In fact... Civ7 is Hard to Learn...

[Naokaukodem]

Maybe not for top players but I've realized that I didn't get the Cities/Towns/Specialized-Towns story quite well. Funny thing, that's one of the rare things Firaxis gives hints about : 1 City for 1 Town is recommended. But this is incomplete since this doesn't mention Specialized Towns.

In my only game (well technically second because I started the first one in difficulty 2/6 accidentally, re-started another in difficulty 1/6), I had 10 settlements and only 2 as Cities for the most part. (just converted another Town to City somewhere before I stopped playing) I just failed to see how more cities could be of any help, considering I had hard times to know what to build in those, except wonders that were quite terrible for the most part. There was just the same buildings from an age to another that gave terrible yields, so why to bother.

As to Specialized Towns, I always set them to "more food from farms and fishing boats", since that's the main purpose of specialization : all the food goes to Cities. As to know in which ones exactly, it's pretty hard to figure. First I had limited connections, so I kind of planned my new towns to feed my cities, but after that everything was more or less all connected so I don't know. It's so bizarre.

After I entered the modern age, I stopped playing and realized that I was kind of itched by this mechanic all the time. I was at 10/16 settlements and didn't want to start new ones because the locations were kind of lame, and by the way by the time they grew and became useful the game would probably be ended. Most AIs by that time had 12/16 settlements. I wasn't planning any war, since the AI units got upgraded in the modern era. I have a feeling that this game is set up for wars, but I can't imagine them in Deity with the +8 strength of AI units.

By the way this was a long, sad game. (no wars except in Antiquity with aggressive independent peoples) And I even didn't complete it... (20 hours already !)

So I'm wondering... what's with all the mess of Towns/Cities ? What's the point of not Towns, but Cities ? Couldn't one produce everything with gold instead ? It would be much more simple !

By the way I noticed a lot of people here have questions that keep unanswered, because there is so many black spots that's it's becoming insane. Is there even a virtual booklet for this game ? I didn't see one on PS5 at least. And anyway, I don't think the devs could answer questions they didn't think about preemptively, because I'm thinking they had no clue of what they were doing. I think they loosed their mind because either they were puffed up with pride or panicked by the late competition.

 

[King Flevance]

Cities are actually more powerful than towns because towns are not allowed any buildings except warehouse buildings and religious buildings I think. Civ 7 has new things to learn vs previous Civ titles. City layout matters but it is flexible and this is something that needs to be learned through play. City:Town ratio is debatable. War is encouraged although I attribute this to smaller maps on launch. If we had huge maps, this could be different. Small maps make wars more lucrative. I havent found my stride with specialized towns yet. I usually just do farming or fishing. But I also havent had much time with v1.2 yet unfortunately. Life is currently being a bit demanding and requiring my focus.

Edit: I tend to use Antiquity to map out where my warehouse building will go to "dead zone" them in my bigger layout. Sometimes I can get lucky and have well placed bonus buildings in Antiquity but I usually overbuild in Exploration to maximize my layout. But I seem to have problems others dont about actually reaching good tiles for maximum bonuses.

 

[civlateintothenights]

Hard to learn - for a number of reasons... but easy to master. That's my interpretation so far. This is the first game I was easily able to beat on Deity on day 1, game 1, despite not completely understanding the process involved.

 

[MutilationWave]

So just buying everything with gold is only possible because you're playing on the lowest difficulty. I think you would have more fun if you turned it up at least one if not two difficulty levels. The point of cities is to have more production queues for units, and to get more buildings, which means more yields. And specialists can only be put in cities, which are your main source of science and culture.

You should check your city connections. If you have so many towns, is possible some of them aren't even connected to your cities, so all that food is wasted. The reason you would want something other than farming/fishing town is hub towns. They give two influence per settlement connection, and influence is the hardest yield to get. Then they still provide their food to cities they are connected to. More rarely, you may want a trade town to improve your trade route range. Let's say there's a settlement with camels, cotton, and mangos that's just out of range. You really want those things, so you specialize a trade town and send a trader. Again, they will still provide their food to connected cities.

As far as settlement cap goes, you should always be at the cap or working a plan to get to the cap. Sometimes you'll even end up above the cap, especially during war. The fact that the AI players weren't at their caps is because of the low difficulty level.

When you say you didn't feel like building new buildings, there's something you may have missed. Aside from buildings marked "ageless" and some special circumstances we don't need to get into here, your buildings become obsolete between ages. They give 2 or 3 of their base yields depending on age, while still costing happiness and/or gold. It is high priority to overbuild these with new age buildings because they are dragging you down. Also any urban district that contains an obsolete building no longer counts as a quarter, which has several disadvantages.

I wonder if you were looking at your obsolete buildings when you say they weren't providing good yields. If you were looking at current age buildings and they had poor yields, then they were placed badly. I recommend reading or watching a video about adjacency bonuses. These are huge. It can be as big a difference between a market that gives three gold versus 10+. Your specialists also rely on these adjacencies to provide more yields.

War is at it's best ever in civ 7. Some people only like to play peaceful, but with the addition of commanders, once you get good at them, there are such a variety of tactical decisions that are really fun for many of us. That's another thing you should read or watch a video about.

As far as black spots in knowledge, yes, the game does a totally crap job of explaining how to play. But I believe all the answers can be found here on CivFanatics and on YouTube. Please don't hesitate to ask, I love helping people learn and I love this game. There are a ton of helpful people on here that really helped me out when I started.

For instance, in my first game, I spent at last twice as much time asking questions and looking things up as I did playing. I won that game on immortal difficulty, but that's due to all the research I did, my previous experience playing every mainline civilization game, and quite a bit of save scumming (meaning something going badly so I would reload an autosave from several turns before to prevent it). Now that I've learned just about everything about the game, I don't save scum except for disastrous misclicks.

Please ask any questions you want. Let's fill in those "dark spots". Once you understand the game you'll have much more fun, and I think it's truly a good game with potential to become great.

I hope you'll raise your difficulty level by a couple notches. For me, a great part of the fun is the difficulty. The AIs get cheating bonuses, sure, but we have the power of our minds to outsmart them. So what if you lose a game? You learned a lot and you'll be better next time. I bet if you stick with it you'll be playing on sovereign, immortal, or even deity soon enough.

Good luck, don't hesitate to ask for help! We all needed a lot of it to understand the game.

 

[sixty4half]

I usually have 1 trade hub town, several Influence hubs and only a couple fishing/farming towns.

In Modern it's a trade hub town, factory town every town that's eligible, and influence hub anything that's not.

I also occasionally use the town that gives happiness per resource when I war monger. I think that helps but I'm not sure i have hard evidence to show it does.

 

[pmarc]

Acken's guide to the Age of Antiquity is a really good resource to get started: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/antiquity-guide-the-perfect-early-game.695947/ . Even if the food formula has changed and growth beyond a few population units is not as hard as it used to be in the Antiquity, it's still a good idea to develop a strong production in the capital early on to get settlers out quickly. The guide also covers towns vs. cities, building placement, etc.

A good hub town will provide a big chunk of the Civ's influence in early exploration. The TCS Improved Plot Tooltip mod will show the connections for each city, I believe that's still missing in the unmodded game.

 

[MutilationWave]

TCS Improved Plot Tooltip mod

I believe they're playing on PS5 unfortunately. I was going to recommend several mods including that one.