Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[Siptah]

This was how i played too, i loved watching the playback on the map and seeing key moments again on my route to world domination.
I have no idea why this was taken out (dont think it was in 6 either?)

It may have been left out on purpose in 6. Was it even in 5? To me, the design philosophy starting from 5 is that the game should be less of a map painter. Hence, maybe the 'look how you painted the map' was seen as less important? Yet, it should be quite easy include this 'follow the game on the minimap in fast forward' accompanied by a scrolling list of important events, and have a hall of fame. I never understood why it took years to include a hall of fame in civ 6, when the respective score was calculated for each game anyway – all that was missing was the menu that showed it in comparison to past games.

I think, for 7 these could potentially even be more interesting. A hall of fame could be per era in addition to the whole game. And as it includes not just your civ, but all civs, leaders, and mementos, comparing outcomes might be more interesting than just seeing which Rome game was your most successful, but that you fared better with Rome/Abbasid/French-Isabella than with Rome/Abbasid/French-Augustus, and it is because you had a much better exploration age. For the playback, it would also be interesting to have a little summary at the end and start of each age.

 

[Gorbles]

A single mechanic is not all of gaming

I never said it was. But if you veto all iterations of any mechanic because at one point somebody tried it and it didn't work out, the games industry would've died out years ago.

It should have been pretty obvious that civ switching and era resets would be pretty unpopular with a franchise that for literal decades has been about Building An Empire To Stand The Test Of Time

It should be pretty obvious that the developers expected pushback. I doubt they expected the pushback they got, however.

Also, as I keep mentioning, that tagline changed at least once already. It used to say "civilisation", not "empire". A civilisation can be contiguous with history in layers. An empire, less so.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Was it even in 5?

It was in 5. A couple of months back, for the first time in a years, I played a domination game through to the end, even though I knew I had won it after capturing the fifth rival capital. I went ahead and conquered the remaining two. I got my little gold trophy icon. And then I got the chance to do the game replay. I had forgotten how fun that replay was. You get it in different forms: seeing the map get painted (Egyptian yellow), as you say, but also a score screen that's just a graph. I never pay attention to score while playing, but this showed me having taken the lead when I conquered England. England had been a wonder-builder in that game, so when I took London, I got a mess of wonders, and that's what boosted my score starting from that moment. So the replay actually helped me to remember things about the game that I wouldn't have on my own.

 

[stealth_nsk]

A single mechanic is not all of gaming

It should have been pretty obvious that civ switching and era resets would be pretty unpopular with a franchise that for literal decades has been about Building An Empire To Stand The Test Of Time

Claiming that civ switching and era resets are the main problems of Civ7 is a big stretch:

1. Civ7, like previous games since Civ4, I believe, was playtested by a Frankenstein Group - dedicated civ fans and they accepted the game.
2. We had analysis of the negative reviews and civilization switching was small enough to not be mentioned there. Abrupt age ends were mentioned as a problem, but well beyond other problems like UI and with focus on abruptness, which is fixed by now.
3. Modern internet is very fast on running hate trains. Content creators catch the narrative and align their content with it, creating media feedback loop. So, the scale of negative reaction often don't represent how things are actually perceived by the community.

I totally understand the desire to project personal feeling to the whole community, but in reality we see very different viewpoints and I doubt it was possible to predict whether was decisions would be perceived as good or bad. If it would be possible for Firaxis to delay the game release till autumn and polish things they had to rush, the launch would probably have totally different narrative.

 

[queenpea]

Claiming that civ switching and era resets are the main problems of Civ7 is a big stretch:

1. Civ7, like previous games since Civ4, I believe, was playtested by a Frankenstein Group - dedicated civ fans and they accepted the game.
2. We had analysis of the negative reviews and civilization switching was small enough to not be mentioned there. Abrupt age ends were mentioned as a problem, but well beyond other problems like UI and with focus on abruptness, which is fixed by now.
3. Modern internet is very fast on running hate trains. Content creators catch the narrative and align their content with it, creating media feedback loop. So, the scale of negative reaction often don't represent how things are actually perceived by the community.

I totally understand the desire to project personal feeling to the whole community, but in reality we see very different viewpoints and I doubt it was possible to predict whether was decisions would be perceived as good or bad. If it would be possible for Firaxis to delay the game release till autumn and polish things they had to rush, the launch would probably have totally different narrative.

There was anxiety present on these forums after Civ switching was announced and before the game launched. These anxious voices were mostly encouraged to quiet down or to close their eyes and think of England. Regardless of who play tested the game, my hope is that Firaxis will find more ways or a new play test team to test future products.

Civ switching’s interconnectedness with the Age system makes it almost impossible to criticize one system without implicating the other. I don’t think you can say that Civ switching is not a significant source of player dissatisfaction.

(As an aside, I’m confused as to what you say has been fixed—the UI or age transitions?)

I think it’s safe to say that the community is currently very divided on this 7th iteration. I don’t think it’s a media loop phenomenon, either. Civ creators on YouTube are still making Civ VII videos—just not with the frequency, enthusiasm, or the rapt attention that, say, Civ VI videos experience. If this hate train was a media creation, you would see these same creators dunking on the game week after week for views.

Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, people just seem less interested in watching creators play VII. It’s probably for the same reasons that few people seem to be playing the game regularly.

 

[Crashdummy]

This was how i played too, i loved watching the playback on the map and seeing key moments again on my route to world domination.
I have no idea why this was taken out (dont think it was in 6 either?)

I think they removed it because it encouraged to play wide and they were trying to discourage that gameplay. Devs with 6 and 7 are trying to limit how many cities you have

Again, that was a big reason why i finished games i knew i already won, i dont know why but watching the recap painting everything granted me satisfaction

 

[Crashdummy]

Claiming that civ switching and era resets are the main problems of Civ7 is a big stretch:

1. Civ7, like previous games since Civ4, I believe, was playtested by a Frankenstein Group - dedicated civ fans and they accepted the game.
2. We had analysis of the negative reviews and civilization switching was small enough to not be mentioned there. Abrupt age ends were mentioned as a problem, but well beyond other problems like UI and with focus on abruptness, which is fixed by now.
3. Modern internet is very fast on running hate trains. Content creators catch the narrative and align their content with it, creating media feedback loop. So, the scale of negative reaction often don't represent how things are actually perceived by the community.

I totally understand the desire to project personal feeling to the whole community, but in reality we see very different viewpoints and I doubt it was possible to predict whether was decisions would be perceived as good or bad. If it would be possible for Firaxis to delay the game release till autumn and polish things they had to rush, the launch would probably have totally different narrative.

I disagree. Many of the problems people say they have when they dont mention age transitions or civ switching are actually problems derived from those mechanics

About the game being unpolish at launch, as you say, since Civ 4 every Civ game launched in a bad general state, yet none had a launch as bas as this one

In my opinion, if the game launched as it is now, the reaction would have been very similar, because the main problems remain

 

[stealth_nsk]

There was anxiety present on these forums after Civ switching was announced and before the game launched. These anxious voices were mostly encouraged to quiet down or to close their eyes and think of England. Regardless of who play tested the game, my hope is that Firaxis will find more ways or a new play test team to test future products.

I know and the same picture could be seen on the vote about civ switching. The broad question is how well this forum represents civ player community in general. We're quite old and few.

 

[queenpea]

I know and the same picture could be seen on the vote about civ switching. The broad question is how well this forum represents civ player community in general. We're quite old and few.

Yes but the opinions expressed here + social media engagement + low Civ VII interest on YT and Twitch + disappointing sales + low player counts on Steam = a divided (at best) player base.

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

I know and the same picture could be seen on the vote about civ switching. The broad question is how well this forum represents civ player community in general. We're quite old and few.

There was a post on Facebook by the Civ account the other day advertising Genghis khan. There were about 80 comments on it, and I'm not kidding when I say about half of them were disparaging Civ switching. The other half were either toxic abuse towards the Devs or general lamentation, occasionally punctuated by a "I'm having fun".

This forum I think overrepresents the pro Civ switching side. Unless there is a very silent majority hidden somewhere that we can't see in player data.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Yes but the opinions expressed here + social media engagement + low Civ VII interest on YT and Twitch + disappointing sales + low player counts on Steam = a divided (at best) player base.

I disagree with a couple of points on this list, but in any case it's clear that the player base is divided, Steam reviews are indicator enough. My point is that if the game would be released in much more polished state, possible it won't be that divided.

There was a post on Facebook by the Civ account the other day advertising Genghis khan. There were about 80 comments on it, and I'm not kidding when I say about half of them were disparaging Civ switching. The other half were either toxic abuse towards the Devs or general lamentation, occasionally punctuated by a "I'm having fun".

This forum I think overrepresents the pro Civ switching side. Unless there is a very silent majority hidden somewhere that we can't see in player data.

The same situation appears on Twitter - under each post we could see replies like "classic mode when?", from a couple of dozen accounts. Honestly, having 40-50 people (out of millions of the game owners) posting negative replies is more about vocal minority than community opinion. Steam reviews are much more representative, but even they are just about 1% of the game owners.

 

[criZp]

Yeah, I've been thinking about this.

(You can add me to the list of people who don't finish games but start game after game after game.)

I might go a step further and say that snowball is THE GAME.

What I mean is this. The other slogan besides "stand the test of time" that used to get bandied about was "interesting choices." I'll just focus on the choice from among buildings. So, as you're first learning Civ, early game, you can build a monument, a granary, a watermill, a shrine. (5 is my reference point). The game tells you what each one will do, but you don't really have a way of knowing, long term, how some extra culture, food, food and production or faith will help you. But it's a clear choice. Those are various strands of the game, and you can decide on whatever basis on which strand you'd most like to advance.

Once you've played a few games, you have a better sense of how those various things do benefit you long term, and maybe you've started to get the sense, well, nothing benefits me more than population growth. So you start to gravitate toward granary as your go-to choice in that early situation.

Once you play a little more, if you've got a certain kind of mind, you start to ask, "now, which one will help me the most?" You start min-maxing, in other words. For every set of possible competing buildings, through the whole game, there is a best answer to that question. Not one single best answer in all cases; it's partly situational. But you start to get the sense for what sort of situation has to obtain for you to deviate from the generally best.

As you get better at all of these things, you move up in difficulty level in order to keep giving yourself a challenge. You hit deity and the AIs start with so many advantages, and all through the game do everything faster than you that for you to compete at all, now all of those choices have to be absolutely optimal. You can't miss a trick. But if all of your choices are optimal, you can gradually chip away at the AIs starting advantages. Again, you can't do this unless you are making absolutely optimal choices, but once you do edge past the AI, all of that optimal infrastructure you built now lets you keep building your lead over them (snowballing).

You have got to that point by getting particularly skilled at doing THE. THING. THAT. THE. GAME. MOST. FUNDAMENTALLY. ASKS. YOU. TO. DO. (make good choices).

So-called "snowballing" is actually PLAYING. CIV.

In my opinion, "snowballing" has nothing to do with how the AI works, and isn't necessarily about making good choices. Snowballing just means "the rich get richer" and is an issue because if you get a small advantage, possibly due to chance events, the small advantage has a tendency to compound to an ever greater advantage. Which means that you can then make suboptimal choices and still maintain or increase your lead.

 

[Gori the Grey]

In my opinion, "snowballing" has nothing to do with how the AI works, and isn't necessarily about making good choices. Snowballing just means "the rich get richer" and is an issue because if you get a small advantage, possibly due to chance events, the small advantage has a tendency to compound to an ever greater advantage. Which means that you can then make suboptimal choices and still maintain or increase your lead.

Right, but that principle is deeply embedded in what it means to play the game.

In effect, when you are choosing between monument, granary, watermill or shrine, the question you are asking are "which one of these will snowball the most?" i.e. make me a little bit richer so that that richness can make me still more rich. That's part of why I chose the example I did. Usually the best move is anything that increases population. The reason for that is that population has multiple other positive effects. Adding a new citizen brings along with it science+production+gold+higher city defense value+etc.

So a granary is an investment in all of those other things improving, usually a better investment than any of the other three choices you have early. A more snowballing investment, I mean. Not all of your small advantages come from chance events; many of them come from your game choices. (Including how you manage the ones that come to you randomly.)

So, on that second point, to take the Ethiopia game that I've referenced. Standard play if you're going tall is to pick Tradition and wait for Landed Elite to give all of your cities free monuments. But in this case I built a monument (-equivalent, the stele), because the Civ I rolled was Ethiopia. Their monument comes with faith as well. I knew that if I got an early pantheon, I could make crazy use of all the jungle around me: i.e. that culture would then snowball. By thus finishing out tradition by turn 75 (the earliest I ever have), I got aqueducts in my expo cities earlier than I generally do and nothing contributes to pop more than aqueducts. The thing you're trying for most in a tall start (quick population growth) I saw that I could get in a different way than one usually tries to get it. Two bits of chance (Ethiopia and jungle), but my build-order decision on how to turn that into a snowball.

 

[socratic]

Claiming that civ switching and era resets are the main problems of Civ7 is a big stretch:

1. Civ7, like previous games since Civ4, I believe, was playtested by a Frankenstein Group - dedicated civ fans and they accepted the game.
2. We had analysis of the negative reviews and civilization switching was small enough to not be mentioned there. Abrupt age ends were mentioned as a problem, but well beyond other problems like UI and with focus on abruptness, which is fixed by now.
3. Modern internet is very fast on running hate trains. Content creators catch the narrative and align their content with it, creating media feedback loop. So, the scale of negative reaction often don't represent how things are actually perceived by the community.

I totally understand the desire to project personal feeling to the whole community, but in reality we see very different viewpoints and I doubt it was possible to predict whether was decisions would be perceived as good or bad. If it would be possible for Firaxis to delay the game release till autumn and polish things they had to rush, the launch would probably have totally different narrative.

Era resets are not fixed. Every problem that plagued the late-game (snowballing, micromanagement, unimpactful decisions) in previous Civ games is present in Civ 7. Ages failed to do what they were originally designed for and are now being actively reworked. You can't look past that.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Era resets are not fixed. Every problem that plagued the late-game (snowballing, micromanagement, unimpactful decisions) in previous Civ games is present in Civ 7. Ages failed to do what they were originally designed for and are now being actively reworked. You can't look past that.

Ages were designed for several things and yes, they are still being reworked. I was talking specifically about "abruptness" of age transition, which was the complain from significant amount of reviews early on - and this part of them was fixed already. With age counter and continuity option, the age transition works much smoother now.

 

[Sagax]

This forum I think overrepresents the pro Civ switching side. Unless there is a very silent majority hidden somewhere that we can't see in player data.

If you want to see some true pro civ-switching representation, then I recommend looking into Civ 7 Discord. You know, the community where FXS is currently actively gathering feedback and giving shoutouts to in their patch videos instead of CFC. Take that info as you will.

 

[UWHabs]

Right, but that principle is deeply embedded in what it means to play the game.

In effect, when you are choosing between monument, granary, watermill or shrine, the question you are asking are "which one of these will snowball the most?" i.e. make me a little bit richer so that that richness can make me still more rich. That's part of why I chose the example I did. Usually the best move is anything that increases population. The reason for that is that population has multiple other positive effects. Adding a new citizen brings along with it science+production+gold+higher city defense value+etc.

So a granary is an investment in all of those other things improving, usually a better investment than any of the other three choices you have early. A more snowballing investment, I mean. Not all of your small advantages come from chance events; many of them come from your game choices. (Including how you manage the ones that come to you randomly.)

Setting yourself up for the future is civ, yes, but I think there's a wide gap between that and some of the snowballing mechanisms at play. To me, "setting myself up enough so that I can maintain my lead when the era resets" is or could be as much part of the game as just continuing to roll ahead. Having game mechanisms or a setup where you double your science every 10 turns when you hit a certain point of the game, and you start running into a sort of exponential growth aspect to the game that keeps feeding onto itself, IMO, doesn't have to be a "core feature" of a civ game.

I'm more and more convinced that there's still some unexplored bugs or game decisions that are causing the snowball to be way too rapid right now when you hit a certain breakpoint. Yes, at some level, you sort of always need some sort of snowball aspect to the game. Otherwise you run into the problem that earlier decisions simply don't have enough value, if i can easily reverse course on a bad decision later and end up in basically the same spot. But if you can get the right pacing on it, where the rise is more structured, then you do potentially still leave open a little space that a perfectly executed strategy can bridge the gap and overcome. If I'm so far ahead, that I can purchase 20 cavalry units a turn without worrying about the gold, I'm never going to be in a place where I worry about my neighbour. But if all my work before has left me just enough ahead of my neighbour that I'm not really worried about them, but close enough that maybe i have to spend a little bit of decision making in making sure I either stay friends, or keep at least a few troops on the border, then you can at least keep the game interesting until later.

 

[Kev1916]

Yea "Civ" 7 is doing fine , it will be great in a few years, no need to panic , Review scores are going down - that dont matter , Player count is cram - that dont matter .
Head of production is gone after 6 months of launch - no big deal , this version and there flawed core system(s) should IMHO stick with a new meta and leveling leaders focus on the console\casual market .

This version will never get the numbers to take on Civ 6 on Pc

Once the next expansion roll's out at $ 60+ and burns this game will be a footnote

 

[Gori the Grey]

To me, "setting myself up enough so that I can maintain my lead when the era resets" is or could be as much part of the game as just continuing to roll ahead.

I also actually believe this could be a viable and even fun game mechanic.

Even if so, though, I would not advise the developers to build a game around it. Here's why.

It could be fun for us civ veterans--to become skilled in both gradually building a snowballing civ and preparing ourselves to best handle a known coming downturn.

But it's not good for hooking new players, I would think. Civ is complex enough, when one first picks it up, that one doesn't need to be told 1/3 of the way through one's first game: "oh, you know how you've been building, building, building? Now, instead start bracing yourself to minimize the number of things that will be taken away."

I think back to my first games. That would feel like too much complexity to me, in a game that I was already struggling to understand. It would feel like the game didn't know what it wanted to be, like it was schizoid. And I'd probably just have walked away from it. The relative simplicity of Build, build, build at least has the advantage of helping with the onboarding of new players.

Edit: I guess I'd add one more thing. There's a kind of player who doesn't so much prefer challenge as just beating up in the AI. People like that would be put off by severe setbacks.

Maybe it could be in the game as a mode, for players like me and you who might relish that as a challenge.

 

[socratic]

If you want to see some true pro civ-switching representation, then I recommend looking into Civ 7 Discord. You know, the community where FXS is currently actively gathering feedback and giving shoutouts to in their patch videos instead of CFC. Take that info as you will.

Yeah these forum are pretty balanced in opinions. Most stuff I see outside is staunchly anti-civ switching. The Discord on the other hand can be… fanatic when it comes to Civ 7.