No one should envy Firaxis. Every ten years or so, a legendary strategy game creator is asked to reinvent Civilization, a video game series that hasn’t had any actual weaknesses for a long time. Almost every entry presents a different version of the turn-based 4X recipe, but it’s demanding to say that any of them are significantly better than the others. So that’s the burden that Civilization 7 carries with it. Here’s a game that, after playing the first of three different eras, seems very good, but the fact that it introduces a huge number of major fixes and reinterpretations that – in both petite and huge – provide a completely novel way to play Civ means it asks experienced players to come in with an open mind.
If you’re novel to the series, remember that Civilization 7’s primary colors follow a proven formula: telling the story of humanity, one turn and one hex at a time. You start cultivating a petite village, armed with mace-wielding and torchlight-wielding warriors, and grow it into a global empire, balancing their cultural, scientific, diplomatic, and combat needs. There are countless subsystems woven into this pursuit, and when Civilization is at its best, it’s straightforward to enter a kind of psychedelic zen, remixing human history. A novel feature in Civilization 7 that we detailed in IGN’s original preview last August. Instead of choosing one nation and charting a path to victory, you will be in control of a consistent leader, but over the course of history you will switch from your original civilization to two others – which is divided into three eras: Ancient, Exploration and Modern – before victory can be assured .
Some Civilization fans were understandably upset about this change. This is a gigantic change! One of the things people love most about the previous six games and their spin-offs is their ability to tell strange and comical stories by creating a timeline in which, say, dogmatic Catholics in China build the Parthenon. Will this still be possible if we drop the flag when the calendar ends? After experiencing the transition from historic to exploratory for myself, I can confidently say that this novel approach will be intriguing to civilization bosses who love to look under the hood. There are so many different civilizations to choose from that if you play clever, you and your chosen leader will be able to discover devastating wombo combos. (For example, the highly expansionist Augustus Caesar, who in historic times was the shepherd of the proud Egyptians, may have found an ideal home with the Mongols during the age of exploration.) It’s reminiscent of the compositional choices you make when building your League of Legends squad, but with the world at your feet.
The same can be said for the way Firaxis has revamped its diplomacy system, which again detracts from some thematic richness in favor of gameplay. If you’re a Civilization 6 veteran, you probably know how unstable the other barons on the map can be and the exorbitant fees they charge for basic strategic deals like open borders. All this has been removed. Diplomacy in Civilization 7, like everything else, has become a currency. You accumulate and spend “influence points” in the same way you could spend faith or gold in previous generations, and all agreements available in the diplomacy screen have a non-negotiable cost. Do you want to establish research cooperation? Or condemnation? The price is on the menu. Some may miss the circular negotiations from earlier games, but personally I think this improvement is long overdue.
In fact, outside of the radical shift to a three-act structure, most of Civilization 7’s other gigantic changes are extremely subtle and seem intended to clarify some of the unknown micro-decisions that tend to mar a campaign. Remember how, since Civ 5 allowed only one unit per field, gathering an army required setting up an unwieldy battalion that would inevitably be smothered by its own mass? Now you can marshal multiple units into an army commander and operate them to dictate group orders – such as a powerful combined attack – on a single target, which should hopefully make military action less tiring. (These commanders are now the only units that can be promoted, allowing for customization of different combat force objectives.)
One change that seemed like a bigger deal than it actually turned out to be is the elimination of worker units. In Civilization 7, your cities grow by improving selected tiles as they grow. Remember those downtimes in the early game where you mostly wait for your population to grow? This time you are given development goals for your nation’s economic, cultural, scientific and military goals. If you complete them, you can unlock bonuses at the end of the era, and this will ensure that you always have something to do instead of pressing the end-turn button.
The goal, from what I can tell, is to ensure that Civilization 7 will be able to surprise us even in its moments of lull. The best illustration may be the narrative choices throughout the campaign, where your leader may encounter intriguing text and a pair of branching dialogue options, both of which involve a short-term boon. (In one instance early in the game, I found an abandoned mine and was able to mine it for gold or turn it into a eternal source of silver on the map.) This is the smallest dusting of a Crusader Kings-style RPG in a series that usually steers away from any notions of morality . I can’t wait to see what ethical dilemmas the present day brings.
I played Civilization 7’s campaign up until the Exploration Age, when the map begins to open up to startup empires that can venture beyond their home continents. Units can begin their trek across the ocean with wooden fleets, and I was pleased to see that just off my home shores, tempting archipelagos were ready for the taking. It was intriguing to see how quickly my priorities changed in each era and how suddenly I felt motivated to explore the open seas. I wonder if Ancient, Exploration, and Modern will work more like separate gameplay, and given the way Civilization 7 lets you launch the game at the start of each, I imagine that’s Firaxis’ intention.
But even after 10 hours, I still couldn’t experience everything Civilization 7 had to offer. For example: In the leader selection screen, a meta-progression system is built into the leader’s DNA, allowing you to slowly unlock bonuses for the characters you invest the most time in. This is a huge change from how we’ve all been playing Civ all this time. How will all these elements be combined? The answers will be revealed in the present day and beyond.
