Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[Civinator]

Core mechanics are the worst in the series.

Navigable rivers in my eyes are good.

 

[lander]

Navigable rivers in my eyes are good.

I was actually thinking about that right after I posted the reply lol.
But that's the only upgrade

 

[bumpyglint]

Navigable rivers in my eyes are good.

I find this kind of funny, honestly. Navigable rivers are a great idea in theory, but the feature is completely undermined by how terrible naval combat is. Since naval vs. naval combat is limited to melee attacks—and those do such pitiful damage—you can end up in a situation where a defending naval unit just sits still and heals every turn, and your attacking unit will almost never manage to kill it (you make 22-23 damage, but they heal 20 damage per turn).

In navigable rivers, the number of attacking units doesn’t even matter, because only one ship can attack at a time. That means you can block a river with a single ship, and as long as it heals every turn, it’s practically invincible. And if you’ve got two ships, you can just rotate them when one gets low on health. The result? Navigable rivers turn into impenetrable choke points.

It’s honestly wild how a feature with so much potential ends up being broken by such nonsensical gameplay mechanics.

 

[GIO888]

I haven't got Civ VII yet, looked at Steam stats affo the Patch and was SHOCKED to see Civ VI (I still play, a LOT!) AND Civ V (I haven't played in years) both in the top 100, and no Civ VII to be seen.

Looks like it'll be a long time before I get it at this rate.....

 

[KayAU]

Just curious. Who thinks civ 7 will eventually overtake civ 5 for steam numbers?

Who thinks it will overtake 6 as well?

In terms of reviews, never. In terms of player count, I think it may overtake both at some point, but it will probably take some time, some improvements, and a real discount (15% brings it down to just above a regular premium AAA game in my region).

Civ 5 has incredible staying power, though. It remains to be seen if the same is true for Civ 6. It was supported with patches and promoted with events up until quite recently. Civ 5 hasn't received anything official in more than a decade, and still regularly draws 15-20k concurrent players. It is not inconceivable that at one point, the most played "modern" Civ game could be 5, followed by 6, and then 7. But as I said, it depends on how Civ 6 does now that it is no longer the most recent.

 

[Civinator]

Navigable rivers are a great idea in theory, but the feature is completely undermined by how terrible naval combat is.

It stays, that navigable rivers are good - many other concepts (among them as posted naval combat) are bad or at least not implanted well. Navigable rivers are the Civ 7 feature I would want to implant into my Civ 3 mods, but I am not able to do this with Civ 3.

 

[MutilationWave]

I was actually thinking about that right after I posted the reply lol.
But that's the only upgrade

Not even the (land) combat? I think it's the best it's ever been.

 

[Leucarum]

When it comes to core features I think it depends on what you are thinking of. The game was marketed on civ switching and the era system - the former I dislike, the latter was not released in a polished form. But I find it hard to call them core features when the game appears to treat each era as a separate mod...

And the core features I'd say all amazing! Removing builders (how did this take so long?), army commanders (let's just get rid of the one disadvantage 1UPT has), leader/civ mixing (hello replayability), navigable rivers (fun but pretty minor), towns/cities (you mean I don't need 500 build queues?)...

Civ7 is a little bit like having someone with a supermodel's body, but trying to market them off a smile that has clearly never seen a dentist.

 

[Krajzen]

Yea, it's not like the lead designer has any say of what goes into the game. Let's blame the janitor.

I need to finally finish my huge work in progress post where I theorize that a lot of civ7 problems, similarly to a lot of civ6 problems, stem from Ed Beach's approach of viewing civ games too much as board games and not enough as simulation games. Basically he tries to repair every issue with abrupt brute force mechanics trying to top-down enforce certain game states (e.g. the way ages, age transitions and crises work) instead of designing the simplest building blocks in such a way that they will naturally generate complex situations later on (e.g. few simple mechanics regarding citizens' happiness -> crises, revolutions, cultural change; many Paradox games can do that).

See also the way religion works, where every game it gets more and more artifically constrained, gamey and strictly dependent on player's active actions - and less and less "living on its own" in the background via the passive spread. Strangely enough it is also considered worse and worse every game

One of the most egregious example of this approach are the treasure fleets. The devs want the "cool scenario" of global trade conflicts and colonialism but nothing in the game's economic engine facilitates that sort of dynamics occuring naturally, so instead they mutilate the map and introduce an entire separate minigame in order to violently force the AIs and humans to do this.

 

[lander]

When it comes to core features I think it depends on what you are thinking of. The game was marketed on civ switching and the era system - the former I dislike, the latter was not released in a polished form. But I find it hard to call them core features when the game appears to treat each era as a separate mod...

And the core features I'd say all amazing! Removing builders (how did this take so long?), army commanders (let's just get rid of the one disadvantage 1UPT has), leader/civ mixing (hello replayability), navigable rivers (fun but pretty minor), towns/cities (you mean I don't need 500 build queues?)...

Civ7 is a little bit like having someone with a supermodel's body, but trying to market them off a smile that has clearly never seen a dentist.

When I seriously think about it, many things I could actually live with even with disliking them but I have 3 solids that make the game unplayable for me.

era change: when I play civ i make a plan and build from the start which is almost always a naval power. Troop change is something I will never be able to accept. Not because im going out of my way to boycott, because the experience was horrible and I was filled with more anger and disappointment than fun. Infact fun was barely present.

Resources: i used to absolutely love mining resources in civ 6 that I needed for weapons and troops, and trading them. Was very realistic and fun. This new system just feels absolutely pointless for me.

Lack of customisation: i have always viewed default and scenarios as the games tutorial. The only way I have ever played civ is to heavily customise the game i feel like playing. I always played incredibly long games so enjoying it is important.

A little extra one is diplomacy, it had many problems and the ai wasn't the best but it was an amazing mechanic that just needed improved.

Summary: if a basic ask of keeping the naval fleet i built and stockpiling and trading resources on a game a moded myself was available to me i could live with anything else. To me these are the core mechanics and the only reason I enjoy civ.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I need to finally finish my huge work in progress post where I theorize that a lot of civ7 problems, similarly to a lot of civ6 problems, stem from Ed Beach's approach of viewing civ games too much as board games and not enough as simulation games. Basically he tries to repair every issue with abrupt brute force mechanics trying to top-down enforce certain game states (e.g. the way ages, age transitions and crises work) instead of designing the simplest building blocks in such a way that they will naturally generate complex situations later on (e.g. few simple mechanics regarding citizens' happiness -> crises, revolutions, cultural change; many Paradox games can do that).

See also the way religion works, where every game it gets more and more artifically constrained, gamey and strictly dependent on player's active actions - and less and less "living on its own" in the background via the passive spread. Strangely enough it is also considered worse and worse every game

One of the most egregious example of this approach are the treasure fleets. The devs want the "cool scenario" of global trade conflicts and colonialism but nothing in the game's economic engine facilitates that sort of dynamics occuring naturally, so instead they mutilate the map and introduce an entire separate minigame in order to violently force the AIs and humans to do this.

I'd be interested in your post and your expanded thoughts on this. I've been stating since the launch of Civ 6 that Beach's vision is too much "let's add this cool thing ... and this cool thing ... and this cool thing" for my tastes. I much prefer that complexity and "cool things" arise organically from the interaction of small, simple mechanics that work well together and define how the underlying game runs, rather than the game devs adding new mechanics for every new idea they have. Not least of which because every new mechanic requires teaching the AI how to use it (or not bothering to do so). The success of Civ 6 says that my preferences are out of step with the broad audience for Civ games, but now Civ 7 is stumbling despite following the same design philosophy. So is it the game philosophy that is showing its limits, or did the game devs just misstep in adding the wrong "new cool things"?

 

[Leucarum]

I need to finally finish my huge work in progress post where I theorize that a lot of civ7 problems, similarly to a lot of civ6 problems, stem from Ed Beach's approach of viewing civ games too much as board games and not enough as simulation games. Basically he tries to repair every issue with abrupt brute force mechanics trying to top-down enforce certain game states (e.g. the way ages, age transitions and crises work) instead of designing the simplest building blocks in such a way that they will naturally generate complex situations later on (e.g. few simple mechanics regarding citizens' happiness -> crises, revolutions, cultural change; many Paradox games can do that).

See also the way religion works, where every game it gets more and more artifically constrained, gamey and strictly dependent on player's active actions - and less and less "living on its own" in the background via the passive spread. Strangely enough it is also considered worse and worse every game

One of the most egregious example of this approach are the treasure fleets. The devs want the "cool scenario" of global trade conflicts and colonialism but nothing in the game's economic engine facilitates that sort of dynamics occuring naturally, so instead they mutilate the map and introduce an entire separate minigame in order to violently force the AIs and humans to do this.

I've generally been skeptical towards this argument since Civ pretty much IS a board game. So the line between what works in a board game and what works in Civ is very blurry IMO.

But there is a mechanic in Civ7 which is really common in board games, but I think works especially badly in Civ7, and it's the era progression. So many board games have a competitive end condition where the players in contention are pushing to bring the game to end, while others are trying to stall it out. And that's basically era progression. The trouble is, AI pushing the era ahead is very opaque and mostly uninteractive. You get some tiny notifications, but you can't usually interact to stop it anyway. And there's issues with players finding era changes too abrupt which is 100% down to this mechanic.

So, while I remain skeptical that Civ games don't benefit from importing mechanics from board games. I think I have found a board game mechanic which is hurting Civ7, so I can't be as absolute about my usual "naah it's all fine" response to this argument.

 

[Leucarum]

When I seriously think about it, many things I could actually live with even with disliking them but I have 3 solids that make the game unplayable for me.

era change: when I play civ i make a plan and build from the start which is almost always a naval power. Troop change is something I will never be able to accept. Not because im going out of my way to boycott, because the experience was horrible and I was filled with more anger and disappointment than fun. Infact fun was barely present.

Resources: i used to absolutely love mining resources in civ 6 that I needed for weapons and troops, and trading them. Was very realistic and fun. This new system just feels absolutely pointless for me.

Lack of customisation: i have always viewed default and scenarios as the games tutorial. The only way I have ever played civ is to heavily customise the game i feel like playing. I always played incredibly long games so enjoying it is important.

A little extra one is diplomacy, it had many problems and the ai wasn't the best but it was an amazing mechanic that just needed improved.

Summary: if a basic ask of keeping the naval fleet i built and stockpiling and trading resources on a game a moded myself was available to me i could live with anything else. To me these are the core mechanics and the only reason I enjoy civ.

I've been a big advocate of allowing "what gets carried over at era transition" to be a customizable option...

I do like the new resource system though. Civ6's system was too random, and the stockpiling worked better earlier in the game than later IMO.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I need to finally finish my huge work in progress post where I theorize that a lot of civ7 problems, similarly to a lot of civ6 problems, stem from Ed Beach's approach of viewing civ games too much as board games and not enough as simulation games.

I think it's false dichotomy. Civ7 has clearly a bit too much board game in approach (although some things stemming from which approach are fantastic), but simulation is even more wrong approach. Civilization is and always was a strategy game. Although I could totally guess there could be some misunderstanding here, because terms like "simulation" or "strategy" have variety of definitions and term "board game design" doesn't have an agreed definition at all.

And while I see some problems coming specifically from Ed Beach approach, like his like for crises and natural disasters, I don't thing they are significant.

--

My view comes directly from how Firaxis marketed Civ7 and prioritized their features and it has several points:
1. Firaxis clearly targeted multiplayer a lot. It appeared in pre-release promos much much more than in any previous Civ title.
2. Firaxis also targeted consoles. Again, no previous Civ game had simultaneous launch on that many platforms with crossplay.
3. Based on those 2 points, I'd say Firaxis aimed at some new audience. I wrote several posts about why we can't say for sure yet whether this aim was a hit or miss, but it surely harmed old time players
4. As with previous revolutionary title, Civ5, this game clearly didn't have enough time to be polished with all those new things in gameplay. It was released in minimal playable state, which surely didn't help

 

[Gori the Grey]

I need to finally finish my huge work in progress post w

I'd be interested in your post and your expanded thoughts on this.

I second Canuck's interest in seeing your post, Krajzen.

 

[kaspergm]

And the core features I'd say all amazing! Removing builders (how did this take so long?), army commanders (let's just get rid of the one disadvantage 1UPT has), leader/civ mixing (hello replayability), navigable rivers (fun but pretty minor), towns/cities (you mean I don't need 500 build queues?)...

Funny, pretty much all the things you list here are things I, at least on paper, dislike or at best is indifferent about.

 

[Leucarum]

Funny, pretty much all the things you list here are things I, at least on paper, dislike or at best is indifferent about.

I'm surprised! I tried going back to Civ6, and while I could take or leave eras and civ switching, those features were things I really, really missed! To the point where I didn't feel like I wanted to play 6 every time I built a builder, or felt like I needed to spam settlers... What doesn't grab you about them?

 

[kaspergm]

I'm surprised! I tried going back to Civ6, and while I could take or leave eras and civ switching, those features were things I really, really missed! To the point where I didn't feel like I wanted to play 6 every time I built a builder, or felt like I needed to spam settlers... What doesn't grab you about them?

I was not fond of the Civ6 builder system, but I liked workers of previous game. I wouldn't mind a system where improvements were constructed in town (similar to how districts are constructed), but I really don't like the Civ7 model where tiles is auto-improved when you place a population on it - first of all, it removes the whole point of the improvement being a thing in itself, and reduces the strategic element of the game (in earlier games, there was always the choice, do I invest time an resources in improving this tile now, or will I rather have the citizen work the unimproved tile and prioritize something else). I also feel very strongly against how you no longer have different improvement choices (again, less strategic decisions), how you can't move citizens once they are placed (again, ...) and how it is linked to improving borders (why??).

As for the other things - Army Commanders, I think overall they are a good addition to the game, my only objection is some cheesy min-maxing strategies with loading/unloading. Leader Civ Mixing is easily the feature of Civ7 I dislike the strongest, it completely kills immersion for me. Navigable rivers I kind of fail to see the point with, particularly how there are now two kinds of river tiles - aren't they just a bit like having coastal tiles forming an inlet? - but maybe I will feel differently once I play the game. Town/Cities was very top of my wishlist for Civ7, but I'm not impressed with how they implemented them, although I guess there has been made some improvements here with later patches?

 

[Leucarum]

I was not fond of the Civ6 builder system, but I liked workers of previous game. I wouldn't mind a system where improvements were constructed in town (similar to how districts are constructed), but I really don't like the Civ7 model where tiles is auto-improved when you place a population on it - first of all, it removes the whole point of the improvement being a thing in itself, and reduces the strategic element of the game (in earlier games, there was always the choice, do I invest time an resources in improving this tile now, or will I rather have the citizen work the unimproved tile and prioritize something else). I also feel very strongly against how you no longer have different improvement choices (again, less strategic decisions), how you can't move citizens once they are placed (again, ...) and how it is linked to improving borders (why??).

Fair enough, I mean there is still choice in terms of prioritizing resources, expanding borders, or growing to desired spots... I think the more I play with it, the more I like it, and the harder it would be to go back.

As for the other things - Army Commanders, I think overall they are a good addition to the game, my only objection is some cheesy min-maxing strategies with loading/unloading.

Loading/Unloading isn't too bad. It can be the most fiddly if you need to be precise I think.

Leader Civ Mixing is easily the feature of Civ7 I dislike the strongest, it completely kills immersion for me.

That's a shame. It really adds to the replayability. I am personally hoping it becomes an evergreen feature!

Navigable rivers I kind of fail to see the point with, particularly how there are now two kinds of river tiles - aren't they just a bit like having coastal tiles forming an inlet? - but maybe I will feel differently once I play the game. Town/Cities was very top of my wishlist for Civ7, but I'm not impressed with how they implemented them, although I guess there has been made some improvements here with later patches?

Yeah, towns are improving, and the base idea is really good to start with.

 

[Civinator]

The success of Civ 6 says that my preferences are out of step with the broad audience for Civ games

Than my preferences are "out of step" with the broad audience for civ games, too.

But the question is, what is meant by success of Civ 6 ? If it is meant, that for me it is the best game of the civ series? Than the answer is no. The best game of the civ series for me is the new Civ 3 in combination with the great additional options that are now offered by the C3X mod.

If success means the sold copies of Civ 6, than the answer is yes. But, per example, I bought Civ 6 because it was still looking like a civ game (that I like since Civ 1,2,3 and partly 4) and Ed Beach in his interview in the German gaming magazine GameStar Black Addition: Civilization mentioned short before the release of Civ 6, that Civ 6 would have a much improved AI, compared to its predecessors.

Spoiler :

Years later we all know about the quality of the Civ 6 AI in reality: At least the copy of Civ 6 sold to me, is no sign of a better quality of Civ 6 compared to the other versions of the civ series.

So is it the game philosophy that is showing its limits, or did the game devs just misstep in adding the wrong "new cool things"?

In my eyes the game philosophy of the civ series is not showing its limits with Civ 7, but the game designers in Civ 7 failed in adding some important new features in Civ 7 properly. Per example in the Civ 3 mod CCM 3 (and its predecessors) since many years the rulers switch for each civ in each of the 4 eras of Civ 3 - and there was never any protest about it in the threads of the CCM mods. Additionally, since the mod C3X is allowing this, the 4 phases of a civ in Civ 3 can have their own different names for that civ and their rulers and titles during the game. In my eyes Civ 7 would be much better accepted, if the devs would look at the current different territories on earth and the civs that are living there today and than are looking back on that territory in the former stages of history (=eras) and the people who dominated those former eras, not counting other civs in the game that are dominating that territory of another civ in the game (no "Britain is Roman", if Britain and Italy/Rome are part of the game).