the quantity of bonuses, unnecessary complexity of mechanics
It seems to have been designed so that this doesn't matter. Making the game a bit easier than previous entries. Now that people have solved the different METAs, they're nerfing that to prevent Deity snowballing I assume to keep the modern age at least somewhat relevant. Regression to a mean.
A self goal that doesn't seem to be related to any intended design other than the bizarre commitment to not providing information to players, and instead having them just intuit their strategic path and then having it not matter.
So, the visually poor UI, the clumsy features (like having to click into and out of menus a couple times when queuing building orders etc.), the just alignment and font errors - that's "poor UI".
The general lack of information seems to be design intent though. The infamous UI team rumor lent a substantive contribution in that the alleged point of disagreement between the UI team and management was that the UI designers were trying to include tooltips and things which management felt - according to the glassdoor post - conflicted with the full scope of experience they wanted cross-platform, i.e.: it would be clunky on consoles.
However, given recent patch notes, it really seems like no actually they don't want people to have too much information. The design intent. I'm not being cheeky or cynical in saying that it appears as if they don't want your choices to really matter that much, and as such, they don't want you to have the information you need to evaluate trade-offs. They want you instead to pick a path, feel as if that path matters by viewing some icons that indicate boosted yields, but don't look under the hood, and carry on. This seems to be their reconciliation to casual gamers.
And on the other side they actually made it less interesting, because they created a pigeon hole effect with the legacy and ages systems - because you have a number of certain objectives you have to play towards, with a number of certain ways to play towards them, with bonuses specifically tailored for them.
I think, given what I wrote above, that the design intent was for players to look at what sort of civ they're playing and generally pick just one legacy path, and pursue it until time runs out and see who wins. I think they believed this would bring different audience members together, created braindead strategic simplicity, but giving the illusion of strategic breadth.
It's just poorly designed, though. For instance, if the idea is you'd decide, "I'm going economy in the Exploration Age," then what you'd want is a legacy path that rewards simply having the most gold or something directly related to that. Treasure ships would be a major pathway to getting gold, but there wouldn't be a discrete "amount of treasure brought home to port" as a separate victory token. So, this design ends up being very confused in intent on top of its blandness.
The religion and archeology paths are also just plain poorly designed. They honestly feel like, to me, that the designers just crashed out and quit developing the game in the final year and a half and junior programmers scrambled to just make up something that seemed to work. I'm not making that accusation, it's just that's how those two particular paths feel. Like a college programming project.
Let's compare it with the alternative. If you had open-ended bonuses and no specific objectives, then you could carve your own way to Victory every time and play an essentially different game every time.
Let's keep going with my conversation on the treasure fleet victory. If the intent was to have maxing out gold be how you achieve an economic victory, then the function of treasure fleets ought to have been simply bombing your treasury with gold. However, an alternative function of treasure fleets could have been to accumulate influence, which is historically apropos. Or, frankly, treasure fleets could have a military function. Again, the Ming treasure fleets were military monsters - on purpose.
So what you have here is an incredibly simplified objective: get gold to win, a specific feature to help you get there - treasure fleets - and finally alternative paths that leverage additional bonuses offered by these fleets.
Ideally treasure fleets are very expensive, so you need a strong gold base to get them, but they snowball - which, given the age system, would be appropriate if the snowballing mechanism is limited to the Exploration age. Snowballing multiplicative treasure fleets towards a gold deluge that gets reset on age reset, as your final sprint to victory, doesn't that seem like the
intent of Civ 7's core premise? So how'd we get what we got?
I know treasure fleets
really means colonial plundering fleet. Here they suffer by hiding politically incorrect history behind other history, which is a common theme in Civ 7 and it's frankly disgusting that there are agitators who make history itself a taboo that has to be blended and whitewashed.
You could play an economic game without being a colonist, or you could be a colonialist with an economic / religious focus like Spanish.
There is no treasure fleet to draw your focus, and the bonuses aren't so specific as to pigeonhole you.
Many people say that antiquity is the best age, but what they often mean is "Whenever I start Exploration, I'm immediately deterred and stop playing." I was thinking about how getting your first ocean worthy ships in Civ games is one of the highlight moments and few parts of the game are more fun. You'd think this was the whole premise of the Exploration Age, and it would be perhaps the most fun age. They somehow ruined that. I can think of what's wrong, though.
- Cookie cutter world maps so you're not really exploring you're just accessing islands and the farther off continent you know will be there.
- The painful heavy seas damage that causes far more pain than the Shipbuilding remedy creates joy.
- The fact that in many cases you arrive at distant lands and their fully settled.
Here I sense the problem comes from making it "fair" so that people can compete for distant lands treasure spawners at an equal pace. But again, even casuals are not having fun with this, so pandering to somehow bring the game closer to their level of comfort wasn't the ultimate result of this design.
I suppose I understand how an early ocean worthy tech could give a player a snowball advantage, but then, isn't that what settlement limits are for? I don't know the exact solution but the one we got basically ruins the experience.
This way you can worry less about Civilization and Leader balance and more about general game balance. The player can worry less about their strategy at the start of the game and more about their strategy as it unfolds in real time.
I think the irony is that it's already designed so that you don't really have to worry about civilization or leader. These are flavor choices, with minor strategic advantage for choosing well. They're not deep strategic choices.
Giving players strategic agency seems to be the opposite of design intent. They seem to want everyone locked into a mostly balanced competition lasting well into the final stretch of the game.
Think about that, assuming that's the design intent, and then think of not only all the civs and leaders, but the countless mementos. At some point, there are so many different little bonuses you can apply that if these bonuses actually mattered, it would sincerely break the game. So the design intent must therefore necessarily be to flood you with an illusion of choice while limiting the meaningfulness of choice. It has to be.
I think they felt the illusion of choice would bring everyone together, and in having a fun social experience, ignore the lack of strategic depth. Ironically, the lack of meaningful choice, or the effort to minimize meaningful choice, has made the game cumbersome and unfulfilling, even for casuals.
