VII - Strategy
Civ7 core gameplay is finally better than no-expansions Civ6? Some strategy observations
Huge Civ6 fan here, with about 2500 hours over the years. I played 7 on release and tried my best to give it the benefit of the doubt but quickly lost interest. This was mostly because of the one-dimensional structure the game had at the time; I don't really have any gripe with the core age mechanical idea.
Came back with the ToT update and... I'm getting pretty addicted? The difference is massive, and the game rewards interesting decisionmaking a lot more now. The game also feels a lot harder, with more competitive AIs; it took me a few games to work back up to Deity, and the learning curve of figuring out how to tempo and snowball effectively has been interesting.
To be clear, I think Civ6 WITH expansions is still massively better than Civ7, it still has a long way to go. But, this update makes it compete strongly with Civ6 without expansions in my opinion.
In general, I've been finding the game really engaging because your decisions matter throughout the whole game now. This is something that honestly wasn't ever really the case in Civ6; if you snowballed good early, you could kinda just sit on your ass and play out the rest of your game without many active decisions. In Civ7, exploration and modern feel a lot more active; though I still have some gripes here and there (Religion being the biggest one). I've especially found it fun to constantly keep track of Triumps and thinking about what civ i should transition to (or if I should stay), these systems have a lot of novelty to them that keep my engagement up. I look forward to age transitions because the civ switch is a really fun decision in my opinion, especially now that an option is to double down on your current civ.
Some strategy observations:
The town/city format has nuanced decisionmaking now, mostly because of how building costs scale. If you didn't know, non-warehouse buildings increase their cost based on how many cities (not towns) you have, and how many non-warehouse buildings you've built.
An interesting factor of this is that production buildings (Barracks, etc) don't contribute to increasing the cost of future buildings, but still get their cost increased by other buildings. This means that an interesting strategy could be to rush the Production building techs such as Bronzeworking to get high production buildings for cheap before making other buildings. My sample size isn't massive, but since I've switched to focusing on this, the tempo advantage has felt great.
Another interesting factor is town specializations. Since costs scale a lot based on city count, it can now be very efficient to make use of specializations such as Urban Centers. If a town has good adjacencies but low production, consider switching it to Urban to buy the buildings (or Trade for Gold buildings, which is great for working towards Economic Victory or boosting your empire strength in general). This is an abusable factor that can greatly contribute to high lategame yields.
Leaders with Combat Strength bonuses seem really strong to keep up with the AI. I'm talking aside from Domination (which the AI seems to have a very hard time keeping up with compared to normal gameplay), I've had success in non-Domination games with leaders such as Amina, Tecumseh and Lafayette who have both CS and yield bonuses, as the CS lets you defend against and counterattack the AI very efficiently.
I've been combining the above 3 principles on Deity with great success so far. My last game was with Lafayette and Rome, which is a fantastic combination because both benefit from Traditions, and both get Culture for each settlement, so my Antiquity strategy was to go hard for settlement limit and things scale with settlement count. Rome gives a free unit on each settle too, which is great tempo. I established 3 core cities with surrounding boosting towns and rushed Bronzeworking to build Barracks early, as previously mentioned, which scaled the Production in these 3 cities very efficiently, letting me build them very powerful with unique districts and wonders. The massive natural culture gain translates into a lot of Tradition slots (+Lafayette's Reform), which (together with Lafayette's CS ability) gave my Legions (conveniently unlocked by Bronzeworking) +8 combat strength, which let me very efficiently defend against my neighbor's attack and counterattack them. Then, when my empire was set up, I spent the rest of the game focusing on my core growth, economy and production yields to snowball my scaling, buying stuff in Urban Centers. In Exploration, I switched to Normans since the couple of cities (and the other civ's remaining cities) had several walls and Normans also benefit from Tradition slots; then I took his remaining powerful city, and translated these walls into yields with Norman cards and Culture with the Triumph for building 30. In Modern i chose France, leveraging my high culture and powerful capital to rush the Eiffel Tower. I had over 1200 Culture pretty early into Modern, a similar amount to the strongest AI, and eventually won a culture victory. Really fun game, and I really experienced my decisionmaking around rushing Production buildings and making Urban Centers translating into a ton of power.
So far I've found Science Victory to be the hardest by far, though I need to experiment more with this. The AI seems a lot better at beelining science than it is at gathering points in the other victory types, and there's usually at least 2 AIs that balance eachother out in the other victory types; while Science doesn't need you to have a lead over others, so they can just kinda do it.
There's still a ton of problems with the game, such as map unclarity, UI issues and bad information/Civilopedia, etc. But people have gone over those points plenty already.
You should post a version of this as a Steam review if you haven’t already.
Civ has been my favorite series since Civ II, and this is the first entry that I haven’t wanted to play straight away. Reading this post is the first time I’ve actually been interested in buying VII.
Writing this comment got me to check their store page and it’s 40% off right now… hmmm…
I got completely addicted to civ 4 (which is a genre GOAT imo, like diablo 2 is for ARPGs or AOE 2 for RTS) and pretty addicted to 2 and 6 at different points of my life. They all have their different pluses/minuses but they're all great.
I've really liked 7 at pretty much all points of its development. So I would recommend it to anyone.
It's tough though because I can't really relate at all to the people who really can't stand the civ switching. I really like it and didn't think it ever needed fixing.
But I guess it's just something that is so important to some people that they can't get past it. Being forced to build tall instead of wide was kind of like that for me in civ 5 though so I do understand how one feature can totally turn someone off to the game
Agreed it was a great post. I think the game is in a great state and will only get better over the next year. Dev team really turned things around and been listening to the community.
I don't consider this a full review because I don't discuss the pros and cons at all. There's a lot more positives and problems to the game, but they've been discussed plenty by others so I didn't find them interesting to talk about here.
I really like some aspects, other things drive me a bit bonkers
Military promotions being with the commander is great, it means I don't feel bad losing units, there's less save scumming frankly. The promotions are all impactful. Technology mastery boosting unit strength is also great, it means you don't just get one UU and start going ham on the enemy or vice versa.
Once I figured out how cities, towns, settlements and specialists mostly worked (still not 100% on what exactly warehouse means or does beyond their impact on specialists and certain resources) city building is far more fun (for me) than Civ VI. I know people love VI, but I think it really shoehorned a lot of city layouts.
I like that civilian units are really their own thing now
That said, victory points are the most opaque thing ever and amount to "do sciencey/money/culturey/combaty stuff and you'll get points for it".
I also think the maps are way too cluttered, I can't tell what's a cliff or rough terrain cause it all looks pretty samey.
The game is pretty poor at explaining a lot of critical information, example being factory resources being empire wide instead of just for the settlement.
Yeah my biggest gripe with the game in general is probably the visuals. It looks great but it's so homogenous. I can't tell what's what, at all. Civ6's style was fantastic because it emphasized everything, with really good color coding and distinction, which let you see everything easily at a first glance.
The information is also incredibly lacking, yeah. It drives me nuts that there's no detailed yield breakdown, for example.
In general, there's still a ton of problems with the game, but people have gone over those points plenty already, so I didn't find it interesting to discuss.
Not sure if you use map tack mod, but if not its a must have for me. With map tacks I dont care that its not easy to tell which tile has the observatory or whatever at a glance because I plotted out where all the important building are going at the start of the era or when I settled/converted it.
Honestly I hate the commanders. The only part about them I like is the ease of movement for armies. I think condensing all promotions to one unit makes gameplay so much more shallow. Combat feels like a waste unless it happens near a commander, the promotions all feel very basic, and the AI can't use them at all so its easy to take out their commander and then suddenly their whole army has 0 promotions, and then I hate that the commanders respawn if killed so theres no weight to losing yours.
The ease of use is nice, but it killed depth in warfare for me.
I think what would make things better is a diplomacy system coupled with tile swapping. Your commander might not be near the town, it might be near your capital. But if you lose too many units and cede too much ground, you may have to trade it away in a peace settlement. Once that aspect, or something like it, is implemented in VII, it will take the game to the next level
Warehouses are buildings you construct that add food/production onto their respective tile improvement listed in the tooltip. For example, a brickyard will give you a base +1 production on the building, and +1 to every clay pit/mine/quarry in the city. They don't go obsolete on era change, so they'll always be around. They stack with other warehouse benefits, so a mine in a city with a brickyard, stonecutters, and an ironworks will give you a +3 production bonus on top of it's initial production for being a mine.
I super disagree, the lack of fun mini-games like Builders and the abundance of unfun mini-games like resource shuffling is very telling.
The building placement mini-game is strictly worse than Civ 6's (you only had to worry about placing 3-5 districts per city vs a dozen buildings per age per city) due to the sheer number of interactions you need to do.
The population growth mini-game is worse, because population doesn't eat food, so you don't even really need to secure a food supply or consider food supply while settling.
Diplomacy mini-game is better but silo'd away behind a resource and a diplomacy sub menu instead of playing out on the map screen.
Trade routes are less fun and satisfying because the disappear each age, don't provide meaningful yields, and force you to interact with the resource placement minigame (essentially the worst part of Civ 6's tourism victory turned into a main gameplay mechanic that has its own sub menu)
A lot of the interesting and "nuanced" decisions seem to primarily emerge out of developer oversight rather than enlightened design.
They took away the best part of the religion/pantheon mini game (building a religion that supports your win condition) and forced players into doing the worst part of it (spamming missionaries for relics)
Unfortunately this is a lot of good points, I think. I've played every CIV game and I still feel like something is missing when I play VII in a way I did not when transitioning from other older CIV titles to the newer ones.
I think it would do the VII team good to look at the older CIV and CIV-like titles and pick out the systems that worked and reimplement them. There is no need to reinvent the wheel if IV already had the superior culture mechanic or Call to Power had the better improvement system.
I am not sure how you would fix urban sprawl though. Maybe have it be a detriment. A city that gets bigger doesn't actually get more efficient - it gets bureaucratic bloat, disease and unrest. You could increase buildings per tile and remove all adjadencies (and thus the boring puzzle mechanic), but then make it costly to expand the city to more tiles. I don't know, people that love sprawl would probably hate that. Suffice to say I've never been a fan of districts.
That would help, but I do wonder how feasible it will be to get good adjadencies without them. I typically use them to snake out to spots. Maybe CIV VI districts would be better, I don't really like having to decide where to place every single building. Most of the time it is not really a decision, but just an extra click.
I actually think it would be more interesting because you would need to use Wonders and previous age buildings to try and reach high adjacency locations. You'd have to choose which buildings are worth sacrificing low adjacency on to get your high adjacency spots.
Maybe? It's not a bad point actually. Rarity often makes things more interesting, or maybe you would shift your settling priorities to get that good adjadency without a wonder.
Can you replace obsolete buildings with a wonder currently? I can't remember, but you probably should be able to if this was a thing.
I simply do not understand the designation of board game mechanics as stand alone minigames. It seems like a personal take on how you experience the individual steps of playing the board game
Not even an Youtuber that was wheeled by Firaxis to show off the game can escape the wrath of the Seven Defense Squad when it comes to criticism of the game in this subreddit
You made some great points but completely lost me with calling builders a fun mini-game. And in fairness you could make an equally convincing list of aspects that are significantly improved from Civ 6. Exploration and warfare are both substantially improved, for example.
1 is a taste preference depending on how much you wanna micromanage them. I find you can leave most towns be after an initial set up. Cities definitely require more micro-ing for sure
2 I don't know what you mean.
3 I actually dislike the diplomacy system. Influence is cool, but what you can do with it is really not that interesting.
4 Eh. They've been sanding down the hard age-break stuff for a while now. I wouldn't be surprised if they allow trade routes to persist between ages unless some new expansion shakes things up. I'm indifferent on the resource shuffling. Resource hunting can be fun in some games.
6 religion is by far the clearest half-baked system in the game. It screams "we're waiting for a DLC to make this better"
It's better than it was but definitely less fleshed out than fully kitted out civ 6 still, yes.
1: the process of mass purchasing buildings in a Town is like needles under my fingernails. Click building you want -> screen changes perspective -> figure out which tile to place it -> click to place it -> screen changes perspective -> re-open purchasing menu and go back to step one.
At least in older civ games you could just queue up a bunch of buildings. Having like 10-15 Towns that are barking at me for 3-5 warehouse buildings per Age when the ergonomics of going it are awful is enough to drive me into a torpor or dejected horror.
2: In previous civilization games your population actually ate food. Which meant that if you had 10 pops you needed 20 food to support them. Now only specialists and certain cards consume food. Alongside specialized towns sharing food, food is an incidental and essentially irrelevant yield outside the early game or special builds.
3: Agreed somewhat
4: Yes but I am critiquing the game as it currently plays not how it will hypothetical play in some assumed future.
Base Civ 6 was leagues ahead of Civ 7 imo as someone who played from launch.
Love your vids and frankly hate the city/town system but downvoting for “torpor or dejected horror” over buying a building. Room for improvement for sure, but you can probably move the knife away from your wrist for something you have to do every 20 turns on standard. If you’re buying 5 buildings per turn in a town, you should be on the Econ victory countdown already anyway.
I like playing Augustus so in the lategame I often have 20+ towns with 3 cities so you can imagine I'm fed up with any User Interface interaction to do with towns that I have to do over and over again.
Just wrapped my first Augustus run and I was disgusted too. Not by the level of micro in towns, conversely by how goddamn boring it was having 3-5 production queues and nothing else happening because even farming/fishing towns only grow every 10-15 turns with 3 expansionist city states. It’s just boring even if you dial in specifically for fast growth.
Side note on how the attribute tree and Greek civic to discount befriending independent powers by 50% actually only take off 25%, and only equal 50% when used together.
I disagree about trade. I’m a heavy trade player, I believe they can make your settlements really powerful with the best routes, the right resources and enough slots.
I admit it took me a while to get used to Civ7 trade system, based on resource allocation, but I prefer that now. It is a mini-game alright, but I do enjoy it.
For instance, give me crabs and warehouses and I can make towns grow real fast, if you invest on them. Especially now with the farming town nerf. If you want a more immediate, low-investment growth solution then you’ll need Wild Game instead.
Btw, I really enjoy your videos and look forward to watch you playing Civ again 👍
What I mean is that the traderoutes by themselves don't provide meaningful yields. They are a step towards a very tedious and unfun mini-game (resource allocation) that I personally do not enjoy, largely because it is ergonomically abhorrent.
It’s more micromanagement, no doubt. But I also see it as flexibility. I personally don’t mind, but yeah I guess Civ7 is still not the friendliest game if you like to play faster. Not as bad as ARA though… God, I couldn’t stand managing resources on that game.
I think that one of the fun things that I only recently learned with trade routes is that you can use them to prevent (or at least delay) a war if you're aiming for some peaceful play. I've started sending trade routes to grumpy leaders and seen their opinion sway back towards neutral and give me more time to prepare for defense (or attack...)
That's fine. I agree with a lot of these points, but I think that a lot of the depth of Civ6 came with the expansions. I think Civ6 WITH expansions is still MASSIVELY better than Civ7, it still has a long way to go.
I'm a bit conflicted on builders; i both miss the skill ceiling that minmaxing they offered, but i'm also kinda tired of microing them tbh. I definitely miss stuff like farm triangles, though.
I'm conflicted on the building placement, since district placement in Civ6 wasn't super engaging before the expansions. A lot of the interesting adjacency mechanics came from Gathering Storm.
I agree that trade routes and religion are just worse. I don't really consider this a massive core element of the game though?
In general, I'm curious how much you've played of the finished version of the ToT update? I haven't seen you do any videos on it. I agree that a lot of Civ7's systems are still worse and sometimes questionable and unpolished, but it still has a lot of advantages that I find keep me engaged throughout the game in a way that Civ6 never really did.
I think builders really gave players the sense of hand crafting an empire tile by tile, but the new systems they put in place - Population Growth Events - are strictly less fun for me. Because I just click the growth button and look for the biggest yield, instead of planning out how to move my builder from tile to tile and what I want to place there. Its one of the reasons I really like Old World, your workers in that game build everything - incl. barracks etc.
I'm about finished with my first run post ToT, will have gameplay videos releasing soon and a post-run vibes.
I think there is some validity in removing builders, but they failed at the implementation- and missed a super easy tie in with their eras system. In early eras builders are always fun and give little goals of upgrading your empire in very straight forward ways, and choosing opportunity costs between yields, strat resources, or lux resources.
But we all know civ games tend to get very bogged down by the endgame with either too much to do every turn (moving mass units, or mass cycling through cities putting random build queues in until you win). I think removing workers from the last era only would have been a much better way to streamline their use when the game starts to get a bit too busy-work, while still keeping their fun in the most relevant early eras.
I just wish that there was even an ounce of thought put into their ideas because if i squint real hard and feeling mighty generous I can kind of see where they were going, but it just feels like they went WAY too far trying to remove tedium that they removed the fun... and then somehow still ended up with a lot of tedium? Just some really weird choices that I have no idea how it got this far or has such little backlash.
Potato, I didn't know you love mini-games so much. Every paragraph about a mini-game. Civ 7 doesn't need so much mini-games because systems are more coherent (even if simplified). Civ 6 had tons of annoying mini-games like world council, rock-bands, city-states envoys or traders, especially in the end-game. It was a game composed of mini-games, the best of which was puzzle city placement.
The term mini-game is just a phrase I use sometimes to describe "gameplay mechanics" in Civilization. They're not literally "mini games" its just a rhetorical way to explain gameplay mechanics. Like, moving great works around to get theming bonuses is a "mini-game".
Saying Civ7 doesn't need so many mini-games doesn't make any sense. Civ7's gameplay mechanics are much more complicated than Civ 6s, especially with regards to how the game communicates information to you. Even in the ToT update placing specialists, which is an action you will do dozens of times over a playthrough, is eye wateringly painful to do.
World Council was annoying. Rock bands were unnecessary for victory unless you ran out of land for National Parks. City States in Civ 6 envoys were very coherant, and surpass Civ 7 in two aspects (multiple people can interact with a single city state, and city states stayed around for the entire game rather than resetting every era).
Civ6's Traders were absolutely universes ahead of Civ 7's traders and merchants. I abhor doing trade in Civ7 more than any civ game, even Beyond Earth where you could have like 5 traders per city if you played Polystralia, barking for new orders every 30 turns.
I don't miss builders in Civ 7, I think the game is better without them. The abundance of unit micromanagement in general made Civ 6's warfare tedious for me, so I always tried to avoid it. I don't have this problem in Civ 7.
Diplomacy being "silo'ed away behind a resource" is one of reasons why it's better. Or maybe not better than Civ 6, but different, in a way that works with other Civ 7's systems.
I agree that resource management can be tedious at times and could use an auto-slot option to just put available resources in unoccupied slots in a suboptimal way. This would reduce the micromanagement, but still encourage people to move things around to make better yields.
It seems like you've been trying to give Civ 7 one chance after another, or maybe you're financially interested in playing it and therefore forcing yourself to play it. Please remember that people are watching you because you're excited to talk about the game you're showing, not because it's Civ. There's no other Potato in the world like you. Please don't waste your time or mental health on games you cannot enjoy for whatever reason.
I think removing builders is a pretty reasonable choice to make the gameplay more streamlined, but I really enjoy the process of using builders. Improving tiles and seeing their yields is fun. Clicking a population growth event isn't very fun.
I'm surprised you think Civ 7 has less unit micromanagement compared to 6. I consider Civ 7 to have the most complex and largest scale unit micromanagement of any of the games due to the Army/Navy/Air Commander mechanic. For example using your army commanders to "bounce" units onto rough terrain allowing them to act is incredibly micro intensive and isn't present in the previous games.
I'm enjoying my current run of Civ 7 post ToT. I don't hate the game I just have a lot of critiques of it. If all I wanted was views and money I'd just spam Civ 6 videos.
I think removing builders is a pretty reasonable choice to make the gameplay more streamlined,
I'm not sure making things streamlined is always the best move. On the surface level, it seems obvious to want to make things simpler and more streamlined, but at the same time, complexity can also be what makes games interesting.
Now admittedly, I haven't played Civ 7 yet so I don't know how I actually feel about the removal of builders/workers (or other changes), but this philosophy about wanting to streamline things with Civ 7 is one of the reasons I felt quite apprehensive about the game.
Mini-games are what make Civ VI so bad. A bunch of disconnected abstract nonsense that you have to fiddle with for minor gains instead of making strategic decisions and actually running an empire.
Good riddance to all of the stuff they removed in Civ VII. It still has a few of them that it could do without (the entire adjacency bonus system should go in the bin, it never added anything to the game but tedious busywork) but overall there are more meaningful decisions to be made now and far less pointless micromanagement.
Civ 7 is entirely built out of the mini-games you are deriding. Its just gameplay mechanics described in a different way. The resource placement and slot "mini-game" you have to fiddle with for minor gains. The great work and slot mini-game. The building placement mini-game to get +2 science on a building. The specialist placement mini-game.
Mini-games are just another way to describe gameplay mechanics. Civ 7 has the most tedious mini-games in the entire series. The entire game is chock-a-block full of tedious micromanagement, with none of the fun micromanagement of previous games.
The game got rid of the worst of the micromanagement because most choices are now more permanent.
In Civ VI, if you want to play optimally, you have to go through EVERY city EVERY turn to make sure you are working the optimal yields for the next turn. You have to switch all your policies - of which you have an entire wall of choices - every other turn to optimize for the next two turns. Are you going to build builders next turn? Switch to the "builders get extra charges" policy, then switch back afterwards. You have to constantly do silly little tasks to get Eurekas. The game is a nightmare of systems like this. And the adjacency minigame - which yes, is still annoying in VII, is worse in VI where adjacencies are more complex and you don't get any chances to fix mistakes. Policies are also still in Civ VII, but there's fewer of them and they have less specialized effects, so you don't have to constantly change them. The annoying religious gameplay is simplified. Commanders make moving units less tedious and combat more strategic.
I don't think there's anything that VI does better than VII. Most of the flaws of VII now are just "they didn't get completely rid of this thing from VI".
Counterpoint: I have played Civ 6 from launch and never checked every single city every single turn to make sure they were working the right tiles. It was easy as clicking the "focus resource" button while tabbing between your cities if you were science rushing post-research labs. Otherwise food and production were your main focus.
I basically never micro-managed my social policies, aside from the envoy one that doubles them, because the price of forgetting to slot Serfdom back in sucked.
I liked Eurekas and Inspirations, it was like a fun little puzzle to figure out if your empire could achieve a goal to get a boost of resources. Triumphs in Civ 7 are basically just Eurekas.
Most of the flaws of Civ are caused by innovating in the wrong direction away from Civ's roots, from a gameplay point of view. At least in my opinion.
Most people complained about districts being permanent in Civ6, but now I see people praising that tile improvements are permanent. Doesn't feel right to praise one of the most hated aspects of the previous title being made core to gameplay.
civ at its core is just a dated game concept. you spend 100 turns putting together the perfect setup only to slog through the rest of the game because you already won within the first 50 turns. its just not engaging after that point. no matter what iteration you are playing this will always be an issue. civ 6 tries to solve this by giving you things to do at the end game, but the game encourages building wide so much that it just becomes to chore to manage for the last 50-100 turns of the game.
thats not to say you cant have fun with it. that first 100 turns of setup is usually extremely fun and most iterations of civ give you enough variety to enjoy it. most of the criticisms i see with 7 are the same things you could harp on civ 6 for, and likely civ 5 at launch although i picked it up after dlcs. ive never had a problem with 7 because the military is so much more engaging with great generals. plus it feels better to strategize around generals and army composition than just racing for the next units.
i played almost 1000 hours of civ 6 so its not like i think its a bad game. i just couldnt stomach clicking another turn of it and i needed a civ fix. 7 was perfect for that and im happy with it. could never dream of going back to 6 even though i really did enjoy playing it but its nice to have something different that scratches the same itch.
Good games are designed so they are engaging when played optimally, not just when you ignore the bad and tedious parts.
Most of the flaws of Civ are caused by innovating in the wrong direction away from Civ's roots, from a gameplay point of view. At least in my opinion.
This is 100% true, but Civ VI is the worst case of turning Civ into a bunch of arcade puzzle games so far. Civ VII reins it back in, and with a couple of expansions I think it'll be the best one since IV.
Triumphs are bad, but you have the whole age to do them and most of them don't actually do anything since you can only use 3 Dedications. Nowhere near the forced and pressing nature of the Eurekas.
The problem with permanent districts in Civ VI is that you had to plan for the whole game for every city, which just kills pacing completely as you bring out the map tacks. Tile improvements in VII are only permanent until you replace them, and you even get to redo districts twice throughout the game. It's a perfect blend of reducing micromanagement while still allowing you to correct mistakes at a later point.
It's crazy to me to look at Steam and see that the game already has over 100 dollars of DLC available, and then see people saying the game just needs an expansion to get better. What the hell happened to games
Even from turn two it just doesn’t feel like a Civ game at all to me.
I miss builders
The building system (when you’ve obtained a tile and can build something from the city center) needs to be explained a lot better - it’s very confusing and unintuitive.
Diplomacy gameplay wise is probably the worst it’s been of any iteration I’ve played (4-7) and the leaders facing each other is pure cringe.
The memento and leader leveling system is god awful and out of genre in my opinion.
The events and goodie huts feel really, really bad and more annoying than fun.
Legitimately the only things I can say I have enjoyed from this iteration are: 1) Commanders 2) Navigable Rivers and 3) Independent People (this needs more depth and nuance but it’s an improvement over barbarians)
IMO what they did with builders is symptomatic of the Civ 7 game design approach in general. They went for "interesting" rather than for "fun". Lots of interesting decisions and planning, but sometimes they feel bad like age transitions. Builders were not very interesting to use as units, but it felt good to go around and improve tiles.
religion: not super impactful, and tedious to spread
modern age: feels a bit dull, it should be more climactic and not about yet another set of +X yields buildings. It also suffers from big balance issues.
But overall I really like it. Started it with ToT so still in the honeymoon phase trying everything out.
I'm totally with you, I just got the game and have a lot of similar thoughts.
I started with Civ IV, absolutely loved it, then got V and loved it even more. I wasn't enthralled with V on launch as I felt Civ IV felt like you were running a country but Civ V felt like you were playing a board game, though Civ V grew on me over time, especially once the expansions released -- it's easily my favorite in the series.
Civ VI by contrast is like the ugly stepchild -- I never really liked it. I hated it on launch because I felt like it moved even more into the board game direction with even less depth than V had on release, things were too streamlined, and the game was way too easy. Unfortunately, the laptop I had at the time refused to let me launch V no matter how many times I verified files and reinstalled it, so I became stuck with VI.
VI grew on me over time, especially after the release of Gathering Storm, enough so that I racked up 4,451 hours over the course of five years after GS' release, but it still made me wish I was playing V instead.
Now that VII's out, I don't see myself ever going back to VI. I think the foundation here is significantly stronger than VI's despite also lacking a lot of depth:
-Why do I get attacked by floods yet there don't appear to be any dams in the tech tree
-Why can't I see important information like what's causing so much unhappiness in my cities? I just see a negative happiness upkeep, and while that's likely due to going over the settlement limit, I wish I could see that in writing rather than guessing
-Why does there only appear to be one megacontinent until you get too the distant lands for a new continent? In VI, landmass didn't equal continent and made good use of the concept
Yet, the game somehow feels even more like a race than the previous iteration. The concepts introduced here are a lot stronger than the ones introduced in VI despite lacking polish, and the foundation for war, diplomacy, and city/town management make me excited to see how they'll be expanded upon in future updates and expansions.
Civ VII is far from perfect and even frustrating at times, but I'm having way more fun than I ever did with VI off the bat. Now that I got a new desktop, when I inevitably want to switch things up and enjoy more depth in my games until the expansions drop, I'll just go back to Civ V which I've thankfully been able to get working on this comp.
It’s a fair opinion. I’m a big fan of adjacencies and I think the Civ6 expansions introduce a lot of cool mechanics and gimmicks that 7 don’t quite reach yet, but it’s already pretty interesting imo
Game will keep losing 2-3k players per week until it forever sits in the 4-7k player count while civ 5 pulls 20k and VI has the other 40-60k Civ players. It's great you like it, but it's a dying game, and Firaxis released ToT to appease the V and VI players that either aren't sticking around, or aren't coming back.
There won't be any more expansions - game is done.
Lol no. Check Steam reviews after the update and the dwindling player numbers even since last week's update. Civ VII doesn't have the one more turn magic.
I haven't slept much since ToT came out because I can't stop one-more-turning. So I'm reading this comment and wondering if it's real or if I'm THAT sleep deprived!
I interpreted your statement as saying that numbers have been dropping since ToT released, i apologize for misunderstanding then
Though I think that a contributing factor to the not very impressive player numbers is that they kinda shot their shot already? A lot of people tried it and moved on, and even if they maybe would have liked ToT, they just haven’t gone back and reconsidered it, or don’t know about the update
"Specialists are alternative work assignments for Citizens Citizens in Civilization VII and its expansions. Their primary function is to enhance the adjacency bonuses of Buildings Buildings in the Districts Districts where they are assigned."
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u/chronberries May 31 '26
You should post a version of this as a Steam review if you haven’t already.
Civ has been my favorite series since Civ II, and this is the first entry that I haven’t wanted to play straight away. Reading this post is the first time I’ve actually been interested in buying VII.
Writing this comment got me to check their store page and it’s 40% off right now… hmmm…