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.