Yeah but you're wasting an entire city by having it stay as a town so that you don't have to waste a couple citizens.
Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread
- Thread starter user746383
- Start date
I just keep feeling like people are seeing the concept, not the actual numbers and opportunity costs. It's a fine concept, it just doesn't work.
I mean, if towns have some purpose to exist other than bragging rights for "look we implemented a concept which in theory does XYZ but don't actually ask yourself if it does that, just admire the theory", then that purpose would be cheaper, less committed settlement of areas to get access to resources. But then this only makes sense as a non-forced feature if like you absolutely can't just do the same with a city.
The answer here is that if the game is balanced around cities, and they're like "whoa, more than 6 cities in antiquity and the yields get out of balance and there's snowballing" so then they're like "ah ha! We'll use a settlement cap to nerf having too many cities and keep potential yields under control and in balance" and then they're like "but what about far flung awkward resource locations that would make poor cities, since we've imposed a settlement cap?"
In that case, you'd have a use case for towns. Unfortunately, Civ 7 doesn't have differential settlement cap limits for towns vs. cities or something to address the use case.
If I'm using towns to feed cities, well the same exact trade off exactly could have been accomplished by just having more effective food buildings or better growth sensitivity to farms.
Towns only make sense as growth engines if you can control where their yields go. If you separate the food function from a city, then just having it become part of city yields all over again obviates the intent. If food function is to be separate, it has to actually be separate. Meaning a town's food can either go to one city OR to another.
I hear some hopium that the new patch will let us control where food goes. Honestly, I don't believe they'll EVER do more than band-aid patch the UI. It's complicated, but for one they can't admit defeat. This is corporate media policy in America now. Don't ever admit mistakes, even tacitly.
If we can easily control what food goes where, I'll take it back and consider that towns maybe have their own use-case now. Until then, they're just shiny theoretically useful, actually pointless, poorly implemented distractions.
I do think long-term, they need to split the settlement cap to act different between towns and cities. Whether to make towns "free" towards the settlement cap, or have them cost 1 and cities 2, or some other balance, that's a start.
Second, they desperately need to fix connections. Just simplify it back basically to the "you're connected to anything within X as long as you can get there by road or water", and then let that chain.
If you do that, IMO that's good enough. Letting you choose I think would give a distraction that if not as needed. But make sure that when I settle this fishing boat town on an island, and it's connected back to my mainland empire, that I can actually still use that food in the core. And not just feel the one city they're connected to, while starving my core cities.
VGT
Warlord
Fully agree. It was quite a surprise for me it doesn't work this way. When I first saw settlement cap, I thought they are trying to solve wide play tediousness for some (I love it) by introducing something along puppet cities. You will have 3+ core cities throughout the game and as many puppet towns as you like to satisfy wide play. Then I learned they also count towards the limit.
On the release:
Adding secondary negative indicators:
- strong preorder sales
- strong reviews
- peaked on charts on the opening week (UK & NZ retail sales, Steam)
- poor user rating on Steam, Xbox and PS stores
- quickly fell off the console charts
- reportedly low player count on consoles
- only 85k concurrent players on Steam at opening week
- declining player count, declining sales
- 1st DLC has "very negative" rating on Steam
Adding secondary negative indicators:
- VR reception is weak
- Steam discussions never got past "is this really civ"
- Reddit civ forum getting cold
user746383
King
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2002
- Messages
- 775
Also, streamers no longer streaming the game much.
It’s pretty subjective, but the explanations for how the game is actually a success are increasingly flat out unhinged (makes me think of the "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's aliens" guy), which is an indicator in a way.
It’s pretty subjective, but the explanations for how the game is actually a success are increasingly flat out unhinged (makes me think of the "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's aliens" guy), which is an indicator in a way.
Last edited:
Noble Zarkon
Elite Quattromaster - Immortal (BTS)
Super Moderator
Hall of Fame Staff
GOTM Staff
Supporter
This is a strong point towards a poor launch which I don't think anyone disagrees with.
I don't see anybody arguing this, however some of us think we don't have enough info (on console sales etc) / it's soon to determine it's a success or a failure.
Askia Muhammad
Prince
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2019
- Messages
- 305
It looks bad but I don’t think Firaxis is taking it as badly as we are here. Unfortunately, I remember back when streamers were just showing off initial previews from being flown to Maryland, many mentioned being concerned about ages and Civ swapping.
According to the preview videos, the devs were adamant that the playerbase would absolutely adore Civ 7. I’m genuinely concerned there is disillusionment at the helm of the product. I even had an initially negative response to its announcement. They somehow seem to have fallen far astray of the average players desires with this iteration.
user746383
King
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2002
- Messages
- 775
Nobody is saying it’s definitely already a failure either, just that all the actual evidence we have points to negative signs.
That said, there’s been a few posts explaining that actually people love the game but reviews are being woke bombed, steam count is low but that’s because all the players are in china, playing VR, etc.
Maybe it’s just a couple very frequent posters throwing out hypotheticals, but I think it’s a fairly reasonable approach to go with what we have evidence for and make assumptions based on that until better evidence comes in. “Maybe it’s popular on mobile but who knows” isn’t really a counter argument, it’s just spreading doubt for lack of actual evidence.
99-percent-sure
punches up
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2021
- Messages
- 180
The connections as of right now are unreliable, especially after there's an age change. Losing connection to a core town that has been in your empire since Antiquity is ridiculous, and yet, in the Modern age I'm playing right now, I had to prioritize my tech research to be able to get merchants first in order to repair a broken connection that, frankly, made no sense looking at the map. It's not like there was another AI's town blocking the path between the affected town and my two neighboring, contiguous settlements. And the connection didn't break after the Exploration age change, so why now? Just because another civ's city center was maybe (I'm guessing here) one hex closer to me now than the long-connected centers of my neighboring settlements? Ridiculous.
Meanwhile, I also had an island town in distant lands that somehow was not connected to the closest settlement, a city seven hexes away (across water), which I could not repair with a merchant. I wound up having to make an unplanned city out of a further-away town that was considered "connected" in order to be able to take the island town's food yield and use it constructively, when I'm trying to focus on other uses for my gold.
Because of these types of issues, I think it would be a good idea if we were able to choose connections to any settlement within, say, 10 or 12 hexes that is not blocked by another civ. Having to change your strategy in order to accommodate random connection losses/failures is not the kind of random event-type challenge I'm looking for. Also, once you research merchants in the antiquity age, you should continue to be able to build them in future ages, especially where lost connections are a common gameplay issue.
I've also noticed lately that some of my quest fulfillments aren't registering, such as having a treasure fleet deliver three treasure resources to my empire. I even built a new town and had it deliver exactly three resources (instead of the four or five other towns were sending home), and that didn't do the trick. I can think of two others recently that didn't register as well. It feels like new glitches that I didn't notice before are popping up now. I even reported one (I converted Carthage to my religion without being able to see the city center, and didn't get the relics I should have), and the Firaxis agent told me that I needed to send in a gameplay recording to show the problem. I didn't have a save file handy to take me back to that moment, and honestly, I don't feel like this bug is something I should need to record in order for them to understand it. So they're not doing anything about it, other than sending me reminders that my ticket will be closed if I don't send in supporting files, even though their agent already confirmed with me that we're leaving it be for now.
It is getting frustrating.
Last edited:
queenpea
Emperor
To be fair, there have been posters who have been extremely negative and have pushed the failure narrative. I don't think you are among them, but there have been a good number.
user746383
King
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2002
- Messages
- 775
Sure that’s fair, I shouldn’t have said nobody. There’s some out there positivity and negativity for sure.
I was curious and checked the stats myself. If you align to release the player retention doesn’t look so much different than what has been for civ 6.
I can agree that the launch could have gone better, I also think some people here are making the situation appear way worse than what it is in reality.
I can agree that the launch could have gone better, I also think some people here are making the situation appear way worse than what it is in reality.
DeutschDachs
Emperor
Were reviews actually strong though? For a random video game title they are, but for Civilization they're the lowest a new iteration has received at release
Not as strong as VI reviews, but they were not bad.
civlateintothenights
Chieftain
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2025
- Messages
- 33
A metacritic score of 79% is bad. In any other context, 79% sounds good - but for videogames, 79% is not good...
It was 84% in the first week.
Okay, 84% is not strong but lets not tell anyone
I don't think that the franchise has seen the last Civ title - although for any strategy game, seven titles is stretching your luck - but all signs are that Civ7 will be a failure (played for less time by fewer people, fewer mods in relation to time played, less overall interest, etc).
The new mechanics (primarily civ changing) are simply bad enough to ruin it as a specifically Civ game.
The new mechanics (primarily civ changing) are simply bad enough to ruin it as a specifically Civ game.
Askia Muhammad
Prince
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2019
- Messages
- 305
Ok this data is interesting.
it definitely seems that although Civ 7 has overall lower number of players - the player attrition does seem to mirror at least up to day 60, where Civ 6 begins an upward trend. V and VII more or less stabilize at lows
Is it safe to assume maybe 7 simply sold fewer copies but is holding into the players that did purchase?
stealth_nsk
Deity
The upward trend of Civ6 was due to Christmas / New Year holidays.
Similar threads
