Civ 7: First Thoughts

Since Civ 7 came out about two weeks ago, the civ community has been pretty polarized about the game. This isn't too surprising. Civ is an old franchise, and like any old franchise it gets screwed over by its own successes. There's a delicate balancing act between keeping enough of the old formula to keep veterans happy, while still innovating enough to justify a new release in the first place. Nintendo has the same problems — even though Breath of the Wild was critically acclaimed and objectively fantastic, there were still some folks who were upset that the franchise they were used to changed too much.

All of this to say: there are a lot of people with a lot of takes and reviews and opinions about Civ 7 out there. I'm assuming folks who are reading this have at least played a single game of Civ 7 all the way through; if you haven't and want an overview of the game and its mechanics generally, go read some of those other takes.

Here (as before) I want to hone in on a specific civ experience: how does the game play in multiplayer, when you're dealing with other human players?

The short version: I like it.

At a high level, I think this is a 4x game that plays really well in multiplayer. I think when you look at the game from a multiplayer lens, instead of human vs ai or single player, many of the game design decisions make a lot more sense.

Things I like: Rubberbanding

Civ is a multi-hour game, even when playing on the fastest game modes. In a multiplayer setting, this poses a challenge: how do you keep the game competitive and interesting throughout the entire runtime of a single game? I don't think any of the Civ entries — or really any 4x game — has figured this out. In every previous civ game, it is possible to get a commanding lead pretty early on, such that victory is essentially assured. If you're in a multiplayer game and you're getting stomped, this absolutely sucks.

In my opinion, this was consistently the worst part of Civ 6. It was just too easy for someone to fall behind, and once they were behind, it was pretty tough to really get back in the game. So you'd just have to sit around — often literally just waiting — while other people's turns get longer and longer as their empires got bigger and more complicated.

Civ 7 does a lot to fix that problem.

First, it reduces the impact of random bullshit that would be devastating in Civ 6. You can't steal settlers. Units aren't locked behind specific strategic resources, so you can't get totally screwed over if you don't have e.g. iron in your territory. War support mechanics are a fantastic way to prevent early game sweeps, and to more generally make defending easier than attacking. There's a real penalty to just going around declaring surprise wars and razing cities, and weaker civs have the ability to force peace treaties for some number of turns if there's a military buildup on their borders. Half of my Civ 6 games would end before the medieval era because someone would be playing Rome and would just swallow up half the world before niter was discovered. It's basically impossible to do that in Civ 7.

Winning as Rome in 13 minutes and 88 turns? Sounds about right.

Second, there's a strong focus on game mechanics that embed balance. Every era is a soft reset — civs that are powerful because they have a lot of city state alliances or military units or cities have to reinvest to maintain that power between eras. Dark Age legacies are extremely powerful, so if you are getting stomped in one era you can jump forward in the next.¹ Each civ gets a unique unit and a unique building, which allows you to swap mid stream based on what you most need. And geographic variance is less problematic when you can specialize towns for specific global yields — a region with a ton of food but no production is essentially useless in Civ 6, but very useful in Civ 7. Obviously if you're really far behind, it's going to be tough to come back and win. But these changes make a win possible all the way through the modern era.

And then there's a grab bag of small things, like notifications when someone else starts building a wonder so you don't end up wasting a ton of production building something you can't get.

All of these changes help reduce variance. And that in turn makes the game significantly more fun when you're competing with other people. Civ 7 evens out some of the worst edges in Civ 6, preventing someone from getting so far ahead that the game isn't worth finishing.

Things I like: Civ balancing

Civ 6 had the most leaders of any civ game to date. Each leader had different abilities, different units, different buildings. The variety was really fun, because there were a ton of ways to play…but it was very clear that some civs were strictly better than others. Rome, Aztec, Nubia — these civs all get strong bonuses and strong units really early in the game. That made them strictly better than civilizations that would only come online in the atomic or modern era. Maybe the American p51 plane is much better than the default fighter! But it comes so late in the game that it rarely matters.

Civs (and leaders) feel much more balanced in Civ 7. Every player gets a unique unit and a unique building in every age, so you don't have to wait until the modern era to really leverage your specialties. Now, I am sure that folks will find specific leader/civ combinations that are overwhelmingly powerful. I think there's a lot of tweaks and balance patches to come. But the mechanics of the game are such that any particularly strong builds or combos are only available for at most a third of the game, which dampens the impact of anything that's really game breaking.

While I'm on the subject, another massive improvement in civ balancing comes from the way navy units work. In Civ 6, a bunch of civs were basically useless on land-based maps. Norway, Indonesia, and Portugal all rely on opponents having a lot of coastal cities, while England, Carthage, and Brazil need at least some ocean to really come into their full potential. In Civ 7, all navy units can attack land; and navigable rivers means they can attack deep inland. If you're going up against a primarily land-based army, a boat is basically an untouchable unit that doubles as range and siege. A single naval unit can completely flip the outcome of a war, especially in antiquity. This makes naval civs viable in all eras, and helps smooth over many of the RNG inconsistencies in previous games.

Things I don't like: strategy balance

The biggest problem that any multiplayer strategy game can have is when there is effectively a single route to win, and it's a toss up who gets it. Having only one viable path to victory that is more or less determined randomly defeats the point of a strategy game; your choices no longer matter, it's just clicking the right things at the right times. You might as well roll a die.

Right now we're still in the "figure out what builds are good" stage for Civ 7, and folks are discovering that some of those builds are so good that they break the game.

For me, that’s culture victories in the modern age. They are way too easy to do, require very little planning, and frankly don’t even require much culture. As a result, in multiplayer games, every time someone goes for a culture victory everyone else needs to drop what they are doing and immediately go to war to stop them. There’s a bit of implicit balancing here, especially if you are playing with a bunch of other folks who understand the risks of a culture victory. But, like, it’s not that fun.

Getting artifacts is just way too easy.

Still, I’m not concerned.

When Civ 6 first came out, the community quickly discovered that there was a clear singular winning strategy: many factories with overlapping radius, cavalry rush, stacked great generals. Rome and Germany and Sythia were way overpowered. A lot of people rightfully complained that the game was less fun as a result. And then Firaxis made the game better by nerfing overpowered metas.

My guess is that the culture victory will likely get nerfed or reworked. But right now, this is by far my biggest complaint with 7. We need balance patches, especially around victory conditions in the modern era.

Misc

• I like diplomacy generally. There's an actual reason for multiple people to trade with each other and build up alliances and so on, even from the beginning of the game. In Civ 6, I would basically never use the trade screen with other human players except to see how much gold they had or how many cities they had. In Civ 7, diplomacy feels rich and well thought out. Still, I don't love that there is no way to directly trade for gold or strategics.

• I really don't like how city states remain locked with a single person for the duration of an era. I understand the race mechanics but I don't think they are super good — normally if I see someone racing to befriend a city state, I just try and kill that city state first.

• I'm neutral on the removal of builders. It's nice to not have to think about improving tiles, but I liked the additional strategic element of trying to race to build a wonder by chopping out trees (for e.g.). Remains to be seen how much I miss that, especially once it becomes clear which wonders are OP and which ones aren't.

• Big fan of the military changes. War feels very tactical, and really fun. No notes yet.

• Very confused about distant lands mechanics in multiplayer. So far I've only ever played Civ 7 with 4 folks, but I enjoyed playing Civ 6 games with 10+ people. I think the game works with just 4 players, but there's a certain dynamism that is missing.

• I’m neutral on the legacy tracks. Lots of folks online have a lot of tunnel vision about how repetitive they are or how limited they make the game. In my experience, focusing exclusively on legacy tracks is a mistake. They are a guide for new players, but experienced players will get much more benefit from focusing on high population, good economy, and winning wars.

• This is a beautiful game. I just love how everything looks.

Last notes and wish list

It's still early, I only have a few games under my belt. But I think Civ 7 has a LOT of potential. And, most importantly, it's fun — even if the random screaming hordes online say otherwise.

Things that I want to see more of:

• More eras. I am pretty sure the devs are planning to add an era after the modern era — after all, the modern era already has legacy points set up, which don't really make sense if there's no final era for the legacy to apply to. As currently set up, the modern era is very imbalanced; I think adding another era would solve that issue directly.

• More damaging crises that force strategic trade-offs. The crises right now just aren't that big a deal — their effects feel mostly random, and the way you handle them has little impact on the future of the game. I want to see much more significant effects that really force bigger resets between eras. Players should have to make choices that actually matter. I will say, I think this is a tough line to balance for Firaxis. They don't want to make the crises so bad that there's no reason to play the earlier eras because it all gets reset to 0 at the end anyway. Maybe a severity dial could work?

• Better UX. This is a complaint that many others have so I won't dwell on it too long, but I do think there are some low hanging fruit improvements like:

  • Making cities more identifiable at a glance;

  • Pins;

  • Explanations for what effects different policy cards will have.

• More players in multiplayer.

Will hopefully be writing more about Civ 7 as I dig my teeth into different leaders and civs and play styles! Stay tuned.

1. My favorite Dark Age legacy is the one that gives you 3 full armies with cavalry and siege in exchange for losing all your other units and settlements besides the capital. That is 12 free units, not counting your commanders. If you are getting hit hard in the Antiquity era, you may not have much an army or settlements to begin with. So this legacy basically gives you a new lease on life.