Having indulged many times in "it's basically a new game" concepts for Civ 7, I'd like to engage with the idea of making very simple changes that have a big impact on what's causing problems for Civ 7.
For me, I'd get rid of specialists. Specialists are tied to all the pain inducing mechanics of the game like many of the legacy paths, yield stacking, the food problem, age-transition headaches like a happiness cliff, and I think it's symbolic of the banal, repetitive, surface level progression that makes Civ 7 so boring for so many people.
While the "simple" idea is to just get rid of specialists, this necessary would require some changes. At a minimum, techs, wonders and policies relating to specialists would have to be altered. Also, the Exploration Science path would have to be reinvented.
I strongly suspect "they tried to get rid of snowballing but it happens anyway" is due to specialist stacking. I wonder, without the fish exploit/bug and specialists, how yields might look in Modern.
This also begs two questions:
So, are there bigger changes to make? Again, look back on all our discussions on food production, towns vs cities, and the changes they've already patched in. So far, it seems to me that Firaxis is making these changes to appear to be responding to our complaints. I wish instead they'd just overhaul this problematic system and make it good. It's Civ 7 so I know we won't get famine and negative population growth. Still, I think there's more which can be done with towns and food. Specifically, a better visual representation of how food is distributed, and ways to control where food is sent. I've once recommended that they add a new layer to Civ 7:
EMPIRE INFRASTRUCTURE AND CITY INFRASTRUCTURE
Empire infrastructure are simple improvements that maybe are buildable in your capital as projects, which add things like improved roads. Improved roads would increase the distance food can be sent from towns to cities, leading to a food management mini-game. This will make town planning more interesting, better define towns vs. cities, improve the situation with the growth curves, and replace the need for specialists as a food endgame. If you can manage food production to make growth better, then you nerf growth a bit in contrast. Slow empire growth was their goal from the beginning, but it was painful. Giving us a way to mitigate slow growth, as a trade off with other strategies, brings food yields back into contention with the other yields. Which is also balanced by not having specialists. While I can't think of any empire infrastructure other than roads and maybe aqueducts, in the future in expansions you can have flood control, irrigation and canals.
To replace specialists, you should have city infrastructure. These are large projects aren't buildings, but city-wide features like "avenues" or "sewer system". They require minimal visual representation. They replace some of the concept of specialists (sewer = food, avenues = trade, plazas = culture, workshops = science). I'd compare them to wonder-like projects that boost all of some yield in a city, where there's no limit on building them (i.e.: each city could build any of them, and other players having them doesn't restrict you from building them, resources and hammers are your constraint, and if you built all city infrastructure in a city in an age, you'd build nothing else at all).
Finally, one thing specialists do is play with adjacencies. With no specialists, I'd instead add variety to existing buildings by adding some new adjacency rules. This is a way of making buildings more unique with more synergies, without having to change their functions or yields as they are now in the game. You'd of course need a more robust UI to communicate these adjacencies and to assist with placement planning.
With just removing specialists, you'd remove stupid snowball yields, and remove one of the more banal features of the game, causing people to focus more on unique towns and military combat. However, with some of the relatively simple, almost moddable additions I've proposed to replace specialists, you'd have a much more fun game.
Beyond specialists, I would just literally get rid of religious war, just take it out because it's annoying. Obviously it should be replaced with a better system, but even just changing the function of missionaries (like, you get 3 of them then after that it's natural religious pressure and you're done at that point) to be less involved would improve the game.
What sort of simple basic changes (with some leeway for more potentially) do you think could fix Civ 7, rather than big huge dynamic sets of changes? And, classic no civ switching mode is fine to discuss, but we have another thread for that specific topic in detail.
For me, I'd get rid of specialists. Specialists are tied to all the pain inducing mechanics of the game like many of the legacy paths, yield stacking, the food problem, age-transition headaches like a happiness cliff, and I think it's symbolic of the banal, repetitive, surface level progression that makes Civ 7 so boring for so many people.
While the "simple" idea is to just get rid of specialists, this necessary would require some changes. At a minimum, techs, wonders and policies relating to specialists would have to be altered. Also, the Exploration Science path would have to be reinvented.
I strongly suspect "they tried to get rid of snowballing but it happens anyway" is due to specialist stacking. I wonder, without the fish exploit/bug and specialists, how yields might look in Modern.
This also begs two questions:
- If specialists are removed, has anything been lost, and what should replace it?
- With specialists gone, are there less simple, bigger changes to be made?
So, are there bigger changes to make? Again, look back on all our discussions on food production, towns vs cities, and the changes they've already patched in. So far, it seems to me that Firaxis is making these changes to appear to be responding to our complaints. I wish instead they'd just overhaul this problematic system and make it good. It's Civ 7 so I know we won't get famine and negative population growth. Still, I think there's more which can be done with towns and food. Specifically, a better visual representation of how food is distributed, and ways to control where food is sent. I've once recommended that they add a new layer to Civ 7:
EMPIRE INFRASTRUCTURE AND CITY INFRASTRUCTURE
Empire infrastructure are simple improvements that maybe are buildable in your capital as projects, which add things like improved roads. Improved roads would increase the distance food can be sent from towns to cities, leading to a food management mini-game. This will make town planning more interesting, better define towns vs. cities, improve the situation with the growth curves, and replace the need for specialists as a food endgame. If you can manage food production to make growth better, then you nerf growth a bit in contrast. Slow empire growth was their goal from the beginning, but it was painful. Giving us a way to mitigate slow growth, as a trade off with other strategies, brings food yields back into contention with the other yields. Which is also balanced by not having specialists. While I can't think of any empire infrastructure other than roads and maybe aqueducts, in the future in expansions you can have flood control, irrigation and canals.
To replace specialists, you should have city infrastructure. These are large projects aren't buildings, but city-wide features like "avenues" or "sewer system". They require minimal visual representation. They replace some of the concept of specialists (sewer = food, avenues = trade, plazas = culture, workshops = science). I'd compare them to wonder-like projects that boost all of some yield in a city, where there's no limit on building them (i.e.: each city could build any of them, and other players having them doesn't restrict you from building them, resources and hammers are your constraint, and if you built all city infrastructure in a city in an age, you'd build nothing else at all).
Finally, one thing specialists do is play with adjacencies. With no specialists, I'd instead add variety to existing buildings by adding some new adjacency rules. This is a way of making buildings more unique with more synergies, without having to change their functions or yields as they are now in the game. You'd of course need a more robust UI to communicate these adjacencies and to assist with placement planning.
With just removing specialists, you'd remove stupid snowball yields, and remove one of the more banal features of the game, causing people to focus more on unique towns and military combat. However, with some of the relatively simple, almost moddable additions I've proposed to replace specialists, you'd have a much more fun game.
Beyond specialists, I would just literally get rid of religious war, just take it out because it's annoying. Obviously it should be replaced with a better system, but even just changing the function of missionaries (like, you get 3 of them then after that it's natural religious pressure and you're done at that point) to be less involved would improve the game.
What sort of simple basic changes (with some leeway for more potentially) do you think could fix Civ 7, rather than big huge dynamic sets of changes? And, classic no civ switching mode is fine to discuss, but we have another thread for that specific topic in detail.
