I just don't like it. Part of the appeal of the series, for me at least, has always been the grand narrative of following your civ through 6,000 years of history. Actually, I would not only just say my civ, but it was also fun to watch what the other civs got up to in that span of time as well. I think one of VI's best features was actually the timeline, because I like how it celebrated momentous occasions in the story of your civilization, like the first time you created a seafaring unit, the first time you circumnavigated the globe, and so on. But I find it very hard to create a coherent mental narrative with VII because (what with the civ-switching) it seems so disconnected, disjointed, and borderline schizophrenic. And this is not even getting into weird things like how the game can just leapfrog over time spans of hundreds of years when you switch from one era to another. It creates these gaping lacunae in the timeline of your civs where (aside from the civ transitions) nothing major seems to happen in the world, and it's like, "Welp, I guess in that 400 year jump not only did my civ switch from Egypt to Abassid, but apparently in that same span of time they neither built nor lost any cities, and no other civ was defeated . . . until now it's a new era and suddenly we can start magically doing all that stuff again." Ugh.
I also don't like how essentially Antiquity is both Antiquity and Classical smushed into one age, Exploration basically Medieval and Renaissance lumped into one, Modern being Industrial and Modern lumped together.
I just see myself getting very bored very quickly with this game because, civ-switching aside, everything is so specifically and inflexibly regimented to the Eras. By which I mean, you can only ever play as, say, Egypt in Antiquity or Mongolia in Exploration (but never vice-versa), the tech trees are very rigid so that you can never go further than the techs or civics for that specific age, you can only ever explore one continent in the first Era but have to wait until the second to begin exploring the rest of the map, pantheons can be opened in the first Era but religions can only ever be started in the second Era, you can literally only end the game in the last Era, every Era ends with a manufactured Crisis . . . it's all so lockstep. Previous Civ games I felt had more spontaneity and flexibility to how you could approach things. Like I had some CIV VI games where sometimes I would get religion in the first age or sometimes in the Classical Era, there were some games where I won in the very final era but other games where I won in an earlier age, and so on. And the way things gradually unfolded felt, to me, more organic, whereas here, they feel very artificial and staged, if you know what I mean. Now, you can say, "Well, CIV VI had the whole "Rise & Fall/Golden or Dark Age" mechanic," but even there there was still a lot of flexibility as to how you could go about getting those Golden Ages. Here, it's always, "You need to build 7 World Wonders in Antiquity," or "You need to get 9 relics in Exploration," or whatever. Thanks but no thanks!
