Tune in November 7 for an Exploration Age livestream!

[Siptah]

How is symmetry not elegant?

It's not true to RL history to have treasure fleets and colonisation happening the other way, but that's because in RL the technology gap between Eurasia and the Americas in ~1500 was astronomical. But there's no reason why that would be the case in a game of Civ. Depending on how many civs got killed off, how much they expanded, or how they handled the crisis; it's even possibly for there to be more available land on the HL than the DL. Imposing a directionality on which way treasure fleets go, and designating the HL landmass as the one "true" H, even for civs that didn't start there, strikes me as an unnecessarily ugly break of symmetry. And the symmetry that all civs (minor IPs aside) play by the same rules is a foundational one to the series.

Well, of course, as we all know „symmetry is the aesthetic of the unimaginative.“

More seriously, the game is designed to be played from the HL, in SP and MP, simulating the old world based exploration and trade. Making it symmetric (which it isn‘t anyway due to hard coded asymmetric civ numbers) takes away from that experience. If anything, the DL civs should have diverging mechanics and age goals

Maybe the modern age will see triangular trade instead, and it is more important what the HL has to offer to the DL settlements of the HL civs?

And still, if it was dynamic/symmetric, why didn‘t the devs say so when asked?

 

[Olleus]

Well, of course, as we all know „symmetry is the aesthetic of the unimaginative.“

Well, of course, as we all know, there are artists who are contrarians and will say the opposite of what everyone feels just to stand out. Not that I'm arguing for perfect symmetry here where no civs have uniques and every landmass is identical down to every last tile. Football is a game with symmetric rules, even if the players are different on each team and one gets red carded.

Maybe the modern age will see triangular trade instead, and it is more important what the HL has to offer to the DL settlements of the HL civs?

And still, if it was dynamic/symmetric, why didn‘t the devs say so when asked?

Why railroad something so specific? Why not build trade systems such that something like that arrises when the circumstances are right (and play with map generation and civ placement to make that happen more often than not)? Didn't the devs say that they were trying to make it symmetric, it just wasn't in the current implementation? It's in the very name, it's absurd for all civs to agree on which continent is the homeland when they didn't start there: the very name homeland and distant land implies that it's relative to a particular civilizations point of view rather than a global constant.

It's pretty fundamental to Civilization that all the civs play by the same rules. Sure, they have different uniques, and there are difficulty bonuses, and the map will spawn them in different places; but the underlying rules are the same. This isn't, eg, a city builder where the player is the only one building a settlement and the AI merely controls raiders that intrude on the player. If you have civs that obey fundamentally different rules with different goals and some are locked out of winning all together, then they're not really civs anymore. Might as well just replace them with barbarians or city states or independent powers.

Now you could, I guess, have different legacy paths and victory conditions for civs depending on whether they start on the same continent as the player or not. But that seems to be a lot of work. And, eventually, players would want to to try out those legacy paths. But they would be unable to do so because, obviously, they can't start on a different continent to themselves. So it's better to put that work into creating new civs with those legacy paths, no matter where they start.

 

[anemo]

I think the DL civs play a different game in the first two ages, but can compete for the actual victory at the end of the game.

I had this thought as well. But it would be really strange if there is no option to trade resources and build roads anymore at all. Maybe there's a different kind of trade with DL civs?

You can still go for two paths (culture and science), but I think you'd be waging a big war at some point to a) capture some treasure fleets for at least a bit of legacy points b) capture some cities in the HL (to get coastal access or even one or two DL settlements directly).

Another consequence of this railroading is that coastal towns are more likely to become cities, as you can't buy naval units in towns, right?
By the way, did they have a chance to decide which city becomes the capital of the new age? Or is this a random assignmeI

I think that they chose the new capital between 2 cities, if I remember correctly.

 

[chaosprophet]

On the discussion about the Exploration mechanics making so people who complete ignore DL getting some disadvantages, I agree in part but then exploring and getting new land is part of the game that you can always ignore but that obviously would make you weaker than other players if you just sit still. So overall may not be that much of a difference from previous games than it seems, besides the order (first you can only explore the homeland and only later you can explore the distant lands). From the streams we saw so far, you would expect the antiquity age to end with most of the useful space on the homelands to be covered by cities of the various civs (while larger maps would have more land also would have more players). So that means that on exploration, players would naturally have to either conquer other civs land or go explore the distant lands if they want to get more land. And if they don't want to get more land, that is a choice they can make but makes sense they would then have some disadvantages compared to other players, the same if they would stop expanding around turns 150~200 in other civ games.

So basically, if the game natural flow makes so in general there wouldn't be much space left on HL during exploration, then going to DL is less about deciding to go expand there rather than expand on HL, but more about deciding to expand or not expand. And makes sense that a player who decides to not expand at all would have disadvantages.

And lastly, take in account there are apparently interesting dark age legacies if you don't get any bonus in a legacy path, so maybe ignoring one or another for an interesting boost on next age may even be a good strategy.

As I understand it, we now have 2 kinds of civ opponents. The civs of your homeland, who compete with you for the win and the civs in distant lands, who are there as a stronger.IP, but can't compete with you for the win. Did I misunderstood something?

We don't know that yet, but may be the case. We really need some clarification on that.

- we've been told that trade works differently in each age. We haven't seen any trade in the stream, right? I also didn't catch any merchant unit in the production overviews, but I also haven't looked specifically for them.

Good point, I'm curious about trade on exploration. There is probably some just wasn't the focus on this stream, as it already had tons of stuff. Hopefully they make a new exploration age stream in a few weeks to give us more details on stuff that didn't fit the first stream.

- I wonder how many "your legacy goal works different" civs à la Mongols we'll see in the base game and early expansions. This has huge potential for different play styles.

- I hope that FXS manages to find 2-3 legacy goals per age per type to have some more variety at some point (maybe as focus of the first major expansion). It would be "fun" to not know what's waiting for you in the next age in a way.

I can see many civs, especially in DLC with their unique legacy mechanics in the near future. While I think would be a good idea to have different legacies goals, I don't expect them anytime soon as they may need big rebalances, changing the AI to aim for them or decide which option is the best and more aggressively aim for those, etc. Albeit one wya that may be easier to balance is to make them count together instead of separated paths. For example, if an alternative economic is to establish trade routes with settlements that have those treasure resources earning you also one point as long as those routes exist at the end of the age, or depending of the difficulty it earning you less or more points. For example, an idea I mentioned before for antiquity Wonder legacy being instead: Obtain 21 points where every urban district with both slots filled equals one point and a wonder equals 3 points.

By the way, did they have a chance to decide which city becomes the capital of the new age? Or is this a random assignment?

In both streams, they had an option between two settlements, likely the two bigger ones besides the current capital. I just hope the game let me check the map so I can fully remember if one of the two options are really good options for my next civ, as I tend to be forgeteful.

Different Treasure Resources are on both Lands, but you can only make/cash in Treasure Fleets from resources that are distant to you. ie Sugar is on your homelands, Spice is on your Distant Lands, so you can’t build or cash Sugar Fleets. (you may not even be able to steal them)

That would be a good solution, yeah.

 

[Siptah]

Well, of course, as we all know, there are artists who are contrarians and will say the opposite of what everyone feels just to stand out. Not that I'm arguing for perfect symmetry here where no civs have uniques and every landmass is identical down to every last tile. Football is a game with symmetric rules, even if the players are different on each team and one gets red carded.


Why railroad something so specific? Why not build trade systems such that something like that arrises when the circumstances are right (and play with map generation and civ placement to make that happen more often than not)? Didn't the devs say that they were trying to make it symmetric, it just wasn't in the current implementation? It's in the very name, it's absurd for all civs to agree on which continent is the homeland when they didn't start there: the very name homeland and distant land implies that it's relative to a particular civilizations point of view rather than a global constant.

It's pretty fundamental to Civilization that all the civs play by the same rules. Sure, they have different uniques, and there are difficulty bonuses, and the map will spawn them in different places; but the underlying rules are the same. This isn't, eg, a city builder where the player is the only one building a settlement and the AI merely controls raiders that intrude on the player. If you have civs that obey fundamentally different rules with different goals and some are locked out of winning all together, then they're not really civs anymore. Might as well just replace them with barbarians or city states or independent powers.

Now you could, I guess, have different legacy paths and victory conditions for civs depending on whether they start on the same continent as the player or not. But that seems to be a lot of work. And, eventually, players would want to to try out those legacy paths. But they would be unable to do so because, obviously, they can't start on a different continent to themselves. So it's better to put that work into creating new civs with those legacy paths, no matter where they start.

I find it hard to argue, as I would have to argue for a point that I don‘t believe is a good one. Of course, a dynamic system would be better. But I don‘t see any evidence for it and shy evidence against it in the shown build and revealed info.

 

[Evolena]

In both streams, they had an option between two settlements, likely the two bigger ones besides the current capital. I just hope the game let me check the map so I can fully remember if one of the two options are really good options for my next civ, as I tend to be forgeteful.

My hypothesis is rather 2 Coastal Settlements.

 

[chaosprophet]

My hypothesis is rather 2 Coastal Settlements.

Do you mean always that being the case for exploration? Or maybe the game picking two settlements that are likely the best related with your choice of next age civ?

 

[Krikkit1]

I'm still trying to get my head around everything we saw but I think this is my main takeaway. Like, I don't mind this idea of DL and treasure fleets but I think there should be at least one interesting HL alternative so that not all cis following an economic path are forced to go overseas and get treasure.

I think my overriding feeling is that the game has tremendous potential but I'm a bit unsure about some of the implementation.

All the pieces are there to make something phenomenal: I think the Age structure is great, I like the idea of having distinct gameplay elements in each Age, I like the idea of legacy paths, and points to spend in the next Age based on your performance, I like civ switching because imo it fits well within this framework.

But religion looks weak. Hard to get excited about what they've done there. And whilst DL is a cool idea, it seems to dominate Exploration a little too much, basically forcing everyone to engage in treasure fleets. And I don't know how I feel about having Civs in the game that can't win.

Ultimately, I have more questions than answers after the stream. If anything, it has made me more keen than ever to get stuck in and start exploring the game myself, but I can't pretend that I liked everything I saw.

I think the science victory is enough of an “economic” non expansion path (ie just boost yields)

I do agree I don’t quite like the asymmetry of the HL v DL. (one is part empty and can’t get the treasure fleets)

 

[Evolena]

Do you mean always that being the case for exploration? Or maybe the game picking two settlements that are likely the best related with your choice of next age civ?

I was thinking the former, but the later sure is interesting as making use of these starting biases!

 

[Krikkit1]

My hypothesis is rather 2 Coastal Settlements.

I think it was their 2 other cities, ie you can only switch your capital to another city.

 

[chaosprophet]

This stream also confirms that overbuilding can be done over any non ageless building, and not something like an upgrade, where you could only overbuild a library with an specific science building or just any science building, as some theorized.

Expanding on this I mentioned before, I wonder if the best strategy would be, aside from the unique district in case your civ have one, to have at least one slot on an urban district being a non ageless building, or basically to avoid having two ageless/persistent buildings on the same urban district. That way, on the next age when you overbuild, you have more options of adjacency for the new buildings and may also make it not as bad to not plan too ahead, as you can correct course of a new age.

 

[8housesofelixir]

Every major empire in human history employed some system to move the resources they extracted from the provinces or colonies to the capital or metropolis. Treasure fleet is just one such system.

I don't mind Civ 7 using one system to represent all of them, and I also hope we can at least have a land-based "treasure fleet" mechanic for a land-based empire and its colonies (Russia proper and Siberia, for instance).

 

[NooBusMaxximus]

I really enjoyed the naval gameplay showed on the stream: with treasure fleets, piracy etc. However I feel like exploration age is decent at representing interactions with new world, but at the same time it abandons the continental aspect of medieval ages, especially due to the fact that legacy path literally forces you to explore terra incognito, and not your homeland. At least from what devs have shown to us.

For example such system would not cover the land spice trading which started within the Eurasia between India, Arabs and Europe, or medieval Silk Road across the Eurasia. And in this case I would like to see not only naval but also land treasure traders. Maybe they could be less efficient (To support naval expedition like Portugal did in this situation =D) but for sure beneficial in case you are not a naval empire. For the same reason I think that treasure resources spread should work similar way to civ 6, when you have a few contents on your homeland and each continent have it’s own set of unique resources, and you have to get ones far from you somehow. And same for distant lands. It would be symmetrical, so trading is equal for all players in all lands(would be especially important for MP, in case there are players that start on different lands), and it would allow to stay relevant in case you are land empire without huge naval power.

Same with military legacy path it again forces you to be a naval empire. Making mongol an exception isn’t the way, I think all civs should be able to progress this path through colonizing your own continent (example - Russian colonization of Siberia) or capturing the neighbors(same Mongols). For example all civs receive full points for distant land settlements and half on a homeland (except mongols for example that have full points for any towns or cities on their land).

Among other medieval aspects - Religion got simplified and I am not sure how I feel about it. It had a huge influence on medieval politics and culture. And each player having it’s own religion seems to be “just another set of bonuses for now”, and doesn’t contribute much to interactions between players, how it was in previous civs. Especially Civ IV for example: when civs with the same religion had better relationships, different religions affected trading, alliances and wars. Maybe stream didn’t show a full picture and it’s deeper, I don’t know.

Also culture highly relying on relics seems incomplete. Yes, the art was mostly religious, but it was more than some religious artifacts: paintings, sculptures, mosaics, architecture, texts - all of this is a big part of medieval culture on the humanity’s way to Renaissance . Probably it is now a part of civ-specific great people, than it is okay, I just didn’t see that from stream.

Overall I think that there are still plenty of work to do regarding this age, and I am sure it will be more complete on release or soon later, but for now it seems significantly less worked out than antiquity (which is already really good).

 

[Evolena]

- we've been told that trade works differently in each age. We haven't seen any trade in the stream, right? I also didn't catch any merchant unit in the production overviews, but I also haven't looked specifically for them.

The Chola is all about Trade Routes, by land or sea, so I suppose they are stille there. But you may have to make the Trade Agreements again...

 

[V. Soma]

My take on their reaction there is that the new world civs essentially don't play the same game, they're more or less locked out of the policies. I wonder if they could add a mechanism where their goals essentially are the reverse of the old world civs - ie. they can "capture" treasure fleets, and when they bring them back to their lands, they get points for "defending their resources". I don't think it makes sense to have them try to go the opposite way with treasure fleets.
You need to come up with some alt version for their military path. Maybe you give civs over there a default ability like Mongolia where it's simply about conquering stuff. Even if they're not playing with the same victory conditions, it would be nice if they could be a foil with an adversarial feel.



Yeah, I don't recall seeing anything different with trade. I do think the whole treasure fleet thing is probably what they were referring to mostly when they talked about "trade" being different in the different ages. Maybe there's other pieces, but IMO given that's tied to resources, that's probably what they meant most. Whether the old trade system is still in place in that era or not, I don't know.


Overall, it looked interesting, although obviously it's so heavily geared towards a race for the new world, my problem is that if you don't have a naval base setup, you're pretty much going to be completely locked out of the era if you don't take a Mongolia-like civ. I mean, I guess you could ignore those trees and really focus on the other trees, but I can definitely foresee a number of games where you essentially are stuck in an inland sea or in impassable ice/tundra, and you're just not going to be able to do any of the new world stuff.

So then you can't get colonies, like real world Germany couldn't get much - so you would then go to war in modern age - like Germany did... talk about history game, eh

 

[Josephias]

Sorry if i’m repeating someone, but wanted to say that the moment I saw it on the stream:

Anyone else finds the “tresaure fleets” mechanic having echoes of Colonization “bring treasure to metropoli” feature?

 

[Haig]

Remember that this is still "vanilla" Civ VII, many things like homeland-centered strategy will probably be more fleshed out in the future.

 

[Krikkit1]

The Chola is all about Trade Routes, by land or sea, so I suppose they are stille there. But you may have to make the Trade Agreements again...

Also there was a religious belief that spread over trade routes.

It would be interesting if trade routes can go to the Distant Lands. or if Treasure Fleets are the only option there.

 

[Siptah]

With the new info digested, I wondered how it feels to skip the distant land and exploration in exploration era, and instead focus on your homeland as a non-mongol civ. Looking at the legacy paths, two are wide open, and two are closed. This means, in worst case, you'd miss out on a few militaristic and economic legacies and attribute points. In return, you can concentrate on culture and science to get these respective points. This is certainly suboptimal (as the first points in all paths seem rather easy to get if it weren't for the distant lands requirements), but it's also not game breaking to focus on the homeland and preparing for the actual victory goals of age 3.

But maybe, and here the speculation starts, this isn't it. In previous civ games, you could only get cities in peace deals when you occupy them. With the clear separation between homeland and distant lands, I could see the following option: you fight a war against another civ in the homeland, occupy their capital and other settlements, but in the peace deal, you ask for some colonial possessions, and not in the homeland. As you then control a conquered city in the distant lands, this would give you a bit of progress towards the militaristic path at least - a reward for your military prowess without really engaging in distant lands play. I don't think this is particularly likely to be the case right now, but maybe this would help in games in which you have a hard time to get exploration or coastal cities going.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

With the new info digested, I wondered how it feels to skip the distant land and exploration in exploration era, and instead focus on your homeland as a non-mongol civ. Looking at the legacy paths, two are wide open, and two are closed. This means, in worst case, you'd miss out on a few militaristic and economic legacies and attribute points. In return, you can concentrate on culture and science to get these respective points. This is certainly suboptimal (as the first points in all paths seem rather easy to get if it weren't for the distant lands requirements), but it's also not game breaking to focus on the homeland and preparing for the actual victory goals of age 3.

But maybe, and here the speculation starts, this isn't it. In previous civ games, you could only get cities in peace deals when you occupy them. With the clear separation between homeland and distant lands, I could see the following option: you fight a war against another civ in the homeland, occupy their capital and other settlements, but in the peace deal, you ask for some colonial possessions, and not in the homeland. As you then control a conquered city in the distant lands, this would give you a bit of progress towards the militaristic path at least - a reward for your military prowess without really engaging in distant lands play. I don't think this is particularly likely to be the case right now, but maybe this would help in games in which you have a hard time to get exploration or coastal cities going.

The Mongol UA gives them militaristic play with or without going to the Distant Lands. They will certainly be very competetive in that Legacy