What's your opinion on civ switching?

[stealth_nsk]

Going by the sales and playercount, yes it is

There's another thread for analyzing those, but in short:
1. There's no info that the sales are bad. We could guesstimate number of units sold (2-2.5M by now), but we have no idea that target Firaxis had.
2. Player count is a pretty horsehockey metric, especially for SP games. There's almost zero information you could get from it.
3. Finally, even if the sales are bad, attributing them to this hypothetical loss of core identity has no ground.

EDIT: Forgot to add to the last point. We had analysis of Steam reviews some time ago and civ switching wasn't mentioned as one of the top concerns.

 

[Gedemon]

No amount of lipstick can make this pig appealing. No amount of polish can make this turd shine.

If the very concept itself is alienating, that doesn’t change a thing.

that's a bit off topic here, civ switching IS cosmetic, the issue you have is age transition.

 

[Crashdummy]

So, with this I'd say implementing civ switching looks like a mistake by Firaxis, due to amount of negativity it produced. On the other hand, expecting Firaxis to implement any drastic measures and removing civ switching now is delusional - the feature has enough positivity to keep it and removing would cause negativity wave from the other side, not to mention the huge amount of work required to rebuild all the civs.

I disagree. A game like Civilization cannot be sustained with the current amount of active players. We saw this with Beyond Earth

I think Firaxis should start developing a Classic Mode ASAP, one that is ooptional, doesnt remove the current gameplay, but under that mode, Age transitions are like they have always been, just a notification in game, and there is no civ switching, i wouold bet such a mode would be more popular than the current gameplay loop

I know its a lot of work, but honestly the alternative is to just let Civ 7 wither

There is a reason why every 4x game that implemented civ switching was a failure

 

[stealth_nsk]

I disagree. A game like Civilization cannot be sustained with the current amount of active players. We saw this with Beyond Earth

I think Firaxis should start developing a Classic Mode ASAP, one that is ooptional, doesnt remove the current gameplay, but under that mode, Age transitions are like they have always been, just a notification in game, and there is no civ switching, i wouold bet such a mode would be more popular than the current gameplay loop

I know its a lot of work, but honestly the alternative is to just let Civ 7 wither

There is a reason why every 4x game that implemented civ switching was a failure

Please look at my next post https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/whats-your-opinion-on-civ-switching.699056/post-16847560 it's a reply to your points as well.

 

[AD1730]

I'd also say making attempts to appease the unhappy players by giving them options to play without civ switching defeats the point. Civ Switching is a core mechanic of the game. The answer here is to make Civ Switching as fun and immersive as they can, so that even the doubters can be won round. The basic idea is there, I feel like most people are on board with it, they just want it to be organic and more fun. It's definitely possible to get there.

I used to believe this, but based on the player count and sales numbers, I believe that removing civ switching entirely is the only way for this game to become successful. It has alienated far too many players.

 

[Crashdummy]

Please look at my next post https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/whats-your-opinion-on-civ-switching.699056/post-16847560 it's a reply to your points as well.

I am sorry but i think you are wrong

Not only we do have active players, which we can compare to previous titles and its showing a similar trend as Beyond Earth (which was a complete failure) but we are also seeing Firaxis reaction, trying to lessen their core mechanics patch after patch (but sadly they never decide to go deep enough).

That wouldnt happen if the game was a success. We dont have exact data, but we do have trends and partial data.

 

[Brutus2]

Respectfully, this is false. Blatantly so. Take Greece. Does their "Gain an additional Wildcard policy slot in any government" go away as the game progresses? No, it doesn't. Take Korea. Does their "Farms receive +1 Food and Mines receive +1 Science for each adjacent Seowon" become obsolete in later eras? No. You can go on and on for MOST major Civ6 civs: Russia, Germany, China, India, Inca, Spain, Rome, Portugal, Zulu, Egypt, and so on.

Actually that's exactly my point. Aside from the unique units and buildings that were only very briefly useful, a bonus like extra wildcard policy or +1 food on Farms doesn't go away but it also doesn't interact with the game mechanics in any interesting way. Sure, you can design Civs with general all purpose bonuses like that which is fine but not very interesting. Compared to something like Civ 7 Spain with Traditions that boost Treasure Fleet speed and Conquistadors that provide big advantages to settling the distant lands. Those abilities make me feel much more like I'm truly leading Spain to colonize the new world and bring home Treasure Fleets better than any one else without feeling like I have nothing special to do for the rest of the game because I will be switching to a different civ. I don't want civs with "+1 Food on Farms," I want things that are more interesting and interactive and I want that for the entire game which civ switching accomplishes.

Again, I'm not saying it's a perfect solution. I originally wanted a system where you played one civ but unlocked different abilities that you could choose from at transition to add to your civ for the next era. However, with more thought, that would be bad too because there would undoubtably be abilities that become "best in slot" and you would end up building your civ the same way every time you play, basically making every civ the same so that doesn't work either.

All I'm saying is nothing is perfect. This is a new game, they tried something new to fix a common complaint from civ6 and they did accomplish that goal. Does it introduce new things for people to not like? Sure but I think anything they do is going to have pros and cons. I want a new game to be a different experience, not a Civ 6 clone with better graphics.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Actually that's exactly my point. Aside from the unique units and buildings that were only very briefly useful, a bonus like extra wildcard policy or +1 food on Farms doesn't go away but it also doesn't interact with the game mechanics in any interesting way. Sure, you can design Civs with general all purpose bonuses like that which is fine but not very interesting. Compared to something like Civ 7 Spain with Traditions that boost Treasure Fleet speed and Conquistadors that provide big advantages to settling the distant lands. Those abilities make me feel much more like I'm truly leading Spain to colonize the new world and bring home Treasure Fleets better than any one else without feeling like I have nothing special to do for the rest of the game because I will be switching to a different civ. I don't want civs with "+1 Food on Farms," I want things that are more interesting and interactive and I want that for the entire game which civ switching accomplishes.

Again, I'm not saying it's a perfect solution. I originally wanted a system where you played one civ but unlocked different abilities that you could choose from at transition to add to your civ for the next era. However, with more thought, that would be bad too because there would undoubtably be abilities that become "best in slot" and you would end up building your civ the same way every time you play, basically making every civ the same so that doesn't work either.

All I'm saying is nothing is perfect. This is a new game, they tried something new to fix a common complaint from civ6 and they did accomplish that goal. Does it introduce new things for people to not like? Sure but I think anything they do is going to have pros and cons. I want a new game to be a different experience, not a Civ 6 clone with better graphics.

Exactly my thoughts.

Also, I believe the problem with "one civilization adopting different bonuses/cultures" approach is that it disconnects those bonuses from real world civilizations. As you correctly pointed out, currently you play Spain, which feels like Spain. If instead it would be, for example, India with "colonizer" culture adopted, that won't feel as immersive.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I am sorry but i think you are wrong

Not only we do have active players, which we can compare to previous titles and its showing a similar trend as Beyond Earth (which was a complete failure) but we are also seeing Firaxis reaction, trying to lessen their core mechanics patch after patch (but sadly they never decide to go deep enough).

That wouldnt happen if the game was a success. We dont have exact data, but we do have trends and partial data.

Let's put aside thing with number of players. I already spent too many posts explaining why this metric can't be used for that kind of estimations in the relevant threads. Regarding the rest:

1. Firaxis doesn't try to "lessen their core mechanics patch after patch". That's the first patch, which makes age transition snoother and that's something Firaxis already did before release (they described this in dev diaries, I believe).
2. The real problem for Firaxis are not number of simultaneous players, but number of negative reviews and that's something they address with so much efforts, because it could affect further game and DLC sales
3. I never said Civ7 is a success, I said we don't have information about whether it's success or not

 

[McSpank01]

Actually that's exactly my point. Aside from the unique units and buildings that were only very briefly useful, a bonus like extra wildcard policy or +1 food on Farms doesn't go away but it also doesn't interact with the game mechanics in any interesting way. Sure, you can design Civs with general all purpose bonuses like that which is fine but not very interesting. Compared to something like Civ 7 Spain with Traditions that boost Treasure Fleet speed and Conquistadors that provide big advantages to settling the distant lands. Those abilities make me feel much more like I'm truly leading Spain to colonize the new world and bring home Treasure Fleets better than any one else without feeling like I have nothing special to do for the rest of the game because I will be switching to a different civ. I don't want civs with "+1 Food on Farms," I want things that are more interesting and interactive and I want that for the entire game which civ switching accomplishes.

Again, I'll just point out, this isn't massively different to how things are done in Civ 7. In 6, you may have bonuses that affect you the entire game, but overall your UB and UU tend to focus around one era, the majority of unique gameplay happens in a short space of time, that you tend to need to take advantage of. There are definitely some civs that lean into one way of playing over another too.

In 7 it really isn't all that different. Your UB sticks around and mostly performs the same no matter the era, you get a series of traditions that carry over into other ages. Your cities can stay the same if you don't choose to rename them. The difference instead is that you now also get a series of additional UUs and UB and traditions to use in the next age as well.

I don't disagree however that more could be done to add much more flavour to those differences. Traditions should feel much more flavourful and create more impact. Thats why I think Civ Switching can absolutely work, the concept of building in layers is great, they just need to make it feel like you are actually doing that. Right now it feels like you need to build again on the rubble of past civs.

 

[AD1730]

Actually that's exactly my point. Aside from the unique units and buildings that were only very briefly useful, a bonus like extra wildcard policy or +1 food on Farms doesn't go away but it also doesn't interact with the game mechanics in any interesting way. Sure, you can design Civs with general all purpose bonuses like that which is fine but not very interesting. Compared to something like Civ 7 Spain with Traditions that boost Treasure Fleet speed and Conquistadors that provide big advantages to settling the distant lands. Those abilities make me feel much more like I'm truly leading Spain to colonize the new world and bring home Treasure Fleets better than any one else without feeling like I have nothing special to do for the rest of the game because I will be switching to a different civ. I don't want civs with "+1 Food on Farms," I want things that are more interesting and interactive and I want that for the entire game which civ switching accomplishes.

Again, I'm not saying it's a perfect solution. I originally wanted a system where you played one civ but unlocked different abilities that you could choose from at transition to add to your civ for the next era. However, with more thought, that would be bad too because there would undoubtably be abilities that become "best in slot" and you would end up building your civ the same way every time you play, basically making every civ the same so that doesn't work either.

All I'm saying is nothing is perfect. This is a new game, they tried something new to fix a common complaint from civ6 and they did accomplish that goal. Does it introduce new things for people to not like? Sure but I think anything they do is going to have pros and cons. I want a new game to be a different experience, not a Civ 6 clone with better graphics.

The true problem is the hesitancy to make bold choices in civ design. Using civ switching to solve that problem is like using a chainsaw for hand surgery. In other words, it doesn’t solve the problem and only makes things worse. Civ switching is not a pre-requisite to better civ design.

Previous iterations of civ created a natural ebb and flow to civ strength, where the smart player sought to capitalize when they had the most advantages. The problem was that there were far too many milquetoast civ designs (i.e. America in basically every iteration of Civ) and not enough unique and interesting ones (i.e. Venice). I agree with you that simply giving yield bonuses is not interesting civ design. It can be an aspect of civ design, but each civ should be memorable because of unique abilities, features, and even disadvantages rather than plus X to Y resource.

 

[TylertheDestroyer]

Let's put aside thing with number of players. I already spent too many posts explaining why this metric can't be used for that kind of estimations in the relevant threads. Regarding the rest:

1. Firaxis doesn't try to "lessen their core mechanics patch after patch". That's the first patch, which makes age transition snoother and that's something Firaxis already did before release (they described this in dev diaries, I believe).
2. The real problem for Firaxis are not number of simultaneous players, but number of negative reviews and that's something they address with so much efforts, because it could affect further game and DLC sales
3. I never said Civ7 is a success, I said we don't have information about whether it's success or not

We have more than enough information to conclude that the game was a flop from estimated sales which put the total far below VI, peak player count half of VI on the most popular platform for the series, less concurrent players than V, negative/mixed reviews, etc, etc. You know all the statistics at this point... honestly you seem to be the only one here who still entertains this notion that the game could secretly be some huge success and we all just don't know about it yet

 

[stealth_nsk]

We have more than enough information to conclude that the game was a flop from estimated sales which put the total far below VI, peak player count half of VI on the most popular platform for the series, less concurrent players than V, negative/mixed reviews, etc, etc. You know all the statistics at this point... honestly you seem to be the only one here who still entertains this notion that the game could secretly be some huge success and we all just don't know about it yet

I'm going to die on this hill, but I'm strongly advocate real data analysis in contrast to baseless speculations. And from real data analysis standpoint we have nothing to conclude whether Civ7 is a flop or success.

 

[Evie]

The results of the poll, if applicable to the entire player base, are fascinating, particularly for multiplayer games. If only 70% of players are willing to touch Civ7 due to civ swapping, 4 buddies playing multiplayer Civ6 thinking about migrating to Civ7 have a 75% chance that at least one of them hates civ swapping so much as to not touch the game. The chance of at least two of them hating civ swapping is 35%. These are the terrible odds of unpopular game design choices. I'm amazed how Firaxis couldn't figure out that nearly half of its player base would come to dislike civ swapping. Especially since this feature was poorly received in Humankind.

And I for one won't buy any future historical 4x "one static civ the whole game" game. The model was already ridiculous and stretched to its limits with VI, and it needs to just die already. It's a relic.

The idea that "anti" voices must be satisfied because they aren't buying the game but "pro" voices don't matter because they'd still buy it with or without the features they like is a flabbergasting pile of stinking bad faith (and really just a long way of saying "my preference shoudl be more important than yours".

There is no "remove civ switch and everyone is happy again because then the antis become happy and the pros will stay happy anyway" scenario. There's a zero sum game where some are happy and some are not, and you can only switch which side is happy or which side is not (or try to find a compromise that leave some on each side unhappy).

 

[socratic]

that's a bit off topic here, civ switching IS cosmetic, the issue you have is age transition.

Civ Switching isn’t just cosmetic though. You lose access to most of your previous abilities every time you swap. When I go from Carthage to Spain/Abbasid/whatever I’m not just changing my name and banner, but also my entire game plan. Even if my civ was still named the same, the core of what made Carthage interesting and different is gone.

 

[Leucarum]

Regarding multiplayer - it's an interesting question. I strongly doubt many people who don't want to touch the game play multiplayer, because Civ7 does so much for multiplayer games. Including the promised (but, unfortunately not yet delivered) ability to finish the game in any age, negating negativity from civ switching

From personal experience, my multiplayer group did fall apart, with only me and one other player willing to move over to Civ7. Alongside Civ switching, compressing techs into eras was the big issue, as it hit the playstyle of "get a big tech lead then leverage it" which a lot of players in my group enjoyed.

that's a bit off topic here, civ switching IS cosmetic, the issue you have is age transition.

I'm curious the extent to which this is true. There is definitely an emotive element to disliking civ switching. "I don't feel attached to/identify with the civ I am switching into" and "I want to see the alt history of a civ standing the test of time when it didn't" are both reasons I don't like civ switching... In principle a cosmetic change where you kept the old civ with new rules would help.

And some elements of not enjoying Civs are related to exploration being half-baked, and modern being raw. However, on the whole I like the era system but don't like civ switching. So I don't think it's entirely "cosmetic."

Some of it is definitely mechanical. l often want to carry on playing with the mechanics of the civ I choose in the era I choose, albeit scaled so that I don't feel it's a loss of power. When playing as Aksum I might want to continue building Hawilt Island, switching out of Maya every city without their UQ feels like a waste, and Assyria is so much fun I'd love to keep their conquest train going. As another exampke, I don't like later civs having terrain dependencies, that makes it feel like the map is dictating your game, and closes off interesting transitions.

I've been able to play Civ7 in spite of Civ switching, so being able to retain the cosmetic appearance of a civ isn't something I'd hate, but what I really want is to be able to "transcend" and keep a civ's mechanics between eras, scaled so they work well. Ultimately I think there needs to be new stuff gained with a transcended civ since the mods which just let you play a civ cosmetically aren't hitting the spot... I've kept on saying I want to try getting into modding so now the support is more visible I might try picking my favourite civ and adding later versions for myself... But while a mod can point the way, I don't think one can replace an official fix.

 

[Crashdummy]

And I for one won't buy any future historical 4x "one static civ the whole game" game. The model was already ridiculous and stretched to its limits with VI, and it needs to just die already. It's a relic.

The idea that "anti" voices must be satisfied because they aren't buying the game but "pro" voices don't matter because they'd still buy it with or without the features they like is a flabbergasting pile of stinking bad faith (and really just a long way of saying "my preference shoudl be more important than yours".

There is no "remove civ switch and everyone is happy again because then the antis become happy and the pros will stay happy anyway" scenario. There's a zero sum game where some are happy and some are not, and you can only switch which side is happy or which side is not (or try to find a compromise that leave some on each side unhappy).

Of course everyone can be happy, you just make it OPTIONAL, and give the player the choice if they want to play with Age transitions and Civ switching or not

Thats why we need a Classic Mode, so we can play the game with the classic Civilization ruleset and you can play with the Humankind inspired ruleset. And then that can even give Firaxis a metric about which one is preferred

 

[Evie]

And then one option will be the default and get all the design resource and the other will be "optional" and be left to the side and barely given any support by the devs, and whichever side is the later won't be happy.

(Or the devs split their effort and some people on each side are unhappy because their side isn't getting as much attention as they want)

The idea that there is an easy solution here is lackdaisical. You cannot support two different games on the resources of a single game.

 

[Crashdummy]

And then one option will be the default and get all the design resource and the other will be "optional" and be left to the side and barely given any support by the devs, and whichever side is the later won't be happy.

(Or the devs split their effort and some people on each side are unhappy because their side isn't getting as much attention as they want)

The idea that there is an easy solution here is lackdaisical. You cannot support two different games on the resources of a single game.

I never said anything about being easy

And most of the Development is independent of these modes, of the new things introduced by Civ 7, things like navigable rivers, the new combat system, towns/cities, influence system, etc its all independent

You have some development overhead when creating new leaders and Civs, but given how divided the playerbase is on these subjects, i dont think you have a choice

Again, a AAA like Civilization cant survive 10+ years with the amount of active players it has

 

[McSpank01]

Civ Switching isn’t just cosmetic though. You lose access to most of your previous abilities every time you swap. When I go from Carthage to Spain/Abbasid/whatever I’m not just changing my name and banner, but also my entire game plan. Even if my civ was still named the same, the core of what made Carthage interesting and different is gone.

Civ Switching is about adapting your gameplan to the age, that is the point. I think going from Carthage to Spain is a good example of how you can take an expansionist naval power and translate it to a new age. In what way does your gameplan massively change? The Civ switch is about making decisions about how you need to potentially change how your civ evolves depending on circumstance. Maybe you have to become a bit more militaristic, so you go Norman or something.

You also don't really lose total access to your previous abilities, you retain many through traditions and UBs.

Of course all this could be improved, I would like to see more carry over between ages and each civ should feel more flavourful so that any carried over changes are actually noticeable.