Overall impression (poll)

What is your overall impression of the game?

  • It looks great!

    Votes: 65 19.1%
  • It looks great mostly, but some things could've been done better

    Votes: 105 30.9%
  • 50/50 good/bad

    Votes: 56 16.5%
  • It looks bad mostly, but has some great elements

    Votes: 37 10.9%
  • It looks bad.

    Votes: 49 14.4%
  • I don't have an opinion yet and prefer to wait for more info

    Votes: 28 8.2%

  • Total voters
    340
Looks great mostly. But yeah the civilization switching I'm still not sold on. I'll still play it, but I think Firaxis really underestimates how we want to roleplay as a nation, not a leader. When I played Civ 6 I didn't see myself as Gandhi, but the leader of the Indian empire.

I'm a little worried about the victory conditions as well. They look too much like Humankind as well.

And the lack of builders. I admit this will make the AI better at the game, as will the "reset" during the age changes, but I want more control, not less.

That said, I'm sure I'll have fun with the game, but probably not as much fun as I had with the even number civs.
 
Some good and some bad. I like the civ evolutions. Diplomacy looks more involved now. Visuals are solid.

My main concern is the bad aspects of Civ VI they didn't get rid of, such as policy cards. I can not believe they kept that horrible chore of a system that grinds the game to a halt every few turns as you have to pick the optimal set of half a dozen cards out of a deck of several dozen to use for... just the next few turns until you have to do it all over again.
Grinds the game to a halt for you.
Hardcore Players take a few seconds to plug in the cards.
 
The game looks beautiful. And a lot of the game mechanics sound great:
- No more builders. Improve tiles directly when city grows.
- Army commander units with promotions and you can "stack" units to move but unpack for combat. Also, you can add new units to an army automatically without manually moving units across the map through reinforcement mechanics.
- Towns mechanic.
- Governments with celebration bonuses.
- Unique civics for each civ.
- Diplomacy with minor powers. Giving war support to civs in other wars.
- Leaders with traits.
- Crises mechanic.
- Era score.

Things that I may not like:

- Selecting new civ each era. I did not like that in HK. Although in civ7, it sounds like you can select civs that make sense historically if you want so that might be ok.
- Also, I am not sure I will care for only 3 eras. I get that they are making each historical era more meaningful but 3 eras seems small. It feels like you will play 3 mini civ games instead of actually progressing through history. And the tech trees seem small.
- And it does feel like the game will throw a lot of micro bonuses at the player (leader traits, civ traits, government celebrations, cultural civics, legacy traits, army commander promotions etc) but that each era will feel shallow as you race through the tech tree.

I don't know if this is bad or not but civ7 looks like a hybrid of Millennia and Humankind. It seems to borrow mechanics from each game. Hopefully, civ7 does it better!

Overall, I like what I see.
You would think Civ VII would just be Civ VII and not have to copy inferior games.
 
The game definitely looks beautiful, I love the art style and map...I will patiently wait until we have full information on all the new systems before forming an opinion. I'm leaning towards cautious optimism at this point. I've been playing since III and have gotten 1000s of hours out of each iteration, so I expect to get the same here even if I don't end up loving every aspect.
 
I voted 50/50 good and bad.

The good:

Graphics look nice. Iguazu falls look beautiful. 👍
Navigable rivers are very cool.
Some interesting choices for Civs revealed already.
Some Civ specific wonders. I like that idea.

The bad:

Unfortunately Civ switching looks terrible. Egypt into Mongolia or Songhai is beyond stupid.
Global Crappiness is back to rear it's ugly head from 5. *Ugh* Get ready for 2-3 city empires and general hand slapping.
Civ unique bonuses look dull. It is more about the leaders.
UI is terrible. The content creators let them know so hopefully that'll get fixed.

However, if they have a classic mode and make it very modder friendly, it may become a good game.
 
Having watched a lot of the content on YouTube from creators (would thoroughly recommend Ursa Ryan's, if you haven't seen it - long but really well put together and detailed), I am now firmly in the "it looks great" category.

Of course, it's still very early and much could change, but there are so many things that sound fantastic and a much needed evolution of the formula: towns, trading, commanders, less micro management, diplomacy, city sprawl, leader attributes, unique civic trees. And I think we can all agree thay it looks spectacular, aside from the janky leader animations.

I am still cautious about Ages, Crises, and switching Civs. I think these could be brilliant but it's a fine balance, and I do understand the concern that some people have (though not the way people are communicating this concern!!). If they pull it off, I think it could be absolutely transformative - end game monotony is my single biggest gripe with VI, I could play the early eras forever without getting bored, but I rarely finish a game.
 
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I think with DLCs and expansions the civ switching concept will only get better. As we might get more options for each civilization.
E.g. for Persia: Achaemenid -> Safavid -> Iran.
 
I think with DLCs and expansions the civ switching concept will only get better. As we might get more options for each civilization.
E.g. for Persia: Achaemenid -> Safavid -> Iran.
That is a point worth making: in this system the addition of more civilizations will add more options to each individual playthrough.
 
I think with DLCs and expansions the civ switching concept will only get better. As we might get more options for each civilization.
E.g. for Persia: Achaemenid -> Safavid -> Iran.
Yes, the more Civs they add, the smoother and more logical the switching would be. Will make for a very expensive game in the end, though. Like $350+
 
I've only watched trailer and showcase, and it seems great to me. I hadn't played Humankind, and don't know much about it, so I don't compare it with Civ 7. Civ switching don't bother me, seems interesting, even great. To me the game is about building your own unique empire, based on some real-life civ, not strictly following the real-life history on every step. When playing Civ 6 I like playing with civs that have bonuses for the first eras, because they are more important, and hadn't played much with civs like America that have bonuses for the latter eras, because, by the time these bonuses became available, I'm normally was already on a way to victory, so they hadn't added anything to my game. With Civ 7, new civ every age would give me unique bonuses each age, so each age would be impactful and in theory competitive, with me and AI having chances to change the situation and eventual winner. And from the civs already revealed, it seems like each civ would be even more unique now and this sounds great to me.

The art is very beautiful, really like how rivers looks and works now, and the cities looks wonderful.

There seems to be a lot of new systems or changes to how the systems worked in the past, like cities being divided into cities, towns, settlements, and there are also districts and quarters, right now it all seems a bit confusing and overwhelming, the most confusing part to me right now is ages, how they changes and how it affect the world and everything that was achieved in the previous ages. But I like the way it all sounds, and expect to understand more with additional reveals in the following months, so overall impression right now is extremely positive.
 
My overall impression is that almost every aspect of the game looks fantastic and exactly the kind of changes I would expect to solve the problems civ6 at root level and remove redundant complexity.
Meanwhile long term potential of changing civs mid game is great, it shall definitely enable great things at one point filling the gaps with mods.

But enforcing civ switching as the main mode of the game is crazy and I genuinely have no idea what Firaxis was smoking. It's something very few people desired and going very radically against the basic appeal of the series, and they had a lot of time to see just how very negative was reponse to Humankind's version of it. By the way, why copy from Humankind if you have your own approach which is popular, thode two games could fulfill two different niches!

By the way you do realize guys that civ switching system irreparably destroys TSL maps and most likely is going to radically limit the number of civs in one session? So say bye to your epic 20 player Earth maps for a long time!

Two game modes, one with switching and one being "classical mode" are an absolute must.

I genuinely think that Firaxis has completely underestimated its playerbase's approach to the game's "historicity" and thought players are going to be ovejoyed en masse by the "oh wow Aztec to Germany how cool jaguar tanks : DDD" and did not expect at all people's uprising "against too crazy alternate history and in the name of historical immersion". There would be some buildup to this great miscalculation with how arcade and zany civ6 was, ending with its fantasy game modes.

They thought people are going to love switching because it is More Varied Gameplay and completely failed to recognize just how serious Historical Immersion is for huge part of their playerbase. It's like a gameplay version of civ6 graphic style dissonance, where they were seemingly taken by surprise by like 50% of the players disliking "cartoonish" graphics.
 
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They thought people are going to love switching because it is More Varied Gameplay and completely failed to recognize just how serious Historical Immersion is for huge part of their playerbase.
Yet players are fine with Japan building Petra or stone age USA
 
Yet players are fine with Japan building Petra or stone age USA
Some players don't like Japan building Petra or stone age USA, yet they are fine with playing on some randomly generated map of the planet.

Different people can have different approach on what element of history gives them immersion. For some it will be old civs dying out and being replaced by new ones, and for some giving them the option to guide old civs through history instead of transforming Egypt into Mongolia.
 
Yet players are fine with Japan building Petra or stone age USA
No, "we" are not. But what to do with that? That is an unsolvable technical issue since civ 1.
Sorry: Wanted to reply to: Some players don't like Japan building Petra or stone age USA, yet they are fine with playing on some randomly generated map of the planet.
So but regarding Petra:
No, "we" are not. Don't know why it evolved so, but it is not a deal breaker like civ switch, it is just a side-part of the game.
Edit2: I guess thats also a technical issue, cause you'd need to have many more wonders if you wanna see them in the few civs in a game.
 
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I watched the Firaxis gameplay video again (20 mins) and Boesthius' YouTube (over an hour) with the result that I like what I see.

I've always viewed games in the Civ franchise as building an empire. If I'm honest, my Civ3 maps ended up looking pretty similar, regardless of which leader/civ I was playing. I built my empire, conquered my neighbors, grabbed resources, without really embracing that I was leading the Japanese, or Americans, or Russians. My Civ6 games -- yes, the buildings and units look distinct for the leader I chose -- but they, too, had similar structures. Place the districts for adjacency, mine the hills, out-expand my neighbors and invade them. The mini-map shows my empire getting bigger... and bigger... and bigger. That's why I liked the 4-city Tradition play in Civ5 the least. My empire wasn't growing.

First, I love that Civ7 is its own game. They've made some bold choices (no workers OR builders) and the graphics look like nothing else. Just stunning.
They are emphasizing "building your empire", not building the Roman empire or the Kongo empire or the Mayan empire. It will be very individual, very different on each play through, not just because of differences in the map. By this time next year, we will be talking about which choices of 3 civs make the most sense for winning a science victory with Ben Franklin, which will likely be different than the 3 civs you choose to win a culture victory with Hattie.

I agree with @Krajzen that "true start location" TSL maps are probably dead. Random maps will rule this game, although specialty maps will still be fun for a change of pace. I voted "mostly good" because I agree with Boesthius that the color choices for the UI need improvement. The Civ6 tech and civic trees made good use of colors and icons; Civ3, Civ4, and even BERT were clearer than the early UI for Civ7.
 
My main concern is the bad aspects of Civ VI they didn't get rid of, such as policy cards. I can not believe they kept that horrible chore of a system that grinds the game to a halt every few turns as you have to pick the optimal set of half a dozen cards out of a deck of several dozen to use for... just the next few turns until you have to do it all over again.
My biggest issue too. I want government/policy to be macro-level, long-term decision-making, not a bunch of gamey cards to adjust every 5-10 turns when I'm building cavalry or whatever.
The looks to end in the mid 20th century now, which would be a massive disappointment for me, as I've been banging on the drum that civilization should be depicted having an explicit future, way beyond the times we live in now. Please, none of this "End Of History"-nonsense
They've already shown rockets and said global warming is definitely in, which leads me to believe the game will last into the near future (like 2050ish). They just haven't shown a lot of the third era yet.

By the way you do realize guys that civ switching system irreparably destroys TSL maps and most likely is going to radically limit the number of civs in one session? So say bye to your epic 20 player Earth maps for a long time!
Rhye's & Fall -style TSL >>>> 20-players-in-4000-BC TSL

There's more than one way to play TSL maps, and I for one am very excited to play a TSL game that evolves by era.
 
I think it's just as likely that we "fanatics" overestimate how much we represent Civ's fanbase. :lol:

If you speak about the possibility of players outside civ fanatics being totally fine with civ switching then I have to disprove it - all discursive spaces are on fire and havingly seemingly like 50% of their voices very negative (with the remaining half not even being purely positive but positive + neutral). Civ reddit, youtube comments, paradoxplaza, random forums across the web... It's massive discontent at this point. I am frankly surprised how uniform it is - I have perceived civ reddit to be fairly uncritical, conformist and overall not a place of discussion, and even they are on fire.
 
If you speak about the possibility of players outside civ fanatics being totally fine with civ switching then I have to disprove it - all discursive spaces are on fire and havingly seemingly like 50% of their voices very negative (with the remaining half not even being purely positive but positive + neutral). Civ reddit, youtube comments, paradoxplaza, random forums across the web... It's massive discontent at this point. I am frankly surprised how uniform it is - I have perceived civ reddit to be fairly uncritical, conformist and overall not a place of discussion, and even they are on fire.
I was being flippant! I get the same impression as you but we'll never truly know, I suppose. I have a group of friends who play Civ MP very casually and none of them seem to care, but they're very unlikely to venture here or Reddit or YT comments to voice their opinion. Not saying I'm right at all, btw, just that it's quite hard to escape your own echo chambers. During most of Civ VI's launch and early life, I got the distinct impression that Civ Fanatics was out of step with consensus, wouldn't surprise me if that is true here too.
 
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