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.

 

[Naokaukodem]

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.

I didn't buy everything with gold, just thought buying everything with gold would have been much more simple. I hope production is more efficient than gold in the long run though.

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.

Yeah like King Flevance said you cannot build certain buildings in towns ? (well, buy) Like libraries ? As to units I'm trying peaceful games first, so they are of few use to me. Specialists yes I had a few in my two cities, only when there was no more good food tiles to work. (by good i mean 3+ food) Those two cities were about to hit 50 pop each.

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.

As far as as know all my towns were connected to cities with roads, except maybe the 2 in distant lands. (that I'm not sure if they were connected and how do one connect them)

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.

Problem with that is that I hate trade routes in this game, i must have built what, 4-5 traders and they didn't seem to work properly. Only once I got the resources to dispatch to my cities. And also, how do I check an interesting route that is not in my range yet ? Considering I probably didn't clear all the fog of war.

The fact that the AI players weren't at their caps is because of the low difficulty level.

No they were all at their cap in the last age, 12/12, except Machiavel who only got 3 cities left. (that guy is boring with all his propositions, and he backstabs you a lot)

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.

Boo this seems boring and overcomplicated.

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.

I was looking at a series of lame buildings that I never built because they are lame, and keep appearing in every age in the queue. As to adjacencies, I just the build the building in the nearest displayed yields in the queue as possible. I don't have another method really...

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.

Nah sorry I just don't want to waste time for something so odd to me I'm not even sure to understand. But FYI I like to watch Marbozir's videos on Youtube, I even started to watch his first gigacut of Civ7. May learn from there, maybe.

 

[MutilationWave]

>I didn't buy everything with gold, just thought buying everything with gold would have been much more simple. I hope production is more efficient than gold in the long run though.

Production is far more efficient than gold. One hammer is worth four gold. The benefit of gold is that it's instant and can be used anywhere.

>Yeah like King Flevance said you cannot build certain buildings in towns ? (well, buy) Like libraries ?

Yes you are locked out of getting the majority of buildings in towns. If you were playing Augustus you can buy culture buildings in towns, otherwise not even those.

>As to units I'm trying peaceful games first, so they are of few use to me.

Having a large standing army will keep people from declaring war on you in higher difficulties, so an army is needed even in a peaceful game.

>Specialists yes I had a few in my two cities, only when there was no more good food tiles to work. (by good i mean 3+ food) Those two cities were about to hit 50 pop each.

So it's awesome you got your cities so big, but by that point they shouldn't even be working food tiles. They should get their food from specialized towns. Food tiles should be used for buildings. You should have roughly the same number of cities and towns for basic advice, this can get much more detailed. So every time you had someone working a 3 food tile (which are garbage outside of early game) you could have been getting production from a mine or woodcutter, or even better culture, science, and other yields from a specialist.

>As far as as know all my towns were connected to cities with roads, except maybe the 2 in distant lands. (that I'm not sure if they were connected and how do one connect them)

You can click on the settlement, go over to details, and see what they are connected to and where they are sending their food if specialized. Towns should be specialized around the time they are taking over 10 turns to grow, as long as you've grabbed all the resources you want from the area. As far as distant lands connections, they connect through fishing quays. They may be too far away, so you'd need to maybe have an island city somewhere to get them connected. You can tell if they aren't connected if you can't change their resources, use their resources in other towns, or checking the settlement details like I said above. You can also use a trader unit to build internal roads if settlements don't connect naturally.

>Problem with that is that I hate trade routes in this game, i must have built what, 4-5 traders and they didn't seem to work properly. Only once I got the resources to dispatch to my cities. And also, how do I check an interesting route that is not in my range yet ? Considering I probably didn't clear all the fog of war.

You can see from the menu that comes up when you select a trader what is available in settlements outside your trade range. If you haven't seen the settlement center, it won't show up on the list. If you don't have enough trade routes for a civ, they show up at the bottom with the out of range settlements. To use a trader, you select the city you want them to trade with, and hit the button. Eventually they will arrive and they will come up in unit selection again. They will have a new button to start trade route. In modern age, this is instant and the traveling step doesn't happen. It's important to improve trade relations in diplomacy so you can have more routes to an individual civ, especially while playing peacefully.

>No they were all at their cap in the last age, 12/12, except Machiavel who only got 3 cities left. (that guy is boring with all his propositions, and he backstabs you a lot)

Yeah you should get to your cap. Make cities from the settlements with the best production and use specialized towns to feed them.

>Boo this seems boring and overcomplicated.

You aren't alone, a lot of people hate that buildings go obsolete on age transition. It's important to get the new ones in their spots with good adjacency bonuses. This has wide ranging powerful effects for your yields that I'm not going to discuss in detail, these posts are already huge.

>I was looking at a series of lame buildings that I never built because they are lame, and keep appearing in every age in the queue. As to adjacencies, I just the build the building in the nearest displayed yields in the queue as possible. I don't have another method really...

I think you may have been looking at warehouse buildings if you say they are showing up in every age. These are ageless and do not go obsolete, but their huge benefit is not their yields, but the yields they give other tiles. For instance if you build a boring saw pit and saw mill, all your forest tiles and camps will have +2 production. Things like the brickyard will do the same for mines and quarries. Production is KING, it is the most important yield except maybe influence. It doesn't do much in towns though, it gets converted into gold. Which as we said, is only worth 1/4 of production. You want your towns making food and your cities making production. Specialize your towns, make sure they are connected to your cities, and watch your cities grow while building more important things.

>Nah sorry I just don't want to waste time for something so odd to me I'm not even sure to understand. But FYI I like to watch Marbozir's videos on Youtube, I even started to watch his first gigacut of Civ7. May learn from there, maybe.

For what it's worth, I think commanders are the best addition in civ 7. Learning to use them is one of the most important things in the game, even for playing peacefully.


Sorry for the terrible formatting, I'm on my phone. I hope you keep trying and end up having fun! If you have any questions you can DM me or just post about it and I, or someone else, will help. I love helping people.

 

[Naokaukodem]

I'm sorry but I really don't get the insights below buildings adjacency and obsolete buildings. Do you have to look for them in every single tile ? How do you replace them ? I mean, which by which ? How do you know that ?
As to adjacency does it mean building some buildings in the same hex or in two different hex ? Which buildings act for adjacency for which others ?
Nah, it's definitely too hard to learn, sorry Firaxis.

I don't know how many of Civfanatics still play the game, but I wouldn't say more than a dozen. And of course, for a number of reasons of a very large spectrum the majority stopped playing. Some because they beat the game in Deity every time (similar to Civ6 but even more easily), some like me because it's just such a mess. (IMO) Frankly, I prefer to dig on games like Old World than Civ7 if it's to not understand the basics at a first glance.

 

[MutilationWave]

I'm sorry but I really don't get the insights below buildings adjacency and obsolete buildings. Do you have to look for them in every single tile ? How do you replace them ? I mean, which by which ? How do you know that ?
As to adjacency does it mean building some buildings in the same hex or in two different hex ? Which buildings act for adjacency for which others ?
Nah, it's definitely too hard to learn, sorry Firaxis.

I don't know how many of Civfanatics still play the game, but I wouldn't say more than a dozen. And of course, for a number of reasons of a very large spectrum the majority stopped playing. Some because they beat the game in Deity every time (similar to Civ6 but even more easily), some like me because it's just such a mess. (IMO) Frankly, I prefer to dig on games like Old World than Civ7 if it's to not understand the basics at a first glance.

I guess there's about 10-9k people still playing each day so more than the 12 of us are enjoying it.

Adjacencies are very simple but of course, badly explained. Food and gold buildings get adjacency from being placed next to coast or navigable river. Science and production buildings get adjacency from being placed next to resources. Culture buildings get adjacency from being placed next to mountains. They all get adjacency bonus from being next to a wonder.

All you have to do is replace your obsolete buildings with new ones. Hopefully you get some good adjacency bonuses. Put your specialists on those tiles and stop worrying about working all the worthless rural tiles.

I hope you come back, everyone bounces off things from time to time. Have fun!

 

[Naokaukodem]

All you have to do is replace your obsolete buildings with new ones.

Which ones by which ones ? How do I even know if a building, assuming I put the highlights on every tile, is obsolete ? And so on...
And adjacency is not badly explained, it's not explained at all.

 

[Elhoim]

And adjacency is not badly explained, it's not explained at all.

Are you reading the tooltips on the buildings? It is explained there.

 

[Naokaukodem]

the tooltips on the buildings

On the map ?

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I thibk a lot of the on-going frustration with Civ VII boils down to two things:

1. The most uninformative Civilopedia and UI of any Civ or Civ-like game, Ever.

2. Once you overcome those and learn the game, you quickly realize that many of the mechanics - especially the Legacy Paths to Victory in the Ages, have only a single path to complete and once you learn that become mind-numbingly Boring - many of them, like Antiquity Science or Exploration Age Culture Paths, have no conflict in them at all: quite simply, there is almost nothing any other entity in the game can do to stop you from completing them. Another part of this is that the 'Crisis Periods' between the Ages really aren't. Again, once you are familiar with them, avoiding the worst effects of the Crisis is ridiculously easy.

The first fault is pretty quickly overcome by playing despite the UI mess. The second fault is basic to the game's current structure and curtails any long-term enjoyment of it, unless some considerable thought is put into correcting the simplistic Legacies and putting some real bite into the Crisis Periods, at the very least.

 

[MutilationWave]

Which ones by which ones ? How do I even know if a building, assuming I put the highlights on every tile, is obsolete ? And so on...
And adjacency is not badly explained, it's not explained at all.

It doesn't matter what replaces what. Buildings will either be ageless and last forever, current age so they can't be replaced, or marked overbuildable. The game won't let you overbuild a building if it isn't obsolete. As far as which ones I don't know how to explain adjacency any better than I already have, and it is explained (badly) in the tutorial which I went through even though I've played every mainline civ game for the past 30 years.

 

[Elhoim]

On the map ?

You are playing on PS5, right? I guess that there is harder to hover over things to get the info. This is what I mean that the information about building adjacency are on the tooltip.

Then you noticed that for regular buildings the rule is:

- All get adjacency from wonders.
- Science and production get it from resources.
- Food and money from coast and navigable rivers.
- Culture and happiness from mountains and natural wonders.