Civ 7: End Game Strategy
Note: this post was completed before the recent 1.1.1 update, so it may be out of date already.
One of the things I loved about Civ 6, and the civ series in general, is that it really lived up to the promise of the Grand Strategy genre. Strategy is about understanding what your long term objectives are, why those are your objectives, and how you can get there. Most games cannot create compelling gameplay loops that allow a player to drive towards some set of strategic objectives over the course of a multi hour, multi-hundred turn game. Civ is unique — you really do want to start thinking about what your last turns are going to look like from the very beginning.
Civ 7, with its era reset mechanics, changes the calculation. You cannot easily plan for a given victory type in the antiquity era. In fact, in every game of Civ 7 I've played thus far, I've only really decided my victory condition at the start of the Modern era — ie the last phase of the game.
Consider the way adjacencies work in 6 vs 7. In Civ 6, placing districts is a binding choice. If one tile gives high theater square AND high campus adjacencies, I cannot pick both. I have to lock in a choice that then drives the rest of the game, and presumably synergizes with other decisions I make. In Civ 7, I'm only locked in for the era itself. I can go for science in Antiquity only to hard pivot to culture in Exploration. In fact, I'm encouraged to do so, as previous districts lose their bonuses. The result is that instead of thinking about particular victory conditions, you kinda just have to build a generically "good" civilization — one with strong, high population cities, a lot of settlements, a lot of science/culture/gold, etc.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. One of the most engaging parts of every civ game is figuring out how to turn your particular leader/civ/geography combination into a winning power house. Civ 7 let's you do that three different times. And it's a testament to the game that you really can go from getting crushed in the Antiquity era to outright winning in the Modern era.
But it does fundamentally change how you think about game progress; in particular, when thinking about end game strategy, you have to be much more cognizant of the limited ways in which you can actually set yourself up for a particular win condition.
Transitioning into the Modern Era
Broadly speaking, the following things transfer age to age:
Settlements and their population. You keep the rural tiles and districts that you built in the previous era. Having a lot of settlements in general is basically always a net good, assuming you aren't getting slammed by happiness penalties.
Wonders. Unlike most other buildings in the game, wonders retain their effects throughout all three eras and provide adjacency bonuses. Some of those effects are era specific — eg Nalanda gives +2 codex slots, which really only matters in Antiquity — but most are not. My favorite wonder thus far, Gate of All Nations, is useful all the way to your last war.
Military units, sorta. You retain your commanders and their promotions, but it seems like the type and location of the actual units you trained is subject to change.
Yield bonuses, sorta. If you were really ahead of your opponents on science or culture, you will likely start the next era ahead as well. But it won't be nearly as much, especially depending on the civ and legacy choices.
In my opinion, there's not much you can do to really set yourself up for science or culture victories beyond the generic 'have lots of good cities and towns'.
The science victory depends on raw science output and a little bit of production at the end for various space race projects. You can try and build a lot of science-specific districts in the prior era or leverage scientific legacy points to get some additional science yields, but the reality is that your science output in the modern era is heavily dependent on the science districts that you build in the modern era.
The culture victory depends even less on raw culture output than the science victory does. For culture, you send little Indiana Jones explorers around to try and collect artifacts. You only need a few explorers, and you can build them with one of the first civics of the era (Natural History). There are a limited number of artifacts, and more are revealed when you research Hegemony, so in theory getting to Hegemony first would be better. But in practice, you're better off just having a bunch of cities on each continent so that you can quickly get explorers out to where they need to go.
In contrast, you can prepare for econ and military victories.
The economic win condition requires you to build this complicated network of factories and railroads that all connect back to your main capital, followed by a little world tour where you have to bring one special unique unit to every capital around the world. Completing the Exploration age economic legacy path is massively helpful here, because it effectively sets you up with half of your railroad network.
And it's easy to prepare for the military win condition — just build a bunch of units and commanders, all of which will transfer to the next era. You can then use those to go out and capture a bunch of settlements.
If this all feels a bit dry, that's because it is. The actual win conditions in Civ 7 are fairly streamlined, so the strategy to pursue them (to the extent that you can do anything in particular to pursue them) is linear and does not really vary much. To the extent that there is variance, it is less about what you are trying to accomplish and more about the most efficient way to get there. And finding that path can be more due to randomness than skill. Even though I have several dozen hours in Civ 7 by this point, I'm still mostly operating on instinct. A big part of this is because the UI does not easily convey information about trade-offs, which is a necessary element to any strategy game.
For what it's worth, I think it's fair to criticize Civ 7 for this change. One cool thing about Civ 6 was that it felt like there were a bunch of different routes to a given ending. Maybe you go the standard route and generate culture by building a lot of theater squares. Or maybe your civ has appeal bonuses, so you actually go a completely different route and build preserves instead. Or maybe you spec into religion, use that to generate a bunch of tourism, and then switch to culture in the end. Or you try and build a bunch of wonders in the ancient era so you can win before anyone even researches factories. Because Civ 7 is split into chunks, your route to the end is simultaneously blurry and more constrained.
While I'm mentioning critiques, Civ 7 is also obviously missing an age. The Modern era has players racking up legacy points that they never use, and the age tracker does not seem to track proximity to winning. The addition of another era may significantly change how people think about both the modern era and its relationship to the rest of the game — especially if the win conditions are also meaningfully different. In particular, if the Modern era is not the last era, then it is much less important to perfectly optimize your transition to work towards a given legacy path.
World at War
None of those critiques matter if the end game is fun. And so far, it seems like I've more consistently gotten to exciting nail-biter race-to-the-finish endings where the three or four most dominant players are jockeying for position, than I ever did in Civ 6. Even though the era reset mechanics have some downsides, they also give people who are behind an opportunity to get back into the race, transforming king-makers to potential winners in their own right. In multiplayer games, I never really know who is going to win by the start of the era, which makes me much more engaged because (if I'm behind) I still have a chance or (if I'm ahead) I need to watch my back and can't get complacent.
The evenness of the playing field dramatically increases the likelihood of all out war. I've spoken positively in the past about Civ 7's war mechanics — suffice to say, I think they are really good! By increasing the odds of war breaking out, I think the game is able to lean on the best part of its design throughout the last act. This is significantly aided by the overall construction of the game. In Civ 6, it was possible to reach the modern era and still be on the other side of the continent as your opponent. You may not have any opportunity to actually engage them before they outright win. But in Civ 7, by the time you reach the Modern era, you and your opponents likely have a few core cities in your starting continent that are almost guaranteed to be near each other, and vast colonial holdings scattered around the world. So when war eventually breaks out, it really feels like a massive, total, expansive war. You have to bring in boats and planes, cavalry and siege. And there's so much optionality for tactical maneuvering and surprise gambits.
The evenness of the playing field also dramatically increases in the importance of diplomacy. As each player inches closer to their respective win condition, previous alliances tend to rapidly shift, and enemies may quickly drop their weapons to go after a new threat. This is aided by the fantastic war support mechanic. Because people can provide support to each other's wars without committing to declaring war, people who work together to achieve their military goals have an inherent advantage even if they are not explicitly allied.
It's possible I haven't played enough of the Modern era — maybe the endless wars get boring after a while. But I like war! And so far it's been a lot more adrenaline than I'd expect from a turn based game.
Concrete tactics
I want to end with a few concrete tactical suggestions for how to approach the last era, based on my experiences in my own games. Take all of these with a grain of salt, I expect the game to change a lot as time goes on.
You should assume that every Modern era will have a big blowout war at some point. Plan accordingly — get militaristic attributes that give you war support and free commander promotions, try to get to the "Order" commendation (+5 combat strength) as soon as possible, store up influence so that you can get war support (and try and declare formal wars over surprise wars), trade for oil and other strategics that boost combat, and seriously consider choosing the Autocracy government (+3 combat strength to units when in a celebration).
The only way to tell how close someone is to winning is by checking the legacy rankings. For cultural victories, you can hide how far along you are by collecting-but-not-slotting artifacts. For science victories, you can hide how far along you are by researching projects but not running them. This slows down your victory condition slightly, because you cannot parallelize building museums/running projects while digging artifacts/researching techs. But it may let you avoid war until you can guarantee a victory.
Every victory type requires some additional extra step after the legacy path is complete. The culture/science/military victories trigger only after the user completes some additional project. That means those victory conditions can be stopped by going to war and destroying the city with the relevant project. This is not possible with econ victories. The econ victory requires the player to bring an immortal unique unit around to each civ capital. Once the econ victory gets started, there is a fixed timeline before the game ends. Your only option is to wipe out the econ player entirely (unlikely) or win first.
Build planes. They are good. They have a lot more maneuverability than in Civ 6. The squadron commanders basically allow planes to move anywhere.
In every era, war is easiest in the beginning of the era, before the era's equivalent of walls comes up. This means that if you have a lot of units you can attack immediately coming out of the era transition. It also means your settlements may be exposed. Plan accordingly at the end of the previous era.