Update 1.2.3 is coming soon!

[jestix]

I really have to wonder if Auto-Explore is really going to be as useful as people seem to think. I've been using the auto-explore mod for a couple of months now, and and I only ever use it in the latter half of Exploration, mainly to locate any remaining city states. I've never used it in Antiquity at all. At the start of Antiquity, Scouts need tight management balancing movement and search to find goodie huts, suss out other civ capitals and then settlement locations (or possibly vice versa), all while dodging slingers, fording rivers, and cursing the ancestors of whoever thought navigating ridges would make for fun game play. Then it's finding the three C's - city-states, camels, and coastlines. None of which is a good fit for auto-explore.

The start of Exploration is the same - even with Treasure convoys city placement is key or you'll lose precious turns expanding out to treasure resources since it's usually 15+ turns from settling to first shipment received. You have to pair up Scouts and Settlers, coordinate movement tightly, and pray you don't run into mountain ranges which force you to backtrack. I've even tried spamming 10+ Scouts at the start of Exploration, turning on auto-explore once they hit the major landfall, but with very little impact. Suffice to say that they start of Exploration is a tedious, punishing grind if you're pursuing the Economic Legacy path.

I hope I'm wrong, but this feels like it's going to be a big disappointment. I'm in software product management, and one of the fundamental rules is "never give the customer what they ask for; give them what they need." And Auto-Explore is not it.

For me ill use it in antiquity when i have most of the map explored and no longer want to manage the scouts. A point in the game when goody huts will all be gone, i see most of the opponents land and i know all of my settlement locations.

 

[stealth_nsk]

The other thing to bear in mind is that reviews only reflect the views of people that werent put off enough to stop them buying the game. If you're looking at it from a potential player POV, I think the trend is far more to the critical side given how many people haven't bought the game compared to how many own Civ VI.

That's a deep rabbit hole of data analysis. Let's say there are plenty of things working the other way too.

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

That's a deep rabbit hole of data analysis. Let's say there are plenty of things working the other way too.

Plenty is a real stretch at this point. I think the number of people remaining who would say this game isn't underperforming are vanishingly small

I'll leave it at that though, I don't want to detail the update thread with player stats when there's a perfectly good player stats thread!

 

[Kenshiro70]

I'm not sure I understand why there's a "Continuity setting" necessary to preserve unit positions. That implies that:

• The "Mobile mini-game" age transitions won't be going away
• The Continuity setting will be disabled by default

This is bad on several levels:

• It splits development resources
• It doubles testing requirements
• It violates another one of Sid Meier's rules that "you shouldn't add too many game-changing options to the settings menu; your job as the designer is to make those calls" (I'm paraphrasing from his GDC talk available on YouTube)

Why on earth would Firaxis do this? I've had era changes where I started with four commanders stacked on my capital, so Firaxis must know how busted the current system is. And yet this relatively tame improvement still isn't the default going forward.

There's only two reasons I can think of why they'd do this:

1. They are still clinging to the fantasy that Civ VII will become a multiplayer/e-sport powerhouse; or
2. Era resets are necessitated by Console/Switch 1 memory constraints that require "resetting" the game state to avoid memory or CPU limits. In other words, Era resets are just fancy garbage collection algorithms

Am I missing something here?

 

[stealth_nsk]

I'm not sure I understand why there's a "Continuity setting" necessary to preserve unit positions. That implies that:

• The "Mobile mini-game" age transitions won't be going away
• The Continuity setting will be disabled by default

1. Does someone really expects age transitions to go away? They are one of the core game mechanics for Civ7
2. Nothing tells it's disabled by default. When unbalanced map option was released, it was enabled for single player games

This is bad on several levels:

• It splits development resources
• It doubles testing requirements
• It violates another one of Sid Meier's rules that "you shouldn't add too many game-changing options to the settings menu; your job as the designer is to make those calls" (I'm paraphrasing from his GDC talk available on YouTube)

1. Since one of the options is how the game already works, it doesn't split development resources as only new functionality needs to be implemented...
2. ... and tested. Sure, some testing around turning it on and off is needed, but that's the minimum
3. While in general this concept is true, for games with as high replayability as Civ, having different options and modes is necessary

Still, I don't think this deserves an option. So, I believe Firaxis just want to be sure this variant won't be gamebreaking. With monthly releases, new features could get enough technical testing (although not always), but not enough gameplay testing.

Why on earth would Firaxis do this? I've had era changes where I started with four commanders stacked on my capital, so Firaxis must know how busted the current system is. And yet this relatively tame improvement still isn't the default going forward.


There's only two reasons I can think of why they'd do this:

1. They are still clinging to the fantasy that Civ VII will become a multiplayer/e-sport powerhouse; or
2. Era resets are necessitated by Console/Switch 1 memory constraints that require "resetting" the game state to avoid memory or CPU limits. In other words, Era resets are just fancy garbage collection algorithms

Am I missing something here?

I think you miss that:
1. Age transition is one of the core features of Civ7 and it will not go away. Removing it would require like 50% of efforts needed for a totally new game
2. Average perception of age transition is probably not as negative as it looks for some pretty vocal part of this forum. I'm putting "probably" here, because we had discussion on this already and I don't think we'll get anywhere on continuing it

 

[McSpank01]

1. Does someone really expects age transitions to go away? They are one of the core game mechanics for Civ7

I don't think anyone expects them to go away. However there does seem to be a large growing sentiment (that I agree with and Firaxis seem very aware of) that the transitions are very abrupt and break the flow of the game. I don't think it's possible to do away with them, for many of the reasons given on this board, however it might be possible to make them far more seamless and less noticable. It is going to require far more dev effort and time than we are seeing in the minor tweaks Firaxis are putting out though.

2. Average perception of age transition is probably not as negative as it looks for some pretty vocal part of this forum. I'm putting "probably" here, because we had discussion on this already and I don't think we'll get anywhere on continuing it

While this might be a hope to cling on to, clearly the game has failed to hook players, and the numbers playing it are disappointingly small. Age transitions I would suggest are a major part of that, even if it isn't always the direct problem that people cite. Age transitions for me, break my enthusiasm for my current game, the prevent me wanting to continue. I have literally never finished a game and can barely get to modern without being bored. Every game feels like a grind. Subconsiously much of that is because I don't feel the enthusiasm for building an empire, and ages break my momentum. I would bet good money many people feel the same.

 

[Siptah]

I don't think memory constraints are a reason why the game resets between eras. I have no clue why FXS went for programming the game as three separate games, instead of one game with 3 acts, but I don't think blaming consoles or compatibility with older PCs is right here – it's fine to blame the compromised UI and smaller maps at launch on that, and that's already a lot to blame on something that's inherently a super-positive thing to consider for a game studio/publisher. I'm no expert on this but it would probably have been possible to clean some caches in the transitions without resorting to creating a new game each time. Yet, as people that have more knowledge about the matter here seemed to suggest that it is impossible to get from three separate games behind the scenes to three acts of a single game – or a single act without resorting to putting all content in the first hard-programmed antiquity act.

 

[Civinator]

Does someone really expects age transitions to go away?

As you have seen by answering such a post: Yes - and this would be possible without any problems.
Please don´t forget, that Civ 7 in these mechanics is only the updated C3C campaign, created by Ed Beach decades ago, and these "age transitions" are only the putty to glue several otherwise independent scenarios together (in the C3C campaign 9 scenarios and not only those lousy 3 as in Civ 7 yet).

The putty in the C3C campaign was a score system by points for each single scenario and these scores were added together for the final result of the campaign. This is the same mechanism yet, but updated to the current age transitions in Civ 7. The age transitions should help, that now more civers should play Civ 7 to the end of the game and (not so frequently posted), still glue parts of the game together, that otherwise would not fit together. When looking at many posts here at CFC, the current mechanics of "age transitions" failed in convincing many players of Civ 7 to play the game up to the end. Those players seem now even to stop at the end of era 1 and even worse - don´t are motivated to play Civ 7 again, at least not in a longer time.

The crazy truth is, that these "age transition" parts of the game in reality are not needed at all, when the "civ switching" is set to a more smooth evolution of the civs (civ defined as the history of the population at a certain place on earth) and not to such comical settings to transform per example edit: "Egypt to Ming to Prussia". If you don´t believe this, please play the C3C mod CCM 3 in combination with the C3X mod and you can see that this is the truth (of course in that mod there is always place for improving it).

 

[Pfeffersack]

I also don't see age transitions going, neither completely nor as option. Technically too deep entreched in the game and also too essential to the devs vision. If at all, then maybe the forced civ switch coming with the era change will become an opt-out (similar to Humankind, where you have the option, though little gameplay incentive is being provided to stick with a civ) - even that isn't highly likely, but I view it as technically feasible with some effort and the demand from a part of the community might be enough to justify the investment. For the era transition itself however all I see is more polishing/smoothing in the future, like already mentioned in the 1.2.3 teaser.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I don't think anyone expects them to go away. However there does seem to be a large growing sentiment (that I agree with and Firaxis seem very aware of) that the transitions are very abrupt and break the flow of the game. I don't think it's possible to do away with them, for many of the reasons given on this board, however it might be possible to make them far more seamless and less noticable. It is going to require far more dev effort and time than we are seeing in the minor tweaks Firaxis are putting out though.

As we see by other replies, some really expect age transition to go away. And I totally agree with you that age transition abruptness is a major source of the problem - we've also seen it in review analysis. I just htink Firaxis does exactly the right things to address this abruptness in this patch. We'll see how it goes and afterwards next steps will be clear.

While this might be a hope to cling on to, clearly the game has failed to hook players, and the numbers playing it are disappointingly small. Age transitions I would suggest are a major part of that, even if it isn't always the direct problem that people cite. Age transitions for me, break my enthusiasm for my current game, the prevent me wanting to continue. I have literally never finished a game and can barely get to modern without being bored. Every game feels like a grind. Subconsiously much of that is because I don't feel the enthusiasm for building an empire, and ages break my momentum. I would bet good money many people feel the same.

As I wrote several times, simultaneous number of players is really tricky metric itself. And tying it to particular game feature is quite a big stretch.

I don't think memory constraints are a reason why the game resets between eras. I have no clue why FXS went for programming the game as three separate games, instead of one game with 3 acts, but I don't think blaming consoles or compatibility with older PCs is right here – it's fine to blame the compromised UI and smaller maps at launch on that, and that's already a lot to blame on something that's inherently a super-positive thing to consider for a game studio/publisher. I'm no expert on this but it would probably have been possible to clean some caches in the transitions without resorting to creating a new game each time. Yet, as people that have more knowledge about the matter here seemed to suggest that it is impossible to get from three separate games behind the scenes to three acts of a single game – or a single act without resorting to putting all content in the first hard-programmed antiquity act.

I think age transition reuses a lot of code from map generation, like resource allocation, so it was more or less logical to go that way. I think it's totally technical team decision, based on amount of code to write.

As you have seen by answering such a post: Yes - and this would be possible without any problems.
Please don´t forget, that Civ 7 in these mechanics is only the updated C3C campaign, created by Ed Beach decades ago, and these "age transitions" are only the putty to glue several otherwise independent scenarios together (in the C3C campaign 9 scenarios and not only those lousy 3 as in Civ 7 yet).

Age transition is connected with Civ swtching. And civs are designed to be age-specific, which means total redesign of civs in addition to total redesign of gameplay, change the concept of districts and overbuilding, redesign tech and civic trees... And that's just the start.

 

[Civinator]

Age transition is connected with Civ swtching.

This is exactly what I wrote in the part of my post, that you cut out in your quote.

And civs are designed to be age-specific, which means total redesign of civs in addition to total redesign of gameplay, change the concept of districts and overbuilding, redesign tech and civic trees... And that's just the start.

Age specific names for civs and leaders can even be done in the Civ 3 mod that I named in my last post (and in that mod for even 4 ages - not only 3 as in Civ 7). Age specific settings for the civs are really not such a big problem as you are trying it to paint here in your post.

It stays, that age transitions are superfluos, if the "switching" of civs (better evolution) is set properly.

 

[stealth_nsk]

This is exactly what I wrote in the part of my post, that you cut out in your quote.

Age specific names for civs and leaders can even be done in the Civ 3 mod that I named in my last post (and in that mod for even 4 ages - not only 3 as in Civ 7). Age specific settings for the civs are really not such a big problem as you are trying it to paint here in your post.

It stays, that age transitions are superfluos, if the "switching" of civs (better evolution) is set properly.

Civ3 had it the other way around - they had universal civs and when mods added some age-specific flavor on top. Civ7 has civilizations specifically designed for particular ages. Rebuilding them to be universally useful would require total rebuild of their abilities. It's just one of nearly all of the game systems, which would require total rebuild if Firaxis decide to get rid of age transitions. From game design perspective it's just not happening.

 

[Civinator]

Civ3 had it the other way around - they had universal civs and when mods added some age-specific flavor on top. Civ7 has civilizations specifically designed for particular ages. Rebuilding them to be universally useful would require total rebuild of their abilities. It's just one of nearly all of the game systems, which would require total rebuild if Firaxis decide to get rid of age transitions. From game design perspective it's just not happening.

Civ 7 civs don´t have to be redesigned to become "universal" civs. Even in the Civ 3 mod CCM 3 in combination with the C3X mod, civs can act in the game with different names in different eras of the game, with different options for every civ in each era, provided by civ-specific buildings and in the next version even by additional civ-specific options provided by the 4 different historical leaders of such a civ in the different eras of the game. In that mod the evolution of a civ is determined by a look from present days on a certain territory down in the past [per example Italy with the path Italy => Italian City States (Byzantium is for era 2 of Greece) => Rome; so the civ starts with the name Rome in era 1]

The current "age transitions" in Civ 7 are only needed to explain "massive changes" by "switching" over big distances between historical locations of civs (per example from Rome to Mexico), what in my eyes at present is not working well in Civ 7 and to motivate players to continue their games up to the end, what in my eyes at present is also not working well in Civ 7.

Edit: Here is a screenshot of the diplomacy screen of CCM 3, showing the names of the different states of the evolution of different civs with the different names of their leaders and titles of those leaders in the four eras of CCM 3:

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

I'm not sure I understand why there's a "Continuity setting" necessary to preserve unit positions. That implies that:

• The "Mobile mini-game" age transitions won't be going away
• The Continuity setting will be disabled by default

This is bad on several levels:

• It splits development resources
• It doubles testing requirements
• It violates another one of Sid Meier's rules that "you shouldn't add too many game-changing options to the settings menu; your job as the designer is to make those calls" (I'm paraphrasing from his GDC talk available on YouTube)

Why on earth would Firaxis do this? I've had era changes where I started with four commanders stacked on my capital, so Firaxis must know how busted the current system is. And yet this relatively tame improvement still isn't the default going forward.

There's only two reasons I can think of why they'd do this:

1. They are still clinging to the fantasy that Civ VII will become a multiplayer/e-sport powerhouse; or
2. Era resets are necessitated by Console/Switch 1 memory constraints that require "resetting" the game state to avoid memory or CPU limits. In other words, Era resets are just fancy garbage collection algorithms

Am I missing something here?

Doesn't double testing times if you don't do testing

*Taps head*

 

[j51]

As you have seen by answering such a post: Yes - and this would be possible without any problems.
Please don´t forget, that Civ 7 in these mechanics is only the updated C3C campaign, created by Ed Beach decades ago, and these "age transitions" are only the putty to glue several otherwise independent scenarios together (in the C3C campaign 9 scenarios and not only those lousy 3 as in Civ 7 yet).

The putty in the C3C campaign was a score system by points for each single scenario and these scores were added together for the final result of the campaign. This is the same mechanism yet, but updated to the current age transitions in Civ 7. The age transitions should help, that now more civers should play Civ 7 to the end of the game and (not so frequently posted), still glue parts of the game together, that otherwise would not fit together. When looking at many posts here at CFC, the current mechanics of "age transitions" failed in convincing many players of Civ 7 to play the game up to the end. Those players seem now even to stop at the end of era 1 and even worse - don´t are motivated to play Civ 7 again, at least not in a longer time.

The crazy truth is, that these "age transition" parts of the game in reality are not needed at all, when the "civ switching" is set to a more smooth evolution of the civs (civ defined as the history of the population at a certain place on earth) and not to such comical settings to transform per example Rome into Mexico. If you don´t believe this, please play the C3C mod CCM 3 in combination with the C3X mod and you can see that this is the truth (of course in that mod there is always place for improving it).

I would agree with all of this but the example of Rome into Mexico (via Spain) being comical. That’s actually a good historical example of cultural evolution. A comical example is Egypt to Ming to Prussia.

 

[jaeenox]

Yes, I expect age transitions to go away. The game in its current state is a failure. 4x people playing 6, 2x people playing 5. Continuing terrible reviews on Steam. If they want me and many others to pay the ridiculous price they are asking for their game a complete rework is necessary. Whoever calls the shots is more patient than me. There would have been mass firings by now and a new team brought in to fix this disaster.

 

[Leucarum]

I don't think Civ7 will win back followers if they stick the course entirely, and they need something dramatic in order to pull people back. I suspect making Civ switching optional is more likely than removing ages if you want a grand gesture though...

I also think the errors with eras can be fixed. The legacy paths, difficulty following changes, abruptness and railroading can all be reduced... So if they were to pick their fights, I think that's a better one to pick than convincing peoole Civ switching is a good idea.

 

[Civinator]

I would agree with all of this but the example of Rome into Mexico (via Spain) being comical. That’s actually a good historical example of cultural evolution. A comical example is Egypt to Ming to Prussia.

Well, than I edit that example to your suggestion.

 

[McSpank01]

I think it is possible that Civ 7 does a Cyberpunk or No Mans Sky and turns the game around after a couple years, and I do think that players will come back to it if the reviews start telling everyone how good a game it has become. There is always room for that to happen.

Whether Firaxis are going to put that much investment into the project is another matter.

I always come back to Totalwar Warhammer 3 as a comparison to what I think will happen. Essentially that game opened very badly, it had a lot of issues, but the big ones were that the core ideas behind the new game, all the new mechanics, were not well liked and badly implemented. After a few years the game is pretty good, but I would suggest it feels more like an extension of Warhammer 2 rather than anything radically different. Almost all the new features that 3 had promised have been sidelined or memory holed. You can now basically play the game without ever interacting with the stuff they were trying to sell the new version of the game on. You get some new factions and the map is bigger, but instead of actually fixing the problems with the game, they sort of hacked it so you could just ignore those problems and forget they exist.

I don't think the new core features of Civ 7 are going away. They cannot get to a point where we don't have ages or age transitions. I don't know what they will do to civ switching, but I doubt they will ever be able to take it away or allow you to play one civ all the way through. Maybe they will just continue to hack away at all the key features until there is nothing left but this bland Civ skeleton.

I hope however that they just find things to ADD to the game to improve it, rather than finding ways to allow the player to ignore features they don't like.

 

[Kenshiro70]

Nothing tells it's disabled by default. When unbalanced map option was released, it was enabled for single player games

Thanks, I forgot that. Perhaps that's the answer - bit by bit they are segregating into single-player and multi-player rule sets. That would be a very good thing - they've been balancing for multiplayer at the expense of a fun single player game. If they could cordon off the nerfs that make multiplayer fair but singleplayer bland it would be a win-win.