Civilization 7 will debut a new 'Ages' system that should lead to a more curated gameplay experience each game. We spoke to Creative Director Ed Beach about how different it makes things.
Crises will strike towards the end of each Age, and players can react to these in different ways. Make the most of the chaos, and you can find yourself with bonuses going into the next Age or shifting your entire civilization into something else entirely.
This reminds me of Sim City disasters, but with a potential reward depending on how you handle them, which seems more appealing. I don’t hate that idea. :)
I played some Humankind recently for the first time, and it made me realise that Civ 7 is stealing a lot of their homework. Districts, civilisations, even the leader interact/diplomacy screen all look incredibly similar to Humankind.
I wish they took the neolithic era from Humankind. That’s such a cool super early game element to the game rather than ‘settle your first city ASAP or you’re screwed’.
I think Endless Legend, also made my the Humankind devs Amplitude, was the first to introduce districts. Granted, the bones of 4x games, in general, are based on Civilization 1, at the very least.
Obviously. I mean, I’ve only played Civ 6 for hundreds of hours. But they didn’t function similarly to Humankind. The districts in Civ 7 seem to work exactly like how they do in Humankind.
I’d just settle for competent AI at any difficulty. I only ever had a few runs in Civ6 because the AI consistently fell apart in late game. Conversely, it’s why I had over 1000 hours in Civ5. Yes, it cheated, but once I started to ignore that, it was really satisfying to climb the difficulty ladder and still feel challenged even into the late eras most of the time.
I never moved from civ 5 to civ 6. Every time I try civ 6 it feels awful and looks like a mobile game. Ive got little hope for civ 7 and since it ships with Denovo I doubt I’ll ever try it.
Ahh yes, Civ IV. From ye olden days, when the dev teams cared about such weird and obsolete ideas as testing the game before release, or creating an interface that tells the player what the fuck is actually happening. Or useable asynchronous multiplayer, or an AI with enough of a clue to play the damn game competently… I could go on.
Some people apparently liked V’s whole “don’t build too many cities, we don’t want to have an actual empire here” deal, which definitely isn’t my thing but does create less micro. But most of the mechanics were reasonable and the UI shared more or less enough info to follow along. They also opened up the code after the final expansion so modders could do some really great things.
IV had a lot of really good ideas, and zero polish. The current version of the game is laden with silly bugs, ride with bizarre balancing choices, and hideously opaque with simple questions like “how much research have I put into this tech”, “how much production overflowed off this completed build”, and “how likely is this unit to kill this other unit, vs simply damaging it.” They haven’t opened up the code to modders, nor have they put any effort into fixing these frankly silly errors themselves.
Civ IV is great because of relatively simple mechanics which allow a lot of interesting choices in how to construct and develop your empire. It accentuates this by getting all the boring stuff right: bugs are few and minor, the interface is communicative, etc. it’s not perfect in either regard, and yet somehow it far exceeds its successors in these simple categories. This is how you make a good turn-based 4X game actually fun, even with 2005 graphics.
And yet, V and VI sold extremely well, and VII seemingly will as well, despite inevitably being a grossly inferior product at release which will be dragged most of the way to a truly finished state over five years of patches and DLC.
I guess this is very “stop having fun meme”, but why the hell are the only games in this genre (of all genres) trading balance, bug fixes, and comprehensible interfaces for fancy graphics? Is it really not profitable to make a game like Civ IV in 2024?
Each to their own! I really enjoyed V and have hundreds of hours in it, but I appreciated the changes in VI and felt like it vbecame a stronger game than V overall. I do have more hours in VI. I get that the art style was a little controversial, but I was never playing V for the visuals anyway
The existing ages system seemed really bad in some of the games I played. You’d have like nuclear warfare while neighboring countries on the same continent hadn’t developed agriculture. I know countries develop at different rates, but like India didn’t have to research and upgrade its way through multiple ages in real life in order to have cities and technology companies.
There should almost be some sort of technological transfer to nearby empires, like cultural influence. If your neighbour is at 10000 tech points or whatever while you are at 1000, you should be able to leech some tech points from your neighbour to develop faster.
Transfer rate increases with the disparity between nations and decreases with distance.
So a super advanced empire on continent A will contribute to nations on continent A and B, but those on continent A get more of a bonus than those on B.
This aligns fairly well with reality as neighbouring countries would transfer students to universities all the time, less so the further the nations are apart.
Reddit and lemmy like to say that but I doubt any noticeable portion of the player base is going to bother. Has been for almost every game with denuvo lol
Sadly your average person just doesn’t care about consumer rights, in any matter.
I learned my lesson about malicious DRM when Starforce broke my new computer’s DVD drive back in the day. Fortunately it was still under warranty so I had it fixed, but sucked all the same.
I don’t like denuvo but for me it’s the price that’s the deal-breaker. Nearly $170CAD for the full version is absolutely bonkers, and I simply can’t justify it. So I guess I’m picking it up in a Steam sale in 2028 or something when it’s $40 with all the DLC.
The “slows down your game” bit has always been hotly contested. There are certainly occasions where a modified exe without Denuvo runs faster, combined with accusations that that specific game integrated Denuvo in a very poor last-minute implementation that calls it dozens of times a second.
I don’t work on video games, but my own experience with software engineering and release management suggests those sorts of murky answers are likely to be the norm.
There’s nothing contested about it. Add a bunch of extra operations to the game loop and you can slow down a game. You only have so much headroom in each frame. Dunova takes up a lot of that time. And let’s not forget you can literally go tests with games that had denovu and then removed it. The testing shows pretty clearly that it does indeed slow down games.
…Great, so you’re going to start giving just as much criticism to devs for writing debug logs every so often?
There’s an order of magnitude between a difficult task slowing operations, and pure inefficiency / bad coding doing it. Can you describe something that actually proves you know the slightest thing about how programming works?
Yes, cracked Denuvo games actually run better because you aren’t running a virus anti piracy software in the background. It runs at the kernel level and Crowdstrike is a pretty good case study on why that’s bad.
Alright. I guess I understand why the best option is to NOT buy this game. But not only that, we need to all make our voices heard that Civilization is a game we WANT to play, but will not buy until Denuvo is removed.
Vote with your wallets, and let them know this choice cost them millions of sales.
Otherwise the NEXT game will have this too. Because we tolerated it.
The crisis system, the era system, and the changing civilizations system all feel especially game-y to me. I get it, Civ is first and foremost a video game. Still, the idea that there are pre-defined eras, and that you have to hit a crisis at the end of each pre-defined era, feels artificial and unnatural. Why can’t I lead my civilization through into a new era unscathed? Why is that disallowed?
Don’t get me wrong: I like the idea of eras and crises. If, instead, eras were triggered by hitting certain milestones or accumulating enough points (e.g. hit some combination of weighted tech/cultural/religious/economic development) - I would be down for that. Different civs would hit those at different times and you would strategize around hitting your new era at the right time. Crises are also totally valid: if your civ is too large and there’s too much corruption you could have a civil war. If too much of your civ is following another religion there could be unrest. Those are all interesting and fun ideas, but the important part is that the goal is to avoid/mitigate them and play around them - not that they’re some kind of inevitable occurrence that you’re forced into even if you play otherwise perfectly.
It feels like Firaxis decided to lean hard into “Civ is a board game focused around balance” and completely away from “Civ is a game about growth and optimization”, and I don’t know if I’m here for it. I guess we’ll have to see.
Great points. I also wonder if fixed crises and era changes will make every game flow in a very similar fashion, leading to repetitiveness? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Hard disagree. The district system of Civ 6 was half-baked, and the new one for Civ 7 seems way more interesting with districts growing more organically. Civ 6’s world congress was garbage. The eras system needed serious work as dark/golden/heroic eras just didn’t feel impactful enough aside from getting a monumentality era early. The new map generation with navigable rivers is a huge plus as well. The climate system in Civ 6 was a dud too, not nearly impactful enough. I think they could’ve made a Civ 7 which fixed all the broken Civ 6 systems and made a great game.
Speaking for myself, if the only selling point was that they revised systems that I already liked, I’d probably pass on Civ 7. Navigable rivers isn’t really enough for me.
Yeah I feel like you could tie these crises into player actions pretty organically - like if there’s a war and a big enough percentage of Civs get involved, then it triggers a World War crisis, or they could tie something into the global warming mechanic from Civ VI, or have a Cold War come up from excessive espionage actions, stuff like that.
Why can’t I lead my civilization through into a new era unscathed? Why is that disallowed?
Seems like a simple config option making disasters optional would solve that.
Different civs would hit those at different times and you would strategize around hitting your new era at the right time. Crises are also totally valid: if your civ is too large and there’s too much corruption you could have a civil war.
I like those ideas. Have you suggested them to the developers?
If they’re not in at release time, maybe the usual expansion/rework DLC will add them. :P
I don’t think Firaxis would agree with any of my feedback because I think I disagree with them in a fundamental sense about how the game should be oriented. Mandatory disasters appear to be a fundamental part of the Civ 7 game philosophy: you build your civ, face the crisis, reset your civ in a new era, and start over with some amount of carry-over. I get the motivation: by forcing these soft resets, Firaxis is making it so you can’t snowball so far ahead that the mid/late game is a chore of uninteresting gameplay. An advantage in the first/second eras won’t put you in so far of a lead in the third era that it’s just a rush to hit the next turn button. On the other hand… that also means that everything you do in the first/second eras counts way less, and that feels bad.
Granted I obviously haven’t played the game yet; this is just my read from demos and press around the game/design philosophy. We will see if I’m right or not.
The biggest issue I foresee is just how short eras are. If they’re going to do these resets then eras need to last way longer relative to unit production and movement.
Not an adjustment for me. I haven’t bought a Civ game within 5 years of release for a very long time. It’s far better to wait for the expansions and DLC to get bundled into the Complete Edition. Denuvo will probably be removed by then.
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This reminds me of Sim City disasters, but with a potential reward depending on how you handle them, which seems more appealing. I don’t hate that idea. :)
I would play Sim City for the sole purpose of destroying it with all the various disasters. Kind of fucked up now that I think about it.
I played some Humankind recently for the first time, and it made me realise that Civ 7 is stealing a lot of their homework. Districts, civilisations, even the leader interact/diplomacy screen all look incredibly similar to Humankind.
I wish they took the neolithic era from Humankind. That’s such a cool super early game element to the game rather than ‘settle your first city ASAP or you’re screwed’.
You’re acting like Humankind didn’t steal from Civ’s homework to begin with, lol
Districts were a thing in Civ 6, before Humankind came out
I think Endless Legend, also made my the Humankind devs Amplitude, was the first to introduce districts. Granted, the bones of 4x games, in general, are based on Civilization 1, at the very least.
Obviously. I mean, I’ve only played Civ 6 for hundreds of hours. But they didn’t function similarly to Humankind. The districts in Civ 7 seem to work exactly like how they do in Humankind.
Which is a weird move IMO, 'cause normally you’re supposed to steal the homework of someone who’s doing a better job than you are.
If I were to be granted a single wish for a new Civ edition, it would be game AI that scaled well across the difficulty range without cheating.
I’d just settle for competent AI at any difficulty. I only ever had a few runs in Civ6 because the AI consistently fell apart in late game. Conversely, it’s why I had over 1000 hours in Civ5. Yes, it cheated, but once I started to ignore that, it was really satisfying to climb the difficulty ladder and still feel challenged even into the late eras most of the time.
With machine learning, there’s no reason we can’t have better AI other than cost. I hope strategy games eventually look into this.
Machine learning is irrelevant to the sort of AI used in a game like this.
It worked for StarCraft. You train a model on human gameplay and then have it play the game.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/30/20939147/deepmind-google-alphastar-starcraft-2-research-grandmaster-level
I never moved from civ 5 to civ 6. Every time I try civ 6 it feels awful and looks like a mobile game. Ive got little hope for civ 7 and since it ships with Denovo I doubt I’ll ever try it.
I’ve got over 1000 hours in Civ V and like 15 in Civ VI
Been playing since OG Civ on floppy disk. I’ll skip Civ VII
To me that just looks like adulthood.
Not really, gaming is still my main hobby when I’m home. I’m just sinking thousands of hours in to more compelling gaming experiences.
Ahh yes, Civ IV. From ye olden days, when the dev teams cared about such weird and obsolete ideas as testing the game before release, or creating an interface that tells the player what the fuck is actually happening. Or useable asynchronous multiplayer, or an AI with enough of a clue to play the damn game competently… I could go on.
Some people apparently liked V’s whole “don’t build too many cities, we don’t want to have an actual empire here” deal, which definitely isn’t my thing but does create less micro. But most of the mechanics were reasonable and the UI shared more or less enough info to follow along. They also opened up the code after the final expansion so modders could do some really great things.
IV had a lot of really good ideas, and zero polish. The current version of the game is laden with silly bugs, ride with bizarre balancing choices, and hideously opaque with simple questions like “how much research have I put into this tech”, “how much production overflowed off this completed build”, and “how likely is this unit to kill this other unit, vs simply damaging it.” They haven’t opened up the code to modders, nor have they put any effort into fixing these frankly silly errors themselves.
Civ IV is great because of relatively simple mechanics which allow a lot of interesting choices in how to construct and develop your empire. It accentuates this by getting all the boring stuff right: bugs are few and minor, the interface is communicative, etc. it’s not perfect in either regard, and yet somehow it far exceeds its successors in these simple categories. This is how you make a good turn-based 4X game actually fun, even with 2005 graphics.
And yet, V and VI sold extremely well, and VII seemingly will as well, despite inevitably being a grossly inferior product at release which will be dragged most of the way to a truly finished state over five years of patches and DLC.
I guess this is very “stop having fun meme”, but why the hell are the only games in this genre (of all genres) trading balance, bug fixes, and comprehensible interfaces for fancy graphics? Is it really not profitable to make a game like Civ IV in 2024?
Each to their own! I really enjoyed V and have hundreds of hours in it, but I appreciated the changes in VI and felt like it vbecame a stronger game than V overall. I do have more hours in VI. I get that the art style was a little controversial, but I was never playing V for the visuals anyway
I loved Civ 5 but I couldn’t go back after Civ 6.
Civ 3. I want my stacks of doom and the ability to blow up improvements and roads with artillery attacks.
I hate that I agree with this, but yup.
Same! I still play Civ V all the time
The existing ages system seemed really bad in some of the games I played. You’d have like nuclear warfare while neighboring countries on the same continent hadn’t developed agriculture. I know countries develop at different rates, but like India didn’t have to research and upgrade its way through multiple ages in real life in order to have cities and technology companies.
There should almost be some sort of technological transfer to nearby empires, like cultural influence. If your neighbour is at 10000 tech points or whatever while you are at 1000, you should be able to leech some tech points from your neighbour to develop faster.
Transfer rate increases with the disparity between nations and decreases with distance.
So a super advanced empire on continent A will contribute to nations on continent A and B, but those on continent A get more of a bonus than those on B.
This aligns fairly well with reality as neighbouring countries would transfer students to universities all the time, less so the further the nations are apart.
I dont hate it. But Crises happening automagically does feel against the typical nature of Civ, where I typically prefer more random events.
It’s more board game feeling.
Sounds similar to the possibility you have in Humankind to change civ at each age while keeping some advantages.
There’ll be nothing to get adjusted to if they continue to insist on Denuvo
Reddit and lemmy like to say that but I doubt any noticeable portion of the player base is going to bother. Has been for almost every game with denuvo lol
Sadly your average person just doesn’t care about consumer rights, in any matter.
I learned my lesson about malicious DRM when Starforce broke my new computer’s DVD drive back in the day. Fortunately it was still under warranty so I had it fixed, but sucked all the same.
I don’t like denuvo but for me it’s the price that’s the deal-breaker. Nearly $170CAD for the full version is absolutely bonkers, and I simply can’t justify it. So I guess I’m picking it up in a Steam sale in 2028 or something when it’s $40 with all the DLC.
In 2028 expect to see an ad every time you click “next turn”.
Why not go with the base version then?
I could, but even the base version here is $90. I’m good to just wait, honestly.
Out of the loop. What’s Denuvo?
Anti piracy software that slows down your game
The “slows down your game” bit has always been hotly contested. There are certainly occasions where a modified exe without Denuvo runs faster, combined with accusations that that specific game integrated Denuvo in a very poor last-minute implementation that calls it dozens of times a second.
I don’t work on video games, but my own experience with software engineering and release management suggests those sorts of murky answers are likely to be the norm.
Cracked games with Denuvo removed run significantly faster.
Given that I already mentioned there are anecdotes of that happening under poor coding, I sincerely hope you have a more reliable source for that.
How about a YouTube video people love it when I use those as a source
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5y_bab5wtHY
Given that I already mentioned there are anecdotes of that happening under poor coding, I SINCERELY hope you have a MORE reliable source for that.
There’s nothing contested about it. Add a bunch of extra operations to the game loop and you can slow down a game. You only have so much headroom in each frame. Dunova takes up a lot of that time. And let’s not forget you can literally go tests with games that had denovu and then removed it. The testing shows pretty clearly that it does indeed slow down games.
…Great, so you’re going to start giving just as much criticism to devs for writing debug logs every so often?
There’s an order of magnitude between a difficult task slowing operations, and pure inefficiency / bad coding doing it. Can you describe something that actually proves you know the slightest thing about how programming works?
I work in software… how about that.
Would buying the game and playing it legally still slow down the game?
Yes, that’s the issue.
Yes, cracked Denuvo games actually run better because you aren’t running
a virusanti piracy software in the background. It runs at the kernel level and Crowdstrike is a pretty good case study on why that’s bad.Alright. I guess I understand why the best option is to NOT buy this game. But not only that, we need to all make our voices heard that Civilization is a game we WANT to play, but will not buy until Denuvo is removed.
Vote with your wallets, and let them know this choice cost them millions of sales.
Otherwise the NEXT game will have this too. Because we tolerated it.
The crisis system, the era system, and the changing civilizations system all feel especially game-y to me. I get it, Civ is first and foremost a video game. Still, the idea that there are pre-defined eras, and that you have to hit a crisis at the end of each pre-defined era, feels artificial and unnatural. Why can’t I lead my civilization through into a new era unscathed? Why is that disallowed?
Don’t get me wrong: I like the idea of eras and crises. If, instead, eras were triggered by hitting certain milestones or accumulating enough points (e.g. hit some combination of weighted tech/cultural/religious/economic development) - I would be down for that. Different civs would hit those at different times and you would strategize around hitting your new era at the right time. Crises are also totally valid: if your civ is too large and there’s too much corruption you could have a civil war. If too much of your civ is following another religion there could be unrest. Those are all interesting and fun ideas, but the important part is that the goal is to avoid/mitigate them and play around them - not that they’re some kind of inevitable occurrence that you’re forced into even if you play otherwise perfectly.
It feels like Firaxis decided to lean hard into “Civ is a board game focused around balance” and completely away from “Civ is a game about growth and optimization”, and I don’t know if I’m here for it. I guess we’ll have to see.
Great points. I also wonder if fixed crises and era changes will make every game flow in a very similar fashion, leading to repetitiveness? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
They’re going to have to make some fundamental changes for this one, because Civ 6 already felt like the final form of the previous design.
Hard disagree. The district system of Civ 6 was half-baked, and the new one for Civ 7 seems way more interesting with districts growing more organically. Civ 6’s world congress was garbage. The eras system needed serious work as dark/golden/heroic eras just didn’t feel impactful enough aside from getting a monumentality era early. The new map generation with navigable rivers is a huge plus as well. The climate system in Civ 6 was a dud too, not nearly impactful enough. I think they could’ve made a Civ 7 which fixed all the broken Civ 6 systems and made a great game.
Speaking for myself, if the only selling point was that they revised systems that I already liked, I’d probably pass on Civ 7. Navigable rivers isn’t really enough for me.
Yeah I feel like you could tie these crises into player actions pretty organically - like if there’s a war and a big enough percentage of Civs get involved, then it triggers a World War crisis, or they could tie something into the global warming mechanic from Civ VI, or have a Cold War come up from excessive espionage actions, stuff like that.
Seems like a simple config option making disasters optional would solve that.
I like those ideas. Have you suggested them to the developers?
If they’re not in at release time, maybe the usual expansion/rework DLC will add them. :P
I don’t think Firaxis would agree with any of my feedback because I think I disagree with them in a fundamental sense about how the game should be oriented. Mandatory disasters appear to be a fundamental part of the Civ 7 game philosophy: you build your civ, face the crisis, reset your civ in a new era, and start over with some amount of carry-over. I get the motivation: by forcing these soft resets, Firaxis is making it so you can’t snowball so far ahead that the mid/late game is a chore of uninteresting gameplay. An advantage in the first/second eras won’t put you in so far of a lead in the third era that it’s just a rush to hit the next turn button. On the other hand… that also means that everything you do in the first/second eras counts way less, and that feels bad.
Granted I obviously haven’t played the game yet; this is just my read from demos and press around the game/design philosophy. We will see if I’m right or not.
The biggest issue I foresee is just how short eras are. If they’re going to do these resets then eras need to last way longer relative to unit production and movement.
I might not have to get used to it if the game launches with Denuvo.
Good point. Denuvo is why I didn’t buy Civ 6.
Not an adjustment for me. I haven’t bought a Civ game within 5 years of release for a very long time. It’s far better to wait for the expansions and DLC to get bundled into the Complete Edition. Denuvo will probably be removed by then.
Same with paradox games at this point.
Sounds interesting. They need something other than changing the shape of the movement grid.