I think art was under heaviest time constraints. And it's not a simple task. Making semi-realistic (diorama) style AND regional differences AND readable color coding is pretty tough task. I just hope Firaxis will have resources to work on it during other work.
Not me. Looks like a huge muddle. In art, a lot of times less is more; Civ 7 leans heavily into the more-is-more aesthetic.
Art assets ars probably the stickiest thing in the game... I'd love to see changes, but I suspect the work would dwarf adding civ continuity...
That's for sure. I just hope art team has some capacity to work on those things when not working on new civs and leaders.
They could add a “strategic lens” that added a color overlay based on buildings present (maybe with map pins)
Oh, I agree with this. The art is the best in Antiquity when there aren't sprawling metropolises all over the place to figure out what's going on. But even then, the city art is still pretty to look at even you have no idea what buildings are where.
I do wonder if that's not the fault of the art itself, but the UI? Civ 6 had the same thing, but it was at least easy to tell the districts/buildings apart.
I would actually just put this as a lens that can be toggled and that activates on city build menu or just the city menu. Most of the game, you dont need to see this especially because once the decision is made, it's made. A culture district tile will probably always be a culture district tile because overbuilding is just rebuilding the same kind of building on the same tile. And knowing where your culture district tiles you already placed are is not something I can even think of a reason to need to know. Placing a population growth this is irrelevant because it is more about watching yields. Placing buildings is really the only place this could be useful but even then it is minor because you are looking more at mountains, resources, and coast.
It gives some information, for example, you could quickly see enemy settlement specialization when planning wars. But yeah, lenses would do it great.
There's been a pretty vocal and significant group of fans who don't like the Civ7 graphics. Lack of readability and city sprawl are the worst offenders, my personal pet peeve is the absolute eye-sore of the city walls and the way they conform to the hexagonal grid. Yuck! So no, not everybody likes the graphics. It's definitely also one of the reasons I can't get myself to jump into the game.
Agreed, the other scenario for me is finding Rail Stations in the modern age. They've got a glass dome, so they are somewhat visible, but on large maps I definitely use them to shuttle units around.
It's the fault of unpacked cities. That's been the design direction since 6. I dislike it as much as the fans of 4 dislike 1UPT. On some matters, the franchise picks a trajectory and keeps it for every subsequent game. This one just isn't to my personal taste. My taste comes from looking at historical maps. When you look at historical maps, they tend to want to capture the extent of territory covered by a particular empire. So cities are generally just a dot. That's what I want my empire to look like in a Civ game, not a huge corner-to-corner urban sprawl. It's a purely personal taste that I recognize will go unsatisfied by the franchise henceforth.
I do think it would be interesting, and a lot better received, if the city itself was reduced to a single tile, and the city sprawl was seen in a city view map still made up of 3 tiles around. That way the actual map could be used for improvements and the city is reserved for buildings and wonders.
Umm, I’m not sure this argument really works. Overall art style would have been an early choice and a key decision is readability. You could have quite quickly determined whether the style was going to cause problems or not and you don't need to have design the whole thing to spot that. You would assume that legibility would one of the things at the fore front of the designers minds, which is where I think somewhere along the long bad incentives became involved.
In principle I like the idea of unpacked cities, but the city sprawl in Civ7 is both nonsensical from a realism point of view, as well as being ugly. After Civ7 was released, I went back to playing Civ5 for a while, and one of the things I really liked when re-visiting that game was the huge rural areas that would cover the areas between the cities. It just looked so pretty and peaceful on the eye. So yeah, I think unpacking cities would be fine if there was like, 10 or 15 hexes between urban centers. I wonder if Civ8 will be the game where the developers try out regions similar to what Old World has. It's a bit ironic that Civ7 actually has towns which one would think would break the urban sprawl, but the rural improvements also have way too many buildings on them to actually look rural.
