Official announcement: Hot off the presses. Next Civ game in development!!!!!!!

[TempusFugit]

Great, if predictable news.

I really hope Firaxis has ditched the Warcraft/Pixar graphic style for this entry. Ideally the new game should use a mix of realism, western art history and world art history for inspiration. All fused into a whole where it is easy to read the map too.

Some people claimed that the "cartoon" style of Civ 6 would make the map easier to read, but I didn't find that to be the case, and actually found it even worse in that respect than Civ 5. Both Civ 5 and Civ 6 needs the additional simplified map for increased readability when planning certain things, and that will probably be the case with Civ 7 too.

Graphic style seems to be a divisive topic. Some people actually preferred the new "cartoon" style in Civ 6 to the bigger emphasis on realism that was in the graphics in Civ 5 and Civ 3. I'm not quite sure why this is the case, but perhaps some people likes the game more when it feels more like a fantasy game, some people like it because it reminds them of other games with a similar graphic style and perhaps some people just look upon Civilization as a big meme generator.

I do think that the feeling of "realism" is very important to many people who plays the game though. From the first entry, the games in this series have always had a strong pretense of world simulation to them. Sid Meier explicitly said that fun gameplay will always be prioritized before realism (I can't remember the exact quote) but it is also clear that giving the player an illusion of the game being a simulation of (an alternative) history has been a strong focus for all games. All game mechanics are built around this. Civ 5 and Civ 6 lessened this somewhat with more abstract mechanics and more boardgame feeling. And Civ 6 even more so with the graphic style and the mostly optional fantasy elements. But the pretense of world simulation is still very important for these games.

When I play any Civilization entry I want to pretend that I am watching the history of a world unfold as I play my strategy game. I suspect that this is an important part of why many other players enjoy this series so much, so I hope that Firaxis has, and will take this into account.

 

[TempusFugit]

Another thing I hope Firaxis has changed is the warfare system. Units should be able to stack together up to 4, 6 or 8. Exactly how that should be resolved is something other people can figure out, but obviously the game must still resolve battles on the main map. Tactical battles is something other series can do.

The so called "stacks of doom" were never any problem for me, and I suspect that some of the people who complain the most about them are people who never took the time to understood the mechanics really well. "Carpets of doom" are a much bigger problem for the series. While warfare is fun in the beginning for Civ 5 and Civ 6, when you make a lot of war, especially on bigger maps, the mix of the time spent on moving units around and the low skill of the AI makes warfare into a boring slugfest it shouldn't be. The previous games did this much better.

Especially Civ 3, which I think is the best game in the series for waging war and making huge empires. The battle system in that game was quite simple, yet still advanced enough that you had to make many interesting choices and also take terrain into account. It also felt more like a real war, than anything I've experienced in Civ 5 or 6. And, it was quite quick and the AI was able to give you a strong resistance on the higher levels, even if it doesn't understandd the system as well as an experienced player.

But I'm not advocating for going back to unlimited stacks. If they limit the amount of units in a stack to something sensible, they will be able to please most players.

On a more positive note, I hope Firaxis continues the awesome an ambitious focus on expansive, great sounding and "authentic" soundtracks from the previous games!

From Civ 1 to Civ 6 this series have always had great soundtracks and the high amount of suitable and great sounding tracks for the two latest games is really praiseworthy!

 

[Navelgazer]

Graphic style seems to be a divisive topic. Some people actually preferred the new "cartoon" style in Civ 6 to the bigger emphasis on realism that was in the graphics in Civ 5 and Civ 3. I'm not quite sure why this is the case, but perhaps some people likes the game more when it feels more like a fantasy game, some people like it because it reminds them of other games with a similar graphic style or cartoons and perhaps some people just look upon Civilization as a big meme generator.

Some of us prefer the Civ6 art style because it just straight-up looks a lot better.

Seriously, that style of leader model is tough to design properly, and their team has nailed it far more often than not. It's also just more capable of animating to display personality than aiming for photorealistic depictions of people who, for the most part, we lack photorealistic representation of to begin with. And the map looks so much more vibrant now that when I've gone back to Civ5 the first overwhelming feeling I get is how dreary everything feels. But seriously, I know the Civ6 art style has detractors and that there have been some aspects to carp on, but I'd take Kublai, or jokes about Caesar's big hands, over meeting George Washington's uncanny-valley waxy death-mask once again.

 

[legalizefreedom]

They have an unnamed DLC attached to Civ 6.

A pre-order bonus for BE2.

 

[TempusFugit]

Some of us prefer the Civ6 art style because it just straight-up looks a lot better.

Seriously, that style of leader model is tough to design properly, and their team has nailed it far more often than not. It's also just more capable of animating to display personality than aiming for photorealistic depictions of people who, for the most part, we lack photorealistic representation of to begin with. And the map looks so much more vibrant now that when I've gone back to Civ5 the first overwhelming feeling I get is how dreary everything feels. But seriously, I know the Civ6 art style has detractors and that there have been some aspects to carp on, but I'd take Kublai, or jokes about Caesar's big hands, over meeting George Washington's uncanny-valley waxy death-mask once again.

Yeah I guess that is true too. To some people the Civ 6 style looks more pleasing to the eye. I disagree with that of course, but tastes vary a lot for graphics as with game mechanics.

Leader portraits is one thing, but that only matters for diplomacy. The style used for plant life, buildings, geography and units is more egregious to me. The trees and buildings in Civ 6 looks so sterile and sanitized, I can't imagine anyone living there. To get around my hangups with the game, I have tried to imagine the graphics as a cartoony representation of what actually happened, instead of a glimpse of the real thing, but it hasn't helped that much. When I play Civ 2-Civ 5, I look upon the visuals as both a map and a collection of glimpses of history. In Civ 6 I only have a map left that I don't like particularly much.

About the leader portraits I can understand what you are saying about photorealism, but I disagree about it as well. "Photorealism", whatever that is, isn't necessarily a goal. Just something that feels immersive. The extreme inversion of photorealism that was the caricatures of Civ 6, was very displeasing and immersion-breaking to a lot of people, including myself. Something in between these two extremes that looks good, is immersive and not too costly would have been a good choice for Civ 7. Often the discussion about graphic styles in games falls into an extreme dichotomy where "photorealism" and "cartoon-style" are the only two options, and that is really limiting people's understandings of what is possible.

Personally I'd take low-polygon and low-animation leaderheads with realistic proportions and interesting and imagination-conductive backgrounds over more costly ones, but that is probably not going to happen. But it really felt like a waste of resources to me to put so much effort into good textures and animations on the leaderheads in Civ 6, when the result was so destructive to the historic immersion that other aspects of the game like the music tried so hard to achieve.

There are problems with the way the leaders were represented in Civ 5 (too dramatic sometimes and always the same) and Civ 4 and Civ 3 (too caricatured) but they worked much better than the ones in Civ 6 for me.

 

[Navelgazer]

A pre-order bonus for BE2.

If they announced a BE2 I would build a time-machine to pre-order it yesterday. Seriously, BERT had so many great ideas in it that it frustrates me to no end that it never got the second expansion that could have fleshed it out to something like completion, and taking a fresh swing at executing those ideas with everything learned since then could be awesome.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Civ Kart, arcade racing game.

Can't wait to start the game on foot and then collect enough science to finally upgrade to wheels, unless you're Gilgamesh as you can start with War-Carts from the beginning.

 

[Navelgazer]

Go Go Turn-Based Karting!

 

[Jkchart]

Gonna just wait and see rather than predict we WILL get a release this year, but regardless, I'm paying attention again

 

[AntSou]

Good luck balancing that and coming up with 50 to 60 unique ways for a civ to get victory points.

I mean, I did mention the archetypes used in Humankind. Civ IV only has 11 leader traits, yet the combination of pairs of traits is unique and more than enough to cover all leaders.

If you have a base cultural trait (e.g. Agrarian provides x2 points from Pops) along with unique abilities for civs/leaders, you don't need 60 unique ways to get VP. You could have an Agrarian Civ which has reduced penalties from low housing and overpopulation, and another with increased immigration pressure from high happiness/amenities.

Scythe only has 7 Factions and 7 "Cultures". That makes a total of 49 possible combinations. They aren't balanced, and in a game like Civ they don't need to be.

No, its an inevitability because having more cities/territory is better than having less unless you arbitrarily penalize wide play vs tall. That kind of arbitrary penalizing is poor design.

You argued this before. That "wide" play is somehow intrinsically natural and that any game design that disfavours it is "arbitrary". Your starting point is to naturalise a certain type of game design as inevitable expressed as "it's an inevitability because having more cities/territory is better".

Back then I suggested it could be attenuated by granting the points to the builder, not the owner. Pair that with a higher focus on wonders constructed, rather than buildings/districts (which they actually did for GS), and you could reduce the skew domination oriented Civs have considerably even in a game not designed with Score in mind.

And, not incidentally, if you look through the "great' civilizations in history, they almost always have a conquer/imperial phase that leads to what is considered their high point as a civilization.

I don't think this is relevant, mainly because game design takes precedence, but I also don't think it's relevant for the same reason you choose to put "great" in brackets. It's a highly and easily contestable claim with a bunch of traps.

One could rewrite it as "if you look through the "great' civilizations in history, their high point as a civilization almost always leads to a conquer/imperial phase". It's all so vague that for the most part you can switch around cause and consequence and the sentence will still be applicable.

No, that's bad game design. If you've been eliminated from game, you lose the game.

Why? You're just declaring it with such confidence. If the point is to accumulate score through time, why should the score be lost upon being conquered by another Civ? "Player elimination" is itself a design choice.

This would be an unlikely but possible scenario. I don't see why remaining on the board with a single city of one pop should be relevant for end game score calculation. And I think there's space to design a game in which some Civs can take advantage of gaining score through temporal achievements (building wonders, being the first to reach the moon, etc), through having pops converted to your founded religion, pops which follow your culture, etc, regardless of who controls the cities. There is so much space for scoring besides territorial.

I'm not really sure what you are getting at here. Like, you do want to have a checklist you go through have do something "diplomatic" and something "religious" and something "scientific?" Because that seems kind of boring and tedious. Its also kind of limiting because you have to specific things. A good score victory should just reward the player for playing good instead of having to chase after specific objectives.

No, I want the opposite. The game attempts to specify what is "scientific" what is "cultural" and what is "diplomatic". I want it to NOT do that, or not as obtusely as it currently does. The capabilities of a Score Victory are limited by the forcing of these artificial boundaries.

 

[The_J]

Back in 2010 or so they mocked up screenshots of a Civilation fighting game for April Fools.

I hope they continue that spirit with new offerings.

Civilization Social FPS, a Fortnite knockoff with Civ 6 leaders.

Civilization Golf, a golf game with your favorite leaders.

Civilization RPG, pick a leader and a class and go level up!

Civ Kart, arcade racing game.

Don't joke man, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_SimGolf .

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

Don't joke man, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_SimGolf .

I remembe rplaying the Demo when it came with Sims Hot Date.

 

[TempusFugit]

Don't joke man, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_SimGolf .

A golf game with the reused assets of some of the leaders of Civ 5, 6 or 7 is something I think they actually could get some people to buy. If they took the Technos Japan and Nintendo approach and “upgraded” the normally pedestrian game of golf with some left-field ideas. They could also frame it around the angle of rich powerful people discussing business, while having a game of golf.

I don’t know how Meier would feel about that since his last golf game was realistic, but you never know.

 

[Gorbles]

Civ has always finessed this by having nominal 'monuments' as Goodie Huts scattered about the map and compressing all the technologies into the first Era - which, again, is Fantasy.

Now, most of us have nothing against Fantasy in games - it's practically inescapable, IMHO, but when you resort to Fantasy because you've simply bungled the design of the entire first part of the game, I submit that is lousy game design, not good fantasy game design.

Going back a few pages, sorry, but I want to push back strongly on this.

What you're describing isn't fantasy. It's abstraction. Tech trees are an abstraction. Culture is an abstraction. Games often feature many, many, many levels of abstraction just to make the process of playing the game feel good. Goody huts in particular represent the abstraction of knowledge gained from interacting with other people and the knowledge they hold. It's a similar kind of abstraction to City-State bonuses and tech / civic boosts. Becoming a Suzerain doesn't magically grant you new abilities, often across your entire empire. It's a gameplay abstraction representing the strength of controlling that particular vassal. Founding a city on a coast doesn't magically make you able to sail, and logically-speaking getting a bonus only once doesn't necessarily track - in real life, building ten cities on coasts tends to give you more than one set of bonuses to understanding the ins and outs cities-on-coasts. But in VI it's abstracted to a one-time boost to researching Sailing (that is irrelevant if you've already learned it).

Phew.

Sorry. This bugged me, mainly because you were arguing backwards from the predefined conclusion of "fantasy is bad, Civ uses fantasy, ergo, Civ design is bad". It's not fantastical! Or at the very least, it's a comparable level of abstraction to a bunch of other game systems, which means none of them are particularly jarring in of themselves.

I really hope Firaxis has ditched the Warcraft/Pixar graphic style for this entry.

The Warcraft series and Pixar movies have a radically different graphical styles. You'd be more accurate simply saying "stylised", even though "stylised" accounts for a huge amount of variance in art direction and (audio)visual design.

This is a minor point, it just bugs me when people try and associate VI with a random <insert stylised, often animated art style here> where the only shared design is the fact they aren't hyperrealistic.

 

[TempusFugit]

The Warcraft series and Pixar movies have a radically different graphical styles. You'd be more accurate simply saying "stylised", even though "stylised" accounts for a huge amount of variance in art direction and (audio)visual design.

This is a minor point, it just bugs me when people try and associate VI with a random <insert stylised, often animated art style here> where the only shared design is the fact they aren't hyperrealistic.

What I meant was a graphic style influenced by Pixar and Warcraft. I should have written that instead, so no misunderstandings could be made.

But that I mentioned these two in particular was quite intentional. The ways the leaders are depicted in Civ 6 looks very similar to the style used for people in Pixar movies. There are probably other studios that makes animated films for children that use a similar style, but Pixar did this style first to my knowledge.

Blizzard is also the originators of the style used for the buildings and units in the game. (They were themselves inspired by Warhammer, but there are many uniquely Blizzard aspects too it.) The reason why this might confuse you is because this Blizzard style has become very common in fantasy strategy games and MOBA’s in the last two decades. But it originates from Blizzard, and personally I would like to see it a lot less. Especially in a game like Civilization.

I fully agree about your other points about abstractions in games though.

 

[Gedemon]

To what end though? What does this add to the game besides moving your units around the map for another 15 turns before you can settle? I don't get it.

How is this materially different from just founding your capital on turn 1, then founding a second city later?

I might be missing something but every idea of this "Neolithic era" I see leaves me wondering what it actually adds to the game.

As other people have said, dynamically picking the initial techs/attribute fitting your starting locations and initial actions instead of restarting the game when the start position don't fit the selected civ attributes.

Now it doesn't need to be only moving units around hoping for random events to goes your way... you could start with the equivalent of a barbarian camp with limited actions and an ability to be moved to another position before converting it to the first "real" city of your Civilization.

 

[TempusFugit]

I do also think that the debate about graphic style often becomes dumbed down to a dichotomy between so-called “hyperrealism“ and very stylized visuals. A lot of stylistic choices would fall some place between these, and all visual styles employ realism to some extent.

 

[pokiehl]

As other people have said, dynamically picking the initial techs/attribute fitting your starting locations and initial actions instead of restarting the game when the start position don't fit the selected civ attributes.

A mechanic where you pick your civ after rolling the map would be awful. It’s not fun in Humankind and it would be incredibly “uncivlike.”

A better idea to combat your rerolling dilemma is for the developers to stop designing civs so heavily around terrain bonuses. Or improve their assign starting plots function. Or any number of things that don’t involve creating a superfluous nomadic phase.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Going back a few pages, sorry, but I want to push back strongly on this.

What you're describing isn't fantasy. It's abstraction. Tech trees are an abstraction. Culture is an abstraction. Games often feature many, many, many levels of abstraction just to make the process of playing the game feel good. Goody huts in particular represent the abstraction of knowledge gained from interacting with other people and the knowledge they hold. It's a similar kind of abstraction to City-State bonuses and tech / civic boosts. Becoming a Suzerain doesn't magically grant you new abilities, often across your entire empire. It's a gameplay abstraction representing the strength of controlling that particular vassal. Founding a city on a coast doesn't magically make you able to sail, and logically-speaking getting a bonus only once doesn't necessarily track - in real life, building ten cities on coasts tends to give you more than one set of bonuses to understanding the ins and outs cities-on-coasts. But in VI it's abstracted to a one-time boost to researching Sailing (that is irrelevant if you've already learned it).

Phew.

Sorry. This bugged me, mainly because you were arguing backwards from the predefined conclusion of "fantasy is bad, Civ uses fantasy, ergo, Civ design is bad". It's not fantastical! Or at the very least, it's a comparable level of abstraction to a bunch of other game systems, which means none of them are particularly jarring in of themselves.

Abstracting everything that happened in the Neolithic Era, which included the first city building and multiple Technologies that were fundamental to virtually every example of city-building that followed is abstracting to the point of fantasy.
But I never said, had you bothered to read the post, that fantasy was bad. I will say, in answer to you and numerous other posters, that claiming that Civ somehow must have fantasy or abstraction to the point of nonsense or 'isn't really history' is all BS in heaping and steaming piles. The game is billed and marketed as Historical 4X - in fact, the Civ franchise practically defined Historical 4X for decades. They didn't bill it as Fantastic Historical or Abstracted Historical or fantastically abstracted, they sold it as Historical and then in far too many places they cheated because it was easier to abstract a fantasized version of history than get the history right in the first place. I call that false advertising and, to repeat, Bad Game Design.

I fully understand your point, I just reject it utterly. Until the game and its designers stop advertising one thing and delivering something quite different, I will continue to call them on it. Or, far more likely, if they screw up the design of Civ VII as badly as they did so many elements of Civ VI, I will drop the franchise completely as not worth the aggravation.

 

[Miserable Old Git]

Thomas Hobbes described life without a Leviathan as "Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short".

I would describe the bulk of posts in this thread as "Multiple, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Long".

Alternatively, as "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin".

For my part, I'm simply delighted that Civ 7 - ANY implementation of Civ 7 - is welcome, as I've exhausted the possibilities of discovering any new twists in playing Civ 6.