Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[Bug Repellent]

Well the update might actually reduce city sprawl (less buildings) however, they also should have the buildings more clearly reflect their type, ie a strong roof/background of blue-science, yellow-gold, purple-culture, orange-happy, red-prod/military, and green-food..possibly gray-warehouse)

Anything that could help will be welcome. Maybe a district view toggle on/off button? It's not like you need to see your districts/buildings all the time.

 

[tman2000]

Well the update might actually reduce city sprawl (less buildings) however, they also should have the buildings more clearly reflect their type, ie a strong roof/background of blue-science, yellow-gold, purple-culture, orange-happy, red-prod/military, and green-food..possibly gray-warehouse)

I don't actually understand this. It seems to be a leftover habit from Civ 6 where long term adjacency planning was critical. Do we really need to know what kind of yield each little building is associated with in 7? What's the value of knowing that?

 

[stealth_nsk]

I don't actually understand this. It seems to be a leftover habit from Civ 6 where long term adjacency planning was critical. Do we really need to know what kind of yield each little building is associated with in 7? What's the value of knowing that?

Adjacency planning in Civ7 works generally the same as in Civ6. Normally you place a district with strong adjacencies and just instead of adding more buildings to the district later, you overbuild old ones.

Yes, you have flexibility of repurposing your districts, but if you plan ahead adjacencies, it doesn't come into play very often.

 

[tman2000]

Adjacency planning in Civ7 works generally the same as in Civ6. Normally you place a district with strong adjacencies and just instead of adding more buildings to the district later, you overbuild old ones.

Yes, you have flexibility of repurposing your districts, but if you plan ahead adjacencies, it doesn't come into play very often.

Right but when it comes time to place the camera zooms in and all relevant information is displayed. From a zoomed out perspective, what is the value of knowing if certain buildings are this or that? It's not like there are fortified military districts or something.

 

[Krikkit1]

I don't actually understand this. It seems to be a leftover habit from Civ 6 where long term adjacency planning was critical. Do we really need to know what kind of yield each little building is associated with in 7? What's the value of knowing that?

It helps give a view of your empire, as opposed to just a featureless sprawl... here is the gold area here is the food, etc.
Not providing planning information, but providing a feel of it. something you can see at a zoomed out view... as well as some possible planning when you are in someone else's empire... what do I want to raze first.

 

[bladex1200]

Right but when it comes time to place the camera zooms in and all relevant information is displayed. From a zoomed out perspective, what is the value of knowing if certain buildings are this or that? It's not like there are fortified military districts or something.

If you're planning several turns ahead and cannot queue up the desired district yet or want to calculate adjacencies ahead of time, it can be useful to be able to read the map at-a-glance before entering the build menu. Forcing the player to break their mental flow by breaking up UI information causes disengagement from systems. That's fine if the system is meant to be a specific scoring mechanism that doesn't necessarily touch everything else (e.g. spreading religion, slotting artifacts/relics), which have their own menus. But building and expanding your cities is a natural flow that drives progression (exploring the map, settling cities, selecting high food or production tiles and improving yields to allow more expansions in fewer turns, placing units to defend your expansions or conquer or punish enemy expansions), so breaking up adjacencies and yields across multiple menus is bad because the player shouldn't be disengaging from this mechanic regularly turn-by-turn.

 

[Kmart_Elvis]

It's incomprehensible, isn't it?

For all that traded off to get the "diorama" look, there's no camera mode to take screenshots at custom angles. Bonkers.

A user on here went into debug mode and got some beautiful close up shots of the game. Imagine an easy-to-use camera mode in-game which allowed you to do this...

Thread 'Messing Around with the Debug Console' https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/messing-around-with-the-debug-console.697522/

 

[Core Imposter]

They should do a strategic level and a tactical level in the future. It's not rocket science.

 

[Gorbles]

Cue the Endless Legend comparisons

*not a dig at EL, but some folks would absolutely not be a fan of that, if it was anything more than an aesthetic layer like the one we had in VI

 

[bladex1200]

Cue the Endless Legend comparisons

*not a dig at EL, but some folks would absolutely not be a fan of that, if it was anything more than an aesthetic layer like the one we had in VI

I don't know that Civ6 devs meant for it to be purely aesthetic. I think possibly it was just so minimally-informative that it ended up being aesthetic, but you can see the bones of a truly-functional "strategic top-level" map mode in there.

 

[Gorbles]

e that it ended up being aesthetic, but you can see the bones of a truly-functional "strategic top-level" map mode in there.

I think it was something that originally helped with performance on low-end devices, but the amount of data that was obscured made this hard to evaluate successfully (imo).

Like, I liked it personally. It was a cool thing to look at. But I never really used it.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I think it was something that originally helped with performance on low-end devices, but the amount of data that was obscured made this hard to evaluate successfully (imo).

Like, I liked it personally. It was a cool thing to look at. But I never really used it.

I went through a phase of using it, chiefly because it made me nostalgic for the Avalon Hill days, then went back

 

[Core Imposter]

Yeah, AI. The future of game development at some point is going to be transformed by AI. Some of us are so skeptical that we just totally discount it. But at some point in time developers are going to be caught with their pants down. This is not a good time to plan a long term project. You run the risk of getting caught flat footed. AI will at some point go from a tool used to produce content to a participant in games. AI will no longer be static code but will learn by playing and will communicate with the player in a similar fashion to our discourse with LLMs. We will need our own AI wingman to stand a chance.

All game genres will change. Civ7 is almost certainly a legacy project.

 

[zerokarma]

You must have never been in an investor call before or worked in that setting.

You absolutely cannot say anything negative even if the release is an unmitigated failure on a scale far grander than Civ 7s. There’s ways to manipulate data to make basically anything look acceptable. The fact he even uttered that it was “off to a slow start” is extremely surprising

This is very true, an investor call is highly controlled and even practiced beforehand. Any news unexpected, especially anything negative can tank the stock and possibly even litigation depending on what it is. So they will not talk freely at all and be diplomatic to spin bad news in a positive light. Saying it is a slow start tells me its worse than we think and it has really underperformed expectations. If Take Two had full confidence in Firaxis I think we would hear more positive messaging from them but it has been mostly quiet, I expect Take Two is looking at contingencies of what to do next.

 

[tman2000]

A user on here went into debug mode and got some beautiful close up shots of the game.

Thanks for posting that. I remember it and it was really cool and being impressed with how a few of my cities looked was one of the first things that enchanted me before I lost interest in playing 7 (until something changes).

 

[queenpea]

I don't actually understand this. It seems to be a leftover habit from Civ 6 where long term adjacency planning was critical. Do we really need to know what kind of yield each little building is associated with in 7? What's the value of knowing that?

Yeah, this is much less of a thing in VII — players are mostly just carrying the habit over. Cities in VI were specialized because of district limits, and the districts interacted with the map in a real, tangible way. Cities in VII are much more general and are most often just good at everything.

 

[queenpea]

4% increase from last Saturday (8,287 to 8,639). Saturday 13th September was 8,613. There was a Saturday in June when it peaked at 8,436. So this Saturday was 4th lowest out of 34. Fridays peak was also higher than the 2 previous Fridays.

Apologies if this has been mentioned before, but the game is currently on sale on Steam at 30% off. This might explain why the patch announcement has not negatively affected player numbers.

Also, as we have seen with future sale periods, reviews have ticked slightly towards the negative.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Yeah, this is much less of a thing in VII — players are mostly just carrying the habit over. Cities in VI were specialized because of district limits, and the districts interacted with the map in a real, tangible way. Cities in VII are much more general and are most often just good at everything.

That is a significant dumbing down of gameplay then.

Apologies if this has been mentioned before, but the game is currently on sale on Steam at 30% off. This might explain why the patch announcement has not negatively affected player numbers.

Also, as we have seen with future sale periods, reviews have ticked slightly towards the negative.

That’s not good, that means that most of the new sales they are getting, customers are unsatisfied.

 

[Crashdummy]

The problem is, thanks to this disaster, if they ever release another civilization title the pre-orders will be low as fans of the franchise would no longer trust the game would be good.

I myself will never preorder anything not only from Civilization, but from Firaxis, TakeTwo or 2k

I preordered Civ 7 Founder Edition because i had faith in Firaxis and Civilization is my favourite franchise (along with Heroes of Might and Magic, yeah, i am sad), that faith is lot now

 

[UWHabs]

Yeah, this is much less of a thing in VII — players are mostly just carrying the habit over. Cities in VI were specialized because of district limits, and the districts interacted with the map in a real, tangible way. Cities in VII are much more general and are most often just good at everything.

I do think there's some value to having better quick perspectives on your territory. For example, if I see one of my cities has a bunch of obsolete buildings, I know maybe I should go in and buy some. Or maybe I just unlocked universities, if I could quickly scan my empire and see which cities I queued them up in already, which maybe I should hop in to buy, etc.. Rather than clicking through settlement by settlement, or hovering over the tiles to see which have obsolete buildings or manually trying to find what I'm looking for.