Civilisation VII
I have played every one of the major versions of the Civilisation series. Hours upon hours lost to a series of choices and decisions. I wouldn't be able to quantify most of them, but Civilization 5 was the one I liked the least and I put 494 hours into that. 3431 hours of my life went into Civilisation 6.
Hi, my name is David and I have a 4x problem.
Civilisation 7 was pre-released on Thursday. Given my established credentials above, you would have guessed I pre-purchased. I have finished my first run through and I have thoughts.
The big change for VII is the concept of Ages. The entire game revolves around them now, in the same way Districts were the pivot for VI. I am pretty sure that if the Ages concept wasn't the first decision Firaxis made, it was the one they tossed out all their previous plans to support. It's trite to say they just ripped off Humankind , but the trends are there and the similarities are striking.
Firaxis like to trot out Sid Meir's Rule of Thirds when their doing PR for a new version:
one-third traditional gameplay, one-third is improved from the last version, and one-third is brand new.
In a small, but-not-really way in Civilisation 7, the first Age is traditional Civilisation gameplay, the second Age is an improved version of Colonisation (albeit more focussed on the home counties still running the New World) and the metaphor/joke falls over in a heap in the third Age but I guess the way the Ages build on each other towards the ultimate victory conditions is pretty brand new.
Each of the Ages is not-quite it's own game with goals to achieve towards the ultimate game victory conditions. So much so you could actually just one Age and have, as a winner, the side that achieved the most on the victory condition being pursued. Those goals track, but morph, through a full run of the game, and in each Age are quite flavourful. For example, in the first Age the Economic victory goal is to have a set number of resource tokens allocated to your settlements. In the second Age the Economic victory is to have settlements in the New World shipping treasure fleets back to the homelands. A culture victory starts with building a number of Wonders, the second Age is earning relics from spreading a religion.
There's a pretty sharp reset at the beginning of each Age. Any units you have are all upgraded are more or less discarded and replaced with era-specific units. I'm still not quite sure how it decides what numbers to give you, if it is a specific mix and number or it is based on what you had at the end of the last era. There's two classes of city now, Cities and Towns. Cities are the first-class, can do everything settlement, Towns are more limited and act more like support. You can upgrade from a Town to a City, but again, at the start of each age, almost all your Cities are reset to Towns.
The Ages are a really interesting attempt at solving two problems: Snowballing and Late Game Grind. There's always been a snowballing problem in the game. Early success and luck for the player (or one player in a multiplayer game) begets more success because that player has more resources to get edge after edge. Firaxis has been trying to deal with that for three versions now. They've not been very successful but a reset serves as a (bit of a) rubberbanding effect, to drag the leader back to the pack. Successes in the previous Age still give you a boost for the next and if you have eaten a big chunk of another Civ's cities you definitely have an edge.
Late Game Grind is the tendency for the late game to shift from a series of interesting decisions to a series of hoops to jump through. The Ages instead give you three reasonably distinct peaks to climb throughout the game before you need to start from scratch again.
Early days and it is in pre-release so there are some ropey balance issues in the game. There are other things I am a bit more wary of. There has been the concept of a worker/builder unit in every version before now. I mean, it's the third X in '4x Game', to eXploit your territory and resources. They're gone. Instead when you grow a city, you pick a hex and lo! it is developed and worked. It takes a lot of micromanagement out of the game, I'm just not sure yet if it takes out too much. Units have been radically simplified. No more rock-paper-scissors balancing of different units being good against each other. Now just an infantry, a more expensive but tougher cavalry, a ranged, and a city-buster siege unit. And three levels of each per Age. So Level 1->Level 2->Level 3 of each class. No differentiation of boats at all. Aircraft got a third class with anti-air, anti-surface unit, and anti-city aircraft. And no promotions for units, but the Great General/Admiral concept is replaced with a Commander unit. That's the one that earns XP and levels up, and Commanders are retained between Ages. And there is an Economic victory. 😬 I've always hated it when the community tried to invent Economic victory types. If an economy is the allocation of limited resources to achieve aims and goals, then every victory type in Civilisation is an economic victory. And usually the community just created shit like 'Own all the money' or 'Own all the resource tokens'. And look, I have a half dozen pages of notes somewhere on an economic victory for Civ 6 that was basically the end of game screen in Civ 1 that showed literacy rates in your civilisation. I was always too lazy to learn enough of the Lua SDK to make it work. So I am wary of this economic victory even if I kind of think they did an interesting solution.
This isn't a review. This is just me rambling on about a new version of the game I like. So I'm not going to score it or anything. It's still a bit messy and it's different and that makes it feel a bit weird and off-putting, but I reckon I am going to get a lot of hours on this game.