement for resources leaves little fishing tiles) but it is resource rich so I cap it at a low population after pushing out the borders the best I can. Sometimes I even have to forfeited resources for the age because there is no way to grow the town. I could turn it to a city for an age and feed it with another town if I wanted, but it is all situational. Hopefully, this helps you see a perspective that city development is part of the strategy in Civ 7 instead of micromanagement. Once you make a decision, you can move on and make another decision built on top of that one, instead of going back and click swapping it over and over again. I agree these decisions currently can be too decisive and should be adjusted to allow a little more flexibility, but not too much. I agree it needs more rural flexibility. Primarily, for food and production but the system generally seems to work as a whole.


I would like to see adjacency bonuses slightly adjusted, but I do think they work fine for the most part as is. Swapping tiles is a highly requested feature that will probably be in the next patch. I would like to see a more interesting city placement and maintenance system too. Technology should unlock plumbing so that settling fresh water should end toward the end of the ancient age or early exploration. Aqueducts missing are very noticeable. Even bringing them back would work. Settling resources really doesn't add much and if they added it, I would be ok if that removed the resource as the yields on resources matter less than the resource itself in 7. I am looking forward to diplomacy evolving in this model. I actually love this diplomacy model but agree there is still much to be desired as it feels generic, and relationships could benefit from some sort of tier system or something. I am still familiarizing myself with it as it is very different than any previous version.
I do think you need to reevaluate the city cap. It really doesn't affect this version much more than any previous version that tried to prevent city sprawl. I would argue 5's system was extremely harsher on city sprawl than this cap is. I honestly feel this cap is very lenient. I actually think they should add some kind of gold maintenance deterrent on top of it because gold is so abundant thanks to towns. By late Ancient age the game is constantly begging me to spend some of my 7,000+ gold. I usually end the age by just buying some buildings since they plan to hit my fat bank account anyways. Age transitions need reworked. Religion needs reworked. There are things I can criticize but that is true for every other game I own pretty much.

 

[Taefin]

The one concern I agree with is that all biomes getting one unique yield makes the map feel less alive overall. Something about coping with challenging biomes, and deserts creating boundaries you either had to build out away from, or find a way to unlock with Petra, added a sense of exploration. That said, if anyone wanted this gameplay back, they could just mod the base yield of flat desert to zero (currently 1 prod) and maybe turn up disaster intensity to boost floodplains.

I wonder what civ6 playstyles lead someone to be more positive or negative in their first impressions of 7. As someone who dislikes entirely peaceful playthrus and plays at difficulties that made 6’s culture victory too hard for me in order to get more challenge from military and science, I am finding 7 simply amazing!

 

[Leyrann]

The one concern I agree with is that all biomes getting one unique yield makes the map feel less alive overall.

I do kind of agree with this. I've only played a little over 100 hours and I'm already ignoring terrain type entirely when planning out my cities - I exclusively look at resources.

Although if they were to rebalance this to be more in line with previous games, they do need to recolor tundra a bit because right now I can hardly tell it apart from grassland. Not sure if that's a colorblindness issue or just the two being too similar.

 

[Carazycool]

Really great responses that give me things to consider upon my next playghrough. Thanks guys!

 

[Atlas627]

You've got one option... Settle on a fresh water tile for a 5-5-5 city center yield. That's basically the only factor to consider. You can't settle on resources, so that doesn't factor into the decision.

Your spacing to get resources is extremely critical.

And all of the adjacency bonuses in the game are dumbed down to ex. "buildings get +1 food adjacency bonus for ALL resources," etc. They don't even bother to differentiate between Luxury and Strategic.

There are no Food adjacencies for Resources, but I'll assume you tried to make up an example on the spot to clarify your point. Each resource provides a different bonus, the different types determine where you can slot them, and yes the adjacency bonus is just to all resources.

They've taken away the player's ability to (micro)manage their cities' yield focus, while simultaneously requiring the player to be constantly making BORING micromanagement decisions about buildings/tiles every few turns in every single city/settlement for the entirety of the game.

What boring micromanagement are you thinking of? Placing new, permanent buildings/improvements? That means each time is a strategic consideration, rather than a micromanagement one. Is it boring because you don't know what to strategize about yet, because the game is new?

They've made building & tile management so incredibly rigid and boring. You can't swap tiles between friendly cities - not even tiles that have never even been worked. Every tile has only one single improvement that can possibly be made on it from the beginning of the game until the end of the game. If you are going to work a flat desert tile then you will be putting a farm on it. And the only thing that modifies a farm's yield is what buildings you build elsewhere in that city. And that's it.

Yields are modified by techs, warehouse buildings, and anything else that gives warehouse boni (like Pantheons).

There's literally no difference between a desert tile or a plains tile or a grassland tile or a tropical tile.

The base yield is different, and sometimes that depends on whether the tile is vegetated/rough. But the amount is always the same. So different biome starts lend themselves to different strategies, but none are strictly worse than others.

If it's flat, you MUST build a farm on each one of them. If they are "vegetated," you MUST build a woodmill on each one of them. If they are "rough terrain," you MUST build a mine on each one of them. And they will all give the exact same yield. And there's no such thing as wooded hills tiles. And there's no such things as deforestation, nor planting trees, nor terraforming.

Or you could build a Building/Wonder on them. Choosing which tiles to build on, and which warehouse boni to get, because of which tiles will become the ones you want to Improve, is a strategic consideration.

So there's no such thing as deciding what improvement to put on what tile... and there's no such thing as learning new techologies to make use of specific situational strategies... There's no such thing as focusing on production and then switching to focusing on science in order to get a certain tech and then switching to food focus in order to make use of the new happiness tech... or because you've gained the ability to build farms on hills... or desert...

The techs absolutely help you specialize, because you have to pick an order to research the techs. And you also have Masteries to consider. Certain strategies require you to beeline certain things, as has always been true. If you always pump out a ton of science though, as in the older games, you'll fly through the tree and feel like the order wasn't impactful.

As far as pivoting, that's what Social Policies and Celebrations are for.

And once you hit an arbitrary number of Settlements, that's it. And if you found a 6th settlement when your arbitrary cap is at 5, everyone in your entire empire just gets angry... because... who knows...

Sounds like you need more happiness buildings, if you want to keep founding settlements. As far as it being arbitrary and feeling like the theme isn't there, I'm not going to try and convince you the theme makes sense, but this is certainly a different type of complaint from the rest of your list. Do you find that you would enjoy the game more if it spelled things out, including the theming justifications, more?

And what i've written is only the tip of the iceberg. The way they reset the whole game between eras... and suddenly everyone in your empire is unhappy about every prior building. But you can't tear them down. You can only try to research technologies that allow you to build more new buildings so that you can build new buildings on top of the old buildings that make people unhappy (however the UI completely ignores this) and cost extra maintenence (the UI also completely ignores this) because... everyone... hates... old... buildings... i guess?? ... like ... what?? It doesn't even make any sense.

Actually, you can tear them down by selecting an overbuild and then cancelling it immediately. You'll end up with an empty building slot yet will not have committed the building to go to that slot.
Also, I'm not really sure what your complaint is here. Are you confused? Are you unimmersed? Do you not like the reset?

 

[Carazycool]

There are no Food adjacencies for Resources, but I'll assume you tried to make up an example on the spot to clarify your point ... and yes the adjacency bonus is just to all resources.

I believe I am refering to the Mississippian's UA.

I find that every single resource being equivilent in terms of their adjacency bonuses makes utilizing their UA feel quite bland.


It's good to know that there's a way to tear down old buildings