Playing as a Continuous Civ- A HUGE Mistake

[disjointaccount]

I'll go against the grain and say I love pretty much everything about Civ 7's city sprawl. The game looks stunning and I really enjoy the fact that cities look like actual real-world settlements now as opposed to in 6 where they were one city block and then three buildings a few tiles away. Yes, it's not as immediately readable, but I've played enough to recognise the key buildings at a glance and it takes half a second to mouseover anything I need to check.

I get why it's not everyone's cup of tea but for me personally it's one of the best things about the game.

 

[Skojardu]

What bothers me is that I can totally imagine Civ switching being a player decision in Civ 4 in an asynchronous manner. Some sort of action triggers a narrative event, and a popup says "Your people are inspired by recent activities and a large group of them proposes you further develop your culture as the [__________]" (You can click Yes or No.) It would be a sort of gamble where you would have some of your cities switch but others (probably periphery) need to be retaken, after which you get a Golden Age or a Great General or something. The fact that everyone switches in a mandatory synchronized way in 7 is just in poor taste.

 

[UWHabs]

I'll go against the grain and say I love pretty much everything about Civ 7's city sprawl. The game looks stunning and I really enjoy the fact that cities look like actual real-world settlements now as opposed to in 6 where they were one city block and then three buildings a few tiles away. Yes, it's not as immediately readable, but I've played enough to recognise the key buildings at a glance and it takes half a second to mouseover anything I need to check.

I get why it's not everyone's cup of tea but for me personally it's one of the best things about the game.

I think some of it is. 6 had the flaw where you could be in 3000 BC and your campus is 500 miles away from the city centre, across a mountain range. VII is great because everything has a natural flow and connection.

Where I don't like it is that you can be in like 500 BC and every city looks like the sprawl of modern New York or London. And personally I'm definitely someone who cannot for the life of me tell what buildings are where. I could play at the most zoomed in level and it's barely more than a guess what's what.

 

[kaspergm]

I think that's again consequence of ages, because towns are expected to be despecialized after age transition.

Funny how any bad element of the game can be explained as a "necessary consequence of the ages system".

Just saying ...

 

[Lazy sweeper]

More "options" do not necessarily make a game better: purposeful and fun choices do. Refining and sharpening what already exists is the best course of action.

I thought someone actually played continuous civs, but this is all speculation...
What already exists are other threads that tries to redefine what already exist, giving
more options.

Options.

But no. Only devs played with this "option".
The best course of action is a strong word for one that has not seen the new gameplay...
Or am I missing something??

 

[Crashdummy]

While this may move the discussion further into OT, I wonder how it would play if production between towns and a connected city would behave similarly as food does. I.e., your buildings can give you a solid production base in a city, but you could also rely on nearby towns for city production, or have both of you want to get really productive.

Currently, town production is on one side devalued, because it is turned into gold, but enhanced because it is turned into a global resource instead of a local.

Would keeping it local but valuable make the game more strategic and interesting? Or if this was possible with the mining town specialization?

The problem with this is that it keeps shifting the game into a City Builder instead of a 4x strategy game. I dont think the game needs more decentralization of resources, what is next, having to build water and power plants in the maps and connecting them with power lines and tubes?

When i play Civilization, i dont want to play City Skylines

I thik we already went too far into that direction and the game actually needds LESS of that, it needs to focus on the genre the game belongs instead of trying to be a board game or a City Builder

But who knows, maybe i am wrong, i hope they dont ruin the franchise with any more of these shennanigans and if they want to try something like that they jdo it on a new IP/franchise

 

[UWHabs]

The problem with this is that it keeps shifting the game into a City Builder instead of a 4x strategy game. I dont think the game needs more decentralization of resources, what is next, having to build water and power plants in the maps and connecting them with power lines and tubes?

When i play Civilization, i dont want to play City Skylines

I thik we already went too far into that direction and the game actually needds LESS of that, it needs to focus on the genre the game belongs instead of trying to be a board game or a City Builder

But who knows, maybe i am wrong, i hope they dont ruin the franchise with any more of these shennanigans and if they want to try something like that they jdo it on a new IP/franchise

Civ is an empire builder. I mean in 6 you had the notion of how much power a city needed, so at some level you were getting to that.

I do think potentially making town specializations more.. special, might add another strategic area. Like if turning a town into a mining town didn't send food back to the connected settlements, but sent its production instead, and its food only "went to feed the miners". Although I think you would want other options, too - like, for example, turning into an urban centre would not let you convert back to a growing town, give you the options you have now, but also the town would continue to grow (effectively turning it into a city without the production queue). Maybe a Fort Town would give 1 XP per turn to stationed commanders in the town.

Maybe that gets too complicated? I dunno. At least the fact you're not changing towns each era means you only need to make the choice once. But they do need to fix connections and make them be way more consistent and obvious before you go down that route. It's still a super pain how I can have an island town that's like 5 tiles away from one city and is not connected, but it is connected to a city that's 50 tiles away in the other direction because they both technically share a continent.

 

[Gorbles]

Funny how any bad element of the game can be explained as a "necessary consequence of the ages system".

Just saying ...

You're free to disagree how it isn't necessary, instead of injecting the assumptive "bad element" as agreed upon. But that would require actually stating a position

The town system was clear (in my mind) to me from launch (which is funny, given how many gameplay systems weren't clear). I never converted more than a couple into Cities (and was puzzled by people who went all-in on Cities, but the early balancing didn't help with this).

I think it's possible for Cities to starve, but hunger management is less of a factor r.e. growth. Combined with the soft Settlement cap, it's clear that Happiness is actually a valuable investment again (vs. how easy it was to game in VI). But at the same time, I'm not feeling like I was in V where Happiness felt so erratic. But maybe I was also just bad at V, that's more than possible

The problem with this is that it keeps shifting the game into a City Builder instead of a 4x strategy game. I dont think the game needs more decentralization of resources, what is next, having to build water and power plants in the maps and connecting them with power lines and tubes?

When i play Civilization, i dont want to play City Skylines

I thik we already went too far into that direction and the game actually needds LESS of that, it needs to focus on the genre the game belongs instead of trying to be a board game or a City Builder

But who knows, maybe i am wrong, i hope they dont ruin the franchise with any more of these shennanigans and if they want to try something like that they jdo it on a new IP/franchise

In order to grow your empire, or civilisation, you've always had to grow your cities. You've always grown your cities by expanding the territory they possess and the buildable tiles owned by that city. This has always necessitated a level of abstraction that is nowhere near realistic.

Resources have always therefore been decentralised. Civ 1 had a bunch of special resources. Many were key to building your cities!

Does this mean <insert slippery slope here>? Of course not. But what the game is "shifting into" is simply what you want out of Civ. vs. what anyone else wants out of Civ. The elements you're complaining about have always been there. What's next, having to construct Roads?! Yeah?

I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I get what you're feeling. But you're framing it as this great ruination, these "shenanigans", like it's some underhanded, destructive thing the developers are doing. They want people to like their game! Whether or not they succeed at it, that's a different thing altogether.

 

[McSpank01]

The problem with this is that it keeps shifting the game into a City Builder instead of a 4x strategy game. I dont think the game needs more decentralization of resources, what is next, having to build water and power plants in the maps and connecting them with power lines and tubes?

When i play Civilization, i dont want to play City Skylines

I thik we already went too far into that direction and the game actually needds LESS of that, it needs to focus on the genre the game belongs instead of trying to be a board game or a City Builder

But who knows, maybe i am wrong, i hope they dont ruin the franchise with any more of these shennanigans and if they want to try something like that they jdo it on a new IP/franchise

Huh? I’ve always played Civ like a city builder. I really enjoy that element of it. I also play it as a role playing game. Am I not allowed to?

 

[ColtSeavers]

Huh? I’ve always played Civ like a city builder. I really enjoy that element of it. I also play it as a role playing game. Am I not allowed to?

Nobody is saying that, why are you making stuff like this up?

 

[Gorbles]

Nobody is saying that, why are you making stuff like this up?

They asked a question, it's hardly "making anything up". If person A wants the game to not be like X, and person B likes X, what happens when A gets their way? Hypothetically-speaking.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Funny how any bad element of the game can be explained as a "necessary consequence of the ages system".

Just saying ...

This particular element isn't bad, it's just a design decision.

 

[Crashdummy]

In order to grow your empire, or civilisation, you've always had to grow your cities. You've always grown your cities by expanding the territory they possess and the buildable tiles owned by that city. This has always necessitated a level of abstraction that is nowhere near realistic.

Resources have always therefore been decentralised. Civ 1 had a bunch of special resources. Many were key to building your cities!

Does this mean <insert slippery slope here>? Of course not. But what the game is "shifting into" is simply what you want out of Civ. vs. what anyone else wants out of Civ. The elements you're complaining about have always been there. What's next, having to construct Roads?! Yeah?

I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I get what you're feeling. But you're framing it as this great ruination, these "shenanigans", like it's some underhanded, destructive thing the developers are doing. They want people to like their game! Whether or not they succeed at it, that's a different thing altogether.

When i spoke about resources it wasnt about special resources, i was talking about things like Water, Power, etc. and it was a reply about the suggestion to decentralize food into towns.

4x strategy games are, in my opinion, about a more grand view of the empire, more general and less specific. City Builders are about more specific choice and less general. And i think Civilization is going in a direction opposite of what the genre they lead.

About liking the game or not, that is subjective and if that is their goal, i think Civ 7 has been the biggest failure ever on that, but i wasnt talking about it. You can like a City Builder, and thats fine, but it isnt a 4x strategy game. If Firaxis wants to make a City Builder, or a board game, by all means they should, but i dont think turning Civilization, which is a 4x franchise, into any of those is a good idea

Huh? I’ve always played Civ like a city builder. I really enjoy that element of it. I also play it as a role playing game. Am I not allowed to?

You can play the game as a sports simulator if you want, that wasnt my point

 

[UWHabs]

When i spoke about resources it wasnt about special resources, i was talking about things like Water, Power, etc. and it was a reply about the suggestion to decentralize food into towns.

4x strategy games are, in my opinion, about a more grand view of the empire, more general and less specific. City Builders are about more specific choice and less general. And i think Civilization is going in a direction opposite of what the genre they lead.

About liking the game or not, that is subjective and if that is their goal, i think Civ 7 has been the biggest failure ever on that, but i wasnt talking about it. You can like a City Builder, and thats fine, but it isnt a 4x strategy game. If Firaxis wants to make a City Builder, or a board game, by all means they should, but i dont think turning Civilization, which is a 4x franchise, into any of those is a good idea



You can play the game as a sports simulator if you want, that wasnt my point

Yeah, it's an empire builder, not a city builder. I don't want to have to put a traffic light to make sure my trader turns left around a mountain ridge instead of right.

There is some overlap - I mean 6 introduced Power into the game, so you did have to make sure you had enough resources and power plants to get max yields. But obviously for an empire game they were still abstracted, it's not like you had to run power lines from your solar farms into your settlements, or worry that some solar farms produced more than others.

 

[uppi]

And you don't even manually build roads anymore.

 

[McSpank01]

Yes Civ is an empire builder game, but one thing that previous games have been doing for a while is creating a sense of ownership of cities and giving you the ability to craft them in specific ways, tailoring them to your needs. I greatly enjoyed the way Civ 4 allowed me to have heavily industrialised cities or farm ones, and in Civ 6 I enjoy creating cities that are not only efficient, but attractive and interesting to look at.

I know some people like to play it purely as a game you 'win', but others do not play it in that way. It's been said many times on this board, but it's likely that Firaxis has misunderstood stats around players not completing games, and not understanding that some will not have 'winning' as a goal.

What has been good about the games up to this point is that it has allowed multiple ways to play, and different players can get what they want out of it.

 

[Crashdummy]

Yes Civ is an empire builder game, but one thing that previous games have been doing for a while is creating a sense of ownership of cities and giving you the ability to craft them in specific ways, tailoring them to your needs. I greatly enjoyed the way Civ 4 allowed me to have heavily industrialised cities or farm ones, and in Civ 6 I enjoy creating cities that are not only efficient, but attractive and interesting to look at.

I know some people like to play it purely as a game you 'win', but others do not play it in that way. It's been said many times on this board, but it's likely that Firaxis has misunderstood stats around players not completing games, and not understanding that some will not have 'winning' as a goal.

What has been good about the games up to this point is that it has allowed multiple ways to play, and different players can get what they want out of it.

Correct, but to do that you have to give freedom to the player. The more constraints you place, the least of that you can do. Civ 7 is a prime exmaple for that

And if we go back to the suggestion i replied to, if you are forced to have towns providing foor for your cities for them to grow, then you are removing options of what you can do with those towns, since you will be forced to have them be farms for the Cities, even when we already have farms as improvements and therefore you will have less real options about what to do with them

The best way to have multiple ways to play is to keep restrictions low and to make the game as much of a sandbox as possible

 

[McSpank01]

Correct, but to do that you have to give freedom to the player. The more constraints you place, the least of that you can do. Civ 7 is a prime exmaple for that

And if we go back to the suggestion i replied to, if you are forced to have towns providing foor for your cities for them to grow, then you are removing options of what you can do with those towns, since you will be forced to have them be farms for the Cities, even when we already have farms as improvements and therefore you will have less real options about what to do with them

The best way to have multiple ways to play is to keep restrictions low and to make the game as much of a sandbox as possible

I agree there should be systems in place that are complex enough that it allows the player to play in multiple ways. I think one issue with Civ 7 is that it has simplified so much, and many of it's mechanics feel rudimentary, that it doesn't really give the sense that a player can play in a sandbox way or find different paths for themselves.

I still think it's possible to lean into the 'towns feeding cities' idea without it being overly restrictive too, and towns could still be specialised to fit a specific need, like resort towns for instance. One issue I think though is that the way the game treats cities and towns is basically the same. They both take up one tile, they look the same, a city is just a bigger town. Therefore there is a limit to how different they can really be in the game. Ideally I would go back to the drawing board on that but maybe that is for Civ 8.

 

[Gorbles]

When i spoke about resources it wasnt about special resources, i was talking about things like Water, Power, etc. and it was a reply about the suggestion to decentralize food into towns.

4x strategy games are, in my opinion, about a more grand view of the empire, more general and less specific. City Builders are about more specific choice and less general. And i think Civilization is going in a direction opposite of what the genre they lead.

About liking the game or not, that is subjective and if that is their goal, i think Civ 7 has been the biggest failure ever on that, but i wasnt talking about it. You can like a City Builder, and thats fine, but it isnt a 4x strategy game. If Firaxis wants to make a City Builder, or a board game, by all means they should, but i dont think turning Civilization, which is a 4x franchise, into any of those is a good idea

I don't think your idea of what a 4x strategy game is, is the same as mine. To me, while 4x games and grand strategy have some overlap, 4x is a clearly separate genre (the four Xs).

Beyond that, the game isn't becoming a city builder. It's always had aspects of, well, building cities, but as others have pointed out these systems tend to be abstracted much more than any actual city builder game's gameplay systems are.