Foulweather
Warlord
I've now put in more than 400 hours into Civ 7, mostly in Immortal. After my initial enthusiasm died away, I wanted to organize and write down my thoughts about the game, even if nobody reads this and much of what I say has probably been said before.
1. Civ Switching
I was excited about this feature. As the devs described their idea of a "history built in layers" and about how you can start as Rome, then play as the Normans, and then as France, it sounded novel and intriguing. I never played Humankind, and only heard negative reviews of its civ switching, but I trusted in the Civ team to get it right. I went in with an open mind, but at this point I feel fairly disappointed by how it's been done.
I just don't feel like my civ is built in layers. My game doesn't feel "Rome-Norman-French," and I see three main reasons why: the bonuses are too weak, there are too many of them, and the most powerful and memorable ones disappear.
The Roman traditions I carry forward into exploration give me +5% food, gold, and culture in specialized towns, and +5% production towards military units for every town. Every amount helps, but these are practically invisible. I usually don't even slot them in my exploration age government after I've unlocked better policies. Likewise, the Normans give me +2 culture for each tradition, which usually amounts to 4-8 culture, a drop in the bucket compared to what I'm making overall at that point. From Girru and Akhet in antiquity, to Farmland Assessment and Qilachas in modern, the game is full of traditions that aren't worth using and don't change the way I play.
Back to the Romans: they have some sort of bonus to culture, food, gold, happiness, influence, and production in their toolkit; all they're missing is science. The bonuses come from every direction and yet can't really be leveraged into changing the game. They're underpowered and overbalanced, and with bonuses to everything, it lacks focus. Surely, I'm cherry picking, but few abilities in my games have been decidedly memorable.
And lastly, when I become Norman, Twelve Tables is gone. The main ability that should make up the largest part of the civ's identity disappears. I wonder how this would feel modded and simplified. I'd love to see a mod that makes the civ abilities stronger and keeps those as the traditions you use in subsequent ages - so when I get to France, I can slot in a buffed Twelve Tables and a buffed Normannitas. I would get to keep playing with the same unique strategies I utilized in previous ages, but the interactions would grow between them as the ages build up. I wonder if keeping only these main abilities (the stars of the show) as traditions would satisfy the feeling of a civ being built in layers of previous kingdoms and cultures. I don't know.
I feel a lack of narrative cohesion in the switching of civs. I don't feel layers, it feels more like a soup: you throw in some Pet Kot and Quipu and La Reforma and come out with bonuses to science, gold, production, and culture all mixed together. And the soup tends to taste the same every game, because there's not much differentiation between the civs. My Rome-Norman-Prussia game didn't feel that different from my Carthage-Spain-France game.
I do miss being able to play one civ all the way through. I doubt there's a chance to play a Classic Mode in 7, but I now hope they return to it in 8. We know that empires rise and fall, but part of the power fantasy was in creating an empire that would "stand the test of time," to create something rich and eternal, and remain standing when everything else around you fell.
2. Ages
When the game released, I didn't understand just how much the new ages system would affect the feel of my games. Now it's become one of my main frustrations.
In the last third of an age, I feel an apathy regarding my city production, because how much does it matter what I build? There's a limit to the gold I can take into the next age (although I do appreciate that the limit recently went up). Focusing on science or culture can earn me attribute points by researching hard, but it's not very satisfying, and the trees reset at the next age. All my buildings will lose adjacencies in 20-30 turns and become obsolete drains on my growth. Wonders aren't usually worth the investment. Codices and relics completely disappear (as well as being disappointingly generic compared to Civ 6). And too much expansion (my favorite of the 4Xs) drags down my empire.
In Civ 6, I was invested in my empire even when I was winning, because every turn was fun. I happily built a market because I knew it would pump gold into my treasury for 200 more turns. In Civ 7, about a third of each age is meaningless to me. What's the point if I don't get to keep it? Maybe a bit harsh, but I often find myself building pointless walls in cities far from my borders simply because I had no desire to build anything else.
If the next DLC contains a fourth age, that doesn't interest me, and would only make my issues with ages and civ switching even worse.
3. Modern Age Problem
I'm certainly not a great player, but even I end my modern ages in 40-60 turns. My last modern age was over in 34 turns: I played as France, and yet I did not research a single French civic, I didn't build Eiffel or Notre Dame, I didn't build a Salon or a Jardin a la Francaise, or a single Garde Imperiale - because I didn't need to. I unlocked explorers, beelined hegemony, and built World's Fair.
I love to linger in antiquity. I enjoy the music, the art, the buildings, the tangibility of that ancient civilization brought to life. In comparison, I can barely even notice which civ I'm playing in the modern age. It's over too quickly, and I'm usually so uninterested in playing with my third civ that I really wouldn't want it to go on any longer anyway. I've built Rail Stations, Aerodromes, and Museums for victory conditions, but there's not much point to building a Grocer, a City Park, a Modern Bridge, or an Opera House. I have never built a single Tenement or Cannery in any of my games. And unless a civ has bonuses specifically towards a victory condition, it serves no point in modern (looking at you, Frontier Expansion).
It's disappointing to not enjoy lingering in France, or Siam, or Mexico, and to have everything over in 34 turns. One reason I play is for that taste of history and culture, and I'm not getting that for a full one-third of the civs they've released. In a way, I feel like I still haven't played France, or Siam, or Mexico, or any other modern civ.
4. City Growth
I dislike the straitjacket that city growth has become. Can't put a farm on hills. This tile has to be a quarry, this one a mine. Can't chop the forest. Can't settle on the cotton. Can't put a monastery there until there's an improvement there. Not going to grow for a while? Guess I'll build a random building on some tile so I can move a farm to get my monastery.
I did not play Civ 6 in an optimal way: I usually didn't chop. I kept my forests and lumber milled them. I planted forests and farmed my valleys and plateaus. I did so because it looked great (I thought mines were ugly, despite how useful they were). And that player flexibility is gone.
And I dislike the Civ 7 metropolitan sprawl. My cities merge with each other across my entire empire and become an endless sea of roofs, because even though old buildings are obsolete, they still provide science and culture, so it's often still rational to build on a rural tile instead of overbuilding a district. I think overbuilding is a good idea with potential in the future, but it hasn't been sufficient to combat the natural sprawl.
5. Wonders
I feel like they're all underpowered. It's probably not worth building more than a couple, mostly for adjacencies in your capital. I mostly build later wonders only when I have nothing else to do in my cities (not a good sign).
Also, there's no way to speed up production of a wonder. When I'm notified that Greece is also building the Colosseum, there's nothing for me to do but hope it works out. There's no governor to move in, no forests or resources to chop. Decisions, and the ability to change strategies, are gone; I can only keep building and hope.
Wonders should be expensive, powerful, and memorable. Building the Pyramids should be a really big deal (not just +1 prod and gold on rivers [not even per age!], which will take a long time simply to break even), and they should give me a sense of excitement, and right now it just doesn't feel that way to me. And when I see Firaxis say "When a wonder is a clear must-pick, it's time for a nerf" because that wonder is one of the few the AI left for me, I just don't understand.
6. Settling for a City
Tile yields are flatter and more balanced, and it takes away the fun of settling my cities. Now I send a settler out, not with a specific location in mind, but merely a loose direction, and when they get to a random point far enough away, I think "maybe here" and click.
In Civ 6, I could find a great holy site location surrounded by four mountains, or a campus spot next to two geothermals and a reef, and I'd trade anything not bolted down to buy a settler and race to grab that spot. I would forward settle the AI and rush its growth, knowing I'd be building a loyalty wall to protect my territory.
In Civ 7, I don't feel like any city location is too much different than any other. Even when I can find a spot with a good library-barracks district, I know those resources will soon move or disappear anyway. Settle in the desert, settle on the tundra, whatever. And I don't understand why we can't settle on resources, because it just further limits my flexibility. The thrill of racing for that +5 campus city is gone.
And forward settling is meaningless now. Put a city on my opponent's border, and they can just sneak a settler in and settle right next to my capital like it's nothing. I feel like they thought of ways to eliminate forward settling, without appreciating that forward settling was risky and loads of fun.
7. Scale
My empire feels small. Partially due to the small maps but also has something to do with the scale of the topography. The mountains feel appropriate to the scale of the cities, but not to the scale of my empire. In Civ 6, mountains formed ranges that stretched across my continent like the Andes or Alps, and changed the shape of my empire. Now, mountains look like individual cliffs and spires, but that scaling makes everything feel small. Figuring out how to include both empire-wide scales with the beautiful city-scale buildings is difficult, but I wonder if there's a way to integrate more zooming or multiple levels of scale.
8. UI
Um, yeah - I can't believe they intentionally made the UI look like this.
9. What I Like
For the most part, the game looks magnificent. The art of the game is amazing. I love the painterly civ screens, as well as the music, which mostly meets the high standards of the franchise. I'm even listening to the Songhai on YouTube as I write this.
I like the concept of war support and hope it can be fine-tuned in the future. The commander system works pretty well.
I look forward to the Power at the Center crisis because I know I'll usually be able to snag a city from the AI. The Rising Storm crisis is less fun but is still exciting, because it can be a real challenge to fight off the ever-increasing tides of barbs. However, both of the plague crises bore me; I still don't know what Physicians do, they don't seem to help at all, and the plague simply sweeps over my empire and disappears without me doing much of anything.
I love the narrative events. Even the ones that repeat frequently (+2 prod on the Colosseum please!) have grown on me. I would find the immersion even worse without those civ-specific narratives, thank God they included them.
Again, I like antiquity. The excitement of building up the shape of my empire never gets old. Unfortunately, I'll never have that excitement with my modern age civs.
10. Conclusion
I feel like I'm about to put the game down after my initial experimentation with all the civs (especially once Silla and Qajar come out). I probably won't buy any more DLC or expansions unless they get rave reviews and seem to address some of the problems that bug me the most. I have no interest in a Collapse Mode. I'll still check in with various streamers to see if there's anything new (but they're quickly fading from the scene as well).
I know games evolve, and 7 was never simply going to be a remaster of 6. However, this installment feels rushed, overbalanced, underpowered, overanalyzed, and the essential story of the game lacks cohesion. Many of the things that were removed from the game (in an understandable effort to fix what they saw as problems) were some of the things I most enjoyed about the franchise.
It's still a beautiful game.
1. Civ Switching
I was excited about this feature. As the devs described their idea of a "history built in layers" and about how you can start as Rome, then play as the Normans, and then as France, it sounded novel and intriguing. I never played Humankind, and only heard negative reviews of its civ switching, but I trusted in the Civ team to get it right. I went in with an open mind, but at this point I feel fairly disappointed by how it's been done.
I just don't feel like my civ is built in layers. My game doesn't feel "Rome-Norman-French," and I see three main reasons why: the bonuses are too weak, there are too many of them, and the most powerful and memorable ones disappear.
The Roman traditions I carry forward into exploration give me +5% food, gold, and culture in specialized towns, and +5% production towards military units for every town. Every amount helps, but these are practically invisible. I usually don't even slot them in my exploration age government after I've unlocked better policies. Likewise, the Normans give me +2 culture for each tradition, which usually amounts to 4-8 culture, a drop in the bucket compared to what I'm making overall at that point. From Girru and Akhet in antiquity, to Farmland Assessment and Qilachas in modern, the game is full of traditions that aren't worth using and don't change the way I play.
Back to the Romans: they have some sort of bonus to culture, food, gold, happiness, influence, and production in their toolkit; all they're missing is science. The bonuses come from every direction and yet can't really be leveraged into changing the game. They're underpowered and overbalanced, and with bonuses to everything, it lacks focus. Surely, I'm cherry picking, but few abilities in my games have been decidedly memorable.
And lastly, when I become Norman, Twelve Tables is gone. The main ability that should make up the largest part of the civ's identity disappears. I wonder how this would feel modded and simplified. I'd love to see a mod that makes the civ abilities stronger and keeps those as the traditions you use in subsequent ages - so when I get to France, I can slot in a buffed Twelve Tables and a buffed Normannitas. I would get to keep playing with the same unique strategies I utilized in previous ages, but the interactions would grow between them as the ages build up. I wonder if keeping only these main abilities (the stars of the show) as traditions would satisfy the feeling of a civ being built in layers of previous kingdoms and cultures. I don't know.
I feel a lack of narrative cohesion in the switching of civs. I don't feel layers, it feels more like a soup: you throw in some Pet Kot and Quipu and La Reforma and come out with bonuses to science, gold, production, and culture all mixed together. And the soup tends to taste the same every game, because there's not much differentiation between the civs. My Rome-Norman-Prussia game didn't feel that different from my Carthage-Spain-France game.
I do miss being able to play one civ all the way through. I doubt there's a chance to play a Classic Mode in 7, but I now hope they return to it in 8. We know that empires rise and fall, but part of the power fantasy was in creating an empire that would "stand the test of time," to create something rich and eternal, and remain standing when everything else around you fell.
2. Ages
When the game released, I didn't understand just how much the new ages system would affect the feel of my games. Now it's become one of my main frustrations.
In the last third of an age, I feel an apathy regarding my city production, because how much does it matter what I build? There's a limit to the gold I can take into the next age (although I do appreciate that the limit recently went up). Focusing on science or culture can earn me attribute points by researching hard, but it's not very satisfying, and the trees reset at the next age. All my buildings will lose adjacencies in 20-30 turns and become obsolete drains on my growth. Wonders aren't usually worth the investment. Codices and relics completely disappear (as well as being disappointingly generic compared to Civ 6). And too much expansion (my favorite of the 4Xs) drags down my empire.
In Civ 6, I was invested in my empire even when I was winning, because every turn was fun. I happily built a market because I knew it would pump gold into my treasury for 200 more turns. In Civ 7, about a third of each age is meaningless to me. What's the point if I don't get to keep it? Maybe a bit harsh, but I often find myself building pointless walls in cities far from my borders simply because I had no desire to build anything else.
If the next DLC contains a fourth age, that doesn't interest me, and would only make my issues with ages and civ switching even worse.
3. Modern Age Problem
I'm certainly not a great player, but even I end my modern ages in 40-60 turns. My last modern age was over in 34 turns: I played as France, and yet I did not research a single French civic, I didn't build Eiffel or Notre Dame, I didn't build a Salon or a Jardin a la Francaise, or a single Garde Imperiale - because I didn't need to. I unlocked explorers, beelined hegemony, and built World's Fair.
I love to linger in antiquity. I enjoy the music, the art, the buildings, the tangibility of that ancient civilization brought to life. In comparison, I can barely even notice which civ I'm playing in the modern age. It's over too quickly, and I'm usually so uninterested in playing with my third civ that I really wouldn't want it to go on any longer anyway. I've built Rail Stations, Aerodromes, and Museums for victory conditions, but there's not much point to building a Grocer, a City Park, a Modern Bridge, or an Opera House. I have never built a single Tenement or Cannery in any of my games. And unless a civ has bonuses specifically towards a victory condition, it serves no point in modern (looking at you, Frontier Expansion).
It's disappointing to not enjoy lingering in France, or Siam, or Mexico, and to have everything over in 34 turns. One reason I play is for that taste of history and culture, and I'm not getting that for a full one-third of the civs they've released. In a way, I feel like I still haven't played France, or Siam, or Mexico, or any other modern civ.
4. City Growth
I dislike the straitjacket that city growth has become. Can't put a farm on hills. This tile has to be a quarry, this one a mine. Can't chop the forest. Can't settle on the cotton. Can't put a monastery there until there's an improvement there. Not going to grow for a while? Guess I'll build a random building on some tile so I can move a farm to get my monastery.
I did not play Civ 6 in an optimal way: I usually didn't chop. I kept my forests and lumber milled them. I planted forests and farmed my valleys and plateaus. I did so because it looked great (I thought mines were ugly, despite how useful they were). And that player flexibility is gone.
And I dislike the Civ 7 metropolitan sprawl. My cities merge with each other across my entire empire and become an endless sea of roofs, because even though old buildings are obsolete, they still provide science and culture, so it's often still rational to build on a rural tile instead of overbuilding a district. I think overbuilding is a good idea with potential in the future, but it hasn't been sufficient to combat the natural sprawl.
5. Wonders
I feel like they're all underpowered. It's probably not worth building more than a couple, mostly for adjacencies in your capital. I mostly build later wonders only when I have nothing else to do in my cities (not a good sign).
Also, there's no way to speed up production of a wonder. When I'm notified that Greece is also building the Colosseum, there's nothing for me to do but hope it works out. There's no governor to move in, no forests or resources to chop. Decisions, and the ability to change strategies, are gone; I can only keep building and hope.
Wonders should be expensive, powerful, and memorable. Building the Pyramids should be a really big deal (not just +1 prod and gold on rivers [not even per age!], which will take a long time simply to break even), and they should give me a sense of excitement, and right now it just doesn't feel that way to me. And when I see Firaxis say "When a wonder is a clear must-pick, it's time for a nerf" because that wonder is one of the few the AI left for me, I just don't understand.
6. Settling for a City
Tile yields are flatter and more balanced, and it takes away the fun of settling my cities. Now I send a settler out, not with a specific location in mind, but merely a loose direction, and when they get to a random point far enough away, I think "maybe here" and click.
In Civ 6, I could find a great holy site location surrounded by four mountains, or a campus spot next to two geothermals and a reef, and I'd trade anything not bolted down to buy a settler and race to grab that spot. I would forward settle the AI and rush its growth, knowing I'd be building a loyalty wall to protect my territory.
In Civ 7, I don't feel like any city location is too much different than any other. Even when I can find a spot with a good library-barracks district, I know those resources will soon move or disappear anyway. Settle in the desert, settle on the tundra, whatever. And I don't understand why we can't settle on resources, because it just further limits my flexibility. The thrill of racing for that +5 campus city is gone.
And forward settling is meaningless now. Put a city on my opponent's border, and they can just sneak a settler in and settle right next to my capital like it's nothing. I feel like they thought of ways to eliminate forward settling, without appreciating that forward settling was risky and loads of fun.
7. Scale
My empire feels small. Partially due to the small maps but also has something to do with the scale of the topography. The mountains feel appropriate to the scale of the cities, but not to the scale of my empire. In Civ 6, mountains formed ranges that stretched across my continent like the Andes or Alps, and changed the shape of my empire. Now, mountains look like individual cliffs and spires, but that scaling makes everything feel small. Figuring out how to include both empire-wide scales with the beautiful city-scale buildings is difficult, but I wonder if there's a way to integrate more zooming or multiple levels of scale.
8. UI
Um, yeah - I can't believe they intentionally made the UI look like this.
9. What I Like
For the most part, the game looks magnificent. The art of the game is amazing. I love the painterly civ screens, as well as the music, which mostly meets the high standards of the franchise. I'm even listening to the Songhai on YouTube as I write this.
I like the concept of war support and hope it can be fine-tuned in the future. The commander system works pretty well.
I look forward to the Power at the Center crisis because I know I'll usually be able to snag a city from the AI. The Rising Storm crisis is less fun but is still exciting, because it can be a real challenge to fight off the ever-increasing tides of barbs. However, both of the plague crises bore me; I still don't know what Physicians do, they don't seem to help at all, and the plague simply sweeps over my empire and disappears without me doing much of anything.
I love the narrative events. Even the ones that repeat frequently (+2 prod on the Colosseum please!) have grown on me. I would find the immersion even worse without those civ-specific narratives, thank God they included them.
Again, I like antiquity. The excitement of building up the shape of my empire never gets old. Unfortunately, I'll never have that excitement with my modern age civs.
10. Conclusion
I feel like I'm about to put the game down after my initial experimentation with all the civs (especially once Silla and Qajar come out). I probably won't buy any more DLC or expansions unless they get rave reviews and seem to address some of the problems that bug me the most. I have no interest in a Collapse Mode. I'll still check in with various streamers to see if there's anything new (but they're quickly fading from the scene as well).
I know games evolve, and 7 was never simply going to be a remaster of 6. However, this installment feels rushed, overbalanced, underpowered, overanalyzed, and the essential story of the game lacks cohesion. Many of the things that were removed from the game (in an understandable effort to fix what they saw as problems) were some of the things I most enjoyed about the franchise.
It's still a beautiful game.
