Will there actually be a Civ 7?

[Das Capitolin]

This has been an enjoyable read. It has been forever ago since I played Civ 4, and several years since Civ 5. I am still very much focused on Civ 6, as opposed to calling it finished and waiting out Civ 7 (which will eventually come, because money).
My own personal opinion is that Civ 5 and Civ 6 are similar in 4X theme, but differ dramatically in mechanics. I won't mention tall vs wide possibilities, because it's complex comparison. This opinion gets muddy if you take expansion packs into account, which add loyalty as a means to cope with forward settling.
All in all, Civ 5 was great and I enjoyed it most, but Civ 6 has modernized the appearance (which is better, but not great) while introducing some areas of improvement.
On a final note, I did not ever play with mods on Civ 5, but did have all DLC. I liked that version as much as vanilla Civ 6, but less so with R&F and GS. YMMV.

 

[LastSword]

In Civ 6, you can win a game perfectly fine on 5-7 cities, each with a governor, the right policies, et cetera. Meanwhile, it was virtually impossible to expand in Civ 5 without crippling your happiness and cultural progression - and to a lesser degree your scientific progression.

I am quite sure you can also win with one city in civ 6. I am also quite sure victory in civ5 was not automatically locked after acquiring Xth city.
Having one less social policy/ideology tenet was not truely so gamebreaking.
Anyway the direction of arguments leans heavily towards the balance discussion. I don't want to follow that. Existence of optimal strategies is certain and does not mean other do not exist.
To not leave you without response I am gonna link T-hawk's blog, quite detailed explanation, wide variety of gameplay and documented history of civ 5 through expansions:
http://www.dos486.com/civ5/bnw16/ (at the bottom there is a table of contents)

I'll do you one better: I've attempted tall games in both Civ 5 and Civ 6, and I enjoyed them more in Civ 6. Let alone the difference between wide games.

Oh, I completely agree tall games are more interesting in civ 6. In general auto-turn processing have a better feel due to amount of checkboxes (for example eurekas).
Wide games on the other hand... Though again, opinions, just because you don't enjoy something it does not mean it is fundamentally broken.

If this makes sense, in Civ 6 I feel like there are incentives to not expand, while in Civ 5 there are punishments against expanding. And I'd much rather be led by incentives than punishments.

You know in some race cars games, there is a system that every continuous player is moving a bit faster (the last one is the fastest). The point is that speed is relative. So do feelings. And so do rewards/penalties.
At one point Settler/Builder/Districts costs PENALTIES may hit enough for player to feel that expanding is not worthy. For the conquest, I have no idea, I heard rumours of grievances, war weariness, emergencies, diplo favour?
Older players may also suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome penalty.

All that is of course ignoring that the entire concept of tall versus wide did not exist until Firaxis included it in their Civ 5 design philosophy.
As for the unhappiness... the system is not complicated. That doesn't mean it isn't the single most annoying game mechanic I've ever encountered. It punishes you for building a new city, it punishes you for conquering a city, it punishes you for growing your cities, it punishes you for any action that's supposed to grow your empire, and it does so by cripping your empire. In Civ 6 (which technically has roughly the same calculations for happiness!), if you don't meet happiness demands, individual cities drop into negative happiness and receive sizable penalties to their production and growth. In Civ 5, if your empire as a whole lacks even one point of happiness, you get... what was it again? -75% food in all cities, or something like that? And if I remember correctly, that wasn't all, but it's been six years since I played the game.

-75% Food penalty sounds very scary. Of course like most Food modifiers it is applied to surplus food (after the cost of citizens was applied) and automatic management instantly moves citizens to optimize other yields. It is also extremely logical, because extra Citizens would generate more unhappiness. It applies for both civ5 unhappiness, civ6 housing and civ6 unhappiness.

As you noticed civ6 also have very similar penalties for new city, conquering a city, growing your cities, any action that's supposed to grow your empire, however the penalty is more local due to different balance and numbers.
You may believe it or not, but Unhappiness penalties were increased in BNW (last expansion of civ5) for two reasons: wide approach was casually better in GK (previous expansion) and BNW was supposed to make late game more interesting (which required balancing out early conquest).
Though, this is again balance stuff I don't care about and history, therefore I am gonna redirect you to T-hawk's blog if you are interested in those aspects.

At this point I have the assumption that the fundamental flaw for an AAA title was this ANGRY RED unhappy face and COLOR_NEGATIVE_TEXT that was widely considered as a bad move and made a lot of people angry. Thankfully Firaxis grew up as a corporation to better manage players' moods with much more toned colours and tooltips.

And as for the snowballing, I consider that a rather fundamental mechanic of 4X games. Sure, there should be bounds, but the entire deal with expanding and exploiting is that you use your resources to get more resources, which allow you to get more resources, and so on.

The fundamental issue of 4X. They tried to keep a challenge in further stages of game which is important.
Imagine the alternative where you early conquer a neighbour: you are ahead in territory, production (not only per turn), population, culture, science. Technically it would mean that to keep a challenge other players would also have to conquer their surroundings.
What if other players would not conquer anyone though (not so uncommon for an AI)? We would probably end up in combat penalty vs AI on higher difficulties to keep at least a bit of challenge.

There's no reason to build a road other than to connect cities. So why not simply make roads free and do not add a bonus for connecting cities, just like it was in previous games? The fact that connecting cities gets you money implies you're supposed to make money from connecting cities.

Making roads free would end up the same as every previous iteration: road on every tile.
They introduced something new which eventually evolved into current traders.
The city connections were very complicated (/costly) to calculate and I like to believe that we have traders, because they decided to get rid off that. Even though adapting to builders seem a more likely cause.

Not sure if I'm a fan of it, faith tapers off at some point by it's nature, while you'd expect a tree to go to the end. Best to keep religious stuff in the civic tree imo.

Futuristic era could actually be easy.
Ideologies, secularism, cult of personality, there is some stuff to fill industrial/modern. It would probably overlap with civics, but currently civics also feel a bit overlapping with technologies.
Just a possibility I liked to think about.

Envoys are their own resource, meaning they don't compete with other things you can spend on, nor do you have the opportunity to gear your entire empire towards city states in order to absolutely dominate that aspect of the game. Which, in fact, also allowed you to win a ""diplomatic"" (economic) victory.
Decay of influence is just the city state begging for more money, I don't see what it adds to the game.

Both cases are about an extra layer of decision making.
Imagine how envoy dropping by 1 (each game era) or (after X turns since the last envoy was added) could affect the possibilites.
Though I am not saying any of those systems are better, they are just different.

 

[EvaDK]

How about introducing dynamic victory conditions for Civ7?

As an example; the player chooses from a selection of options at the beginning of the first, second and third era. The three selections then become your secret combined winning objective (all the AI civs does the same). You could also add/increase the dimension of espionage to include the ability to detect the winning objectives of other civs, then pursue a strategy of denying them reaching some of those objectives and get boosts for your own civ and spy promotions, if succesful.

The selections could be anything from purely science, religious, cultural, diplomatic goals combined with conquest of other civs, conquest of continents, control of oceans, control of city states, industrial power and so one. Whatever journey you want to play and challenge yourself with.

 

[Leyrann]

As you noticed civ6 also have very similar penalties for new city, conquering a city, growing your cities, any action that's supposed to grow your empire, however the penalty is more local due to different balance and numbers.

That's simply not true. The penalty for having -1 empire-wide happiness in Civ 5 is more severe than that for having -1 happiness per city in Civ 6.

Making roads free would end up the same as every previous iteration: road on every tile.

I have not played Civ 1 and Civ 3, but in Civ 2 it was only worth doing because roads increased trade yield, and in Civ 4 you didn't put a road on every tile; you built roads to connect cities and to connect resources, which all required a road connection in that game. Simply remove the resource road connection thing from that, and it functions perfectly fine.

 

[canadamufc]

As far as I'm concerned, can't fix a broken premise. Civ V's issues are usually in fundamental game mechanics, while the execution of the game is pretty good. Civ VI's issues, on the other hand, are in the execution, while the fundamental game mechanics are very good.

Want to fix global happiness being extremely frustrating? Good luck, because my gut says the 'needs to be more restrictive' and 'frustrating to play with' issues have overlap, meaning no good spot exists where it's both restrictive towards overly wide play, yet not frustrating to play with.

Want to fix wide being too strong compared to tall? Simple! Give more incentives for going tall. More established governor bonuses, steeper Settler production cost ramp, maybe reduce base housing in a city while increasing housing opportunities for developed cities? If you go a little deeper, perhaps you can increase the capital's loyalty pressure, but reduce that of other cities, making far away cities less loyal? Et cetera.

I don't disagree. Civ VI handles the wide/tall dynamic much better because rather than punishing the worse strategy, it encourages the better one. In Civ VI you can try to play tall, people have won games with 5-6 cities, yet in V it is extremely difficult, bordering impossible to do anything while having more than 6-7 cities. That's just bad game design.

My point lays in that V has more modding capabilities, as @Gedemon said. Without mods I'd take VI in a heartbeat, with mods however, you can make a very strong argument for V being the better game.

 

[Gorbles]

I think the biggest disgrace of Civ VI is that they made modding 10x harder to do.

I just want to pick at this a bit.

This is natural. It's not just seen here either - I'm seeing it play out with Age of Empires IV, where the modding tools are arguably the best I've seen from the developer (Relic), but people still just want to be able to pick up Notepad and rewrite half the game logic. Games don't work like that anymore. We ask for more, we get more, and it takes more to make. More code, more complex rendering, more performance shortcuts, more severe optimisation of the code, more hard disk space (more loading times), and so on.

And it's a turn-off in of itself. I get it. Nobody likes a steep learning curve. I'm a software developer and there are modding tools for modern games that literally still have a learning curve for me (admittedly, not a huge one, but enough of one for me to realise the impact this has on hobbyists). But what's the alternative? Budget is infamously enough of a bottleneck for games developers as it is (regardless of the profits of the owning company and shareholders).

What people are generally miffed at is the lack of DLL source code being released. But that's also a problem that goes beyond simple development. It's a legal issue. And ultimately isn't up to Firaxis, but 2K (note: assumption, but this tracks with my general knowledge of the industry). And personally I can understand being miffed, but the problem I find is that then that saps interest in trying out the tools at all. It becomes this murky misrepresentation of "modding is bad in Civ VI". It isn't. People just see more limitations and don't even bother. This is in no way a slight to the people who obviously have, I'm just describing a trend. And it's not like releasing the DLL source wouldn't in of itself be releasing something that is very complicated that only a few people will be able to properly-leverage.

I'd argue that while it's worse in the short (to medium) term to not release the source, it's better in the long run. It makes working tools with an achievable learning curve more critical to a game's uptake and continued existence. Assuming the modding scene is valued in the first place, and I can tell you that despite the understandable want for more, any developer that gives tools / SDKs / etc these days desperately cares. Because it's easier than ever not to (monetisation, loot boxes, other often poorly-implemented systems designed to hook your attention, etc). To get time to work on providing modding tools instead of implementing some quick and dirty monetisation (which would often be preferred in terms of profit) is a cost / effort argument that means people do, really, care.

 

[Gedemon]

I've said it many time, and it's worth saying it again, but I'm pretty sure they've spend more time in developing the mods framework for civ6 than they did for any previous version of the game.

It's the results that's kind of disappointing. And I'm still wondering why there was no active modders in francky during the initial development, would have helped the community a lot to have a few people that can interact with Firaxis to know at least what's possible to do or not (and how).

Well, that could been explained by modders getting involved by other things IRL during development and no time for Firaxis to look for replacements... Hope this time they've some active in the team for civ7.

And yes, I think it's also worth repeating that they care because I've seen a lot of people saying (here or on discord maybe) that they didn't release the source DLL or didn't listen to the modding community because they didn't care. IMO that's false, we all now here that they do listen to the community, and so the reason is somewhere else. Still thinking they planned to release the source at start but didn't manage to remove dependencies or get the authorization from 2K. Else I suppose they would have at least exposed as much in civ6 Lua as they did in civ5 Lua to compensate, and/or told us from the start.

There is just one thing I disagree on.

And it's not like releasing the DLL source wouldn't in of itself be releasing something that is very complicated that only a few people will be able to properly-leverage.

Seen it used a lot, but I don't get that point, it's also true for anything related to graphics (who can make 3D leaders for civ6 ? who can add new 3D units/buildings models for civ6 ? less people that there were DLL modders for civ5 so should that ability be removed from civ7 ?)

And DLL modding can benefit to all the community, not just people able to understand it, just think documentation and community patches (and it's not like anyone start with innate knowledge about DB relations, XML, SQL, Lua, 3D software, ..., as everything else it can be learnt, and if I did anyone can)

 

[Gorbles]

And yes, I think it's also worth repeating that they care because I've seen a lot of people saying (here or on discord maybe) that they didn't release the source DLL or didn't listen to the modding community because they didn't care. IMO that's false, we all now here that they do listen to the community, and so the reason is somewhere else. Still thinking they planned to release the source at start but didn't manage to remove dependencies or get the authorization from 2K. Else I suppose they would have at least exposed as much in civ6 Lua as they did in civ5 Lua to compensate, and/or told us from the start.

Exposing things takes time, and time is a resource. Eventually it caps out. It's rough, because of course it's a limitation on what modders can do, but regardless of any DLL plans, considering the general assumptions (that are normally true) about games development, there's always going to be a hard limit on what can be exposed for modding. And that resource is going to be lower than basically anything else spent on any other system in the game, because those systems are critical to playing it, which is the primary goal.

Modding helps playing and helps retention, but that makes it secondary. I don't think I can think of an AAA or even AA game that puts modding front and centre, mainly because the game would have to be a one-and-done kind of release. Not saying that's a bad thing, mind you. It's just probably not best for the economics of it all.

Seen it used a lot, but I don't get that point, it's also true for anything related to graphics (who can make 3D leaders for civ6 ? who can add new 3D units/buildings models for civ6 ? less people that there were DLL modders for civ5 so should that ability be removed from civ7 ?)

And DLL modding can benefit to all the community, not just people able to understand it, just think documentation and community patches (and it's not like anyone start with innate knowledge about DB relations, XML, SQL, Lua, 3D software, ..., as everything else it can be learnt, and if I did anyone can)

Yeah, sorry, I didn't word myself well. It was in response to the poster who claimed they made modding 10x harder. The DLL source wouldn't be easy, and yet it would still be a benefit. Something being difficult shouldn't be a criticism, basically. It's unfortunate as it creates a barrier to entry, but it's mainly just the advance of tech in games.

 

[Gedemon]

Yeah, sorry, I didn't word myself well. It was in response to the poster who claimed they made modding 10x harder. The DLL source wouldn't be easy, and yet it would still be a benefit. Something being difficult shouldn't be a criticism, basically. It's unfortunate as it creates a barrier to entry, but it's mainly just the advance of tech in games.

ha, yes my bad, missed the context there.

 

[Solver]

I'm still wondering why there was no active modders in francky during the initial development

That was not the case.

 

[Gedemon]

That was not the case.

thanks, my bad again then, that leave me with other questions when I compare civ5 and civ6 releases, but none worth asking at this point.

 

[FinalDoomsday]

Diplomacy in strategy has been on my mind particularly in light of Soren Johnsons recent admission that adding the bargaining table to Civ 3 was a 'big mistake' https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/soren-johnson-says-civ-3s-bargaining-table-was-a-big-mistake/

I agree I dont think I've ever relished going to the bargaining table with the AI. Diplomacy has gone on largely unchanged in Civ since 5 I think for 7 its about time to really overhaul it. Given how much attention civ places on its leaders who undoubtedly take large amounts of time, skill and money to create (too much personally for what they add to the game) I want to see the interactions with them be more meaningful.

 

[vorlon_mi]

Since Civ3, the diplomacy screen has served two -- connected, but different -- purposes. It was both a marketplace -- where resources, gold, and techs could be bought/traded/sold -- and a means to change relationships between factions -- declare war/peace, open/close borders, declare alliances, friendships, or denouncements.

IMHO, the game benefits from having both a marketplace and international relations. The Rising Tide expansion for BE took the screen in an interesting direction, by removing the marketplace aspect and reimagining nearly all the relations. It was no longer possible to bribe someone to declare war or open their borders. The BERT experiment was not entirely successful, but it points the way to how those two functions could be revised.

I do look forward to going to the diplomacy screen when I have something to sell or some other resource I need to buy. I would like options to tell other players my intentions, bearing in mind the in-game consequences if I break my word. I respectfully disagree with Soren's assessment that the marketplace part was a mistake. Limiting the diplomacy screen to only treaty items would be too limiting.

 

[Haig]

With Civ celebrating Asia and Pacific island history for this month, a new gave announcement is not happening this May.

I hope June surprises us with Civ 7 news.

 

[MrRadar]

The result shows, that by far Civ 6 was considered to be the worst civ game of all times,

Coming back to this "worst" game of the series thing, I don't know if I would call Civ VI the worst, because it does have some very compelling elements, however certain other elements are truly the worst ever, such as:

1. User Interface is the most atrocious in the series. Never before that many mouse clicks accomplished so little. Civs 1-3 I didn't feel any need for UI improvements. In Civ IV-V I felt one UI mod improved things quite a bit. In Civ VI I need nearly 10 UI mods just not to go insane from frustration while playing. Silly pathing, missing or misleading information and so on. UI things never were that bad.

2. AI was made as shallow as possible and was made worse by expansions. While in vanilla it still could play the game a bit, nobody bothered to adapt it much for further expansions, so now AI is mostly clueless. There are so many unique civs and leaders, but AI plays them all the same way. Which destroys the game experience. I play Civ mostly for stories developing before my eyes. Civ 1-4 gameplay in this respect was exiting. Civs rose and fell to civs who rose faster, power blocks came and went, there were some really interesting experiences. In Civ V this aspect became much less interesting, dynamism and civ wipeouts were reduced and there was much more stagnation. In Civ VI all this is gone. No more exciting story. Blobs develop gradually on the map, some city changes hands due to loyalty and that's it. Clueless AI does not know how to go for any kind of victory. No meaningful diplomacy, no actions from the AI remotely recognizable as any sort of a plan.

3. Worst support post-release. Civ VI is the most bug infested game in the whole series, and those bugs taking months and even years to fix. And when it was finally patched up to something bearable, NFP came and wrecked it all again and was just left like this.
And it is generally so frustrating when the game was made so good looking, but the inner workings of it were given so little love in comparison.

And because of the above I am very cold about the eventual Civ VII. I just don't believe that under current trends of continuous pressure to keep releasing droplets of new content every so often a good and stable Civ game can be made. If NFP is any sign of what Civ VII will look like, well, it would probably be better if it wouldn't come at all.

 

[Civinator]

I set great store by never posting, that Civ VI is the worst of the complete civ series. This was the result of a dubious poll.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

The Rising Tide expansion for BE took the screen in an interesting direction, by removing the marketplace aspect and reimagining nearly all the relations. It was no longer possible to bribe someone to declare war or open their borders. The BERT experiment was not entirely successful, but it points the way to how those two functions could be revised.

I did like the respect/fear mechanic in the BERT diplomacy. It could be a little wonky sometimes but I liked the concept that you could get what you want from another faction in two ways, either by building up the respect meter by being friendly or by building up the fear meter by being stronger militarily.

 

[steveg700]

Man, how I'd like civ's to have simple, broad abilities. Keep finding myself in games with opponents that I can't keep track of. Dial back on the splattering and sprinkling of bennies.

 

[Haig]

Man, how I'd like civ's to have simple, broad abilities. Keep finding myself in games with opponents that I can't keep track of. Dial back on the splattering and sprinkling of bennies.

Well Ed Beach himself said on an article this year that the Civ VI unique abilities became too long.

I am sure that VII will have more compact UAs.

 

[shaglio]

Man, how I'd like civ's to have simple, broad abilities. Keep finding myself in games with opponents that I can't keep track of. Dial back on the splattering and sprinkling of bennies.

Well Ed Beach himself said on an article this year that the Civ VI unique abilities became too long.

I am sure that VII will have more compact UAs.

What really didn't help, along with the length of the UAs, was that every Civ has both a Civ UA and a Leader UA, doubling the amount of abilities that you need to remember. I know why they decided to go that route, but if you're going to double the required info, you can't also make that info lengthier as well. Clear, concise UAs would go a long way to making CIV 7 more palatable to players like me that A) don't play day-long sessions, but rather 1-2 hour sessions each night after the wife and kid are in bed, and B) don't have the greatest of memories to be able to retain all the necessary information.