I think debate about snowballing is more discussing a symptom of an issue Firaxis made up themselves.
There have been many, many complains on these boards over the years about the end game being boring because the player knows that they're going to win, but clicking through the last few dozen turns is tedious and time consuming. And that especially applies to V and VI. You just didn't read them, I guess.
If Beyond Earth can get an expansion, Civ 7 will also get an expansion.
That’s an AI problem - not a fundamental gameplay problem.
But we've learned that the AI isn't ever going to be good enough. It's just not.
Yes, I finish my games, but I don't enjoy the last 25% of the game. That's an actual problem, even if it doesn't apply to you.
I very strongly disagree.
In my eyes Firaxis here is making a fundamental simple error about ending a Civ game. Instead of listing retire from the game as a loss, they should set it as a marginal win and not punishing the player for being clever enough, not to waste the time by going through tons of unfun additional turns when the player thinks he has practically won the game. Each additional turn the player will make, must be rewarded in the game by additional fun for the player in such an additional turn.
On old Civ iterations if you retired from the game your Civ score was calculated and recorded. The score was higher if you completed the game, encouraging you to finish the games.
There have been plenty of complaints about how stale Civ6's late game was so I don't think it's completely out of left field. Even if finishing games isn't something which ever especially bothered me, it's something folks have discussed in previous civs.
Totally and a path that led to this mess of three mini games in one .
That's a good video, Civ 6 MP was my by far most played option this was in the main aided by the many fantastic mods rather than any design choices by firaxis
I think it does solve the original problem mostly. Unless you play a very aggressive conquest, you enter modern without clear path to victory and spend significant part of the modern age establishing foundation for victory. Yes, you still reach the "already won" state, but you come there in the last 10% of the game, not 50% as it was in Civ6.
It doesn't fill like 3 minigames at all. You play like 150 turns without breaks and when age transition comes, it keeps most of the things you had in previous age, feeling like continuation, not a new game.
Some snowballing is unavoidable, otherwise early game will not make any sense. Civ7 actually handles it better than previous civ games. Challenging level of AI doesn't help it. Even if you have AI perfectly tuned to your skill level, you'll have games where you run away early and win before the end of the game or games where you lose early and don't want to continue the game.
Probably the key thing here is that in MP you could resign if you see that you're terribly losing.
Except that originally less carried over than it does currently. Transitions are being made softer, which makes snowballing come back more. The transition changes are being done explicitly to address player feedback (whether I think it's the right or wrong move personally).
Sure, though I still play with regroup, I'm one of the players who is fine with it even though I don't think it cures snowballing. But the argument is definitely a bit schizophrenic since the tensions introduced by Civ7's structure are still there. If 7's diredtion of travel is blurring age transitions then later ages will matter less and less, and civs restricted to later ages also becomes a less viable idea.
