If there was a fourth “future” age added later on, I’d like them to go all-out with speculative wackiness

[Black Gate]

Well, then how is there Abbasid in 1454? Even if some tiny bit of them remained, they didn't matter.
Byz will be there in mods, and maybe some cash-grab DLC as usual.

Uh, that's a Paradox joke about how the lead Europa Universalis dev picks start dates that either make Byzantium very weak (EU4 1444) or cuts them out of the game (EU3 1453, later extended back to 1399 by popular demand). Firaxis will obviously add them to the exploration age at some point, they're extremely popular after all.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Overall I expect 4th age (if it will come) to be "contemporary", with only a little bite into the future. For example, space and satellites are an essential part of the contemporary gameplay anyway, but developers could push it a little further.

 

[chaosprophet]

About it, I'm very hopeful because we don't have to see the "future" things for the 4th age. As long as I know, almost every modern age features in the game are focusing on the period from the industrial revolution to the world wars excspt the space race to the moon. There's still enough room for contemporary contents rather than futrue ones.

I wouldn't be that interested in a 4th age if it just happens to be like, the information age level of civ 6 but very spread out in a whole age. Heck, just have those in the base game like usual. Specially because a great crisis / break point for age 4 would be some type of climate crisis, which would make more sense to happen after information age part and could have age 4 focusing a lot of renewable, reusing the seas, thinking of actually going to a different world, etc.

 

[jozef57]

Civ 6 was okay with this sort of stuff. The tier 4 governments, the new policies, and technology such as GDR. However, if there was a whole age that specifically focused on the future, it could be really interesting.

You could do real crazy stuff. Imagine a federalized NATO, or an East African Federation, or cyberpunk, or solarpunk, or any one of the various ideas people have made for the future over the years.

i agree that would be great

 

[Krajzen]

Uh, that's a Paradox joke about how the lead Europa Universalis dev picks start dates that either make Byzantium very weak (EU4 1444) or cuts them out of the game (EU3 1453, later extended back to 1399 by popular demand).

Uhh what? EU games are supposed to cover early modern era, so by their very nature of course Byzantium is going to be very weak, as par for the course for the empire that had its golden age mostly done after AD 1066, any serious relevance definitely done after AD 1204, and last hopes for survival gone by the early 14th century (or already after Michael VIII's successors botched the job). If anything, the games seriously overestimate Byzantine chances of revival, showering it with various bonuses, missions, events, claims etc which altogether with game's mechanics facilitated the utterly improbable reconquest and re-hellenization the entire East. And the next game is going to begin in 1337 which is the precise last moment of hope for Byzantium.

 

[Krajzen]

Personally I really damn hope there is no fourth age or futurology of any kind in civ7, beyond some "five minutes in the future" techs of the third era lasting till AD 2050. The games are supposed to cover humanity's history, not science fiction, I am supportive of orthodoxy in this regard - they are clearly not built to facilitate gamechanging nature of sci fi technologies (Internet and "immaterial" reality, transhumanism, space exploration, extremely complex nature of modern economy etc). Most importantly, the games are built around a "cast" of historical civilizations, cities, people, military units, buildings, wonders, quotes etc - any tacked on sci fi era is going to feel generic and lame when standing directly next to that and being unable to continue this diversity, consisting of generic technological toys lacking any cultural background. Besides, civ games always struggle with the endgame problem and the new game is going to be entirely constructed to deal with it, so I assume its entire pacing and structure shall lead towards release of tension by the end of the third era - it's not trivial deal to then make the game 30% longer on top of that.

I also very much don't want the civ games to contain speculative wackiness, because for me it clashes with the tone of "okay we have some humor from time to time but most of the time kinda want to present dignified version of real history", so if we (mostly) don't have blatant myths, cartoonish depictions and wacky "artistic interpretations" of real history, then we shouldn't have wacky cartoonish sci fi either..

 

[thecrazyscot]

Oh man, never have I wanted to like something so much, only for it to be so pointless.

As much as I love space cities thematically, as cities they were not worth very much, but there were several things which made them very much not pointless:

- The orbital later directly addressed late game war tedium by making almost any point on the map accessible within a single turn. I think movement costs were something 1/16 or something crazy like that in the space layer so you could drop a surprise invasion force wherever you wanted. Space Bombers made mincemeat of just about everything you had on land.

- Space cities should be thought more of as orbital forts. If you got them above your terrestrial cities and fortified then we'll you could essentially nullify space-bases surprise invasions. Underwater cities were far more mechanically interesting from a map perspective but it was much harder to keep them tactically relevant.

- CtP was not shy about straight up deleting your cities by several methods. Your 40 pop capital with 7 wonders? Boom, gone. Global warming. Eco-nukes, etc. Space cities were production power houses once built up enough, and having an infrastructure to pump out units to drop wherever is super helpful when all your cities from the entirety of the game have a tenuous grasp on existence. This was also helpful for pursuing the alien victory as you needed cities that weren't going to disappear to stay ahead.

I think mostly I loved how it completely opened the map up and upended everything about war that you'd gotten used to for the rest of the game. It felt like you could have actual global conflicts in a meaningful way.

 

[kaspergm]

Overall I expect 4th age (if it will come) to be "contemporary"

With only three ages, and them being Ancient, Exploration and Modern, adding anything after modern will be a(nother) completely mind-boggling decision, so I really hope they don't go there. If a 4th age is added (and I have some doubt it will), I really hope it is included as a split of Exploration into two eras, i.e. Medieval + Renaissance/Enlightenment/Industrial/however they make the cut.

 

[The Fanatical]

I would have liked a fourth Medieval Age separated from Exploration, but what I want even more is a Future Age with Aliens (please no purple Gollums this time but rather more Xenomorph-like) and Giant Death Robots or perhaps with Kaiju and Giant Death Robots. That later idea is actually pretty good and fresh, and If you think about it, such an inclusion will solve a few requests from fans (roaming barbarians, wild combatable animals in the overworld).

Instead of barbarians like in the previous games, the planet in the future will be roamed by huge Monsters both on land and sea. Four different varieties will exist, a Godzilla amphibian monster, a Mothra butterfly, a Ghidorah three-headed flying dragon and a huge Gorilla or Werebeast (werelion, werewolf). The monsters don't even need to be copyrighted, the bipedal Godzilla Kaiju can have crocodilian features, the Ghidorah Kaiju can have two heads, the Kong Kaiju can be white with Yeti characteristics.

Regular units (futuristic infantry with laser weapons, futuristic military laser aircraft etc.) will do minimal damage to them and as a result these units will get wiped in a single monster attack, even nukes will heal them, but huge costly and steadily upgradable Mechas will have the power to combat them. The appearance and movement of these monsters will have destructive consequences on cities and tiles, even a whole new interesting narrative around the monster crisis can be added in that era. That's an Age or mode I would love to see in the future.

 

[stealth_nsk]

With only three ages, and them being Ancient, Exploration and Modern, adding anything after modern will be a(nother) completely mind-boggling decision, so I really hope they don't go there. If a 4th age is added (and I have some doubt it will), I really hope it is included as a split of Exploration into two eras, i.e. Medieval + Renaissance/Enlightenment/Industrial/however they make the cut.

I think it depends a lot on the implementation. As far as we know, current modern era ends somewhere in the first half of the XX century, so we have a lot of contemporary stuff not implemented and this could be interesting.

For example, Civilization never really explored the effect of satellites, because their timeframe was too short. If we have a full age fitting cosmic era, they could become another layer of exploration. Same goes for Internet and deep ideologies (we don't know yet to what extend the current modern era explored them).

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

We do not know this, and why it's such a persistent rumour is perplexing.

Its persistent because until now there's been no evidence to the contrary. If/when we see gameplay with 21st century units/buildings/etc, the rumour will go away. Until then, its reasonable to expect that the game may end with the space race (satellites/moon rockets), although its not reasonable to be certain about that (either way).

 

[stealth_nsk]

We do not know this, and why it's such a persistent rumour is perplexing.

I'm not saying it's true, I'm generally writing what if it's true, the fourth age could potentially be interesting.

Speaking about the actual sources, there are minor pieces of information, like civilizations we've seen so far, units we've seen so far, etc. pointing to this direction. Also, I'd say contemporary age is quite different from (the rest of) the modern for the same reasons it could be interesting - that's when we got our ideological cold war and modern game-changing technologies. So, from gameplay perspective it would make sense to separate it. Otherwise those mechanics would take too small part of the last age.

 

[Aeon221]

I think it's quite likely they'll add a fourth age. They added a future age to civ6 after all.

I think it's also quite likely that they'll do some zanier ages and add the ability to pick the age path you want for your campaign. For instance I could totally see an alternate second age where instead of the "age of discovery" it's the "age of myth" and you have stuff like vampires, chivalric heroes, zombies, cults and the like. Or a replacement for age 3 along the lines of the "empire of the smokey skies" scenario they did.

I think the ability to select from a variety of ages when playing the game fits right in with their concept for civ7.

 

[BackseatTyrant]

Personally I really damn hope there is no fourth age or futurology of any kind in civ7, beyond some "five minutes in the future" techs of the third era lasting till AD 2050. The games are supposed to cover humanity's history, not science fiction, I am supportive of orthodoxy in this regard - they are clearly not built to facilitate gamechanging nature of sci fi technologies (Internet and "immaterial" reality, transhumanism, space exploration, extremely complex nature of modern economy etc). Most importantly, the games are built around a "cast" of historical civilizations, cities, people, military units, buildings, wonders, quotes etc - any tacked on sci fi era is going to feel generic and lame when standing directly next to that and being unable to continue this diversity, consisting of generic technological toys lacking any cultural background. Besides, civ games always struggle with the endgame problem and the new game is going to be entirely constructed to deal with it, so I assume its entire pacing and structure shall lead towards release of tension by the end of the third era - it's not trivial deal to then make the game 30% longer on top of that.

I also very much don't want the civ games to contain speculative wackiness, because for me it clashes with the tone of "okay we have some humor from time to time but most of the time kinda want to present dignified version of real history", so if we (mostly) don't have blatant myths, cartoonish depictions and wacky "artistic interpretations" of real history, then we shouldn't have wacky cartoonish sci fi either..

The problem I have with this take, is that it very much feeds into the narrative that history has supposedly ended, a narrative I think has plagued the series from the very beginning. And it's not just about when it ends, but also how it ends; that is, one civilization standing dominant over everyone else. I remember Folding Ideas pointing out there has never been a way to win the game by doing something that would actually benefit common people, like curing diseases or combating poverty; it's always been about some form of dominance, be it militaristic, scientific, diplomatic, cultural, economic or religious, which in real life has ended or ruined countless of innocent people's lives. It feels slightly naïve to assume that The Game of History ends once a civilization becomes what the United States became in our timeline, and that there's nothing left worth to ruminate about.

As for scifi assets looking generic, I feel that can always be solved by relying entirely on vernacular sources of inspiration, be it vernacular architecture, vernacular fashion, vernacular art etcetera. If modernism has an inherent sin, it's that it has turned (or at least tried to) transform all human cultures into one homogeneous blob, at which point it's worth asking if it's a case of all those cultures coming together equally, or if it's more one culture dictating everyone else on what to look like. Again, the assumption that cultural dominance is inevitable in a post-industrial world.

I guess my point is that I want the Civilization games to be less about history (or rather, a celebration of a very shallow interpretation of history) and more about geography and anthropology. Less focus on "historical accuracy", and more focus on trying to simulate human societies and how they interact, and that lens requires a look look both into the past and the future. How could things have happened differently, and for whence can things happen differently?

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

There's also no evidence against Giant Death Robots and X-Com being in the game either. Or for the Exploration era to last beyond gunpowder age rather than be followed by a 300 year gap until modernity. In the absence of direct evidence one way or the other, the default position ought to be "no major change". It's rather obtuse to assume that a major thematic part of the game has been changed without the devs telling us anything about it at all for the last 3 months.

Obtuse? Really? That seems fairly harsh.

The marketing team has released footage of modern age combat featuring WWII era tanks. No footage of GDRs or X-Com units, not even of an Abrams-generation tank. Of course that doesn't mean that more modern units aren't going to be available in the game, but I don't feel like you should be surprised that it could lead people to speculate that maybe they aren't. For everything beyond the antiquity age, we're all in pure speculation mode.

As a side note, re your comment about the devs not saying that they're making a change, I think that's a valid point. The counter-point is to question if that's a selling feature for the game? If it isn't, that could be an explanation for why they haven't said anything up to now. Again, I'm not saying that we don't get futuristic tech - I'm saying we don't have evidence one way or the other, so people are going to speculate. Especially on this forum, its what we do.

 

[ombak]

Obtuse? Really? That seems fairly harsh.

The marketing team has released footage of modern age combat featuring WWII era tanks. No footage of GDRs or X-Com units, not even of an Abrams-generation tank. Of course that doesn't mean that more modern units aren't going to be available in the game, but I don't feel like you should be surprised that it could lead people to speculate that maybe they aren't. For everything beyond the antiquity age, we're all in pure speculation mode.

As a side note, re your comment about the devs not saying that they're making a change, I think that's a valid point. The counter-point is to question if that's a selling feature for the game? If it isn't, that could be an explanation for why they haven't said anything up to now. Again, I'm not saying that we don't get futuristic tech - I'm saying we don't have evidence one way or the other, so people are going to speculate. Especially on this forum, its what we do.

They also released footage of a rocket launching into space. And somehow despite that people starting to spread this idea that the game ends with a WWII equivalent event. Then when the rocket was pointed out some rationalized it as just the beginning of the space race or some equally arbitrary cut off point.

Obtuse might be harsh overall but if I would be tempted to use it when thinking of that example specifically.

Maybe the game does end with World War 2 units. But there is certainly evidence of later events. It just gets cast aside because it's one piece of evidence that contradicted a popular line of thought when the speculation about an earlyish ending was going strong.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

They also released footage of a rocket launching into space. And somehow despite that people starting to spread this idea that the game ends with a WWII equivalent event. Then when the rocket was pointed out some rationalized it as just the beginning of the space race or some equally arbitrary cut off point.

Obtuse might be harsh overall but if I would be tempted to use it when thinking of that example specifically.

Maybe the game does end with World War 2 units. But there is certainly evidence of later events. It just gets cast aside because it's one piece of evidence that contradicted a popular line of thought when the speculation about an earlyish ending was going strong.

Yes, I think I referenced in my original post that there is evidence of going up until satellites / moon missions. That's still 20th century tech, not futuristic or even 21st century, which is what I've seen people speculate as the end date (maybe I've missed the speculation you're referring to).

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

Fair, that's harsher than what I meant. I can't think of the right word: obstinate? contrarian? Something like that.

And, yes, I think achieving something greater than any real human civilization has - including pushing further into space or breaking the current frontier on technology - is a fairly large part of the fantasy the game sells.

Agreed. My personal guess is that we'll get a bit of that in the base game, along with things like a simple climate change mechanic, since the dev team has spoken about feeling like they don't want to remove that, but that we'll get more fleshed out versions of future tech and climate change in the first expansion. But I'm not confident enough in that guess to wager even so much as a jelly donut, as there's no evidence to support it.

 

[Navelgazer]

If something like this were to happen I hope it'd be in the mode of Beyond Earth, as it's own separate game that you can start and play on its own, but which would also have an option to let you "evolve" your civ from the end of Civ7 into one of the Civ options there.

(Now, there might be some issues with that idea, for instance, it'd be coolest if your opponents in Civ7 also evolved into their spacefaring counterparts, but if you've eliminated them, that gets tricky. Also, would you continue on playing Ashoka on another planet? But details aside, this is how I'd hope to see a "fourth age" represented were we to ever get one.)

 

[Gori the Grey]

I've floated the idea before, but I think the Modern Age should end with a Crisis so severe that it sends humankind "back to the stone age," i.e. back to antiquity. There are rules for which Antiquity civ you can pick, the elements surviving from Modern Age make up the goodie huts of the new Antiquity age and you just play Civ on an endless loop.